Prologue
If she had only one word to describe Dominic Milano, it would be unflappable, Audrey Callahan reflected. Stocky, hard, balding—he looked like he had just walked out of Central Casting after successfully landing the role of “bulldog-jawed older detective.” He owned Milano Investigations, and under his supervision, the firm ran like clockwork. No emergency rattled Dominic. He never raised his voice. Nothing knocked him off his stride. Before moving to the Pacific Northwest, he’d retired from the Miami Police Department with over a thousand homicide cases under his belt. He’d been there and done that, so nothing surprised him.
That was why watching his furry eyebrows creep up on his forehead was so satisfying.
Dominic plucked the top photograph from the stack on his desk. On it, Spenser “Spense” Bailey jogged down the street. The next shot showed Spense bending over. The next one caught him in a classic baseball-pitch pose, right leg raised, leaning back, a tennis ball in his fingers. Which would be fine and dandy, except that according to his doctor, Spense suffered from a herniated disk in his spine. He was restocking a warehouse when a walk-behind forklift got away from him, and the accident caused him constant, excruciating pain. He could frequently be seen limping around the neighborhood with a cane or a walker. He needed help to get into a car, and he couldn’t drive because the injured disk pinched the nerve in his right leg.
Dominic glanced at Audrey. “These are great. We’ve been following this guy for weeks, and nothing. How did you get these?”
“A very short tennis skirt. He hobbles past a tennis court every Tuesday and Thursday on the way to his physical-therapy sessions.” The hardest part was hitting the ball so it would fly over the tall fence. A loud gasp and a run with an extra bounce in her step, and she had him. “Keep looking. It gets better.”
Dominic flipped through the stack. The next photo showed Spense with a goofy grin on his face carrying two cups of coffee, maneuvering between tables at Starbucks with the grace of a deer.
“You bought him coffee?” Dominic’s eyebrows crawled a little higher.
“Of course not. He bought me coffee. And a fruit salad.” Audrey grinned.
“You really enjoy doing this, don’t you?” Dominic reflected.
She nodded. “He’s a liar and a cheat, who’s been out of work for months on the company’s dime.” And he thought he was so smart. He was practically begging to be cut down to size, and she had just the right pruning shears. Chop-chop.
Dominic moved the coffee picture aside and stopped. “Is this what I think this is?”
The next image showed Spense grasping a man in a warm-up suit from behind and tossing him backward over his head onto a mat.
“That would be Spense demonstrating a German suplex for me.” Audrey gave him a bright smile. “Apparently he’s an amateur MMA fighter. He goes to do his physical therapy on the first floor, and, after the session is over, he walks up the stairs to spar.”
Dominic put his hands together and sighed.
Something was wrong. She leaned back. “Suddenly you don’t seem happy.”
Dominic grimaced. “I look at you, and I’m confused. People who do the best in our line of work are unremarkable. They look just like anyone else, and they’re easily forgettable, so suspects don’t pay attention to them. They have some law-enforcement experience, usually at least some college. You’re too pretty, your hair is too red, your eyes are too big, you laugh too loud, and, according to your transcripts, you barely graduated from high school.”
Warning sirens wailed in her head. Dominic required proof of high-school graduation before employment, so she brought him both her diploma and her senior-year transcript. For some reason, he had bothered to pull her file and review the contents. Her driver’s license was first-rate because it was real. Her birth certificate and her high-school record would pass a cursory inspection, but if he dug any deeper, he’d find smoke. And if he took her fingerprints, he would find criminal records in two states.
Audrey kept the smile firmly in place. “I can’t help having big eyes.”
Dominic sighed again. “Here’s the deal: I hire freelancers to save money. My full-time guys are experienced and educated, which means I have to pay them a decent wage for their time. Unless there is serious money involved, I can’t afford for them to sit on a tough suspect for months, waiting for him to slip up. They get four weeks to crack a case. After that, I have to outsource this kind of stuff to freelancers like you because I can pay you per job. An average freelancer might close one case every couple of months. It’s a good part-time gig for most people.”
He was telling her things she already knew. Nothing to do but nod.
“You’ve been freelancing for me for five months. You closed fourteen cases. That’s a case every two weeks. You made twenty grand.” Dominic fixed her with his unblinking stare. “I can’t afford to keep you on as a freelancer.”
What? “I made you money!”
He held up his hand. “You’re too expensive, Audrey. The only way this professional relationship is going to survive is if you come to work for me full-time.”
She blinked.
“I’ll start you off at thirty grand a year with benefits. Here’s the paperwork.” Dominic handed her a manila envelope. “If you decide to take me up on it, I’ll see you Monday.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“You do that.”
Audrey swiped the file. Her grifter instincts said, “Play it cool,” but then, she didn’t have to con people anymore. Not those who hired her, anyway. “Thank you. Thank you so much. This means the world to me.”
“Everybody needs a chance, Audrey. You earned yours. We’d be glad to have you.” Dominic extended his hand over the table. She shook it and left the office.
A real job. With benefits. Holy crap.
She took the stairs, jogging down the steps to burn off some excitement. A real job being one of the good guys. How about that?
If her parents ever found out, they would flip.
Audrey drove down Rough Ocean Road away from Olympia. Her blue Honda powered on through the gray drizzle that steadily soaked the west side of Cascades. A thick blanket of dense clouds smothered the sky, turning the early evening gloomy and dark. Trees flanked the road: majestic Douglas firs with long emerald needles; black cottonwoods, tall and lean, catching the rain with large branches; red alders with silver-gray bark that almost glowed in the dusk.
A mile and a half ahead, a lonely subdivision of identical houses waited, cradled in the fold of the hill; meanwhile, the road was empty. Nothing but the trees.
Audrey glanced at the clock. Thirty-two minutes so far, not counting the time it took her to stop at a convenience store to get some teriyaki jerky for Ling and the time she spent driving around to different pharmacies. Getting to work would mean an actual commute.
She loved the job with Milano’s investigative agency. She loved every moment of it, from quietly hiding in a car to watch a suspect to running a con on the conmen. They thought they were slick. They didn’t know what slick was.
To be fair, most of the suspects she ran across were conmen of opportunity. They got hurt on the job and liked the disability, or they got tangled in an affair and were too afraid or too arrogant to tell their spouses. They didn’t see what they were doing as a con. They viewed it as a little white lie, the easiest path out of a tough situation. Most of them went about their deceptions in amateur ways. Audrey had been running cons since she could talk. It wasn’t a fair fight, but then, in the world of grifters, “fair” had no meaning.
Ahead, the road forked. The main street rolled right, up the hill, toward the subdivision, while the smaller road branched left, ducking under the canopy of trees. Audrey checked the rearview mirror. The ribbon of pavement behind her stretched into the distance, deserted. The coast was clear.
