Child Of Fire Part 35

"Yes." There was a pause. "I did have help. A consultant, of a sort. A fortune-teller."

"The same one your father had, and your grandfather."

"My great-grandfather, too. 'Use it sparingly,' my father told me, but there were so many things I didn't know. And the people..."

He kept talking. He sounded very much like the weary activist, so burdened with the tasks ahead of him and so impressed with his own motives and ideals.

But something had struck me. Fortune-teller, he'd said.

What if he was not just looking into the future? What if the magic he was using was actually controlling the future?

It made sense if he was using magic that let him step outside of time in some way. Annalise's burned hands kept coming back, no matter what she did to treat them. The Dubois brothers could heal anything, even brutal, mangling death. Maybe they were simply backing up in time, to a point before they were injured. Maybe that's why the new sigil on Sugar Dubois couldn't heal his injuries the way his brothers had been healed. It could not restore him to a time before it was in place.

As for the Hammer family, I had a.s.sumed that the seizures they suffered during hard times, and the smart moves they had made to turn things around, had come from visions of the future. But what if they were more than visions? What if he was making good things happen?

How else to explain a successful line of toys about Marie Antoinette, for G.o.d's sake?

I tried to picture the power of a spell that could control whole populations of people. I couldn't. How could he be so strong that he forced people to love his products? How could he force people to forget the people they loved most?

Then it dawned on me. He wasn't doing it. His "consultant" was.

Goose b.u.mps ran down my back. Annalise was right. This was completely out of my league.

I looked at Annalise. She was scowling at me. "Have you been paying attention to this c.r.a.p?" Charlie Three was talking about siting a plastics factory.

"His great-grandfather summoned a predator out of the Empty s.p.a.ces, right?" I said. "And this d.i.c.k has been communing with it somehow, using it to draw in customers for his f.u.c.king toys. And it's been taking the children for some reason, probably to eat them."

"That's what I figure, too," she said. "And I'll bet it was this predator that controlled those women in his office"-she held up her hands-"burning them all to protect him. He doesn't have the power or the guts for a move like that."

I turned to Able Katz. "Do you remember what happened after our meeting at your office?"

"What meeting?" he said, sounding irritated. "I've never seen either of you before in my life." Charles was droning on, but I was focused on Able. It was true. Just as I'd suspected, he couldn't remember meeting us any more than Doug and Meg Benton could remember their dead kids. The predator was controlling people.

"Why hasn't the predator run amuck? Why hasn't it tried to kill everyone on the planet?"

"It's probably bound somehow. Eli must have helped them summon and bind it."

"That was a long time ago. Do you think it's likely to get free?"

She looked back at Able Katz, who was scowling at us. He must have thought we should pay more attention to his boss's speech. "It's already free enough to kill."

I thought of the way the children had fallen apart when they burned. They'd turned into little worms and crawled off to the southwest. To here, in fact, or somewhere close to here. I wondered if the predator was feeding on those worms.

Hammer started talking about median home prices, and I couldn't take it anymore. "Shut up!" I snapped. "You want to avoid violence? I'll make you an offer. Send your guards away. Turn over to us all copies of the book Eli Warren sold to your great-grandfather. Take us to your so-called consultant."

"But," the voice said, "the company can't continue without my, um, consultant."

"The company isn't going to continue," I said. "And neither are you. There's too much blood on your hands."

"I can find those kids again!"

I turned to the guards. "Hear that? I'm talking about missing children, and he's worried about his company. Is that who you're trying to protect?"

"Don't bother," Able said. "These men are not going to turn against us. They're professionals. That's why I hired them. They do their jobs."

Annalise turned to me. "And you had better do your job."

She dropped the fistful of green ribbons onto the carpet, then grabbed my arm. She winced while she did it.

The ribbons struck the carpet and flared into green fire. Flames engulfed my legs, but I didn't feel any pain. Several of the guards gaped at us in shock, and one cried out. They thought we were burning ourselves alive.

The fire crawled up our bodies and billowed outward. As soon as the flames reached above her head, Annalise charged forward.

Able Katz's expression went slack. He stood and inhaled deeply.

The tinny voice on the speakerphone shouted, "No! No! No!"

Annalise slapped the desk to the side. It smashed a window and tore the drape from the rod. The desk and drape fell outside and crashed to the rocks below.

The four guards who had been flanking Able opened fire on Annalise, drowning out Hammer's voice.

Annalise slammed into Able, knocking him into the wall with a sickening thunk. Blood-red fire blasted from his mouth, igniting the wooden beams in the ceiling. He had been about to breathe dragon breath on us, just like the officer workers at Hammer Bay Toys.

