The bedroom we were standing in was carefully arranged and covered with a thin layer of dust, like a museum exhibit. I went to the window and looked out. The greenery was heavy, but we were pretty high up. I could see the Dodge Sprinter parked across the street. There was also a sloping roof just outside the window, with a low gutter at the edge.
“Because nothing they’re doing here is worth you losing your life.” I snatched a baseball off the bureau. It felt small in my hand—it had been many years since I played ball, but in my freaked-out adrenaline high, the long throw felt entirely natural. The ball punched a hole in the window, soared out through the tree branches, and struck the side of Annalise’s van.
“That was Mr. Francois’s Mickey Mantle!”
“Well, why don’t you go get it, then?” I opened the window. There was glass on the shingles, but he was wearing shoes. Lino hesitated. Just as I was about to point out the tree he should climb down, the bedroom door burst open.
I tore the curtain rod off the wall, then spun and threw it toward the door. The curtain fell on an invisible form there, and I charged at it, knowing I couldn’t use my ghost knife or Lino’s gun. I drew back my bloody right hand, hoping that the punch I was about to throw wouldn’t hurt too much.
“I have a gun!” It was Bud’s voice. I stopped where I was. The curtains bounced to the floor, and I heard him move away from me. Damn. I stepped toward the sound, but Bud shouted, “Don’t!”
“Show me the gun.”
He obliged by becoming visible. I had no idea why he did what I told him, but he definitely had a gun, which looked so ungainly because of the silencer. He was pale and trembling, so scared I thought he might crap himself. I knew how he felt.
But he didn’t squeeze the trigger. Wally had been completely casual when he told them to murder me, but Bud wasn’t a killer. He was a tough thief and a little mean, but killing someone in cold blood was deeper waters than he liked. I could see that he was trying to work himself up to it.
“Happy now?” he asked. “I’m bringing this loser back downstairs. Him, we want alive.”
“Bud, you have to let me go downstairs to meet my boss. She’s on her way into the building”—in fact, she should have arrived already. Where was she?—“and she’s coming for Wally. I need to tell her to lay off you guys.”
Bud scratched at the side of his neck. The pale skin there looked red. “They have guns.”
I pulled at the holes in the front of my shirt. “So what?”
“You ain’t bulletproof,” Bud said, as if trying to convince himself. “Not with that face.”
“Bud, you have it all wrong. We need to get you—all of you—back to the place where you got this creature.” There was something at the back of my mind, something I was missing, but now wasn’t the time to think it out. “We—”
“Shut up, Ray,” he said through clenched teeth. “You think I’m going to listen to you? You stole my truck!”
He was working himself up to pull the trigger, and he was very, very close.
Lino stepped up from the side, almost from behind Bud, and slammed a golf club down on his forearm.
The gun didn’t go off. I rushed Bud and slammed my right elbow into his mouth while I groped for the gun. I clamped my left hand onto his right, but it was empty. He’d dropped the gun and I hadn’t even heard it hit the floor.
I spun him around and pushed him against the wall. The fight had gone out of him, and when I grabbed his forearm, he hissed sharply in pain. Lino must have broken a bone.
“Sorry, Bud,” I said, although I was suddenly unsure how much that apology was supposed to cover. I looked down to pick up the gun, but it was missing.
So was Lino. Had he gone out the window? Somehow I didn’t think he was spry enough to get out and down so quickly. The bedroom door was standing open.
There was a loud crash downstairs. Annalise had finally arrived.
A sound like water flowing through a tunnel came from the first floor, and I shoved Bud through the door toward it. He let me. An eerie orange light shone up the stairs; was the building on fire? I hurried toward it. Bud curled his arm across his body and moved his feet as fast as I pushed him, but the vitality had gone out of him.
At the foot of the stairs, we found the ground-floor hall blocked by a weird twist of the air, an orange glow that made the air seem to flow toward the front of the house. I didn’t know what the hell it was, but it felt fundamentally wrong, the way some predators do when I get too close.
Bud drew back, not wanting to touch it. The weird flow was close to the bottom step, but I couldn’t judge how close. It was coming from somewhere in the front room and flowing toward the front door—from Wally toward Annalise, I assumed—but I didn’t want to get close enough to look down the hall to confirm it.
Then the flow reversed and I felt a weird pressure wash over me. I started rethinking all my thoughts of the last few seconds, but backward. I fell against the stairs, disoriented, feeling unmade in some odd way I couldn’t understand.
My skin crawled. Whatever strange magic had been flowing toward the door, it had been turned back on itself, and I’d felt the effects. The flow faltered and stopped.
I tried to raise my hand, but it swung downward instead of up and I banged my wrist against the edge of the stair. The spell Annalise had used to turn Wally’s magic back on itself was still affecting me, making me move in the wrong direction and sporadically think backward.
Bud’s drape must have shielded him from the effects, because he stepped off the bottom stair, turned toward the front of the house, and raised his good left hand. He was holding a tiny pistol, and I had no idea where he’d gotten it. He looked tired and sad, as though he’d given up any hope of living out the day. Annalise strode into view. Bud aimed the gun at her throat and, from barely six inches away, shot her.
She didn’t even flinch. She swatted his hand away, and his face came alive with sudden, startled pain. Annalise grabbed him by the belt and collar, then raised him over her head.
“Boss, no!” I hadn’t gotten the words out of my mouth when she threw him down onto the floor with such force that the whole house shook and the floorboards cracked.
Bud suddenly turned crimson—all the blood that would have splashed out of his shattered body washed over his skin, held in by the drape. Someone was screaming and the wooden floor kept cracking, although part of my disoriented brain knew the sound wasn’t coming from the floor.
Annalise stared at Bud’s corpse, her brow furrowed as she watched his blood disappear. A buzzing noise grew louder and I struggled to my feet. Annalise reached toward her vest.
I tried to move toward her but took two steps back instead. Damn, her reversal spell still had me all turned around. I let myself fall toward her—she grew larger in my vision, at least—just as the floor vanished.
Bud and Annalise both dropped into the darkness below. Annalise gasped in surprise just before I caught her sleeve. The Nomex was slick; for a moment I thought it might slip out of my injured hand, but it didn’t.
I jammed my foot between banister posts so I wouldn’t slide in after her. Annalise slid out of the oversized jacket—it wasn’t fastened, and she didn’t fit into it anyway—but she caught hold of the hem and swung out over the void. She looked up at me, and God, for the first time ever she looked genuinely afraid.
And there, below her, was a huge mass of drapes moving toward us.
Just as I was about to start hauling Annalise in, she did it herself, scrambling hand over hand up the length of her jacket, then over me. She hopped up onto the stair behind me and said: “Don’t lose my jacket.”
The drapes were coming, and not in small numbers. Not five, not six … This was a swarm of thousands. I scrambled to the side, trying to get away, but I was too slow. Too slow! The drapes were already here.