She smoothly made the turn onto the smaller road and braced herself. Panic punched her in the stomach, right in the solar plexus. Audrey gasped. The world swirled in a dizzying rush, and she let go of the wheel for a second to keep from wrenching the vehicle off the pavement. Pain followed, sharp, prickling every inch of her skin with red-hot needles, and although Audrey had expected it, the ache still caught her by surprise. Pressure squeezed her, then, just like that, all discomfort vanished. She had passed through the boundary.
A warm feeling spread through Audrey, flowing from her chest all the way to her fingertips. She smiled and snapped her fingers. With a warm tingle, tendrils of green glow swirled around her hand. Magic. Also known as flash. She let it die and kept driving.
Back on the main road, in the city of Olympia, in the State of Washington, magic didn’t exist. People who lived there tried to pretend that it did. They flirted with the idea of psychics and street magicians, but they had never encountered the real thing. Most of them wouldn’t even see the side road she took. For them it simply wasn’t there—the woods continued uninterrupted. Every time Audrey crossed into their world, the boundary stripped her magic from her in a rush of pain. That’s why people like her called that place the Broken—when you passed into it, you gave up a part of yourself, and it left you feeling incomplete. Broken like a clock with a missing gear.
Far ahead, past mountains and miles of rough terrain, another world waited, a mirror to the Broken, full of magic but light on technology. Well, not exactly true, Audrey reflected. The Weird had plenty of complex technology, but it had evolved in a different direction. Most of it functioned with the aid of magic. In the Weird, the power of your magic and the color of your flash determined the course of your life. The brighter you flashed, the better. If you flashed white, you could rub elbows with bluebloods, Weird’s aristocratic families.
The Weird, like the Broken, was a place of rules and laws. That’s why Audrey preferred to live here, in the no-man’s land between the two dimensions. The locals called it the Edge, and they were right. It was on the edge of both worlds, a place without countries or cops, where the castoffs like her washed ashore. Connecting the two dimensions like a secret overpass, the Edge took everyone. Swindlers, thieves, crazed separatists, clannish families, all were welcome, all were dirt-poor, and all kept to themselves. The Edgers gave no quarter and expected no sympathy.
The road turned to dirt. The trees had changed, too. Ancient spruces spread broad branches from massive buttressed trunks, their limbs dripping with long emerald green beards of tangled moss. Towering narrow hemlocks thrust into the sky, their roots cushioned in ferns. Blue haze clung to narrow spaces between the trunks, hiding otherworldly things with glowing eyes who prowled in search of prey.
As Audrey drove through, bright yellow blossoms of Edger primrose sensed the vibration of the car and snapped open with faint puffs of luminescent pollen. By day the flowers stayed closed and harmless. At night, it was a different story. Take a couple of puffs in your face, and pretty soon you’d forget where you were or why you were here. A couple of weeks ago, Rook, one of the local Edger idiots, got drunk and fell asleep near a patch of them. They found him two days later, sitting up on a tree stump butt naked and covered in ants. This was an old forest, nourished by magic. It didn’t suffer fools, gladly or otherwise.
She steered her Honda up the narrow road, past her driveway, forcing it to climb higher and higher up the mountain. A shadow loomed ahead, blocking the way. She flicked on her brights. An old pine had fallen across the road. She’d have to hoof it to Gnome’s house. The road was muddy with recent rain, and she had new shoes on. Oh well. Shoes could be cleaned.
Audrey parked, pulled the emergency brake as high as it would go, swiped the plastic bags off the seat, and climbed out. Mud squished under the soles of her shoes. She climbed over the tree and trudged up the narrow road, following it all the way up to the top of the mountain. By the time she made it to the clearing, the sky had grown dim. Gnome’s house, a large two-story jumble of weird rooms sticking out at random angles, was all but lost in the gloom.
“Gnome!”
No answer.
“Gnooome!”
Nothing.
He was inside. He had to be—his old beat-up Chevy sat on the left side of the house, and Gnome rarely left the top of the mountain anyway. Audrey walked up to the door and tried the handle. Locked. She put her hand to the keyhole and pushed. The magic slid from her fingers in translucent currents of pale green and wove together, sliding into the keyhole. That old ornery knucklehead would probably kill her for this. The lock clicked. Audrey eased the door open smoothly, making sure it didn’t creak, more out of habit than real need.
Flash was a pure expression of one’s magic. But most people born with it had a talent or two hidden up their sleeve. Some Edgers were cursers, some foretold the future. She opened doors.
Audrey passed through the narrow hallway into the main room, sectioned off by tall shelves filled with Gnome’s knickknacks and merchandise. Being a local fence, he had enough inventory to put Costco to shame. He also functioned as an emergency general store. If Edgers needed deodorant or soap in a hurry and didn’t want to drive all the way across the boundary, they stopped at Gnome’s. And ended up paying ten bucks for a tube of toothpaste.
A fit of wet, hoarse coughing came from deeper within the house. Audrey slipped between the shelves, like a silent shadow, and finally stepped out into the clear space in the middle of the room.
Gnome, a huge bear of a man, sat slumped over in his stuffed chair, an open book on a desk in front of him and a shotgun by his chair. Flushed skin, tangled hair, feverish eyes, all hunkered down in a blanket. He looked like a mess.
“There you are.”
He peered at her with watering, bloodshot eyes. “What the hell are you—” Another fit of coughing shook his large frame.
“That sounds awful.”
“What are you—” Gnome sneezed.
“I brought you goodies.” She pulled a box of decongestant pills out of the bag and put it on the desk. “Look, I’ve got canned chicken soup, Theraflu, and here are some cough drops, and here is a box of Puffs tissues with lotion, so you don’t scrub all of the skin off that big beak of yours.”
He stared at her, speechless. Now that was something. If she had a camera, she should take a picture.
“And this here, this is good stuff.” Audrey tapped the plastic cup of Magic Vaporizer. “I had to hunt it down—they don’t make it as much anymore, so I could only get a generic version. Look, you boil some water and put these drops in here and inhale—clears your nose right up. I’ll fix you one, then you can yell at me.”
Five minutes later, she presented him with a steaming vaporizer and made him breathe it in. One, two, three . . .
Gnome sucked in his first breath. “Christ.”
“Told you.” Audrey set a hot bowl of chicken soup on his desk. “Works wonders.”
“How did you know I was sick?”
“Patricia came down the mountain yesterday and we ran into each other at the main road. She said you had a cold and mentioned that you undercharged her for the lanterns by twenty bucks.”
“What?”
Audrey smiled. “That’s how I knew it was bad. Besides, I was tired of hearing you hack and cough all night. The sound rolls down the mountain, you know. You’re keeping Ling awake.”
“You can’t hear me all the way down there.”
“That’s what you think. Take this generic or Theraflu before bed. Either will knock you out. The red pills are daytime.”
