Trace of Magic (26 page)

His arm tightened around my waist. “How did you break the nulls on the cage?” he asked abruptly.

“How do you travel?” I countered. “I just did it.”

“I had the best tracers working weeks to create those nulls.
I
couldn’t have broken out.”

I shrugged. Let him put two and two together. I wasn’t going to do it for him.

“What else can you do?” he asked, and something in his voice made my skin itch. It had that underlying greedy tone, reminded me of a druggie looking for his next Sparkle Dust hit.

“I’ve got mad dish-washing skills,” I said, knowing full well he’d just ask Price, and Price would tell him I could pick up dead trace and make blood nulls and whatever else Touray wanted to know. It was only a matter of time. All the same, I didn’t feel like doing the legwork work for him.

“Don’t try to run from me,” he warned suddenly. “You and I have business, I think.”

A spike of fear drove through me. “Is that a threat? So much for keeping me safe.” I’d lived my first twenty-five years as a cockroach, hiding in the dark and in the cracks of Diamond City, just to avoid letting a man like this discover me. Now I felt exposed, like I was about to get crushed under someone’s boot.

“Not a threat,” he said. “But if you don’t help me, people you love will surely die.”

I stopped and pushed away from him, staring incredulously. “How is that not a threat?”

Those black eyes fixed on me like a shark’s eyes. Hungry. No. More like ravenous. I shuddered, wishing I could cockroach under a door and disappear.

“Riley,” he started.

A
zing
of fear flittered through me. I’d forgotten he knew my name. Like that mattered, but it was just another thing that gave him a handle on me.

“You’ve just walked into the first volleys of a war that started years before you were ever born. If the other side has its way, things will change in Diamond City, and not for the better. People will die. A lot of them. People are going to die, anyway, if I can’t shut down this war sooner rather than later. To do that, I’ll need your help. So maybe it is a threat, but not one I’m making. It’s just reality.”

I licked my lips, my throat dry. I believed him. “Why me?”

“Because you ripped apart my cage nulls like they were wet paper, and because of this.” He dug in his pocket and held up the little vial of blood from Josh’s safe. “Because you might be the key to everything.”

Chapter 21

THE KEY TO everything?

“What the hell does that mean?”

Noises echoed down the hallway. It was impossible to make out whether someone was ahead of us or behind. He shoved the vial back into his pocket and grabbed my arm, pulling me along.

“No time to explain now,” he said in a grim undertone. “Just don’t get killed, whatever you do. If you get caught, I’ll come get you. Just wait and don’t get dead.”

“Funny. Your brother said the same damned thing before he brought me to you and locked me up in your cage.”

He didn’t have any answer to that, or he didn’t feel like talking anymore. He dragged me to a crossway and pulled me left. Another crossway and right. We wove back and forth until we came to a steel door blocking the way. It had no handles. A square black panel inset into the wall was the lock. Touray pressed his hand to it. A beam scanned over it, and the door gave off a low moan as bars inside retracted. The heavy slab of steel swung away from us.

Touray shoved me ahead of him, taking a gun from his waistband and smashing the panel with the butt. He pushed the door shut, scanning his palm on the other side. Once again the door moaned as the locking beams slid back into place. Touray didn’t wait for them to finish, but drew me along.

The hallway was mint green and smelled of antiseptic, urine, and vomit. It made me think of one of those dive nursing homes that everyone lives in terror of ending up in. We passed six doors and came to a seventh. A window high up was woven through with steel wire. Touray put his hand on the knob and stopped, turning to look at me. He started to say something, then sighed and shook his head. He opened the door, waving me ahead of him.

We stepped into a room the color of dog vomit. It was mostly empty, but for a small bathroom stall with a toilet, a washstand, and a shower. There was also a hospital bed in the middle of the room. On it was a man.

He lay still, staring straight up at the ceiling. His shoulders and legs were strapped down, his wrists bound to the sides of the bed.

I stepped closer, horror putting a fist through my stomach. “Josh?”

His head jerked up to look at me. His blue eyes were sunken and huge. He was almost translucent, and his skin stretched tight over his skull like he hadn’t eaten in weeks. The room smelled of piss, vomit, sweat, and bleach.

“Riley?” His voice was hoarse, almost nonexistent. “Riley?” He began to kick and struggle against his bonds. “Riley!”

I ran to his side and grabbed one of his hands. It was like holding dry twigs. “It’s okay, Josh. I’m here. You’re going to be okay.”

His eyes looked wildly around the room as if he couldn’t see me. “Kill . . . Don’t . . . Taylor . . .”

“Taylor’s fine,” I said, though I didn’t know for certain. I hadn’t seen her in days. I looked at Touray.

