The Seven Markets (20 page)

Across the room, Presley was waving his gun around, beating at his left ear with his free hand. “Quit it!” he said, shouting to be heard over the increasing wail.

The gray creature, the wall, and the other onlookers drew far away from where Presley suddenly dropped to his knees. The major fired off several more rounds, not bothering to aim. He dropped his weapon, cradling his head in his hands, squeezing as if trying to keep his brains from squirting out through his ears.

“Quit it! I told you to quit it so you quit it!”

The wail became a hum, like feedback from a microphone held too close to an amplifier. Hart heard voices beneath that hum and understood they were speaking the major’s name. He drew his Glock, ready to charge forward and force the creatures to stop whatever they were doing to Presley.

“Stop,” the old woman said. She guided his hand so that he returned the gun to its holster. She pulled him back, away from Presley. He felt the hum of sound receding, the voices fading.

“You should be safe now,” she said.

Hart stood silent as McBride, still bare-chested, forced his way through the crowd. Docherty was right behind him. McBride’s hands were empty but the other man had armed himself. They bookended the major, who was writhing in apparent agony on his knees. Docherty waved his weapon around as if the travelers were not still backing away, giving them as wide a berth as possible.

“Oh crap, oh crap. What’d you go and do that for?”

Docherty detached the assault rifle from his back and passed it to the unarmed McBride, who switched the safety off and aimed the barrel of the rifle into the crowd.

“Tha’s my boss,” he said. His eyes had gone blank and a thin line of drool hung from his lower lip. When he began pulling the trigger, there was nothing human left in his eyes; he was as empty as a rain barrel sixty days into a drought.

Docherty backed him up, silent, calm, and in control. He sighted target after target, squeezing the trigger with the steady, focused pressure they’d taught him all those years ago. Squeeze too quickly and you’ll throw off your aim. A shooter had to be cold and solid, a veritable rock. Exhale. Squeeze. Exhale. Squeeze.

McBride screamed in agony, cracking his own bones as he contorted himself into unnatural shapes. His arms bent into his chest—and kept bending. A bone jutted out of his shoulder and one of his elbows was spitting blood onto the floor. His head pressed down until his chin was cutting into his chest. His knees folded back until he was kneeling; then they kept bending, until his heels were touching the back of his head. He was being folded up and put away, a toy no one wanted to play with anymore.

Docherty was melting into the floor. No, he wasn’t melting; the floor was consuming him, pulling him into itself, taking only the choicest cuts of meat. It trimmed him down, shaving bone and organs and skin, gobbling up the rest with a wet, smacking sound like a big dog licking its chops.

Hart didn’t want to watch, but he couldn’t turn away. Not until the old woman, perhaps sensing his condition, pulled him back toward the stairs, up, away from his friends’ deaths.

She stopped on the first landing, halfway between the first and second floors, clutching at her chest. All the color had drained from her face. She stumbled and nearly fell, catching Hart’s arm with a wild grab.

He lowered her to the carpeted floor, remembering out of nowhere how, before Presley had lost it, she’d thought she’d been noticed.

“Up . . . room . . .” she said, gasping for air.

Hart’s eyes darted between the old woman and the melee below. Instinct and training insisted his team needed him. It might not be too late to help them, maybe save them.

“Please . . .”

She’d never make it to the fifth floor without help. He dragged himself up, hardened his heart against the sounds of his comrades’ suffering, and reached to lift her.

“Easy does it. Hold on, lady.”

He slung her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, stunned at how light she was. He could have carried two of her with ease. More, even. It was as if there was no one there at all.

Their room was at the end of the hall, far from the stairs up to the Prince’s suite. Hart carried the old woman the whole way, pausing only when he realized they had no key to the door. He cursed his lack of preparation; why hadn’t he thought to bring his lock-picks?

“D-Disney,” she said. It was enough. He laid his hand on the knob, waited as a tingling like millions of tiny feet crossed his palm. Amazed at how ridiculous he
didn’t
feel, Hart pushed the door open. Keys? Who needed keys here?