Gnome gave her a suspicious look. “How much is all this gonna cost me?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
Gnome shrugged his heavy shoulders and put a spoonful of soup into his mouth. “This doesn’t mean you’re getting a discount.”
Audrey heaved a mock sigh. “Oh well. I guess I’ll have to ply you with sexual favors then.”
Gnome choked on the soup. “I’m old enough to be your grandfather!”
Audrey winked at him, gathering the empty bags. “But you’re not.”
“Get out of here, you and your craziness.”
“Okay, okay, I’m going.” He was fun to tease, and she was in such a good mood.
“What is with you anyway?” he asked. “Why are you grinning?”
“I’ve got a job. With benefits.”
“Legit?”
“Yes.”
“Well, congratulations,” Gnome said. “Now go on. I’m sick of looking at your face.”
“I’ll see you later.”
She left the house and slogged her way through the mud down to her car. Gnome was a gruff old bear, but he was kind in his own way. Besides, he was the only neighbor she had within two miles. Nobody was around to help them. Either they took care of each other, or they toughed it out on their own.
Backing the Honda down the mountain in the gloom turned out to be harder than Audrey thought. She finally steered the vehicle to the fork where the narrow road leading to her place split off and took the turn. Thick roots burrowed under the road, and her Honda rolled over the bulges, careening and swaying, until it finally popped out into the clearing. On the right, the ground dropped off sharply, plunging down the side of the mountain. On the left, a squat, pale building sat in the shadow of an old spruce. It was a simple structure—a huge stone block of a roof resting on sturdy stone columns that guarded the wooden walls of the house within like the bars of a stone cage. Each three-foot-wide column bore a carving: dragons and men caught in the heat of a battle. A wide bas-relief decorated the roof as well, showing a woman in a chariot pulled by birds with snake heads. The woman gazed down on the slaughter like a goddess from Heaven.
Nobody knew who had built the ruins or why. They dotted that part of the Edge, a tower here, a temple there, gutted by time and elements and covered with moss. The Edgers, being poor and thrifty, knew better than to let them go to waste. They built wooden walls inside the stone frameworks, put in indoor plumbing and electricity illegally siphoned from the neighboring city or provided by generators, and moved right in. If any archaic gods took offense, they had yet to do anything about it.
Audrey parked the car under an ancient scarred maple and turned off the engine. Home, sweet home.
A ball of gray fur dropped off the maple branch and landed on her hood.
Audrey jumped in her seat. Jesus.
The raccoon danced up and down on the hood, chittering in outrage, bright eyes glowing with orange like two bloody moons.
“Ling the Merciless! You get off my car this instant!”
The raccoon spun in place, her gray fur standing on end, put her hand-paws on the windshield, and tried to bite the glass.
“What is it with you?” Audrey popped the car door open.
Ling scurried off the car and leaped into her lap, squirming and coughing. Audrey glanced up. The curtains on her kitchen window were parted slightly. A hair-thin line of bright yellow light spilled through the gap.
Somebody was in her house.
Audrey slipped from the seat, dropping Ling gently to the ground, circled the car, and opened the hatchback. A tan tarp waited inside. She jerked it aside and pulled out an Excalibur crossbow. It had set her back nine hundred bucks of hard-earned money, and it was worth every penny. Audrey cocked the crossbow and padded to the house, silent and quick. A couple of seconds, and she pressed against the wall next to the door. She tried the handle. Locked.
Who breaks into a house and locks the door?
She peeled from the wall and circled the building, moving fast on her toes. At the back, she slipped between the stone framework and the wooden wall of the house and felt around for the hidden latch. It sprang open under the pressure of her fingers. She edged the secret door open and padded inside, into the walk-in closet, and out into her bedroom. The house had only three rooms: a long, rectangular bedroom, an equally long bathroom, and the rest of it a wide-open space, most of which served as her living room and kitchen, with the stove, fridge, and counters at the north wall.
Audrey peeked out of the doorway. An older man with curly reddish brown hair stood at the kitchen stove, mixing batter in a glass bowl, his slightly stooped back turned to her.
She would know that posture anywhere.
Audrey raised her crossbow and took a step into the living room.
The man reached for a bag of flour sitting on the counter. Audrey squeezed the trigger. The string snapped with a satisfying twang. The bolt punched through the bag inches from the man’s fingers.
The man turned and grinned at her, his blue eye sparking. She knew the smile, too. It was his con smile.
“Hi, munchkin.”
Audrey let her crossbow point to the floor. “Hi, Dad.”
“A good shot.” Seamus Callahan bent down, looking at the shaft protruding from the bag of flour. “I’d say you killed it. Bull’s-eye.”
Audrey set the crossbow down and crossed her arms. Inside her, a tiny pissed-off voice barked, “Get out, get out, get out . . .” He was in her house, and she had to clench her fingers on her arms just to keep herself from attacking him and pushing him out.
But she was Seamus’s daughter, and twenty-three years of grifting made her voice calm and light. “How did you find me?”
“I have my ways.” Seamus opened the bag and poured some flour into the batter. “I’m making my patented silver-dollar pancakes. You remember those, don’t you?”
“Sure, Dad. I remember.” He was in her kitchen, touching her things. She would bleach it all after he was gone.
Ling slipped from the back door, scurried around her feet, and showed Seamus her teeth.
“Your little critter doesn’t like me much,” he said, pouring the batter into a sizzling pan.
“She has good instincts.”
Seamus looked up at her, blue eyes like two flax petals under bushy red eyebrows. “There is no need for that.”
Screw it. “What do you want?”
Seamus spread his arms, a spatula in his right hand. “My daughter disappears for four years, doesn’t tell me where she is going, doesn’t call, doesn’t write. What, I don’t have a right to be concerned? All we had was a little note.”
Yeah, right. “The note said, ‘Don’t look for me.’ That was a clue.”
“Your mom is worried, kiddo. We were all worried.”
Get out, get out, get out. “What do you want?”
Seamus heaved a sigh. “Can we not have a meal like a normal family?”
“What do you want, Dad?”
“I have a job in West Egypt.”
In the Weird. The worlds of the Weird and the Broken had similar geography, but their histories had gone entirely different ways. In the world without magic, the huge peninsula protruding from the southeastern end of the continent was known as Florida. In the Weird, it was West Egypt, the Alligator to the Cobra and the Hawk of the triple Egyptian crown.
“It won’t take but a week. A good solid payoff.”
“Not interested.”
He sighed again. “I didn’t want to bring this up. It’s about your brother.”
Of course. Why would it ever be about anybody else?
Seamus leaned forward. “There is a facility in California—”
She raised her hands. “I don’t want to hear it.”
“It’s beautiful. It’s like a resort.” He reached into his jacket. “Look at the pictures. These doctors, they’re the best. All we have to do is pull off this one heist, and we can get him in there. I’d do it myself, but it’s a three-person job.”
“No.”
