Page of Swords (The Demon's Apprentice Book 2) (28 page)

“My most sincere apologies, my young friend,” he croaked from a few feet away. “I forget that to the living, I am naught but a cadaver that moves and speaks, an abomination before God. But I had to know who else sought out the Codex of the Medici. For centuries, it lay forgotten in my collection, and now, two seek it in less than the span of one year.”

Something about the way he said the name of the book sounded odd, as if we saw the same book in two very different ways. But
what
he said made my mouth work faster than my brain.

“There was someone else who wanted to look at this book?” I asked.

“Aye, though I can not speak his name,” he answered.

He put a little emphasis on the last word, as if that specific thing was important. I gave him a wolfish grin as I thought about what he
could
tell me. Proper etiquette was that I could ask three questions and still be considered polite. If I wanted to push it a little, I could ask one or two more, but I figured I didn’t really want to piss off the really old dead guy.

“Did he come during the day or at night?” I asked, and he lifted a paper-thin eyebrow.

“During the day.”

“Did he have a pulse?”

“When he first rang at my door, he did.”

“How long ago?”

“After the Feast of St Dominic.”

“And why are you letting this information . . . slip?” I asked, wary of a trap. Technically, I was still playing by the rules, since I wasn’t asking a question about the same thing . . . well, not exactly.

“I felt the wyrd upon you as soon as you entered my home. And a thing I have not felt in a great many years . . . one of Samson’s line has touched you. I may be an abomination before God, but I still may be the instrument of His will betimes.”

He turned and limped into the darkness, and I still didn’t hear him move. I reached down for Junkyard’s back, and told myself he was nervous at watching me hold a conversation with a walking corpse, and he needed to be reassured and calmed down. He looked up at me as if he was checking to see if I was okay, and I gave him a mock serious look.

“Scaredy cat,” I said.

He wagged his tail and gave me a big, slobbery grin before he went back to his spot under the table. If I was more reassured than annoyed by his head on my foot, I wasn’t talking. My shoulders twitched as I turned to the book. It was hard to keep from looking over my shoulder to make sure Dead Leo wasn’t going to come back and do something hideous and deforming to me. I was sitting in a creepy dead guy’s basement, reading a forbidden tome, and I’d just had a conversation with said creepy dead guy. What was there to be paranoid about? I tried not to think about the fact that Dead Leo had also walked away from me in a different direction than the stairs.

It took me about an hour of reading and re-reading the first chapter before I noticed the narrow ribbons between pages. I flipped to the page with the first bookmark. It talked about the defeat of Mammon, and the symbols that the Atlantean mage-priests had used to seal him into his prison before exiling him for an eternity. In the margins, there was a note that magick avoided absolutes, like forever or never, because the conditions were impossible to keep, so the spell fizzled every time. It made me look at the term used: “an” eternity. A few pages deeper in, I learned that it meant ‘one hundred times one hundred years,’ the largest number the less literate kingdoms could understand and believe. It went on like that, outlining a recipe for Armageddon with each bookmarked page.

Eventually, I had to pull the rubbings I’d made out of the tube Dr. C had tossed me, and compared them to the descriptions on the page. Nothing was making sense, and I suspected that whoever had been reading this before me had missed something. It wasn’t until I went to the first pages that detailed the G’Honn Tablets, when I saw the description of the reading room that I got it. My blood ran cold as I scanned back in the book until I found the section detailing rituals using the G’Honn formulae, and the consequences of failure. I reached for a sheet of paper from the pile on my right, and stopped as my fingers felt something on the paper itself. I set the page aside and grabbed another one, then snatched one of the pens from the jar.

My legs were shaky by the time Inamosa led me back up the stairs. Dr. C was sitting in one of the chairs with his staff standing unsupported beside him. He came to his feet when I leaned on the love seat for support. The staff snapped to his hand at his gesture, and he was at my side by the time I sat down.

“What’s wrong, Chance?” he asked.

