Hidden Things (15 page)

10

THE WAITRESS TOOK
their orders; the expression on her face said she didn't understand why Calliope was having a midnight meal with a homeless guy, but also that she didn't really care. From beneath his hood, Vikous glanced around the diner. “This place would have worked too,” he commented, “if I'd had the right kind of key.”

Calliope nodded, although she wasn't quite sure she understood. “That sort of thing—magic—that's . . . normal?”

“Nothing's normal with what we're doing,” Vikous replied, his voice back to something like a lecture tone. “Some of it is more . . . common. Some”—he produced the motel key from somewhere—“isn't.” He watched her for a second from the shadows of his hood, then pocketed the key. “It's all knowing how the world goes together, what pieces fit where, then figuring how to rearrange them a little bit.” Without looking, he reached over and scooped up half of the individual jelly packs that sat in a bowl at the back of the booth and dumped them into a pocket. “Or a lot, like we did tonight, but that's harder.” He glanced up. “I'm starving. Where's the food?”

Calliope looked around as well. “Actually,” she said, her voice suddenly very quiet, “where are all the people?”

The waitress was gone, as were the two truckers at the front counter, the tall blond woman huddling in a ragged denim jacket in a booth near the entrance, and the tired couple with the sleeping baby that had been sitting two tables over. The kitchen was silent. Calliope turned back to the table, but Vikous was already standing.

“Run.” He looked around the room, his expression equal parts hunter and hunted. For one electric moment, his haunted eyes reminded Calliope of a cheap black velvet clown painting that had hung in an even cheaper burger joint her family had visited when she was a kid.

“Who—”

“Run. Now.” Without looking, his hands found Calliope's shoulders and he dropped his eyes to hers. “Someone else either has the right key for this place, or they don't
need
one.” He nearly threw her, stumbling, toward the front door and the Jeep. “
Run
.”

Eyes wide, Calliope ran. Behind her, she heard the fire exit at the rear of the building slam open and the wind come howling in. Over it, just barely over it, Calliope thought she could hear Vikous shouting something in a language she didn't know. He sounded desperate, and the wind sounded very much like laughter.

 

Someone was standing just outside the doors to the diner, rock-steady in the tearing wind she could both see and feel, unaffected by the sudden violent flashes of lightning that had sprung up out of nowhere outside. Calliope froze, simply unable to process the shift things had taken in so short a time. The landscape outside was barren, stark, and monochrome in the lightning illumination. Inside . . .

She turned.

Vikous stood where she had left him. His right hand, gloved, extended away from him like a claw. His ridiculous feet were spread wide and staggered to brace against the wind that tore in from the back of the L-shaped diner, pulling at his coat and clothes like a madwoman. Every movable stick of furniture in the place was sliding across the floor toward the rear entrance, moving
against
the blasting wind and piling itself before the opening in heaps, like a warped replay of
The Sorcerer's Apprentice.
Chairs stood in a haphazard pile atop one another, heaped over tables that had turned themselves on their sides.

And still something was coming through, hurling the debris away.

Calliope heard, in the rising pitch of the wind, the front door open behind her. She leapt back toward Vikous and pivoted. A tall man, wrapped in a long black coat that muffled him nearly to his eyeballs, took a few broad strides into the space and stopped. Slowly the door pulled itself shut behind him, and the volume of the wind dropped enough to hear the sound of crashing furniture.

Enough to hear Vikous's exhausted panting.

A voice, thin and reedy, like a sickly child's, came out of the crashing near the back door. “But when, Calliope, thy loud harp rang . . .”

crash

“in Epic grandeur rose the lofty strain . . .”

crash

“the clash of arms, the trumpet's awful—”

crash

“mixed with the roar of—”

Calliope lost the rest of the recitation in the ripping and tearing that rose up behind her. She turned, ignoring the large man, and saw an orgy of violence that cleared a passage through the heaps of synthetic and metal furniture.