Seamus turned off the stove and shoved the pan aside onto a cold burner. “He is your brother. He loves you, Audrey. We haven’t asked anything of you for three years.”
“He is an addict, Dad. An addict. How many times has he been through rehab? It was eighteen when I left; what’s the number now?”
“Audrey . . .”
It was too late. She’d started, and she couldn’t stop. “He’s had therapy, he’s had interventions, he’s had doctors and counselors and rehabs, and it hasn’t made a damn bit of difference. Do you know why? Because Alex likes being an addict. He has no interest in getting better. He is a dirty low-life junkie. And you enable him at every turn.”
“Audrey!”
“What was the one rule you taught me, Dad? The one rule that we never, ever break? You don’t steal from family. He stole Mom’s wedding ring and pawned it. He stole from you, he stole from me, he ruined my childhood. All of it going right up his nose or in his mouth. The man never met a drug he didn’t like. He doesn’t want to get better, and why should he? Mommy and Daddy will always be there to steal him more pills and pick him up off the street. He gets his drugs and all that attention. Hell, why should he quit?”
“He’s my child,” Seamus said.
“And what am I, Dad? Chopped liver?”
“Look at you!” Seamus raised his arms. “Look, look you have a nice house, your fridge is full. You don’t need any help.”
She stared at him.
“Alex is sick. It’s an illness. He can’t help himself.”
“Bullshit! He doesn’t want to help himself.”
“He’ll die.”
“Good.”
Seamus slapped the counter. “You take that back, Audrey!”
She took a deep breath. “No.”
“Fine.” He leaned back. “Fine. You live happily in your nice house. Play with your pet. Buy nice things. You do all that, while your brother is dying.”
She laughed. “Guilt, Dad? Wait, I’ll show you guilt.”
She stomped to a bookshelf, pulled out a photo album, and slapped it open on the counter in front of him. In the picture, her sixteen-year-old self stared out from a mangled face. Her left eye had swollen shut into a puffy black sack. Dry tracks of blood stained her cheeks, stretching from half a dozen cuts. Her nose was a misshapen bulge. “What is this? Do you remember this?”
Seamus grimaced.
“What, nothing to say? Let me help: this is when my sweet brother traded me to his dealer for some meth. I had to give him all of the money I had on me and the gold chain grandma gave me, and I had to break into a rival drug dealer’s lab and steal his stash so I wouldn’t be raped. I had to break into a gang house, Dad. If I got caught, they would’ve killed me in a blink—if I was lucky. And Cory, the dealer? He used me for a punching bag after. He threw me on the ground and he kicked me in the face and in my stomach until he got tired. I had to beg—beg!—him to let me go. Look at my face. It was two days before my seventeenth birthday. And what did you do, Dad?”
She let it hang. Seamus looked at the window.
“You did nothing. Because I don’t matter.”
“Audrey, don’t say that. Of course, you matter. And I spoke to Alex about it.”
She gave him a bitter smile. “Yes. I’ve heard. You told him that if something happened to me, the whole family would suffer because nobody would be left to steal.”
“I said it in a way he would understand: if something happened to you, there would be no more drugs.”
“Because it’s all he cares about.” Audrey sighed. “I left four years ago. I didn’t cover my tracks, I just ran clear across the bloody continent to the other side. I would’ve gone to the moon if I could have, but I would’ve still left you a nice trail to follow because I kept hoping that one day my parents would wake up and realize they had a daughter. It took you this long to find me because you didn’t look until you needed me. I spent years stealing and grifting, so you could put him into one rehab after another. I’m done with you. Don’t come here. Don’t ask me for any favors. It’s over.”
“This will be the last time,” he said quietly. “If you won’t do it for me, do it for your mother. You know that if Alex dies, it will kill her. I swear, this is the very last time. I wouldn’t be here if I had any choice, Audrey. Just look at the pictures of the job.” He pushed some photographs to her across the table.
She glanced down. The first two shots showed some sort of resort. On the third, a white pyramid rose, its golden top gleaming in the sun. A stylized bull carved from reddish stone polished to a gleam stood before the pyramid. “The Pyramid of Ptah? Are you out of your mind? You want me to go into the Weird and steal something from a pyramid?”
“It can be done.”
“People who rob the pyramids in West Egypt die, Dad.”
“Please, Audrey. Don’t make me beg. Do you want me to get down on my knees? Fine, I can do that.”
He would never leave her alone. If she did this job, he’d be back in six months with another and tell her that it would be “the very last time.” She had to find a way to end it now and end it so he wouldn’t return.
Audrey leaned forward. “I’ll give you a choice. I’ll do the job with you, but from that point on we’re strangers. You don’t have a daughter anymore and I don’t have a father or a mother. If you show up on my land again, I’ll shoot you. I’m dead serious, Dad. I will put a bolt through you. Or you can walk away now and keep me as your daughter. Pick. Him or me.”
Seamus looked at the image of her bruised face in the photo album.
She waited. Deep inside her, a little girl listened quietly, hoping for the answer that the adult in her knew wouldn’t come.
“I’ll see you at the end of the road tomorrow at seven,” he said, and walked out the door.
The disappointment gripped her so tightly, it hurt. For a few short, pain-filled breaths she just stood there, then she grabbed the pan, burned pancakes and all, burst out the back door, and hurled it over the cliff.
Chapter One
Kaldar Mar stepped back and critically surveyed the vast three-dimensional map of the Western Continent. It spread on the wall of the private conference room, a jeweled masterpiece of magic and semiprecious stones. Forests of malachite and jade flowed into plains of aventurine and peridot. The plains gave rise to mountains of brown opals with ridges of banded agates and tiger eye, topped by the snowy peaks of moonstone and jasper.
Beautiful. A completely useless waste of money, but beautiful. If it somehow could be stolen . . . you’d need a handcart to transport it and some tools to carve it to pieces. Hmm, also a noise dampener would work wonders here, and this being the Weird, he could probably find someone willing to risk creating a soundproof sigil for the right price. Steal a custodian’s uniform, get in, cut the map, wrap each piece in a tarp, load them on the handcart, and push the whole thing right out the front door, while looking disgruntled. Less than twenty minutes for the whole job if the cutter was powerful enough. The map would feed the entire Mar family for a year or more.
Well, what was left of the family.
Kaldar’s memory overlaid the familiar patterns of states over the map, ignoring the borders of the Weird’s nations. Adrianglia took up a big chunk of the Eastern seaboard, stretching in a long vertical ribbon. In the Broken, it would have consumed most of the states from New York and southern Quebec to Georgia and a small chunk of Alabama. Below it, West Egypt occupied Florida and spread down into Cuba. To the left of Adrianglia, the vast Dukedom of Louisiana mushroomed upward, containing all of Louisiana and a chunk of Alabama in the south, rising to swallow Mississippi and Texarcana, and ending with the coast of the Great Lakes. Beyond that, smaller nations fought it out: the Republic of Texas, the Northern Vast, the Democracy of California . . .
