Game Of Cages (2010) (8 page)

I forced the stun gun to the side and heard it crack against the floor by my head. Ursula cried out and dropped it. I twisted against her, letting her body weight roll over me. She fell onto the broken rocking chair and hissed in pain.

I tried to get out from under her, but she lunged toward me, mouth gaping. I leaned away as she snapped at me, her teeth clamping down on my collar inches from my throat.

To hell with this. I put my knees against her hip and kicked. She fell back and I rolled away onto my feet.

Ursula grabbed the stun gun and lunged at me, arm extended. She was a big woman, but she was slow. I caught her wrist and pulled her toward me, knocking her flat on her stomach. I pinned her elbow and quickly knelt on her shoulder. Now she was the one without leverage.

"Damn," I said. "You're a pain in the ass." I wrenched the stun gun out of her hand. One of the metal leads was broken. I doubted it still worked. "Hold still, or I'll use this on you."

She didn't. The thick ski jacket made it tough to control her. If she didn't settle down, I was going to have to either let her go or hurt her. I laid the stun gun against the back of her neck and shouted at her to be still.

She answered in her native language, whatever it was. I couldn't understand, but I knew she wasn't asking how I take my tea. I tossed the broken stun gun away.

The ghost knife was nearby. I could feel it. I reached for it and it flew into my hand.

Ursula grunted from the effort of trying to throw me off. In a few moments she would have her knees under her and I'd have another fight on my hands.

I slid the ghost knife through the back of her head. She didn't react at all. The spell was supposed to "cut ghosts, magic, and dead things"; it could destroy the glyphs that sustained spells, cut through inanimate objects, and damage people's "ghosts." I didn't know exactly what that meant, but everyone else I had cut with it had stopped trying to kill me. Why didn't it work on Ursula? Did she not have a "ghost," whatever that was?

Ursula nearly bucked me off. She was still cursing at me, and I had no way to control her except by throwing punches.

I wasn't going to do that. I had fought in the street for the Twenty Palace Society. I had broken into homes and burned them to the ground. I had shot men in cold blood. But I wasn't ready to punch this woman.

She kept thrashing. "Let me go," she said, her voice vicious with rage. "I have to check on Armand."

"No one is going to hurt Armand, not if he's worth so much."

She kept fighting me. I wasn't getting through.

I was going about this all wrong. I leaned close to her and spoke quietly. "This isn't his home, is it? If it was, he'd have come back here as soon as he was free." She stopped struggling, although her breathing was still harsh. "I came here to see if he'd return to the people who loved him. But he won't, will he?"

A low moan escaped her throat. I kept talking. "You love him, I know you do. But now that he has his freedom, he's never coming back. He doesn't want to be your prisoner anymore. All these years you've kept him trapped in this little room, giving him your love, and now you know what he's always wanted."

She made a terrible, heartrending sound. It was the sound a mother might make over a dying child. I let her buck me off.

We both scrambled to our feet. She looked at me, her eyes brimming with tears. Then she looked at the Plexiglas cage, turned, and ran out the door.

I looked around one more time. The place made my skin crawl. I'd spent time in prison, but this disturbed me in ways I wasn't ready to think about.

I heard Ursula shouting outside. I hurried to the window. She was lumbering toward the house, screaming and pointing back to the cottage. Back to me.

Damn. I raced out the door. The tree line wasn't far, but I didn't want to run into the woods. Not when Catherine's car was in the other direction.

The ATV had a key in it. I grabbed a bungee cord from behind the seat and strapped the handlebars down. Then I started it up and sent it on its way.

As I came around the edge of the cottage, Ursula ran through the servant's entrance of the house and slammed the door behind her.

I sprinted down the hill toward the house. I had nearly reached the doorway, still stupidly planning to follow her inside, when the back light turned on. She had roused the house faster than I expected.

The corner of the building was just a few yards to my right. I ran around it and ducked out of sight, staying in the muddy tracks Biker and his two killers had made.

