The Warlock's Curse (24 page)

He paused by the side of the bed and looked down at Jenny. She was sleeping peacefully, her face soft and lovely. That one curl, the one that always escaped from her pins, curved across her cheek. He was reaching down to gently put it back in place when pain, sudden and sharp, bent him double. He clutched at his head as nausea knifed through him.

William Wordsworth Edwards!

Will staggered back from the bed, moaning involuntarily.

It was Ma’am. Sending for him.

The amount of pain associated with one of Ma’am’s Sends was directly related to how mad she was. And boy, was she ever
mad
.

What on earth do you think you’re doing?

Each needle of pain that flared inside his head was associated with strange visions: fires, earthquakes, tornadoes. Monstrously destructive forces of nature. Will cringed at the force of magic flowing through his mind.

What have you gotten that sweet Jenny Hansen into? Where have the two of you gone? If you’ve laid a finger on her, boy, I will murder you!

Will gritted his teeth and tried to hold his mind closed against the onslaught. He breathed deeply and steadily. He knew that while the magic was very painful, there wasn’t as much force behind it as it seemed. Ma’am would never use enough magic to cause real damage. This was a beating with a wooden spoon, intended to frighten more than harm.

Pask de la Guerra tried to cover for you, but he told us everything in the end. Where did you get the money to buy his car? It didn’t come from your father’s cash, so where?

Trying to block his mother’s keening inquisition from his mind was like trying to plug his ears against the sound of a bandsaw.

Mr. Hansen cabled us about your appaling behavior in San Francisco. He said you picked up Jenny and ran away from him! Can you imagine what he thinks?

So the cat was out of the bag. Or rather, the cat was in the bag, along with a whole bunch of other angry cats. Will had known that he was going to have to face the consequences of their elopement, but somehow he’d hoped they might take a little longer in arriving.

Where are you?

The question was blasted with more force than anything that had come before it, and it almost compelled Will to scream the answer aloud.

Don’t think about Detroit
, he commanded himself. Then he realized that he was thinking about Detroit. God, he hoped it wouldn’t leak through to Ma’am.

I expect you’re on your way to Detroit.

Will muttered a curse, but then realized it hardly required mind-reading to guess his destination. And his family would follow him—and even if they didn’t care about getting him back, they would care about getting Jenny. Their only hope was to get to Tesla Industries, hide behind the company’s powerful veil of secrecy. That’s what Ben had advised him, Will remembered. Ben had said it was his only hope.

Young man, I hope you realize that your father and I—not to mention Mr. Hansen!—aren’t just going to take this kind of foolishness lying down!

Suddenly, Will remembered something else Ben had written.

You’ve got to be willing to hurt yourself.

Will staggered over to the steam radiator. He held Ben’s words in his head like a shield against Ma’am’s keening.

It’s got to hurt and hurt bad.

If you don’t contact us immediately and tell us that you’re bringing Jenny home ...

Steam at atmospheric pressure was 212 degrees Fahrenheit. Will remembered this random fact as he pressed his forearm against the hot steel. Tears sprung to his eyes as fresh pain, stronger pain, surged through him.

And, miraculously, the screeching in his head subsided almost instantaneously. It vanished with a whimper, like a barking dog squirted with a hose.

Exhausted, Will sat on the floor, cradling his burnt arm. He wondered if he’d hurt Ma’am. He didn’t want to. He just wanted her to stop shrieking at him.

Suddenly, he felt angry. He and Jenny had every right to do what they’d done. It was Jenny’s money, and she got to decide what she wanted to do with it! And he got to make choices about his life too, just like Ben had said in his letter.

Still cradling his arm, he crawled back into bed next to Jenny. He breathed in her smell of long-ago hyacinth soap, new wool, gritty red Otherwhere dust.

“We’ve made it to Detroit,” he murmured to her, closing his eyes. He knew she wouldn’t hear. Maybe he said it for his own benefit. “I don’t know what you’re planning, and I don’t want to know. You get to make your own choices just like I get to make mine. That’s what Detroit means. It’s like what you told me about that silver dollar. It’s more than just what it is. And we’re here.”

Finally, arm aching, Will fell asleep.

Chapter Nine

Signed in Blood

25
DAYS UNTIL THE FULL MOON

T
he next morning, a firm knock on the door startled Will from a deep sleep. Dislodging his arm from beneath Jenny’s head, he noticed she’d drooled all over his sleeve. The honeymoon was over, he thought blearily. He’d sure gotten the short end of that stick.

The knock came at the door again, louder, and Will stumbled across the room. Before opening the door, he rolled his not drooled-on sleeve down over the arm he had burned the night before; the place where he’d pressed it against the hot radiator was shiny red, edged with small blisters.

Waiting on the doorstep was a strange disheveled man. He was in his mid-fifties, Will guessed, with thick, wild, uncombed hair and an air of notable distraction, as if there was something just outside his field of vision that he was desperately trying to see. But his clothes, despite being untidy, looked well-made and expensive; he did not seem to be one of the hotel’s seedy traveling salesmen.

“Can I help you?” Will asked, rubbing his eyes.

“I’m Grigory Grigoriyev,” the man announced in a very loud voice. He had a pronounced Russian accent, yet he clearly strove to speak with precision. “You can call me Grig, everyone else does. I have come to collect you and your ... wife.” He said “wife” with special emphasis.