Kaldar had grown up on the fringes of this world, in the Edge, a narrow strip of land between the complex magic of the Weird and the technological superiority of the Broken. Most of his life was spent in the Mire, an enormous swamp, cut off from the rest of the Edge by impassable terrain. The Dukedom of Louisiana dumped its exiles there and killed them when they tried to reenter the Weird. His only escape had been through the Broken. He traveled back and forth, smuggling goods, lying, cheating, making as much money as was humanly possible and dragging it back to the family.
Kaldar stared at the map. Each country had an enemy. Each was knee deep in conflict. But the only war he cared about was happening right in the middle, between the Dukedom of Louisiana and Adrianglia. It was a very quiet, vicious war, fought in secrecy by spies, with no rules and no mercy. On the Adrianglian side, the espionage and its consequences were handled by the Mirror. He supposed if they were in the Broken, the Mirror would be the equivalent of the CIA or FBI, or perhaps both. On the Dukedom of Louisiana’s side, the covert war was the province of the secret service known as the Hand. He had watched from the sidelines for years as the two organizations clashed, but watching wasn’t enough anymore.
First, the Mirror woke him up at ten till five, and now he spent fifteen minutes waiting. Puzzling.
The heavy wooden door swung open soundlessly, and a woman entered the room. She was short, with a sparse, compact body, wrapped in an expensive blue gown embroidered with silver thread. Kaldar priced the dress out of habit. About five gold doubloons in the Weird, probably a grand and a half or two in the Broken. Expensive and obviously custom tailored. The blue fabric perfectly complemented her skin, the color of hazelnut shells. The dress was meant to communicate power and authority, but she hardly needed it. She moved as if she owned the air he breathed.
Nancy Virai. The head of the Mirror. They had never met—he had not been given that honor, poor Edge rat that he was—but she hardly needed an introduction.
He’d spent the last two years doing small assignments, challenging, but nothing of great importance. Nothing that would warrant the attention of Lady Virai. Anticipation shot through Kaldar. Something big waited at the end of this conversation.
Lady Virai approached and stopped at the desk four feet away. Dark eyes surveyed him from a severe face. Her irises were like black ice. Stare too long, and you’d veer off course and smash into a hard wall at full speed.
“You are Kaldar Mar.”
“Yes, my lady.”
“How long have you worked for me?”
She knew perfectly well when he had started. “Almost two years, my lady.”
“You have open warrants in two Provinces, which we quashed when you were hired, and an extensive criminal record in the Dukedom of Louisiana.” Nancy’s face was merciless. “You are a smuggler, a conman, a gambler, a thief, a liar, and an occasional murderer. With that résumé, I can see why you thought the Mirror would be the proper career choice. Just out of curiosity, is there a law that you haven’t broken?”
“Yes. I never raped anyone. Also, I never copulated with animals. I believe Adrianglia has a law against that.”
“And you have a smart mouth.” Nancy crossed her arms. “As per our agreement with your family and the condition of extracting the lot of you from the Edge, you are now a citizen of Adrianglia. Your debt is being paid in full by the efforts of your cousin Cerise Sandine and her husband, William. You are allowed to pursue any profession you may like. Yet you came to work for me. Tell me, why is that?”
Kaldar smiled. “I’m grateful to the realm for rescuing my family. I possess a unique set of talents that the Mirror finds useful, and I don’t want to rely on my lovely cousin and William for the repayment of my debt. William is a nice chap, a bit testy at times and he occasionally sprouts fur, but everyone has issues. I would feel rotten being indebted to him. It would be taking advantage of his good nature.”
Nancy’s cold eyes stared at him for a long second. “People like you love taking advantage of others’ good nature.”
He laughed quietly under his breath.
“You lie with no hesitation. The smile was particularly a nice touch. I imagine that face serves you quite well, especially in female company.”
“It has its uses.”
Lady Virai pondered him for a long moment. “Kaldar, you are a scoundrel.”
He bowed with all the elegance of a blueblood prince.
“You were born smart but poor. You view me as a spoiled, rich woman born with a gold coin in my mouth. You feel that I and those of my social standing don’t appreciate what we have, and you delight in thumbing your nose at aristocracy.”
“My lady, you give me entirely too much credit.”
“Spare me your bullshit. You revel in sabotaging the system, you hate orders, and you break the law simply because it’s there. You can’t help yourself. Yet two years ago you came to me with a bridle and a set of spurs, and said, ‘Ride me.’ And in two years, your record has been strangely law-abiding. You’ve been good, Kaldar. Within reason, of course. There was that business with the bank mysteriously catching fire.”
“Completely accidental, my lady.”
Lady Virai grimaced. “I’m sure. I need to know why you’re going through all this trouble, and I don’t have time to waste.”
The problem with honesty was that it gave your opponent ammunition to use against you. One simply didn’t hand a woman like Nancy Virai a loaded gun. Unless, of course, one had no choice. If he played coy now or tried to lie, she would see through him and order him out of her office. He would continue his rotation of small-time assignments. He had waited two years for this chance. He had to be sincere. “Revenge,” Kaldar said.
She didn’t say anything.
“The Hand took people from me.” He kept his voice casual and light. “My aunts, my uncles, cousins, my younger brother. There were thirty-six adults in the family before the Hand came to our little corner of the Edge. There are fifteen now, and they are raising a crop of orphaned children.”
“Do you want the Hand’s agents dead?”
“No.” Kaldar smiled again. “I want them to fail. I want to see despair in their eyes. I want them to feel helpless.”
“What is driving you? It’s not all hate. People driven by hate alone are hollow. You have some life left in you. Is it fear?”
He nodded. “Most definitely.”
“For yourself?”
In his mind, he was back on that muddy hillside drenched in cold gray rain. Aunt Murid’s body lay broken on the ground, her blood spreading across the brown mud in a brilliant scarlet stain. He was sure that’s not what he actually saw. Back in that moment, he didn’t have time to stand and watch the blood spread. He was too busy cutting into the creature that killed her. This memory was false. It came from his nightmares.
“What are you thinking of?” Lady Virai asked.
“I’m remembering my family dying.”
“How did you feel when they were killed?”
“Helpless.”
There. She had pulled it out of him. It hurt. He didn’t expect it to, but it did.
Lady Virai nodded. “How well can you handle the Broken?”
“I swim through it like a fish through clear water.”
She gave him a flat look.
“The Edge is very long but narrow,” he told her. “The Mire, where my family lived, is boxed on two sides by impassable terrain. There are only two ways out: to the Weird and the Dukedom of Louisiana, or to the Broken and the State of Louisiana. The Dukedom uses the Mire as a dumping ground for its exiles. They murder any Edger who approaches that boundary. So that border is closed, which leaves only one avenue of escape, to the Broken. Most of my family had too much magic to survive that crossing, so it fell to me to procure supplies and other things we needed. I’ve traveled through the Broken since I was a child. I have contacts there, and I’ve taken care to maintain them.”
