Quinton noticed I was looking askance at the place. “What?”
“Something magic. I don’t know if it will let us pass or not.”
“Magic like a monster, or magic like a spell?”
“Spell. Boundary markers, I think. How do you feel when you look at that house?”
Quinton turned to study the building. “Like I shouldn’t be here; this is the wrong house. Whatever I came here for is pointless and I might as well go home.” He started to turn away and caught himself. “Ah . . . I get it. It’s some kind of . . . ‘leave me alone’ spell. Must keep the kids out of the yard pretty well.”
I hummed to myself. That wasn’t quite the reading I was getting, but then I didn’t see or hear things in the normal way. The energetic border was definitely sending out a “go away” vibe, but more specifically, it was a warning to other magic users: Don’t try it. Looked as if I was in for a bit of dismantling, though I couldn’t imagine that was going to make the spell-caster pleased. I glanced around the property, searching for a place to take a shot at the magical fence without being in direct view of the street or neighbors. This was not going to be fun and I preferred not to do it in public, though it was growing dark so fast that that might not be an issue for long.
As I was staring, Quinton gave a sudden twitch and dug into one of his pockets as if it were on fire. He pulled out a mints tin and held it out to me in two fingers, as if it were hot or infected with something. “I think you want this.”
“What? Why?”
“Your ghost is giving me shocks. Maybe it doesn’t like this place, either.”
I took the tin, having momentarily forgotten about Simondson’s ghost. Flipping it open, the ghost of my killer emerged like a red-orange smog. “Earring.”
“What?” I asked, peering at his thin form.
“I don’t know. Something says ‘earring.’ You need an earring.”
“And whose errand boy are you, now?” I demanded.
He grew thick and solid, then winced and writhed away in pain, falling back to his shadowy state. “I don’t know! I just want shut of you! Of this. Something says ‘get the earring’ and I say ‘get the earring.’ I don’t care if you do or not. Go get yourself killed for all I care.”
I felt the urge to laugh at him, however nuts that sounded. “If I get killed, you’ll be stuck here forever in this candy box.”
“No, I won’t. You’ll come back, like the damned bad penny that you are.”
“Says who?” I asked, but I, too, had the feeling that I wasn’t quite up to death-the-last yet. If I was, Wygan wouldn’t have been continuing to push me; he’d have given up on me as he had on Marsden in London. But if he wasn’t there to push me, who knew what I would become in the Grey? Or what I might lose . . . ?
“Says . . . them,” Simondson replied. “Those . . . voices. They say so.”
Them. The voices in the Grey. He didn’t identify them as other ghosts, just “voices” the same as I did. I nodded. “All right. I got the message. Are you ready to go back in the box, now?”
“No! I want to leave! You said—”
“When I’m done, Todd. Not before. Now, in you go.”
I shoved his incorporeal self back into the tin and snapped it closed. I turned back to the truck for a moment, stuffing Simondson’s box into the glove compartment while I looked around the floor.
“What are you searching for?” Quinton asked, drawing close behind me. He was still rubbing his fingertips as if contact with the tin had given him a shock or a burn.
“That box of Edward’s that the knife was in. It had an earring in it. . . .”
“Why do you want that?”
I’d forgotten Quinton couldn’t hear the ghosts. “Simondson says I need it.”
We scrabbled in the accumulation of bags and belongings stowed in the back until we found the carton I’d slit open outside the FedEx building. I extracted the earring from the collection with care, feeling a bitter pain as I touched it. I tucked it into my pocket with its twin from the puzzle ball and turned back to the house.
I started back along the property line toward the river. Quinton followed saying, “What are you thinking?”
“That I need to find a way past this magic fence and then I can do whatever it is I’m supposed to do with this earring. . . . I have a bad feeling that just walking through is not as easy as all that. And once I do break the fence, whoever made it is not going to be pleased.”
“Maybe you don’t have to break it. Could you bypass it?”
I turned back under a weeping willow tree and frowned at him. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”
“Magic seems to be a bit like electricity. Electrical circuits can be bypassed—jumpered—in some places. You run a piece of wire from one part of the circuit directly to another, which cuts part of the circuit out without the rest of the system noticing since current is still flowing and all other parts are functioning. So long as the bit you bypass doesn’t set off an alarm on its absence, you can go right through the circuit at that point. That’s how burglars used to get through simple wired perimeters: Just make a jumper wire long enough to slide under, connect your wire from one side to the other of the hole you need, cut the original wire, and go through the hole while the electricity keeps on flowing through the system as if nothing happened. Most magic things seem to be pretty simple circuits, so maybe some kind of bypass would work without disrupting the spell enough to set off an alarm.”
“If it were that easy, I think witches and mages would do it all the time,” I replied.
“Maybe it’s not easy for them. Magic users have to address the system through the interface they have; they don’t just grab hold of the system itself. But that’s not the way you see it. You see magic in the raw, as it were.”
“But you’re not talking about seeing; you’re talking about manipulating. I don’t do that.”
“Why not? If you can pull magical things apart like you did with that alarm spell outside the Danzigers’, why not this? It doesn’t make you a mage,” he hastened to add, cutting short my objection, “but it seems to be in line with other things you’ve done recently.”
That startled me. The idea was dangerously close to the one advanced by Carlos: that I could potentially bend the fabric of magic itself. “I . . . really don’t want that power.”
“You don’t seem to have a choice, sweetheart.” He pulled me into a loose embrace under the willow with its long strands of leaves like a curtain between us and the world. “I know you’re afraid—”
“Not afraid, more like horrified. I don’t want to be Wygan’s tool for . . . whatever it is he’s got planned.”
“I understand that. But he’s going to keep pushing until you’re his or you’re dead. I don’t want you dead, not even hurt. It’s hard for me to see the things that happen to you, the things that are happening, but—and I never thought I’d say this—Carlos may be right: The only way to stop Wygan is to take the power and use it against him. If you understand it and control it before he has a chance to control you, it’s not his power or his choice anymore: It’s yours.” Even in the gloom, I spotted a suspicious moist shine in his eyes. Quinton cry? Surely the world had turned upside down.
I didn’t get to reply since a voice from the other side of the willow arras cut into our conversation. “Touching. So touching, in fact, I may be sick. I thought that sort of sentimental dribbling went out of style when Andy Jackson was elected.”
The hanging fronds of the willow parted and the magic perimeter line wavered and flashed a moment, curling toward us as the speaker stepped through. She was about five foot five, neither round nor thin, with a heavy mass of silver-streaked ringlets piled on her head with a plastic clip. In the thin light from over the mountain, it was hard to guess her age. Her posture said thirty, but her hair and the powdery quality of her skin said sixty—or a hundred. I couldn’t guess at the color of her eyes; the darkness masked all but a ruby gleam of magic in their depths.