“I know too much for my own good, that’s all, sir,” I said with a wan smile. “Hey, Inamosa, when’s the Feast of St. Dominic?” I asked the hovering little monk.

“August eighth,” he said after a few seconds.

I nodded my thanks to him and got to my feet unsteadily.

Synreah joined us as we came down the steps, and Dr. C waited until we were out of sight of Dead Leo’s place to give me the third degree.

“What did you learn, Chance?” he demanded.

“Too much. Etienne’s not playing small. He’s trying to open the seals on Mammon’s prison so he can assume his mantle,” I said, my voice still shaky.

“Mammon, as in one of the Seven Princes of the Abyss?” he asked softly.

I nodded.

“It gets worse, sir. The G’Honn fragments are all written backwards. Something about protecting mortal minds from the knowledge they hold. You have to read them with a mirror, or make an impression of them using soft clay to read them the right way. As far as I know, Etienne doesn’t know that.”

“How can you tell?” Dr. C asked me.

“He bookmarked the pages he read. And,” I told him as I pulled a rolled page out of the tube, “he used a ballpoint pen to take notes.” The page unfurled to reveal the shallow indentations of a pen in the page, made visible by the charcoal stick I’d rubbed across the face. “Either way, he’s already very powerful, and he’ll only need one more sacrifice to complete the ritual. Mr. Chomsky’s journal mentioned a Seeker
and
a Wielder, right?”

His eyes closed for a moment.

“Come to think of it, it did,” he said. “I thought he was referring to the same person.”

“I’m not sure. We’ll deal with that once we find it,” I told him, but I already thought I knew the answer to that question. There had been one person who’d been around almost every time I’d seen a vision of the sword. It was a matter for another moment but things were starting to fall into place.

“I’ll need to alert the Conclave. This is too big, Chance. Stay out of it. Concentrate on finding the Maxilla for now. The Sentinels will handle Etienne.”

Thunder rumbled in the distance, and I felt the first heavy drops of rain hit the hood of my cloak. In front of us, people began looking around, and I saw panic begin to dawn in several faces. Merchants started packing up their stuff, and I held my own hand out to catch a couple of drops. Pale red splat marks colored my palm, and I turned to show Dr. C.

“I don’t think so,” I said as it began to rain blood.

Dr. Corwyn spent most of the drive home on his phone, alternately being diplomatic and yelling. He barely seemed to notice the watery red border his windshield wipers were making with every pass. Other people seemed to be staying off the roads, maybe afraid they’d get some blood-borne disease or something. The clock on his dash showed that it was coming up on six o’clock. I cursed at the loss of time, but for some reason, I felt almost optimistic, too. I felt like I was close to figuring out how to find the Maxilla, but I had no idea why.

A white limousine was waiting in front of the house, and I spotted four identical blue Crown Victorias parked up and down the main street. I looked down into one of them as we passed it and saw the Sentinel glare back at me. From the outside, it had a lot of the same things I’d seen on regular police cruisers. Nudge bars and a PIT bumper on the front, a wire mesh partition between the front and back seats, and tires made for the heavy duty suspension. I was willing to bet it had the same kind of high performance engine a law enforcement interceptor had as well. But regular police cruisers didn’t have protection spells woven into the windshield, or aura glass. I felt the gaze of the Sentinel we had just passed hit my aura. Amplified by the aura glass, their aura gazing was like a spotlight; you could feel the heat from a long way off. Even when they didn’t have their Third Eye open, they would have been able to see into the ethereal realm.

We drove past them and pulled into the garage. Junkyard and I got out on one side, and Dr. C pulled his staff from the back seat. As soon as we stepped out of the garage, car doors started opening up and down the street. Sixteen ankh-topped Sentinel
paramiir
staves popped up beside the blue Crown Vics, and a smooth white staff with a ruby tip emerged from the limo. I felt the glare start before Polter stepped into view, dressed immaculately in a dark blue suit. He glanced at the Sentinels, then turned to face us with the same smile I remembered from the other night. It reminded me of a shark, all teeth, no soul.