Lady Virai pondered his face.
Here it comes.
“So happens that I can use you.”
Aha!
“A few hours ago a group of thieves broke into the Pyramid of Ptah in West Egypt.” Lady Virai nodded at the map, where the peninsula that was Florida in the Broken thrust into the ocean. “The thieves stole a device of great military importance to the Egyptians. The Hand likely commissioned this theft. To make matters worse, the thieves were supposed to hand off their merchandise to the Louisianans, and they chose to do it in Adrianglian territory. Their meeting didn’t go as planned, and now Adrianglia is involved, and the Egyptians are threatening to send the Claws of Bast into our lands to retrieve the object.”
Kaldar frowned. The Hand was bad, the Mirror was dangerous, but the Claws of Bast were in a league of their own. There was a reason why their patron goddess was called the Devouring Lady.
“Can you handle a wyvern?” Lady Virai asked.
“Of course, my lady.” Not much difference between an enormous flying reptile and a horse, really.
“Good. You will be issued one, together with funds, equipment, and other things you may require. I want you to use it to fly to the south, find this device, and bring it to me. Find the object, Kaldar. I don’t care if you have to chase it to the moon, I want it in my hands and I want it yesterday. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes. One question?”
Lady Virai raised her eyebrows a quarter of an inch.
“Why me?”
“Because the West Egyptians tells me the thieves are Edgers,” she said.
“How do they know?”
Her eyes flashed with annoyance. “They didn’t specify. But it’s hardly in their best interests to lie. The Hand hired the Edgers to do their dirty work, and now they have vanished into the Broken. They think they are beyond my reach. Your job is to prove them wrong. You may go now. Erwin will brief you and see to the details.”
Kaldar ducked his head and headed for the door. Fate finally smiled at him.
“Kaldar.”
He turned and looked at her.
“I’m taking a gamble,” she said. “I’m gambling that you are smart as well as pretty, and those smarts will keep you following my orders. Don’t disappoint me, Kaldar. If you fail because of lack of ability, I will simply discard you. But if you betray me, I will retire you. Permanently.”
He grinned at her. “Understood, my lady.”
The briefing room lay just a short walk from the conference room. Kaldar rapped his knuckles on the door and swung it open. Erwin rose from a chair with a neutral smile.
Lady Virai’s pet flash sniper had a pleasant face, neither handsome, nor unattractive. His short hair, halfway between dark blond and light brown, didn’t attract the eye. Of average height, he was trim but not overly muscular. His manner was unassuming; at the same time, he always appeared as if he belonged wherever he was. Never uncomfortable, never nervous, Erwin also never laughed. During meetings, people tended to forget he was in the room. He would blend right into a crowd of strangers, and once you passed him, his flash would take your head clean off. Erwin could hit a coin thrown in the air with a concentrated blast of magic from fifty paces away.
“Master Mar.” Erwin held out his hand.
“Master Erwin.” They shook.
Inconspicuous Erwin. When Kaldar had first met him, he’d taken the time to replicate the look and the mannerisms. The results proved shocking. He’d walked right past the security into the ducal palace twice before he decided to stop tempting the fate.
“Would you care for a drink?” the sniper asked.
“No.”
“Very well. On with the briefing then.” Erwin turned to the large round table and tapped the console. The surface of the table ignited with pale yellow. The glow surged up and snapped into a three-dimensional image of a large pyramid, with pure white walls topped with a tip of pure gold.
“The Pyramid of Ptah. The Egyptian pyramids started as tombs and slowly progressed into houses of worship and learning. This particular pyramid, the second largest in West Egypt, is devoted to Ptah, God of Architects and Skilled Craftsmen, Of all creation gods of West Egypt, he is particularly venerated because of his intellectual approach. In essence, if Ptah thinks of it, it comes into being.”
“A useful power,” Kaldar said.
“Very. Ptah’s pyramid is the center of research for many magic disciplines. It’s the place where discoveries are made and cutting-edge technology is produced. That’s why Egyptians guard it like the apple of their eye.”
Erwin touched the console, and the walls of the pyramid vanished, revealing inner structure—a complex maze of passageways.
“This is just what we know about,” Erwin said. “The defenses of the pyramid are constantly evolving. It is seeded with traps, puzzles, impossible doors, and other delightful things designed to separate intruders from the burden of their lives. The Egyptians informed us that the thieves entered here, at two in the morning.” Erwin picked a narrow metal tube and pointed at the passageway shooting off from the main entrance. The hallway lit up with bright shade of yellow. “It’s a service hallway. It’s typically locked at night, and the lock is considered to be tamperproof.”
“Until now.”
“A fair observation. The Egyptians estimate that a talented picklock could open this lock in ten to fifteen minutes. The entrance is extensively patrolled. The thieves had a window of eight seconds, during which they opened the door, slipped inside the passageway, and closed and locked it behind them.”
“They locked it?”
Erwin nodded.
Four seconds to open, four seconds to lock. That was crazy. To break into the Pyramid of Ptah would take incredible talent. Kaldar had looked into it when he was younger, and the family was desperate. If someone had asked him this morning if it could be done, he would’ve said no.
“Then they proceeded down this hallway, leaving three distinct sets of footprints, two large and one small.”
“Two for muscle and the cat burglar,” Kaldar guessed.
“Probably.” Erwin swept the length of the hallway with his pointer, causing sections of the image to light up. “They opened impossible locks in record time. They avoided all of the traps. They escaped detection and ended up here, bypassing both treasury here and armory here.” The pointer fixed on a small room, then lit up rooms to the right and left of it. “They took a wooden box containing the device and walked out of the pyramid the way they came. In and out under twenty minutes.
“That’s impossible.”
“Our Egyptian colleagues are of the same opinion. Unfortunately, the facts have no regard for their collective sanity.”
Kaldar frowned at the pyramid. “Was this the shortest route they could’ve taken to the room?”
“Yes.”
An enterprising thief would’ve done the research and broken into the treasury. A terrorist would’ve gone for the armory and the weapons within. But these three went directly to the room, took their prize, and escaped. Someone had hired them to do this job and provided them with the plans of the pyramid. Only a heavy hitter would have access to this sort of intelligence. The Mirror. Or the Hand. That would explain why a thief with a talent of this caliber took a job for hire. The Hand’s methods of persuasion rarely involved money. Mostly they showed you your child or your lover strapped to a chair and promised to send you a piece of her every hour until you agreed to do whatever they wanted.
There it was, finally, his chance of a direct confrontation. He would make them pay.
Erwin was watching him.
“What happened after the thieves left the pyramid?” Kaldar asked.
