Torn (6 page)

“What about explaining who she is to Rachel? Alice’s sister will wonder when you bring a young girl home. And what about taking care of her while you’re at the pub? Finding someone to watch over her while you’re off fighting demons?”

“Well, listen to you,” I said. “You’ve really got the lowdown on child care. But she’s fourteen, not six. And I swear I’ll work it out.” Of course, I was going to have to break the news to Johnson that he would have to fake being fourteen. I stifled a wicked grin. Finally, something I was looking forward to.

“I suggest you put some thought into the care and feeding of your sister. I need you focused, Lily.”

“See, this is what I don’t get,” I protested. “When you first sold me this gig, you told me I was the girl who could prevent the gate from opening. That I’d stop the Apocalypse. You said that was my mission. My purpose.”

“And it was,” Clarence said, his expression slightly concerned, as if he wasn’t sure where I was going with this.

“I did all that,” I said, working to keep the rage and self-loathing out of my voice. Because I
didn’t
do that, as Clarence damn well knew. “So why aren’t I done? Lily Carlyle,” I said in a newscaster-style voice, “you just saved the world. What are you going to do now?” I peered hard at Clarence. “I should be going to Disney-land, not working harder.”

“You locked the Ninth Gate, kid,” he said, his lie making me sick to my stomach. “And a big high five to you. But you think that solved all our problems? You think the world is all peachy keen now?”

I had to agree it was not, and I tried not to hold my breath as I waited for him to tell me about my new mission, searching for this funny little key that would
lock
the gates shut. Yeah, right.

“Like I said. We got work. We got demons on the streets, infiltrating themselves into the lives of the innocent. And, yeah, we got demons plotting another Armageddon.”

“The fun never stops,” I said. “What are they up to?”

“The other eight gates,” he said. “They’re running around trying to figure out how to open them before the convergence.”

I grinned. Score one for the cynical girl.

“Is that even possible?” I asked, keeping my face serious, my expression concerned. “I thought they were locked tight.”

“It’s not easy,” he said. “But it’s possible. And we need to make sure it doesn’t happen.”

“How?”

“They’re looking for a key,” he said. “The
Oris Clef
. This one unlocks all the gates,” he said. “The three pieces are scattered, but once they’re assembled, we’re talking some serious mojo.”

“Oh,” I said, actually impressed that Clarence wasn’t trying to hide the basic nature of our quest from me. “So what’s our plan?”

He grinned at me, then said exactly the words I wanted to hear. “Give me your arm, Lily. Because we’re going to find those pieces first.”

SIX

Iused my own knife to slice my palm, then smeared my blood over the flat edge of the blade. As Clarence muttered an incantation, I ran the blade down the soft interior of my right forearm, causing two strange symbols to rise on my flesh, the pain as my flesh was seared making me grit my teeth and squeeze my fingers and toes together. A second swipe of blood cooled the pain, though, and I opened my eyes to peer down at the symbols, the first, an Aztec-looking circle. The second, a series of lines and squiggles crammed tight into an area roughly the shape of a triangle.

“I’m running out of arm,” I said, knowing we still needed the third symbol for the third piece of the
Oris Clef
.

“No worries. We’ve got your whole body to work with.”

“Great. If the demon-killing gig goes under, I can always join the circus.”

He tapped my other arm, and I held it out, ready for yet another demonic tat. “You gonna let me do it this time?”

“You know how to call up the symbols?” he asked.

“No,” I admitted, though I realized it would be a good idea for me to figure that out. I wasn’t sure where one went to learn basic body-map-symbol-raising skills—maybe a Learning Annex course?

Wincing a little, I once again smeared the flat edge of my blade with the blood, then passed the blade to Clarence, who drew the blood down my forearm, all the while muttering the strange, foreign incantation. I cringed, anticipating the familiar burn as the blood seared a new locator into my flesh, then exhaled as another swipe of my blood over the by-then-visible design quelled the pain.