The only tool I had was my ghost knife, but I was pretty sure I could crack a steering column with it. Unfortunately, the cars in the garage were on the other side of the house. Horace had distracted me before I could disable them, but I couldn't get to them right now. I could have gone around the front, but if the guard at the main entrance had been replaced, that wouldn't turn out well.

I peeked around the corner. Six Fellows streamed through the back door, each carrying a shotgun. They fanned out across the yard, one particularly fat one moving toward me. Dammit. The ATV had overturned on a tree root across the yard; hadn't they noticed it?

I leaned away from the corner of the house. The tree line was not close enough for me to risk it, especially considering how much noise I'd make in the undergrowth. I'd end up like Biker, a rotting corpse with a bullet in my back. But there was a basement window at my feet. I dropped to my knees in the freezing mud and cut through the latch. The window opened toward me, but the gap was too narrow for me to fit through. The man with the shotgun would come around the corner at any moment. I cut both hinges and slid through the opening, pulling the frame in after me.

The basement was pitch-dark, except for the yard light shining through the narrow windows along the ceiling. I landed on something flat and solid. It didn't tip over and crash onto the floor. I pressed the window frame in place--it was upside down and didn't fit properly, but I tried to hold it absolutely still.

The fat man in the parka walked in front of the window. His puffy face was already red from the cold, but something in the way he scanned back and forth made me wary. He was calmer than the others. More in control.

Luckily, he was looking toward the trees opposite the house, not at his feet.

My ghost knife was in my back pocket, but I wasn't sure it would work on him any better than it had on Ursula. Was it running out of power, or did she have a protection spell? My ghost knife didn't feel any weaker, and it had cut the window readily enough.

Someone shouted, "There!" and the fat man trotted back toward the others. I blew out a long, relieved breath and fitted the window, carefully squeezing it into the jamb. A strong wind would knock it out again, but I planned to be long gone by then.

I climbed down to the floor. The low dresser I'd been crouching on had a white cloth draped over it. Each window was about ten feet from the next one, and by their faint rectangles I could see the shape of the room. It was obviously the size of the house above, but the weird silhouettes and broken shadows showed me it was full of clutter.

My eyes were not accustomed to the darkness, so I moved slowly, my hands guiding me around chair legs, discarded bicycles, and other junk I couldn't identify by touch alone.

At first I intended to go to the front of the building to steal a car, but I heard shouting from the back of the house and moved toward it.

The window closest to the back entrance was blocked by a tangle of what appeared to be broken garden equipment, but the next one over had two steamer trunks stacked beneath it, along with a pile of lacy dresses. I climbed onto them, probably ruining them with my muddy clothes, and peeked out the window.

There were shoes just a few feet from me. One pair were green Chuck Taylors, soaked through by the mud. Beside those was a pair of hiking boots fresh from the sporting goods store. The third pair was the professor's fur-trimmed leather boots. The man in the Chucks fidgeted back and forth but let himself be hemmed in by the other two. It was Kripke. It had to be.

Beyond them, I saw the two Mustaches marching across the open meadow toward the ATV. A third man was with them. He had a lean, hollow look and was dressed completely in cold-weather bicycling gear. He was another Fellow, I was sure. No one else would dress so badly.

I couldn't hear them. I slowly, quietly unlatched the window and eased it open.

"He had a gun," Ursula said. "He threatened to shoot me if I didn't tell him everything I knew about Armand." Just as she finished the sentence, she came into view, walking across the grass with Stephanie beside her, followed by the tattooed man and a frail-looking blond man I hadn't seen before. They walked toward the professor.

"Have you ever seen this man before?" Frail asked. He had a German accent, and his voice was high. Ursula shook her head. "Think carefully. You may have seen him in town or while running errands. Could he be a local?"

"No, he--" Ursula began, but Stephanie interrupted.

"Where are the goddamn guards? I hired a security team to protect the grounds. Where are they?"

"Ms. Wilbur," Solorov said. "Shut up. We have questions to ask."

"Don't you tell me to shut up! I paid them. Now I find that they all ran home to their mommies! I'm going to sue them for so much money--"

"Shut up, Ms. Wilbur, or I will have you shot," Solorov said. Stephanie gaped at her.