“They disappeared off the face of the world.” Erwin fiddled with the console, and the pyramid vanished, replaced by an aerial image of a small town. “This is the town of Adriana, population forty thousand. Two hundred and twenty leagues north, across the border, in our territory. A small, quaint settlement, famous for being the first place Adrian’s fleet disembarked after crossing the ocean. It’s a popular destination for school tours. Six hours and ten minutes after the thieves left the pyramid, Adriana’s prized fountain exploded. The city crew, first on the scene, became violently sick. They reported catching ghost insects on their skin, hot flashes, freezes, temporary blindness, and vomiting.”
The reaction to Hand’s magic. Kaldar grimaced. The Mirror relied on gadgets to supplement their agents’ natural talents, while the Hand employed magic modification. Officially, all countries of the West Continent abided by an agreement that limited how far the human body could be twisted by magic. The Dukedom of Louisiana made all the right noises and quietly manufactured freaks by the dozen. Men with foot-long needles on their backs, women who shot acid from the hands, things that used to be human and now were just a tangled mess of fangs and claws.
Magic augmentation came with a price. Some agents lost their humanity completely, some held on to it, but all emittedtheir own particular brand of unnatural magic. If you were sensitive to magic, the first exposure made you violently sick. He’d experienced it firsthand, and he didn’t care to repeat it.
Erwin straightened. “The Egyptians believe the Hand hired the thieves to steal the object and scheduled the trade in Adriana, where things went badly for both parties. Your wyvern is on standby. With luck and good wind, you should be in Adriana in an hour. After you review the scene, I’d imagine you will have a better idea of the supplies you’ll need. Please stop at the Home Office, and we’ll provide you everything you require. This assignment is rated first priority. Should you be captured, Adrianglia will disavow any knowledge of you and your mission.”
“But you’ll miss me?”
Erwin permitted himself a small smile. “Kaldar, I never miss.”
Ha! “What’s the nature of the stolen device?” Kaldar asked.
Erwin raised his eyebrows. “That’s the best part.”
Kaldar surveyed the sea of rubble, enclosed by a line of fluorescent paint and guarded by a dozen undersheriffs. Before him stretched what had once been the Center Plaza: a circle of clear ground, which until this morning had been paved with large square blocks. The blocks had radiated like the spokes of a wheel from the tall round fountain in the shape of a pair of dolphins leaping out from the water basin. He’d picked up a tourist brochure on his way to the scene of the crime. It showed a lovely picture of the fountain.
Now the fountain lay in ruins. It wasn’t simply knocked down, it was shattered, as if the dolphins had exploded from the inside out. Not satisfied with destroying the fountain, the perpetrator had wrenched the stone blocks around it out of the ground and hurled them across the plaza. The brochure stated that each block weighed upwards of fifty pounds. Looking at the giant chunks of stone, Kaldar didn’t doubt it. A small tea vendor’s wagon must’ve gotten in the way of the barrage, because it lay in shambles, blue-green boards poking out sadly from under the stones.
Blood stained the rubble. Gobs of flesh lay scattered here and there, some looking like they could possibly be human and others sporting weird bunches of fish bladders strung together like grapes. About ten feet to the left, a chunk of an oversized, flesh-colored tentacle curled around a piece of cloth. Long strands of yellowish slime covered the entire scene. And to top it all off, the slime stank like days-old vomit, harsh and sour. The deputies downwind, on the opposite side of the ruined plaza, valiantly tried not to gag.
The tall, broad bruiser, who was the Sheriff of Adriana, was giving him an evil eye. His name was Kaminski, and he was clearly having doubts about the wisdom of Kaldar’s presence at his crime scene. Kaldar couldn’t blame him. His skin was at least two shades darker than most faces in the crowd. He wore brown leather, fitted neither tight nor too loose, and he looked lean, flexible, and fast, like a man who scaled tall fences early in the morning.
The sheriff stared at him. He could just go over and introduce himself, but what fun would that be?
Kaldar grinned. The Sheriff’s blond sidekick began weaving his way through the crowd toward him.
Strange pair, these two, but probably highly effective. And respected, too. They didn’t bother with putting up any barriers, not even a rope. Just a line of paint around the crime scene and a dozen undersheriffs, but the crowd stayed way back.
Cops were the same everywhere, Kaldar reflected. In the Broken, they called you sir and Tasered you, while in the Weird they called you master and hit you with low-level flash magic, but the street look, that wary, evaluating, flat look in their eyes was the same everywhere. Cops noticed everything, and few of them were stupid. He had committed too many crimes in both worlds to underestimate them.
The blond undersheriff stopped before him. “I’m Undersheriff Rodwell. Your name?”
“Kaldar Mar.”
“Do you find the destruction of Adrianglian landmark humorous, Master Mar? Perhaps you would like to visit our jail and spend some time in our jail cell to collect your thoughts and explain to all of us what is so funny?”
“I’d love to,” Kaldar said. “But my employer might take an issue with that.”
“Who is your employer?”
Kaldar sent a spark of magic through his spine. A faint sheen rolled over the earring in his left ear. It dripped down, forming a dull tear hanging from the hoop. The tear brightened, and Rodwell stared at his own reflection in a mirrored surface.
“Kaldar Mar, agent of the Adrianglian Secret Service.” The tear sparked and vanished. “The Mirror is grateful for your assistance, Undersheriff. Thank you for securing the crime scene for me.”
“I just want to know one thing.” Sheriff Kaminski kept his voice low. “Is the Hand involved in this?”
Kaldar considered before making his answer. He needed their cooperation. It would make things easier, and he needed to build contacts in law enforcement. “Yes.”
The Sheriff chewed on it for a long breath.
“How do you know?” Rodwell asked.
Kaldar cycled through his options. Neither one of the men struck him as a social climber. They were good at what they did and were happy right where they were. If he came on with an imperious aristocratic air, they’d stonewall him. The buddy-buddy approach wouldn’t work either—their town was on the line, and they were both too grim for jokes. A straight shooter, just-doing-my-job type was his best bet.
Kaldar delayed another half a second, as if weighing the gravity of the information, and pointed at a fragment of a tentacle a few feet away.
The two men looked in the direction of his fingers.
“That’s a piece of a Hand operative, pieuvre class. Six to ten tentacles, amphibious, weighs in close to five hundred pounds. A nasty breed.” He clipped his words a bit, adding a touch of a military tone to his voice.
“You’ve seen one before?” Rodwell asked. The hint of challenge in his voice was a shade lighter.
Kaldar pretended to think for a moment and grasped the sleeve of his leather jacket. The clasps on his wrist snapped open and he pulled the sleeve down, revealing his forearm. Four quarter-sized round scars dotted his forearm in a ragged bracelet, the reminder of a tentacle wrapping around his wrist. The suckers had burned into his skin, and not even the best magic the Mirror had at its disposal had been able to remove the scars. He let them see it and pulled the sleeve closed. “Yes. I’ve seen one.”