“What is it?” I asked, peering at the strange, geometric marks now burned into my flesh. An odd square, the lines inside seeming to collapse in on themselves as with a spiral descending to a point. A triangle in which another upside-down triangle was embedded. And a design that seemed to resemble a tic-tac-toe board, with dots in the outer squares and the image of an eye in the center.

“The three pieces,” he said, voicing what I already knew. “Each design represents one of the three pieces of the
Oris Clef
.”

“And all three images rose on my arm,” I said thoughtfully. “So that means the pieces still exist. That they’re in this dimension.” My learning curve about the Rand McNally me thing was pretty steep, and one of my first lessons was that my hyped-up blood could only latch onto things that were in this dimension. No locating lost relics that had been hidden forever within the demon realm.

I scowled down at the image burned onto my flesh. This next bit was the part I really didn’t like. “You ready?”

“Go on in,” he said.

I nodded, disconcerted by the fact that Clarence was now my anchor back to reality. Before, I’d believed he worked for the angels. Now I knew the true nature of the creature who was watching my back.

No helping it, though. Trying not to think about what could go wrong, I closed my palm over the square, then waited for the sharp tug near my navel.

It didn’t come.

I looked up at Clarence and shrugged. “You sure you got that incantation right?”

“I did,” he said, bouncing a bit in agitation. “I know I did. Try again. Try again right now.”

“Right.” This time, I went with the next image—the triangle. Again, nothing. “No way,” I said, thinking of Rose and the way Johnson was surely going to freak out completely if I returned to the motel without even a solid lead. “Something’s wrong. You did something wrong.”

“Try the last one,” he said, his voice tight.

I wasn’t expecting anything, but I did what he asked, slapping my hand over the tic-tac-toe board—and getting yanked off my feet by the hard jerk of an invisible thread pulling me down, down, down into the board.

“Clarence!” I called out as I clutched his hand tight. I’d done this twice before, and I still wasn’t used to it. I knew that when I was finished on the other side, I could touch my arm again, and the portal would reopen and Clarence could pull me back. I’d never actually
done
that, having missed my return journey both times before. But I knew how it worked, and intellectually, I was with the program.

Emotionally, though, I felt all alone and lost in the rush of wind as I moved through dark, swirling mists and thick, velvety blackness.

This was the scariest part. The nothingness. The loneliness. This was where I feared getting stuck, and until I passed through to the other side, I was pretty much a wreck.

In front of me, the darkness began to move. At first, the changes were difficult to discern, but the mist moved as well, and soon I could see the mists mixing with the black, faster and faster, until the mists and the blackness formed a vortex, and I was sucked in, closer and closer, until I was finally thrust through the middle and emerged into a blinding white light.

I blinked and realized I was looking at a huge expanse of sky. I shifted, rolling over, and discovered that I was floating above rocky terrain into which someone had carved buildings. I tried to shift to get a better look, but I couldn’t manage. Not this time.

I was looking—or trying to look—at the place where one of the pieces of the
Oris Clef
had been stashed. On my last two trips I’d been dumped unceremoniously into the middle of the target location. This time, however, I couldn’t even get a clear view, much less get close. Somehow, the relic was being protected even from me and my supersecret decoder skin. And didn’t that suck the big one?

I frowned, trying to find some additional clue. Because if I couldn’t get there through a portal in my arm, I was going to have to use the old-fashioned method of taking a plane. But to where? Buildings carved into rock weren’t common, but they also weren’t rare, and without some idea where exactly the key was, I could be bouncing all over the globe trying to find my vision. Good for frequent flyer miles, not so good for my sanity. Or my sister.

Trouble was, I saw nothing. I was too far above the site, and yet I had no range of motion. Nothing, that was, except for flipping over and looking at the sky again. And since I had no better idea, that was what I did right then. Maybe the sky held a clue. But when I looked, all I saw was a whitewashed blue that shifted to black as the sun set before my eyes.