“What did you do to him?” I didn’t know that I’d ever been so angry. I wanted to kill him. If I’d had a gun, I’d have tried to shoot him

He held up his hands. “I found him this way.”

“Yeah, right. You broke into his house and
found
him and tortured him.”

“No,” he said so forcefully I almost believed him. “I’d heard about him. The news spread like fire once the FBI started kicking up a fuss. Rumor was he knew something about the Kensington artifacts. I wanted to hear what he knew, so I tracked him down and took him away from his captors. He’d already been pretty worked over. They put haunters onto him around the clock and—” He grimaced. “They pumped him full of SD. I’ve been working on detoxing him, but he’s in rough shape. He’s mostly not been lucid. I tried a heal-all on him, but it had little effect. I planned to get a dreamer in to see if his mind could be repaired, but he’s started to shift into a wraith.”

Horror froze me in place. I turned to look for the signs. They were there. The opal shine in the eyes, the blue tinge to his tongue, and the translucent skin. I could see the shadows of his bones and arteries in his arms. He was fading. As with Touray’s security, there was a point of no return with Sparkle Dust. Once you hit it, you were a walking corpse. There was no recovering. It was just a matter of time before you dropped dead.

I couldn’t accept it. I couldn’t let myself believe that it might be true. “You’re lying.”

“I wish I were. This is the kind of thing my enemies do,” Touray said, the grooves around his mouth and nose deepening.

“Are you saying you’ve never done anything like this?” I heard myself say in a cold, distant voice. “Are you saying you wouldn’t have done this to him to find out where he hid those artifacts?”

He had the grace to look away. I thought so. All the sides in this war—whatever this war was—were equally horrible.

“I tend to try sugar to convince people to help me,” he said. “The others—they prefer fear and pain. It’s faster.”

I stared down at Josh. He looked panicked. If he still recognized me, I couldn’t tell. His head swiveled back and forth, his eyes darting and flicking after images I couldn’t see. His pupils were tiny. He screamed and flinched, rolling and twisting and kicking at his restraints.

“What have they done to him?” I whispered, not expecting an answer. I got one anyway.

“He’s locked inside a nightmare in his head. They amplified it with SD. I’d hoped he’d get better away from the haunters and the drug. He’s had bouts of lucidity, but they are getting fewer and further apart. I’m surprised he even noticed you were here.”

He started loosening the restraints. “We can’t leave him here. There might be more artifacts out there that he knows about.”

How mercenary of him. Not that I expected different. People were no better than pawns to his kind.

As soon as Josh’s hands were free, he started swinging at the air, punching and scrabbling. Then he grabbed at his own face and screamed. He clawed furrows in his cheeks before I could grab his arms. He gibbered at me and twisted to bite me.

“Give it to me,” he begged, staring at a phantom only he saw. “Please! I have to have it!”

Touray pushed him back down and snapped a pair of handcuffs over his wasted wrists. Next he put a pair of leg shackles on Josh’s legs and snapped them to the wrist cuffs. Wearing blue hospital scrubs and wearing the shackles, Josh looked like a dangerous mental patient.

“Is that necessary?” I asked dully. The tear gas had stolen all my tears, or else I would have been crying. I felt hollow. My heart was bruised and bloody. This wild-eyed maniac was not the man I knew. Josh was the dictionary definition of a young urban professional. He wore suits and ties and button-down shirts; his hair was never out of place; he was tidy—if not freakishly clean; I’d bet good money that he ironed his sheets. He never yelled, never even raised his voice. This crazy, delusional man could not be Josh.

Yet it was.

Taylor would be heartbroken.

“It’s safer to keep him contained. Can you walk on your own?” Touray asked me. “I’ll have my hands full with him.”

I followed them out of the room. Josh continued to twitch and shake, jumping against the wall and then breaking into a shuffling run and crashing to the floor. Touray and I helped him up. Blood ran from his nose.

“Leave it,” Touray ordered when I started to go back to his room for a towel to stop it up. “We don’t have time.”

“You can’t keep him,” I said as my brain caught up with what was happening. “He’s not an animal or a piece of meat for you to take or use as you like. He’s a man and he’s hurting. My sister loves him. I won’t let you have him.”

“How will you stop me?” was Touray’s quiet question.

Yes, Riley, how will you stop him?
I asked myself. “Whatever it takes,” I said out loud.

“Perhaps we will bargain for him. Your services for his freedom.”

I wondered what Price would think of that offer. Would he think his brother was taking advantage of me? Blackmailing me? Then again, what did it matter what Price thought? All that mattered was that I got Josh safely away. If it came down to tracing for Touray, I’d do it. First I’d try to incapacitate him, preferably with the tire iron.