I dropped low into Annalise's green fire and rolled toward the far wall. The guns made an incredible racket in the enclosed room. I felt something zip past me. It must have been a ricochet off Annalise's invulnerable body.

I lifted myself into a crouch. The green flames were spreading toward me, and the six guards along the wall bolted toward the door they had entered through. Good. Let them run. At least they'd live.

One of them turned and saw me. He raised his weapon.

Without thinking, I threw the ghost knife at him. One of his partners b.u.mped him in the rush to get to the door, and another stepped briefly into his line of fire. Then the ghost knife struck him over the heart.

The guard collapsed onto the carpet. The man behind him tripped over him and fell into the doorway, blocking it. The green flames reached them, and they disappeared within the fire. I could hear their screams.

I summoned my ghost knife. It flew into my hand. Of course I had killed them. d.a.m.n.

The door behind me opened. I spun, catching a quick glimpse of the two men entering through the doorway we had just used. Both held their Uzis at the ready. I threw the ghost knife again and ducked into the flames, throwing myself flat on the floor.

The bullets zipped above me. Then I heard a bang, as if one of the Uzis had jammed and backfired, and the two men cried out. All gunfire in the room stopped. Just then, the green fire evaporated. I looked around the room. The two guards who had entered behind us were smoking skeletons. One of the submachine guns in their hands had burst open.

"You did good," Annalise said, her back to me. The room seemed strangely quiet after all the gunfire, but there was a terrible stench of burned plastic and roasted flesh in the air.

"It doesn't feel like good," I said. I glanced over to where she had been fighting. The other four guards were also smoking bones. So was Able Katz.

I should have been sick, but I had already pa.s.sed that point. Maybe if there had been one body, or two, I could have puked my guts out and cried like a little girl, but these were too much. It didn't seem real.

"At least for them, it was quick." Annalise turned toward me. Her right eye was gone. She had only an empty socket there. Just below that empty socket, in her cheekbone, was a second bullet hole.

"Holy...!" I shouted. I backed away from her. She had two bullets in her head, with no exit wounds, but she was walking around as if nothing had happened. What the h.e.l.l was she? Was she even alive?

"I know," she said. "It sucks when this happens." She reached up and gingerly touched her face with her stiff, inflamed hand. One of her fingers slipped into her ruined eye socket.

That did it. I heaved a thin, acid stream onto the carpet.

"Oh, knock it off," she snapped. "You're not the one who got shot. Let's go."

She charged through the doorway, kicking the smoking bones out of her way.

Holy G.o.d, what was I doing here? What was she?

I was about to follow her, but I couldn't. I couldn't step over the bones of the men we'd just killed.

"What are you waiting for?" she snapped at me.

I didn't answer. I couldn't help picturing the guards' wives and children, their mothers and fathers.

The smashed-up computer lay in a heap beside one of the bodies. I strode over to it and lifted the webcam. The little red light was still on, but I didn't know if it was still sending images.

"This is your fault," I said to the camera. "You put these people here. You asked them to die for you. You-"

Something smashed the camera out of my hand. It was a scorched human skull.

"For G.o.d's sake!" Annalise hissed. "This is why you'll never be more than a wooden man, Ray. You're too f.u.c.king soft. Don't talk to the targets. Don't taunt them. Don't be their f.u.c.king friends. It just makes things harder. Be a f.u.c.king professional. Treat them like objects." She held up the skull and waved it in front of my face. "They're gla.s.s figurines, Ray, and nothing more-some are very pretty, some not so much. But it's your job to break some of those figurines, and you can never tell right away which ones that'll be."

I stepped away from the skull. "Don't-"

She stepped toward me, and for a moment I thought she was going to rub the blackened bone against my face. "Does this bother you? Get over it. This is what we do. We make corpses. And maybe, if we make enough of them..."

She broke off. Her hand was shaking. She let the skull fall to the floor and cradled her hand against her chest. Her pain must have been intense. She scowled at the floor. I saw anger in her expression, and resentment, too. And regret.

The overhead sprinkler system turned on. I looked up to see water dousing the flames Able had blasted onto the ceiling. Annalise and I stood in the downpour while brilliant sunlight shone through the broken window.

"Boss-"

"Could you kill a priest, Ray? Could you kill a priest who only wanted to help terminally ill children? Could you kill a mother who was trying to protect her kids? Could you kill a five-year-old girl whose only crime is that some idiot adult cast a spell on her? I could. I've done all those things."

"Annalise-"

"You're good at this, Ray. You're good at this job. And the society needs good people, more than ever. But you're useless if you stop right before the finish line to moralize. We have a planet full of people to save. Get it? If someone gets between you and your target, there's a planet full of people who will die if you can't bring yourself to do your job."

She clamped her mouth shut and turned away. I had the impression that she had a lot more to say, but she had to hold it back. She sealed it all off with anger.

