Hidden Things (20 page)

The emaciated thing atop the chair dipped its head, its eyes half lidded. Calliope couldn't decide if he was trying to look wisely thoughtful or regally bored. “What do you bring in trade?” he asked.

Vikous swung his right hand low, bringing it up the left side of his body and across his face. As he did, packets of Smuckers and Knott's Berry Farm jelly tumbled from the hidden space behind his fingers and dropped into his waiting left hand. The crowd pressed in around them made appreciative noises. “Foodstuffs from the lands beyond,” he said, his voice brazen and set to carry. “Reflections of the rainbow, fuel for your finest forges, fit only for a king and his most loyal followers.”

The king nodded, a sad parody of a potentate in his flabby and wrinkled nudity. He fixed his eyes upon Vikous. “Truly, the jester's talents are not exaggerated.” His oil-slick eyes flicked to Calliope, then back to Vikous as he licked his lips. “No,” he said. His high voice somehow carried the length of the cavern.

Vikous froze, caught halfway through an acknowledging bow. “No, Highness?” He straightened and raised an eyebrow, motioning with one hand to stop a movement that Calliope hadn't realized she was about to make. “If I may presume to ask, why do you decline?”

“I think I can answer that, Vikous,” said a voice behind them. “First, though, I'd like you to secure Ms. Jenkins for me.”

Calliope spun to face the speaker, already recognizing the voice. A few dozen feet away, Special Agent Walker's sharp, saturnine expression seemed to glow softly in the place's pale luminescence. Anger overwhelmed her surprise. “Unless you bribed these guys to help you, Walker, I think the only thing that's going to happen right now is a righteous ass-kicking.”

Walker smiled, and Calliope remembered again how much that smile had bothered her. He opened his mouth to speak, shook his head, and pulled a gun from inside his coat.

 

Why am I on the ground? Who tripped me?

Calliope was having trouble breathing. She tried to get up but couldn't quite get her balance to shift forward. She looked up and saw that Vikous was standing over her, tried to tell him to help her, but couldn't get the words out. She tried rolling over, but her right arm wouldn't work.

He used a spell on me, Vikous, like that one you did on Lauren. Help me.

“You didn't have to shoot her,” she heard Vikous say to someone past her line of sight. Calliope couldn't remember to whom he was talking, which was strange, because it seemed like it should be important.

He shot me? I thought . . .

And then she didn't think anything at all.

13

“I KNOW WHAT
you've been doing, Vikous,” said someone Calliope couldn't see. Above her, Vikous scowled in the direction of her feet. “You've been trying to do your job while staying away from me, because you know what will happen if you don't.” Walker slid into view above Calliope, his gun still leaking a thin line of smoke that somehow reminded Calliope of Vikous's cigar. “You know what you owe me.”

Vikous's face twisted. “I don't
owe
you anything.”

Walker made a dismissive gesture with his empty hand. “Fine. You know your oath, sworn to me for services . . .”—he smiled, his face stretching—“rendered.” Vikous looked away, but Walker continued, “You know its conditions, and you
knew
what I would ask of you should we cross paths.” Walker's expression was bitter. “I'm tired of this game. I want it to end.”

“Then you want everything to end.” Vikous's voice was a growl. “Stagnate and rot.”

“Yes.” Walker's voice snapped at the air. “If that's the only way to break this cycle, I want it dead on the vine. I'm not going to let this one”—his hand chopped down at Calliope—“or anyone else reach the effigy.”

“Because you've given up.” Vikous spat the words out. “You lost your faith before you ever rejected your nature.”

“This role has always been my nature, my calling, and my desire.” Walked looked down at Calliope through what seemed to her to be a long, dark tunnel. “This time . . . let's say I'm investigating more permanent solutions to the problem. Plus the disagreeable bitch has had it coming from minute one.” He tucked the gun away within his coat and looked up at Vikous. “Now, pick her up and let's go.”

Vikous turned his gaze on Walker, and for a moment it seemed as though he would leap over Calliope to get to the man. Instead, he seemed to deflate, bending down and easing his arms under her.

“Vik'ss,” Calliope heard another voice say. After a few seconds, she realized it was hers.