“We’ll see,” I said noncommittally.

A booming clang echoed down the hallway from behind us. Something had been rammed against the steel door.

“They’ve found us,” I said unnecessarily. “They must have circumvented your fail-safes.”

Josh chose that moment to begin howling. He started into a lurching run. Touray and I jogged to keep up. Neither of us tried to stop him. Speed seemed like a much better idea, though where we were going, I had no clue.

I could barely keep up. My feet were in agony. The inside of my boots squelched with every step as blood leaked through the bandages.

The door clanged again, and then I felt a gust of cool air running past me. “What was that?”

“They broke through. Too damned fast,” Touray said grimly.

He pushed Josh around a corner and stopped and turned. He pulled me behind him and hit a button on the wall. A door slid out of the wall into place. Like the other, it was steel. I heard the locking beams slide into the floor and ceiling. Touray pressed his hands against the door, and I felt a hum of magic kick to life. It buzzed over my skin as it rolled away on the other side of the door.

“That should take care of them,” he said, and then gave me a sidelong glance. “I am the last fail-safe.”

I felt the air shudder and the door whined with a low stress sound. The sounds from beyond the door deafened me and dust puffed through the seams above and under the door. Though we stood on the solid rock of the mountain, it trembled and shuddered as the building on the other side collapsed into rubble.

“What about your own people?” I whispered when the silence returned.

“If the FBI got this far, then my people are dead,” he said flatly and motioned for us to leave.

Touray guided us downward. We were in a gently sloping rock tunnel, I realized. The door had marked the end of the building. Touray had sent Price to the tunnels to hide the artifacts. He was somewhere in the mountain ahead of us.

The relief of that knowledge made me want to drop to my knees.

“Why don’t you travel us out of here?” I asked Touray.

“Nowhere else safer to go,” he said. “Besides, travelling would make Josh’s mental difficulties much worse.”

“Why?” It’s not that I didn’t believe him, but he didn’t exactly have mine or Josh’s best interests at heart.

“Travelling can be confusing for the mind. It can get lost, for lack of a better term.”

I frowned. “What do you mean?”

He sighed, nudging Josh to keep moving. “You ask a lot of questions.”

“It helps me stay alive.”

“Travelling is a little bit like a hallucinogenic drug trip. The mind fractures from the body and travels through a dreamspace. When the body and mind arrive, they are separate and it can be difficult for the two to find each other. When they do—if they do—it can take time for body and mind to adjust. Josh could very well be lost forever.”

I stared at him, my mouth falling open. Was he for real? “Is that the truth? Travelling is that dangerous?”

“Not for me,” he said. “For passengers, it can be. It’s easier if the passenger is unconscious, but right now, that’s impossible for Josh. Even if he were to be knocked out, his mind would not quit working. Awake or asleep, he is tortured.”

“Fucking bastards,” I said, spitting the words.

“You can see why I will do whatever it takes to fight against them. If they win this war, they will own Diamond City and every person within it.”

“Sorry, but I don’t see how that would be a big change from now,” I said. “The Tyet owns the place as it is. All that changes is the management, and as far as I can tell, you’re about the same.”

He shook his head. “You’re wrong. The people who took Josh are greedy for much more.”

“What more is there? The Tyet controls the mines and half the businesses in town. What else is there?”

“Power. They want to be gods.”

I stared in disbelief. “You’re not serious.”

“As a heart attack. Those artifacts might just give them the means.”

“What do they do?”

“Nobody knows for sure. All we know is that Zachary Kensington created them and united the Tyet during the early days. Supposedly each one corresponds to a primary talent, and when used in concert, they confer godlike powers. It’s believed that once the Tyet was united and control established, Kensington hid them so that no one would use them capriciously. Nobody has seen them since, until now.

“Two are still missing. I am hoping Josh can tell me where to find them. I’m not the only one who wants to know. That’s why I can’t let him be captured again, and why I need to get him to a dreamer before his mind can’t be recovered.”

I looked at my almost brother-in-law. I barely recognized him. His face worked, the muscles twitching and pulling. It reminded me of the way dogs sometimes have active dreams, all twitchy and jumpy. Only Josh’s nightmares weren’t going to just end on their own.

“I thought haunters needed to touch their victims,” I said. “How come he isn’t recovering?”

“I assume it’s the Sparkle Dust. The addiction is . . . awful,” was Touray’s not very helpful response.

I couldn’t imagine Josh’s torment. I pushed up next to him and put my arm through his, pulling him against me. Maybe touching someone familiar who cared about him would help.