Suddenly Annalise seemed very human to me, despite the grotesque injuries to her face. And she was right. If we stopped now, more little kids were going to die. Charles Hammer needed killing.

She marched into the hall. "Come on. We have to search the house." I bent and touched one of the unfired Uzis. It was, as expected, cool to the touch. I lifted it and draped the strap over my neck. It was a weapon, but it didn't make me feel any more confident about the coming fight.

I followed her into the hallway. There were three doors along the far side. I charged into the first one. It was an empty bathroom. Annalise opened the next. It was a laundry room and pantry. Farther down the hall was the kitchen, complete with gas range and walk-in fridge. Beyond that was a set of stairs leading to the second floor.

The upstairs was just a single room, broken up by a couple of support columns. There was a small cl.u.s.ter of exercise equipment, some bookshelves, some closets, a terrace with a monstrous charcoal grill, and an open futon against the far wall.

"This way," Annalise said. She kicked open a door. It led to a ten-foot-long covered causeway that connected to the entrance of the tower. We strode across it, looking down at the jagged black rocks twenty feet below.

The tower was made of gray stone blocks. It was dark inside, with only a single electric light burning above.

Annalise sprinted up the wooden stairs. I followed as closely as I could with my injured leg. She seemed to have forgotten that I was supposed to be her decoy.

We ran up the spiraling stairs, never pausing at the landings or glancing out the windows. Annalise tugged a ribbon free, but I couldn't see what it was. My shoe was filling with blood, and I started to fall behind.

Annalise finally reached the ladder at the top of the stairs. She climbed up, threw her shoulder into the trapdoor above us, and broke through it.

She flinched, turning her face down toward me. There was the boom of a shotgun. Annalise's head snapped back, and I knew she had taken the blast in the side of her face. The ribbon fell from her fingers, and she sagged toward me for a moment. I heard the gunman rack a new sh.e.l.l into the shotgun.

Instead of falling off the ladder and through the center of the tower, Annalise stood up straight again. She was still fighting.

"No!" someone shouted in disbelief. "No!"

Annalise was halfway through the trap. She covered her face as another blast struck. This time, she had braced herself and didn't even flinch.

Whoever was up there racked the shotgun once more. Annalise climbed out of the trapdoor. I was right behind her.

Charles Hammer backed toward the other end of the room. Annalise ran at him. He aimed the shotgun low, blasting at her feet. Her legs went out from under her, and she fell onto her hands. I heard her hiss in pain.

I gained the tower room. I saw books all around me, and another silver hoop in the middle of the room. This one was bent and twisted into a variety of strange sigils.

On the other side of that hoop stood Charles Hammer. He looked like a sick man. His skin was sallow, his hair was greasy, and he had bags under his eyes. The room smelled like old socks and gunpowder.

Annalise stood. I slipped my ghost knife between my teeth and lifted the Uzi. No sense in being fancy about it.

Hammer's eyes rolled back into his head. His mouth dropped open and he took a deep breath. My iron gate twinged painfully. It felt as though someone had reached under my skin and made a fist.

I squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. It felt stuck. I squeezed it as hard as I could, but the weapon still wouldn't fire. I realized that the safety had to be on, but I had no idea where the safety was.

Charles blasted a column of fire from his mouth. Annalise threw herself at me, knocking me back through the trapdoor. I fell off the ladder just as the flames engulfed Annalise from head to toe.

I heard her scream. I was screaming, too. I tumbled down the stairs, wrenching my arm against the railing as I yanked myself to a stop. My legs dangled over the edge, with the long, long drop through the tower below them.

I pulled myself onto the steps, untangling the gun as I did. The fire still blasted over the top of the stairs. There was no way to enter the room above without charging straight through the flames. I held up the gun, found what looked like the safety, and flipped it. My iron gate throbbed.

Then the jet of flames stopped. I heard a sick, choking noise. What the h.e.l.l, I thought. I charged up the stairs, screaming.

Everything in the room was charred and blackened. The acrid stink of smoke burned my nose and eyes. I couldn't see Annalise anywhere. Hammer stumbled back against the tower window, clutching at his throat.

The inside of his mouth was as black as the room around me. The fire had cooked him as it came out. But as I watched, his lips turned pink, and his mouth and throat healed as quickly as Arlene's ravaged throat had.

I shot him.

I tried to fire a short burst up the center of his body, from crotch to forehead, but the Uzi kicked like crazy, and the trail of bullets tore through his shoulder instead. Charles Hammer the Third stumbled back and fell out the tower window.

I ran across the room, feeling the burned wood wobble dangerously under my feet. I reached the window before he struck the rocks below. I saw him hit. Hard. He was still.