I heard an old man's wheezing laughter. They stopped and glanced back as he shambled into view. He wore a bulky black coat and a black fur cap with the earflaps down, and he leaned on a gnarled black cane that had been heavily carved. A pair of black bird-watching binoculars hung around his neck. Frail rushed to him and gently took a black leather satchel from his hand.

I realized I was staring, just as the others were. There was something arresting about him, although he appeared completely ordinary in every way.

Frail walked beside the old man as though he was ready to catch him, but he continued his questioning. "Please, explain why you are so sure he is not a local."

"It was the way he spoke," Ursula said. Her tone was flat. "Some things he said. He said Mr. Yin didn't have Armand anymore. He said that Armand had escaped."

"That's a lie," Stephanie blurted out, apparently forgetting the professor's threat. "I just spoke with Mr. Yin ten minutes ago, and they are en route without incident. He must have been trying to trick you." The contempt she held for Ursula was clear.

"What did he look like?" Frail asked.

"He was a little over six feet tall. Slender and handsome with a knife scar on his cheek. He was wearing a stolen servant's uniform. And he had tattoos on the backs of his hands."

The old man spoke up, his voice raw and low. "What sort of tattoos?"

"Like his." Ursula pointed at Tattoo.

They fell silent.

"What?" Stephanie asked. "What does that mean?"

The old man turned toward Frail and spoke in a soft grumble of German. Frail rushed away on an errand, then exchanged a meaningful look with Tattoo. "Professor Solorov," the old man called. "Bring your people back to the house, please. This is something I will have to take care of, I think."

I heard a cellphone being dialed. "Come back to the house" was all she said. I heard the phone snap shut.

Then I heard her say in a low voice: "Tell me why those tattoos might be important."

The voice that answered was Kripke's. "I thought you people knew--"

"I do know, Mr. Kripke. Now you have to impress me with what you know."

"Well, the tattoos are spells. The part that shows, anyway. Most are probably protection spells."

"So far you haven't impressed me."

"For instance," Kripke continued, emphasizing the words to show his annoyance at being interrupted. "That one there, on the German muscle's forehead, that's the guiding hand. It's supposed to make others feel something, depending on the little variations. A really common version makes people attracted to you. Sexually, I mean. His is a little different, but judging by how I feel every time I look at him, I suspect it's supposed to intimidate people."

There was a brief pause. Finally, Solorov spoke in a low, urgent, dangerous voice. "You will turn over your spell book to me, along with all copies, or I--"

"I don't have a spell book," Kripke snapped.

"--or I will kill you and everyone in your family. I'll burn their houses down while they sleep at night. Do you understand me?" Her voice was urgent and, unlike the others in her group, completely free of oh boy I get to be naughty breathlessness. She was fierce and cold and sharp.

"I don't have a spell book," Kripke said. "I really don't. If I did, I'd be a badass like them. I wouldn't be letting you hold a gun on me."

"Then where did you get this level of information? Or are you fabricating it?"

Kripke sighed. "A guy dropped by the server uninvited. He baited his way in, but before we could ban him, he offered up good information--very good."

"What good information did he give you?"

"It's too complicated to go into it now. Honest. We can review that later, if you want, but one of the things he gave us was a write-up of a couple of dozen spells and the outward glyphs that go with them. Mostly, they were protection spells like golem flesh and iron gate, but he also included odd things like the twisted path and the second word. No summoning spells. He listed the things the spells could do when they were fresh and when they weren't."

"I want to see that."

"Okay."

"And everything else you have."

Kripke sighed again. "Okay. It goes against our TOA, but okay. Another thing: I know where the security guards went. I saw Mr. Yin approach the one at the front door, the lead. Yin flashed ID and ordered them to leave. The guard called someone, and after a couple of seconds, he shrugged and ordered all his men into their Expeditions."

"The harpy hired one of Mr. Yin's companies to provide security?" Solorov sounded amused.

"More likely Yin found out who she hired and bought them out. He's really, really rich."