The stars came out, winking and twinkling, and I lay there, floating on a current of air and thinking that I had never once in all my life seen the stars so clearly. After a while, they didn’t even look like stars anymore. They looked like drawings. Like sketches. And soon all that was left as I looked was a square chunk of space that was filled with what looked like a hand-drawn map of the very stars I’d been watching.

And that, I thought, was weird.

I tried to commit the image to memory, but visual recall was never my strong suit, and before I could even take a second look to bolster the image in my mind, that damn tug was back, as if a giant hook had emerged from my gut, grabbed hold of the skin around my belly button, and pulled me back inside. Hard and fast, and there was Clarence, both hands holding tight to my own, and his face beaded with sweat.

“What?” I asked in alarm. “What happened?”

“Felt like I was losing you a couple of times.”

“I couldn’t get a good view,” I said. “It was like the place was protected or something.”

Clarence ran stubby fingers through his sweaty mass of hair. “So now we know. We’re more careful next time.”

I swallowed.
Next time.
And there would be no avoiding it. I had to play along because if I didn’t, Rose was dead.

“Could you see anything?”

I told him, trying hard to describe the strange image in the sky and the unusual buildings in the hillside. “They were all carved into the stone,” I said, my eyes closed so I could picture it better. “But one building seemed to emerge from the top. I think I recognized it.”

His eyes lit. “You know the location?”

“No, I mean the type of building. It was one of those—what do they call them?—like in Chinese action imports.
Once Upon a Time in China
and all that.” Movies & More, my place of employment before I got into this new demon-killing gig, had a huge collection of Asian action flicks, and I loved them all. For that matter, with my sword and magic map arm, I almost felt like a character out of one of them. The tragic heroine trying hard for redemption, and in those movies, the good guy always won.

The thought gave me a moment of peace. At least until I remembered the demons whose essence I absorbed daily. Maybe I wasn’t so much the good guy after all.

“So that’s it,” I said with a shrug. “Like I said, I couldn’t get close. Is it enough? Can you figure out where it is? Do you have a jet? A private plane?”

“I think perhaps a bridge will do the job better.”

I frowned. A
bridge
was the name he’d given to the way I’d always gone through my arm to end up at a place. “I just told you it didn’t work.”

“That doesn’t mean we can’t conjure another bridge. A stand-alone. Using the map on your arm as a destination marker.”

“That will work?”

“Possibly,” he said thoughtfully. “Possibly.”

“Oh.” I wasn’t sure what to say to that. On the one hand, I wanted to get the damn relics and get it over with. On the other, I didn’t want to be walking a bridge through other dimensions if we weren’t absolutely sure where I was going to come out on the other side. I mean, I’m a big fan of Space Mountain and all, but the dark on my freaky arm bridge isn’t just an absence of light; it’s an utter void, without time or space or light or anything, and you’re all alone, trapped with the thought that if the other side of the bridge closes off, you’ll be stuck there forever, lost in nothingness for eternity.

Talk about your scary bedtime stories.

“Clarence,” I said, this time more urgently. “You won’t do it unless you’re certain, right?”

“Hmm?” He looked up at me, distracted. “Oh. Right. Of course.” He tapped my arm. “The protections are a bit troubling, but on the whole they were to be expected. No, it’s the other two images I’m worried about. Or the absence of images.” Without asking, he yanked my arm toward him.

“Hey!”

“Touch them again.”

I did what he asked, even though I wanted to smack him for bossing me around. Then again, bossing me around was what he did best.

We both looked at my arm. Nothing.

“Maybe there’s an order,” I said. “Maybe after we get the piece from the buildings in the hill, the other images will pop to life.”

His eyes went wide, impressed, and he tapped the side of his nose. “Listen to you,” he said. “You just may be right.” He puffed out his cheeks and exhaled noisily. “Okay, I’ll do some research, find the location, and we’ll put together a game plan for going in.”

I cocked my head, taking devious pleasure from the fact that I was about to antagonize him. “How come we need a game plan? The pieces are under guard, right?”

“We presume so,” he said, looking puzzled. “It is also possible they are simply well hidden.”