Polter’s grin soured when T-Bone’s Torino pulled into the driveway behind us, and Cross rode his Harley across the grass and parked it on the sidewalk. They still wore the same black outfits I’d seen them in last time, and I wondered if they had a closet full of identical black cargo pants, t-shirts and sweaters. They came over to Dr. C and me, Polter’s face turned red. They shook hands with Dr. C, and Cross came over and put a hand on my shoulder.

“You doing all right, kid?” he asked.

I shrugged. “Not bad for the end of the world and all,” I said.

“Not on our watch,” T-Bone said from behind me.

Polter strode up as he finished and put his finger in the middle of Cross’s chest.

“I didn’t authorize this. Why did you abandon your post?” he demanded. Cross looked down at his hand, then back up at Polter. The pudgy wizard pulled his hand away but didn’t give an inch.

“That’s a good way to get your hand broken,” T-Bone said.

“We don’t answer to you,” Cross said. His voice was a deep rumble, like thunder warning of a storm. He ignored Polter and turned to me. “Draeden asked us to come. Moon and Hardesty are watching over your family in our place.”

“How are they? How’s my sister?” I asked quickly. Polter sneered at me, but I was too busy hanging on T-Bone’s answer to punch him like I wanted to.

“They’re fine. Mostly bored.” He stepped aside as Polter elbowed his way past me then stopped in his tracks as Junkyard planted his feet and growled up at him. The scene held for a second before Dr. C knelt down beside him.

“It’s okay, Junkyard. You can bite him later,” he told him. That earned him a lick on the face before Junkyard trotted over to me. I went to the side door to deactivate the wards while Junkyard greeted Cross and T-Bone. Unlike Polter and most every other human he met, he took right to them, further proof that my dog had good taste.

I watched the Sentinels converge on the house, then my eyes went to Dr. C and Polter standing on the sidewalk. Every single mage I’d seen lately had been carrying a staff. It was their status symbol, and one of the tools of power they wielded. The thing that had been bugging me for the past couple of days dropped into place in my head as I opened the door and invited Cross and T-Bone inside.

In less than ten minutes, Cross, T-bone, and I were cooling our heels in the kitchen while Dr. C was closeted with Polter and most of the Sentinels in his library. Four had been assigned to me, and had promptly disappeared. I was nursing the last bottle of Coke and trying to keep my mind off of the way Polter had started throwing orders around. This was Dr. C’s house, damn it, and I hated that the overstuffed Master had been acting like he had been the one who’d figured everything out.

I was so hacked that I almost missed it when Junkyard’s head came up off his paws and his nose turned toward the front door. Cross and T-Bone were on their feet and out the side door the second I heard Lucas’ voice through the front door. I got up and made for the door at full speed a heartbeat later, with Junkyard on my heels.

The front door swung open to reveal Lucas in the clutches of two sentinels, one the girl who’d been guarding the elevator the night of my trial.

“This cowan has no business here,” she said sternly. “He shouldn’t even know of our world!”

“Well, if he didn’t before, you just made sure he did,” I snapped back at her. Her face went red at that.

“Dude, they took her!” Lucas cried, and I turned my attention back to him.

His lip was swollen, and he had a bruise along the side of his face that was just starting to turn purple. As if the black eye I’d given him wasn’t enough, his other eye was nearly swollen shut now, and his shirt was torn at the right shoulder.

“They took her!” His voice was laced with combination of desperation, fear and anger.

I stepped out onto the porch and put my arm around his shoulder, in the process shoving the two Sentinels away from him. That earned me a black look, but Cross and T-Bone stepped up behind them and pulled them away. I pulled Lucas inside and up the stairs, trying to ignore the sounds of the pompous windbag in the library talking about ‘his’ conclusions. My ego took a back seat to the tears running down my friend’s face.