“Did it hurt?” Rodwell asked.
“I don’t remember,” Kaldar answered honestly. “I was busy at the time.” He heard people say that you couldn’t kill a pieuvre operative with a knife. You could. You just had to have the proper motivation.
The sheriff stared at the wreckage. “What do they want here?”
Kaldar gave him a flat look and clamped his mouth shut. Giving up the information too easily wouldn’t do. Kaminski didn’t like him and didn’t trust him. However, if Kaldar risked his neck and broke the rules to put his fears to rest, well, it would be a different story. But no straight shooter would break the rules without serious doubts.
A wise man far away in a different world once said, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” Kaminski was worried about his town. It was written all over his face. That worry was the lever. Apply the proper amount of force, and Kaldar could shift the sheriff to his side.
The silence won.
“Look, Master Mar, I know you’re breaking regulations,” Kaminski said. “I just need to know if my people are safe.”
Kaldar rocked back on his heels, looked at the sky, and sighed. “I don’t normally do this.”
Kaminski and Rodwell took a step closer, almost in unison. “It won’t go anywhere,” the sheriff promised. “You have my word.”
Kaldar took another breath. “Eight hours ago, the West Egyptian authorities discovered that a group of thieves broke into the Pyramid of Ptah. The perpetrators stole a magic device of great strategic value. It was a theft for hire, and the Dukedom of Louisiana’s Hand was the intended recipient of the device. In the early-morning hours, the thieves crossed the border and arrived here, to meet the Hand’s operatives. The Hand is infamous for double-crossing the hired help, so the thieves picked a public, well-known location for their own safety. As you can see, their fears were justified.”
“So Adriana was never the intended target?” Kaminski asked.
“No, Sheriff. It was simply the closest public place. Your people are safe.”
“Thank you,” Kaminski said simply.
“If the city was never the target, why is the Mirror involved?” Rodwell frowned
“Because the attempted exchange took place on our soil, West Egypt requires our assistance in recovering the device. It’s a diplomatic nightmare already. We must resolve this and quickly, or they may take matters into their own hands. Nobody wants to have half a dozen of the Claws of Bast running around in the realm.”
The undersheriff winced. Even Kaminski looked taken aback for a moment. The Claws of Bast had a certain reputation.
Kaminski surveyed the rubble. “All those pieces look like they belong to the same body, and according to you, they’re pieces of a Hand operative. No other body parts. The thieves got away.”
Kaldar nodded. “Indeed. Somewhere out there, in that mess, is a clue that will tell me where they went.”
“I can have my men pull the rubble apart,” Kaminski said. “I can put sixteen undersheriffs on this. We’ll throw up a grid, work in shifts through the night, and have every crumb and rock cataloged for you by the next morning.”
Kaldar grinned. “I appreciate the offer, but time is short.”
The two men stared at him. Showtime.
“Do you have any coins on you, Undersheriff?” Kaldar asked.
Rodwell dug into his pocket and came up with a handful of change. Kaldar plucked the small silver disk of a half crown from the man’s palm and held it up with his thumb and index finger. The rays of the morning sun shone, reflecting from the small disk of silver. “I bet you a half crown that I’ll walk out there and find this vital clue in the next three minutes.”
Rodwell glanced at the half crown and back at the sea of debris. A small smile bent his lips. “I’ll take that bet.”
A spark of magic pulsed from the coin in Kaldar’s fingers. It shot through him like lightning, awakening something lying hidden deep in the recesses of his being, just on the edge of consciousness. The strange reserves of magic sparked to life and solidified into a tense, shivering current that burst through the coin, through his spine, up through his skull, and down through his legs and the soles of his feet. The current speared him, claiming him, and he shuddered, caught like a fish on the line. This was his own special talent. If he got someone to accept a bet, his magic skewed the odds in his favor.
The current pulled on him, and Kaldar let it steer him. The magic led him, guiding each step, maneuvering him around the pitted pavement, over the heap of shattered marble, to a cluster of splintered wood. The coin tugged him forward. Kaldar bent. Something shiny caught the sun in the crevice underneath a twisted wreck of metal that used to be a tea-making machine. He reached for it. His fingertips touched glass, and the current vanished.
Kaldar pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, wrapped it over his fingers, and gently pried the glass object free. A six-inch-long tube with a wide bulb on the end. Dark soot stained the inside of the bulb. How about that?
He turned and brought his find back to the two men.
“What is that?”
“That’s an ‘I Love You Rose.’ These tubes are sold in certain shops.” Namely, the gas stations near ghettos in the Broken. “There is usually a cheap fake flower inside. They’re bought by addicts who drop cheap narcotics into the bulb and smoke the tube like a pipe.”
Kaminski raised his head. “Bring the goleeyo!”
A young woman, whose blond hair was carefully braided away from her face, hurried over, carrying a contraption of light bronze resembling a long flashlight. She glanced at the pipe, snagged a small leather book chained to her belt, tore a piece of thin paper, and looked at Kaldar. “Hold it up please!”
He raised the meth pipe. Most of the Weird’s gadgetry was still new to him. He hadn’t seen this one before.
The blonde clicked the flashlight. A bright beam of pale green light stabbed the pipe, highlighting dirty smudges, specks of dirt, and on the bulb, one large beautiful fingerprint. The woman placed the paper between the light and the fingerprint, holding it an inch away from the glass, and clicked the flashlight again. The flashlight whirred. Its back end split, the metal plates lifting up, revealing the interior, a series of small gears speckled with tiny gems. The gears spun. The flashlight clicked loudly, in a measured rhythm. With each click, the light turned darker and bluer. Thin lines appeared on the paper, growing darker and darker. The beam of the flashlight turned indigo and winked out. The blond woman handed Kaldar the piece of paper with the fingerprint squarely in the center.
He hit her with a dazzling smile. “Thank you, m’lady.”
She smiled back. “You’re welcome, m’lord.”
If he didn’t have to leave, he could’ve asked her to share a meal with him, and she would say yes. Kaldar checked the hint of a smile hiding in her eyes. She would definitely say yes, then he would get her to say yes to a night together, and it would be a lot of fun for them both. Unfortunately, he wasn’t his own man at the moment.
“So what’s next?” Kaminski asked.
“Next, I’ll go hunting,” Kaldar said.
Fifteen minutes later, Kaldar finished with the pleasantries, shook the hands, thanked and was thanked, and finally headed to his wyvern, waiting for him on the edge of town. Addicts in the Weird didn’t use meth pipes, which meant the West Egyptians were right. The thieves must have come from the Edge or the Broken . Almost four months had passed since he had visited either place. The hop back across the boundary was long overdue.
Of the three people involved, the picklock had to be his best bet. A man with a gift like that wouldn’t stay idle for long. Somewhere, somehow, that man had left a trail. All Kaldar had to do was find it.
He couldn’t wait to meet the talented bastard.