Amid the wreckage stood a dusty brown old man no more than four feet tall: hairless, dry, and desiccated, with great, watery brown eyes that had, with age, bulged in their sockets rather than sinking. His shoes, pants, shirt, and ragged coat were all a simple unadorned black and he gripped the twisted metal leg of a chair in a knotted hand that might otherwise have looked too weak to make a fist. The wind had died completely away.

He looked only at Calliope, his mouth spread into a toothless smile as he spoke: “The ardent warrior bade his coursers wheel,” he continued in his crackling voice, and he turned his wet gaze on Vikous with something like pity. “Trampling in dust the feeble and the brave.” His gaze lowered and he made a simple gesture. Calliope felt the air
tense
like a stretched muscle.

Vikous flew to the side as though he were made of straw. The impact of his body against the painted cinder-block wall of the diner sounded like a baseball bat against a kneecap. He hung there for several moments; then, just as suddenly, he fell to the floor, utterly still.

“The feeble and the brave,” said the shrunken man in his onionskin voice. “Truly, Vikous was both.” He smiled, the skin around his mouth crinkling like old paper. “I suppose that would make me the ardent warrior.” The old man turned his bulbous eyes back to Calliope, pivoting neatly on his heel and toe. “Hello, dear. I am called Faegos.” He executed a tight but shallow bow. “I'm afraid I need a bit of your time.”

 

The storm outside had subsided as quickly as it had come, once the fight was over. The tall, muffled man, still silent, had rummaged through the destruction and salvaged two reasonably intact chairs for Calliope and the one who called himself Faegos to use. These he positioned in the center of the cleared section where Vikous had been standing, setting them facing each other and adjusting both very precisely, even minutely, until he was satisfied, at which point he again withdrew out of immediate notice. Faegos pulled himself nimbly and easily into his chair, moving like a gymnast despite his age-ravaged appearance, and gestured for Calliope to take the opposite seat. His wizened face with its protuberant brown eyes was calm, confident—polite, in a slightly amused way.

Calliope was slowly starting to hate him more than she was worried about what was going to happen to her.

“Have a seat, my dear.”

“I'd rather . . .”—
gougeoutyoureyeballsandbreakyourlegsandkillyouandcryandcryand—
she blinked—“ . . . stand, thanks.”

His head tilted, his face a mix of stern mocking and pity one might use on a disobedient but somewhat mentally handicapped child. “Calliope,” he drawled, “please. Sit.”

An iron band ratcheted tight on her mind at the words, dragging her to the chair. Pulling against the compulsion as much as possible, Calliope grabbed the chair and dragged it back to her, turning it backward and straddling it, her back straight. From its original position, she would have been forced to see Vikous's body just to the left of the old gnome sitting across from her; from the new angle, he was merely a disturbing shadow on her peripheral vision. She tried to push any thoughts about that out of her mind and kept her focus narrowed down to her growing anger.

Faegos's swathed assistant had started toward her as soon as she moved his precisely placed chair, but subsided at a negligent motion from the man's knobby hand. Faegos's eye ridge, as hairless as the rest of him, raised in mild amusement as she sat. “You are, I trust, comfortable?”

Don't look at the pool of blood spreading out like little fingers along the floor underneath his—

Calliope kept her expression cool. “I'm not really interested in chatting with you, so why don't we cut to the chase?” She glanced at the tall shrouded man who stood to the side. “You're going to torture me, find out what I know, and then kill me? Let me save you the trouble.”

“Torture? Oh, goodness me, no.” Faegos's wizened features twisted into a moue of distaste and gestured toward his companion. “Poor Kopro has no stomach for such things. Far too messy. For myself”—he laid a hand on his narrow chest—“I already know that you are sadly unaware of the realities that suddenly surround you.” His face showed pity. “That much, I'm afraid, is painfully obvious.”

“Then why are we wasting each other's time?”

He leaned back in the chair, at ease despite the fact that his legs, neatly crossed, only reached the floor with the toe of one shoe. “I would bargain with you.”

Calliope didn't even bother to frown. “I don't have anything you want.”

He smiled and raised an age-thickened finger, waggling it in the air before him. “Ahh, very good. That is essentially correct, but allow me to amend your statement; you do not have anything I want
at the moment
.” He widened his already staring eyes. “I believe that might change.”

