Dead mans hand, p.20
Dead Man's Hand, page 20
Suddenly, it began to rain. A thin, spattering drizzle that left the cold ground layered with oily black water. Or at least he thought it was water. But when he saw the liquid mixed with the yellow slop, he realized it wasn’t black, but a deep shade of red.
“Is that . . . ?” Grimsby asked, trailing off as his feet squelched over the growing pool of scarlet.
“Blood, yup,” Wudge said, wiping the liquid from his gray-green skin. “Be wary of the clouds, half-witch. Most stay up above, but only most.”
Grimsby retched and pulled his pointy blue hat down over his head, turning his eyes upward at the growing storm clouds. There were more above than there had been before, but they seemed content to remain at their altitude. For now.
“Forecast says: cloudy with a chance of dismemberment,” he muttered.
Then the clock tower across the road creaked and groaned. Its face began to turn, like a slowly spinning plate, and the hands rotated with it. When it came to a rest, the seven was where a normal clock’s eight would be, and the hands all clattered as they twisted toward it.
“Seven minutes—” Wudge said, but he was interrupted.
Behind them, in MMDFK, they could hear glass shattering. A moment later came the baying of hounds. The Auditors had come, familiars in tow, shattering their own mirrors as they did.
Above, the clouds roiled. Wails sounded, too loud to be just a single Geist. They began to descend, like the red sky had broken apart and begun falling.
Meanwhile, Grimsby and Wudge were still in the middle of the road.
Wudge looked around, his eyes wide. “Good luck, half-witch,” he said, and vanished.
Grimsby was alone. At least, aside from all the things that wanted to kill him.
“Puppy dogs’ tails,” he cursed.
TWENTY-SIX
Grimsby broke into a mad sprint, not daring to look up as the sky fell upon him. The road grew darker as though a sudden eclipse had blotted out the black sun, and he felt a chill come along with it.
Behind him, the baying of hounds grew clear.
He risked a glance over his shoulder to see three beasts come running out of the Elsewhere’s MMDFK. They did not look like the familiars he had seen in the real world, but instead were sleek, furless, dark-skinned hounds that had orange pinpricks of light burning in the hollows of empty eye sockets.
Behind them, he saw both Hives and Rayne, their masks obscuring their faces but not their identities. They took a look above at the darkening sky and decided to remain inside.
Grimsby focused on the sanctuary of the building ahead. The tall clock tower seemed to bend over him, leering like a mocking giant as the world converged on him.
The padding scratches of paws on concrete grew audible, and Grimsby felt a deep, instinctual fear take hold of him. It pounded icicles into his spine and sent his legs aflame, urging him to run faster.
So run faster he did.
The darkness was nearly complete around him as he neared the building. He looked up to see a descending Geist, or perhaps Geists, like a roiling fog of nebulous and grasping hands, all reaching toward him. He was scarcely a dozen feet from the entrance; he was nearly safe. He reached the door and fumbled with the handle to open it.
He was too slow.
They rolled over him like a damp wave full of razor blades. He felt them tug and claw at his clothes and skin, tearing at him like the thorns of rosebushes in a hurricane. It was too dark to see; he was blind. He screamed but his voice was lost. He pounded on the door, sightlessly pawing for the handle.
With a last surge of fearful strength, he threw himself forward, his shoulder leading the charge. He felt a dozen digging fingers slide over his skin, nearly drawing him to a halt. He slammed into the door, but it did not open. Again he tried, but to no avail. The Geist was pulling hard at him now, and he felt himself losing his footing. Within moments, it would carry him off the ground and turn him into red rain.
With one final, desperate charge, he threw himself into the door.
He felt it give way before him. He broke out of the darkness and tumbled to the floor, his throat hoarse from screaming, his body trembling from pain and exertion. He lay on the ground for a moment, catching his breath. Behind him, the door led only to inky blackness, like someone had curtained the frame with a silk sheet. The Geists, however, did not cross the threshold into the building.
Outside, the hounds yelped in disturbingly lifelike imitations of the real thing. He heard the sounds of tearing flesh and scrabbling paws. He felt a wincing pang of sympathy for them.
At least until one of them leapt through the door, emerging suddenly from the dark. Its sleek hide was split apart, shredded to nothing in some places, revealing the scrapwork body it had in real life. Its jaws hung open as though panting, though it had no tongue. It had only teeth that looked to be made of shards of obsidian.
It glared at him with its burning eyes and stalked forward. Its scraps of dangling hide looked like torn upholstery. Grimsby scurried backward on his palms and bottom, his blood-dampened robe squelching over the floor, but his back quickly found a wall. As he watched the familiar approach, he saw bits of flesh fall from its form and evaporate into smoke. As they did, its movements became slower and more sluggish. It was injured, and that had slowed it a few degrees.
Grimsby might have been grateful, but he wasn’t exactly in ideal shape himself. He felt cool air lick at the thin bleeding wounds on his cheeks. Blood, either from the rain or his own, had dribbled down from his forehead and was only mostly wicked away by his eyebrows, leaving the rest stinging his sight. The cuts all over his body were shallow, but they were long, and they bled enough to make Grimsby feel faint.