Whoa, I sound bad.

“Quiet, Calli,” Vikous murmured. “Save your strength.”

“Vik'ss. Don' havt do this.”

Vikous closed his eyes, his face gone slack and sorrowful. “I do, Calli. I tried to stay clear of him, but . . .” He shook his head and opened his eyes. “I have to do this.”

Calliope didn't understand. The room was starting to spiral away, but she focused her attention down to her left hand and clutched at Vikous's sleeve. Her eyes locked onto Vikous's own. “No. Y'don't.”

Vikous frowned, his eyes first scanning her face, then growing unfocused, as if searching within for some dark thing they could not find. “I don't . . .” His eyes returned to Calliope. “That's not possible.”

“Get that bitch up and let's go, cousin.” Walker was suddenly looming over them, the V's of his face pulled down and bitter. “I'm not going to—”

To Calliope's shock-addled perception, it seemed as if Vikous
flickered
—one moment, kneeling over her, the next, standing—motion compressed between two heartbeats, effortless as a hummingbird's wing beat. But the sound that echoed through the cavern as Vikous's hand shot out and clamped around Walker's throat—like a baseball bat swung into a side of beef—conveyed violent momentum. Walker's feet swung away from the floor as he dangled from Vikous's outstretched arm.

“What'r you
doing
?” Walker choked out, his hands scrabbling at Vikous's arm.

“Whatever I like, apparently.” Vikous's lips drew back and back into something that could never be called a smile. His arm swung in an arc, and Walker flew across the cavern. Calliope didn't hear him land, but the goblins all made an impressed noise.

Vikous's face loomed over hers again and she was floating in the air, held aloft by his arms. Her shoulder was starting to hurt, but none of his movements seemed to jar her.

Solid,
she thought,
he's solid.

She tried to smile her thanks up at him, but when she saw his expression, the movement died on her lips.

Whatever Vikous was feeling at that moment, Calliope was absolutely sure it wasn't gratitude.

There were rules.

Vikous slipped through the goblin tunnels like fear in the veins of a coward: unstoppable, and bound to break out onto the surface before long.

There were very set rules for all the Hidden Things.

The king's minions scoured their lair for him, but they were creatures of darkness, dependent on scent and sound to track their prey, and he was what he was; the tunnels filled with the scents of roasting peanuts and stale cotton candy; cheap, tinkling organ music echoed from the walls.

Respect the Songs of Power. No blasphemy. All Oaths to be honored.

Vikous scowled, glancing down at the woman cradled in his arms.

She knew. It was right in her eyes.
The thought filled him with a kind of sick rage.

“Oy! Who goes there?”

One. They only put one on the exit.

Vikous smiled, the corners of his mouth stretching back and back and back as his jaw opened.

Too wide.

Too many teeth.

The goblin's screams alerted its brethren, but by then it was far too late.

Morning sun pushed in through the curtains of a motel room. Calliope blinked grit from her eyes and tried to focus. She shifted slightly and agony speared through her right side. The pained hiss of air through her teeth drew movement out of the shadows in the corner of the room. Straining, gritting her teeth, Calliope could raise her head and make out Vikous's hunched form leaning forward in a chair. His hood was raised.

“How are you feeling?” he said.

Calliope settled back into the pillow, trying not to jostle anything too hard. “I . . .” She tried to take a deeper breath, thought better of it. Her entire right side felt stiff and constricted. “I'm awake and I hurt like hell.”

“Good.” He stood up and walked over to the side of the bed so that she could see him without moving. With the window behind him, he was little more than a silhouette. “I've figured out a plan.”

Calliope grimace-smiled. “Sounds good,” she said. “Let's hear it.”

A pause, then: “Once we get some food into you, you're going to tell me what happened back in that diner the first night.”

Time seemed to slow down for Calliope. “Why—” She licked her lips to buy time. “I mean, what's important about the diner? You were there with me the whole time.”

“Was I?” Vikous said. He hadn't moved.

Calliope ignored the question. “What's that got to do with Walker? Do you think he's been following us since then?” She frowned, trying desperately to turn the conversation while keeping her face calm. “He couldn't have been, could he?”