Calliope narrowed her eyes, pondering. “You're the most powerful . . . thing that I've seen since I've gotten involved in this mess.”

“Oh, how you talk,” Faegos said and smiled, tipping his head bashfully as though receiving a compliment. He blinked his eyes. “Really, I am surprised. I was led to believe you were quite coarse.”

Calliope thought of Gluen's angry pig-eyes and easily imagined the fat man selling information on her after they'd left his offices. “Some people just bring that out.”

Faegos spread his hands, palms up. “Hopefully we will have a more equitable agreement.”

“I'm just trying to sort everything out,” Calliope said, barely listening. “See, if I'll eventually, maybe, have something you want, and if you want to bargain for it
now,
it's probably dangerous to you.”

The diminutive old man's smile vanished. “Go on.”

Calliope kept her eyes on his, tilting her head slightly. “What's to keep me from telling you to go fuck Kopro over there, then going and getting whatever it is you think I'm going to go get, and hunting you down like any other rat bastard?”

Faegos's face was grim. “I see I was not entirely misinformed as to your personality.”

Calliope stared, her eyes wide and hard, holding on to her anger. “Some people just bring that out.”

Faegos
tsk
ed. “I would certainly never let you leave this place, were that your choice. Nothing is so valuable to me that I cannot stand to see it destroyed, but I will most certainly not see it
lost,
or in the hands of such as you, which amounts to the same thing.”

“So your bargain is whatever I might eventually get hold of that you find useful, in exchange for my life.”

Faegos leaned a few inches forward, searching her face, then shook his head. “I regretfully must acknowledge that that would be a poor offer for one such as you.” He eyed her shrewdly. “I suspect you might choose death simply to spite me.”

Calliope didn't reply and kept her eyes locked on the old man's face, her jaw tight.

Faegos nodded as though receiving confirmation. “Obviously I would have to offer more tempting fare.” He met her eyes, his gaze steady. “Perhaps the life of your young Joshua White would be sufficient.”

The room seemed to tilt along its axis. Calliope's eyes felt painfully dry, but she could not bring herself to break eye contact with Faegos long enough to blink. “Say it again,” she whispered.

“I have the means at my disposal to bring your lost young man back to you.” Faegos's shoulders shifted as he gestured. “I am offering that to you as a trade for . . . certain hidden things . . . as yet undisclosed or discovered. It is quite a generous offer.”

Calliope's eyes narrowed. “Alive? Actually breathing, not some shambling dead thing, or a ghost, or any other little trick?”

Faegos smiled. “I consider your caution commendable.” He again spread his leathery hands, palms out. “I can bring Mr. Joshua White back to rosy-hued health, and not via some banal resurrection; I can make it as though what has happened never did. That service, executed on his behalf, is precisely and specifically what I am offering, to you.” He leaned forward, his own glistening eyes bright. “As the late, lamented Vikous might have explained, there are ways to slip aside, away from, through, or behind this mortal coil.” He smirked. “Or at the very least slip from one portion of the coil to another. Vikous himself dabbled at such things; it was, in fact, how we found you.” Faegos shifted in his seat, his feet dangling. “But I . . . I can fold
time,
Calliope; I know where your young man died, and I know when. I will take him
around
that point in time, once we conclude our bargain.”

A thin sliver of hope made Calliope's heart beat faster, despite her surroundings. She wrapped her arms around the back of her chair and leaned toward Faegos in turn. “What do I have to do?”

Faegos made an expansive gesture. “Nothing at all.” He stopped, then raised a finger. “Ahh, that is not exactly true. You must continue on as you have. Pursue your quest to its fruition. I believe that will bring the thing I desire into your grasp.”

Calliope managed a smirk. “Well, that's going to be difficult to do with a dead guide, genius.”

Faegos ignored the slight, frowning. “Oh, do not be ridiculous; Vikous is a sorry guide in any case.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Or was, rather.” He shook his head and drew himself upright. “He has, I fear, been too long among your kind to be of much use; adopted so many of your ways—your false logic of violence, for instance.”