“Oh! Mr. Grigoriyev! I mean ... Grig.” Will stood up straighter and attempted to look respectable. “I’m sorry! I ... I wasn’t expecting you.”

“I asked for you specially, you know!” said Grig, sounding oddly put out.

“Yes, I know,” said Will. “Mr. Waters told me.”

“Waters is a good man.” Grig spoke with great intensity, as if his pronouncement on the character of Will’s mentor at the Polytechnic was to be the last statement he would ever make on the subject. He looked past Will, frowning. “Is your wife in there?”

“Yes,” Will said. “But she’s not awake yet.” Then, aware that the conversation had proceeded quite a ways without an answer to the obvious question, “And if you don’t mind my asking, how did you find us here, anyway?”

“
Jepson
told me,” Grig spat the name with venom. “That lazy good-for-nothing janitor who sent you here. He’s always sending people here who don’t know any better. The owner buys him beer for his trouble. But it’s not
his
trouble. It’s the trouble of the people who have to stay here. This place is not clean. It is the kind of place one goes when one does not want other people to hear screaming.”

Will wasn’t quite sure what to say to that disturbing description. He chose a safe route. “I would appreciate any assistance you could give us in finding a better place, sir. We’re very anxious to get settled, and I’m very anxious to get started.”

“We have taken care of all of that,” said Grig. “You, of course, cannot live in the dormitory on the compound, as would otherwise be customary. So we have obtained an apartment for you and your wife. It is a good place near where you will be working. Very clean. It is the same building I, myself, live in, so we will be able to walk together. We have seen to every particular. Mr. Tesla won’t stand for anything else.”

Will was relieved. “All right,” he said, happy for once to place his fate in someone else’s capable hands.

“I will wait for you and your wife downstairs,” Grig said, attempting one last time to look past Will into the hotel room. “I will drive you both over. Please don’t be long.”

Will closed the door and found that Jenny was awake.

“Who was that?”

“That was my mentor, Mr. Grigoriyev,” said Will. “Except I’m just supposed to call him Grig. The janitor told him we were here. He’s waiting to give us a ride to our new apartment.”

Jenny’s shoulders slumped in relief. “If I never see this place again it will be too soon,” she said, with a shiver.

Grig waited for them in front of the hotel, leaning against a handsome burgundy-colored Atlas Model H, staring up at the building as if it were personally offensive to him. As Will and Jenny emerged, he turned his scrutiny on them, paying particular attention to Jenny. They must have made a strange looking pair: Will with his lumpy toolbag and ill-fitting suit and Jenny in her modish new outfit still caked with red Otherwhere dust.

In the bright light of morning, their motoring dusters were just as insufficient against the winter chill as they had been the night before. Grig, who was wearing a heavy woolen overcoat, helped Jenny into the back seat and, with pronounced chivalry, arranged a motoring blanket over her lap. He then gestured for Will to get into the front seat as he climbed into the driver’s seat on the right. It was a gasoline machine, so Will was rather surprised that Grig hadn’t left it running; he’d have to go around to the front and crank-start the car, never an enjoyable task. But Grig did not. He just toggled a switch, and the car engine cranked and roared to life.

“Hey, an electric starter!” Will exclaimed. “Nifty!”

“Child’s play,” Grig sniffed. “And yet the automobile manufacturers around here want nothing to do with it! Henry Ford especially. He has a significant lack of imagination.” He steered the car away from the curb, adding: “We have had some gratifying interest from the men at Cadillac, however.”

The streets of Detroit were made of tightly laid red brick, bright and cold and clean. The main thoroughfares were immaculately kept, with snow and manure piled along the gutters for later removal. Grig turned the car up Woodward, and as they passed the famous Campus Martius and the grand City Hall, he noted their existence with bland indifference. Clearly, he considered this the extent of his duties to provide a civic welcome, for he offered nothing more. They turned onto a broad causeway that ran northwest with ruler-straight precision. Will caught a sign, held the words in his mind:
Grand River Avenue
.

Grand River Avenue was the widest street he’d ever seen, much less ridden on, with two lanes of traffic in each direction and streetcars clank-clanging down the middle. The bulk of the traffic lumbered along slowly—heavy, horse-drawn wagons that kept to the side. But it was the automobiles—dozens upon dozens, more common here than anywhere Will had ever seen—that gave the avenue its air of hectic modernity.

Grig did not speak again until after they had been driving for quite some time, and then it was to comment apologetically: “The Compound is rather a ways from downtown, I’m afraid.” But even though they drove and drove—a mile, two miles from the city’s downtown core, the urban congestion hardly thinned. And Will didn’t notice the distance, or even Grig’s comment on it; there was so much to take in. He’d thought Stockton, California’s hub of manufacture and commerce was impressive—but Detroit!

About three miles up Grand River Avenue, they turned onto a narrow side street lined with newly built homes. Grig brought the automobile to a stop before a building that bore a small brass sign that read “Winslow Street Apartments.” It was a new building, so new that its white stone walls had not yet become grimed with factory smoke.

The tiled apartment entryway was neat as a pin. Grig led them into a common sitting room, which was decorated with a few brightly colored religious icons. A small window garden of carefully tended geraniums and flowering winter cactuses ornamented the bay sill.

A woman was waiting for them there. She was small and spruce, with a smooth unreadable face. Across her lap was spread a knitting project of inexpressible complexity.