He tried to steel himself, but it ended up feeling more like tinfoiling himself. In either case, he still managed to climb slowly to his feet, his eyes never leaving the familiar’s. The Geists outside were beginning to depart, and as they thinned, he could see the running forms of Hives and Rayne coming toward him.
He realized too late that he had let himself be distracted from the hound.
The familiar saw his attention waver and pounced immediately. Its lithe form had surprising strength, despite the wounds the Geists had left it with.
Grimsby threw up a hand and shouted hoarsely, “Torque!”
A sudden, spinning vortex of green light fired from his hand, whirling through the air like a glowing propeller of sparks. It missed by inches, striking the familiar off-center, but managed to throw off its trajectory just enough that instead of colliding with Grimsby teeth-first, it struck him skull-first.
Whatever its appearance, it still felt just as heavy and dense as if it were made of metal. Grimsby felt himself jerked from his feet by the force and fell into a tumbling jumble with the familiar. Its jaws snapped and growled as it tried to find purchase on his limbs, but by some miracle he managed to stay out from between its teeth.
He fell onto his back and the familiar found leverage, pressing down into him, obsidian teeth flashing toward his throat. Only by gaining panicked purchase on the thing’s chest did Grimsby keep its jaws barely at bay.
He grunted as the hound bore down on him. His arms began to tremble, threatening to give way. His strength was fleeting. He needed to do something. If the hound didn’t mangle him badly enough to prevent his escape, the approaching Auditors surely would make up the difference.
He summoned his Impetus, pouring the last shreds of his strength into the spell.
His fingertips began to glow as he touched one hand to the crest of the thing’s chest. There, a glowing sigil appeared. Then, with a shove, he slapped its opposite on the bottom of the familiar’s jaw.
His grip slipped, and the hound’s fangs bore down on him. He uttered the spell through gritted teeth. “Bind!”
He felt sharp teeth dig into his forearm from above, but the ones below did not accompany them. The creature balked and reeled as an azure thread of light pulled its lower jaw toward its chest, distending it unnaturally. Sleek skin split and peeled like disintegrating rubber as the familiar struggled to snap its jaws shut on Grimsby’s arm. The more effort it spent, the more its skin burned away.
Finally, it began to waver, as though its internal mechanisms were rusting to dust, and as its last bit of flesh turned to smoke and its orange eyes winked out, it fell into a motionless heap atop Grimsby.
He tried to take a breath of relief, but the weight of the familiar was crushing. He barely managed to wriggle out from under it. As he did, approaching footsteps on concrete told him it was no time to rest, but when he climbed to his feet, he found the room was rudely spinning around him. He stumbled deeper into the building, eyes searching for the vaguely familiar hall that would lead to what, in the real world, would have been the restroom and its mirrors.
He stumbled through the dim corridors, ignoring the sourceless shadows that scattered before him like roaches. He crashed through the door into what he was fairly sure was the men’s restroom. It was empty and barren, with only a wide mirror and a wall of cold stalls. They had no toilets inside, only stone slabs, like the universe’s budget had run out before it could hire a sculptor.
Grimsby stumbled to the mirror and pressed his bloody hands against the glass. He began to summon his Impetus to will his way through.
His reflection vanished, and the comforting scene of a normal restroom flickered briefly into view. Then it began to fade.
Grimsby’s eyes widened and he tried to pour more energy into the mirror, but it went blank, then returned to showing only his own harried reflection.
He was out of strength. His Impetus had been burned out. It would be a barely flickering ember until he got some rest.
Echoing footsteps drew closer. Hives and Rayne were coming.
He was trapped.
TWENTY-SEVEN
He had bare moments to act before the Auditors caught up to him, arrested him, and unwittingly doomed him to Wudge. But without the Impetus left to escape, he was trapped. It would take a long rest to recover enough, and that was time he didn’t have. The Auditors had him cornered.
Then a thought occurred to him.
They didn’t have to know that.
He gritted his teeth and drew up as much desperate confidence as he could. Then he punched the mirror. Hard.
He felt his knuckles shift in sharp agony as his blow bounced off the surface, rattling the reflective sheet but doing little else.
Again he punched, this time even harder. Something popped and his hand roared with pain. Again, the mirror remained intact.
Finally, as a last resort, he hauled back his head, scrunched his eyes shut, and slammed his forehead into the mirror. Cracks webbed out across its surface before it shattered, falling to dozens of pieces.
Head and hand throbbing, Grimsby stumbled to one of the stalls, clambered up on the stone seat that passed for a toilet, and silently shut the door behind him. Then he waited.
He didn’t have to wait long. Skin-thin moments passed before footsteps pattered into the room. He heard a pair of light, huffing breaths. Then a heavy foot stomped on the ground.
“Damn it!” he heard Hives say. “He beat us to the mirror. He’s back in the waking world.”
“Most likely,” Rayne said, her voice calm and contemplative. “We haven’t missed our first window. If we leave now, we’ll still be seven minutes ahead of him.”
“Wait, what?”