Vikous shook his head, moving the hood only slightly. “He didn't catch up to us then.”

“Then what—”

“I've been thinking about it.” Vikous moved away from the bed and wandered, first to the door, then across the room. “Playing everything back. There are things that linger, like a headache; where you can have it on you for so long that you don't even know it's there anymore. It still hurts, but that's just background noise.” Reaching the far side of the room, he turned and started back in the other direction, not looking at Calliope. “It becomes part of how you feel all the time until you don't even think about it, you just suffer, and when it's gone, sometimes you don't even realize it immediately.” He reached the door of the motel room and turned back again. “You maybe know something's different, but it was so much a part of you that until someone asks you ‘How's the headache?' you don't realize you don't have one anymore.” He turned to look down at Calliope. “I had something like that, something I've been carrying around for a long time.” He shook his head and looked away. “It's gone now. I didn't know it until you told me I didn't have to listen to Walker and I realized you were right.”

In the shadowed gloom of the room, Calliope couldn't read Vikous. “That's . . . that's good, right?”

Vikous's voice was flat. “In the world I live in, oaths means something, Calliope. As far as I know, nothing could have broken the hold that oath had on me.” He was holding himself completely still, as though he was afraid of what he might do if he moved. “I've thought it through—the binding went away the night we were at that motel and the diner afterward.” Vikous's head shifted slightly; Calliope could feel, if not see, his eyes on her. “Something happened there, and I think you know what it was.”

From her pillow, Calliope stared up at Vikous. “I don't . . . believe that,” she said.

She could hear herself breathing, but not Vikous, and it startled her when he spoke. “Excuse me?” he said.

“The oath. Things don't have to bind you if you don't let them. Words are just”—she started to gesture the way Gerschon might have, but a flare of pain from her right side made her think better of it—“words.”

Vikous did gesture, the motion of his arm short and sharp. “Those are the sort of rules your kind live by.”

“My
kind
?” Calliope forced herself a few inches closer to sitting position, hissing through the pain. “I thought we were on the same side. I've got a kind now?”

“Humans,” Vikous said, his voice grating and thin. “You walk in wherever you want, changing things to suit whatever it is that you think is true.” His hand twitched. “You twist everything until it fits whatever flat little image you have in your head.” He leaned in toward Calliope. “It's either arrogance or stupidity,” he said in the silence of the room, just over the sound of her breathing, “and either way you manage to kill off everything that doesn't fit. Tear it out and throw it away, whether it mattered or not.
What did you do to me?
” Vikous's voice nearly choked off in his own throat and he leaned in close over the bed.

“I didn't
do
anything. I don't know
how
to do anything.” The pain in Calliope's shoulder and side pushed up and out with each deep breath. Vikous's face was inches from hers; his breath, almost like lemons and probably the only part of him that never smelled bad, puffed in her face with each panting breath.

“You don't need to know how,” he said in a whisper. “You never have;
none
of you ever have, but somehow something happened, and you were there, so tell me what you did.”

“You
died
!” Calliope yelled, pressing upward as tears ran down her face against any will or desire of hers, brought on by the bright white pain that was reaching up from her shoulder and scrabbling at her mind. “You died, you fucking sociopath, and I made them bring you back and I wasn't supposed to tell you about it so I probably just blew one of the all-important rules that you nut-bags follow, and screwed everything up.” Her face was bare centimeters from Vikous's; she could see herself reflected clearly in his flat black eyes, saw the bandages on her shoulder, saw the pain in her face, and the fear.

Vikous must have seen it as well. He blinked, pulling back a few inches, then reached out and lowered her down to the pillows.

It still hurt, hurt worse than anything she could think of that had ever happened to her, and she hated crying in front of anyone, especially—right at that moment—Vikous, but when she was finally lying back down, she couldn't help but smile in relief through the tears. He turned away.

“I shouldn't have gotten you worked up,” he said, still facing the doorway.

“It's all right,” she said.

Silence dropped down into the room, leaving only the echoes of the things she'd told him. Calliope didn't move until Vikous turned and sat down on the corner of the bed. He didn't look at her.