Rayne sighed and adopted a tone she had used with Grimsby more than once during their studies, and he felt a pang of mixed nostalgia and jealousy. It was a tone reserved for teaching something she thought simple to others who didn’t understand it. “The first window: less than seven minutes in the Elsewhere means that seven seconds pass on the outside. Grimsby is in the second window. He’ll return seven minutes after he entered. If we leave while we’re still in the first window, we’ll be exactly six minutes and fifty-three seconds ahead of him. You can head him off at this mirror and wait.”
“Er. Right,” Hives said, though Grimsby was fairly certain he didn’t fully understand.
In fairness, Grimsby didn’t fully understand, either. Time in the Elsewhere felt like it passed normally, but those rules changed when you returned back to regular time. He was suddenly grateful he hadn’t been able to use the mirror, or he’d be running face-first into a waiting Hives on the other side.
“There’s a mirror in the room next door. You use that one and cut him off.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll find another and be right behind you. I need to collect my familiars first.”
Hives made a hesitant noise, but a moment later his footsteps departed. A few moments after that, the sound of glass shattering reached Grimsby.
Rayne’s footsteps also receded, and within a couple of minutes, he heard more falling glass.
He let out a held breath and allowed his tensed muscles to sink into exhausted slumps. He got to his feet and pressed open the door, trying to figure out what his next move would be.
That was when Rayne’s arm caught him across the throat.
She was a moving blur, faster than he remembered, and before he could really grasp what was happening, he was knocked face-first to the floor with a knee in the back of his spine, crushing his ribs under their combined weight.
Rayne kept atop him, patiently waiting for his hoarse coughs to subside. As they did, she clicked her tongue. “You really think that little of me, huh, Grimshaw?”
“How’d you know?” he asked, voice rasping like claws on a chalkboard.
“I figured you’d be out of juice after that stunt you pulled in the restaurant. Hell, I’d have figured you wouldn’t have been able to pull that off in the first place. You’ve always been a magical lightweight.”
His face contorted with pain, and not just from her knee in his back. “I get by.”
“Stubborn as ever, I see.”
“So what now, you arrest me?”
She didn’t speak for a long moment. “Give me a reason not to.”
“Because I don’t think the Department has jurisdiction in the Elsewhere.”
“Give me a reason that actually matters.”
“Because I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“You assaulted several Department Auditors.”
“With nachos! They’ll recover. Besides, they started it.”
“You ran from a Department task force sent to apprehend you.”
“Because I don’t have time to rot in a cell for a few days and trust in a bunch of bumbling morons to solve a case when they believe they’ve already arrested the killer.”
“Morons?”
“They all got juked by a magician in a wizard robe.”
“Not all of them did,” she said, grinding her knee a little deeper between Grimsby’s spinal disks.
“Yeah, okay, fine,” he said, wincing. “Most of them did.”
He felt more than heard her sigh. “Grimshaw, why’d you have to do this? Why couldn’t you just lay low like I asked?”
“Would you have?”
“Of course I would have. Look, I understand—”
“No,” he said, feeling his chest flare with angry heat as she ground him into the floor. “You don’t. You don’t understand.”
Something in his voice must have driven her to silence, and he felt a little of the pressure lift from his back.
“If you were me,” he said, “and the one thing you’ve wanted your whole life was taken from you, would you lay low? And if you had to spend your days working at a fast-food restaurant where the only thing worse than the food is the customers, would you have laid low?”
“No,” she said quietly.
“No. You would have taken any shot, no matter how distant, at a chance of being something else. Something more. That’s what I am—” He stopped, a sickening weight growing in his stomach. “What I was doing. I was taking a blasted shot at being something more.”
“You won’t be much more if you’re dead.”
“I wouldn’t be much less, either,” he said quietly.
More silence. Then: “Tell me you didn’t do it.”
“I didn’t do it.”
“No.” He felt her knee lift as she turned him over and hauled him up until his face met hers. Her face was still masked but her eyes were wide and searching, pleading for truth. “Tell me you didn’t do it.”
“Rayne,” he said, “I didn’t do it. I couldn’t have. I—” His voice broke and he coughed a few times before he found it again. “I don’t think I could ever do something like that to anyone. Not even her.”
Slowly, she nodded. “All right. I may be an idiot for believing you, but all right.”
She helped him to his feet, but as he stood his head began to spin and he felt like he might tip over. He felt her grip his arm to steady him.
“You’re a mess, Grimsby.”
“Really? Because I feel a whole lot worse than that.”
“You should get some rest.”
He shook his head, but that only made the dizziness worse. “I don’t have time. I’m on a deadline—”
“You really didn’t pay attention when we learned about this place, did you? You have time.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re in the second window. Seven minutes to seven hours on this side, it’s all the same. So long as you leave before it ends, only seven minutes will have passed on the outside.”
“And after more than seven hours?”
Her eyes smiled. “You’ll lose time. You’ll come back seven days after you came in. You can lose a lot of time if you lose track of it.”
“And after that?”
“More than seven days here turns to seven years, but I wouldn’t worry about that.”