The room was spartan compared to the Prince’s suite. That suited Hart just fine. He pulled back the blankets and laid her on the single wide bed.

“Looks like the couch for me, eh?”

She smiled and managed a few words. “I’m a married woman. Remember?”

He walked to the window. It wasn’t locked, but they were too high up to jump. He had a length of cord in his pack. It might be long enough to lower himself, but that wasn’t going to work for her. Could he carry her down the line and try to drop her onto something soft? He leaned out as far as he could, searching the street for a conveniently placed hay cart or a truck hauling pillows. Nada.

“Well, I think jumping is out. Don’t suppose you thought to pack a pair of wings, did you?”

She groaned and pulled herself up into a sitting position. Some of the color came back to her cheeks. Her eyes were no longer seeing things a thousand miles away.

“You okay there?”

“I will be,” she said. “Thank you.”

His instinct was to dismiss her gratitude. To tell her it was no big deal, all part of the job. Trouble was, it
was
a big deal. He’d left his team downstairs. Everything he’d seen told him they’d gone down hard and messy. And he couldn’t shake the feeling that he could have left her on the steps and helped them out in some way.

“It wouldn’t have made a difference.”

“You read minds, too?”

“No. Faces. Listen to me, Captain Hart: there was nothing you could have done for them.”

“Yeah, I—wait. Hold on a second. Nothing I could do for them? Did you—did you know that was going to happen? That they would . . . that’s why you told us not to get violent with the natives. You
knew
!”

She pushed up farther in the bed. “No. I just . . . well, there are stories you hear, all right?”

“What stories?”

“They say the Market protects its visitors.”

“And you knew?”

“It was just a story! I warned you all not to get into a fight. I begged Major Presley not to let you bring guns at all.”

“Because you knew?”

“Because I’d heard. And I suspected.”

“So you knew.”

“No! Listen: nobody fights at the Market. Nobody cheats you and nobody ever,
ever
tries to kill someone. Because even if we don’t know, we’re worried the Peace might be real.”

“What’s that?”

“The Peace? It’s what people call it. The Market protects its visitors, protects the folks who live and work here. And it doesn’t have to be real, don’t you see? Because if they believe it they’ll stay out of trouble.”

“But it is real.”

“Seemingly.”

“And that wasn’t your husband or one of his flunkies there putting a whammy on my team?”

“No. No whammies, Mister Hart.” She felt the Prince’s gem twitch against her skin. “That’s not how it works.”

“Tell me how it does work, then. And tell me how it happens to be that you forgot to mention this whole ‘Peace’ thing. Seems a mite important, don’t you think?”

“You’re angry.”

“Damn right I’m angry. Even if those men weren’t my friends, I wouldn’t want to lose them like that. But they are my friends—
were
my friends. If you knew something that could have saved them, you should have said so.”

“What if I did? What then? I told you all a lot of things, didn’t I? Funny how it wasn’t until you saw for yourselves that you started listening.”

“I’d have remembered this.”

“All any of you remembered was when to come pick up your checks.”

He shook his head, walking back to the windows. They reached from knee level all the way to the ceiling. Hart pressed his face against the glass and made himself count to ten before answering her.

“Never told you, I think, I was married once. Nice woman. It was back when I was with the teams. She couldn’t take the life, you know? Navy SEALs don’t get a lot of free time. If you’re not training you’re planning an op. If you’ve got the day off you never know when that phone’s gonna ring and rip you away.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It was a while ago. My point is, my ex, she had this neat trick she did. Whenever she was losing an argument—or when she knew she was going to lose—she’d change the subject. So instead of explaining why I found another guy’s toothbrush in the bathroom, she’d start screaming about how the teams were more important to me than she was. See, then it’s not about what
she
did, it’s about how
I
screwed up. It’s not that she slept with someone else, it’s that I drove her to it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Don’t you? Why’d you hire us, lady? It wasn’t to kidnap your husband, was it? Because I’m failing to see how that plan can work when you have to worry about the floor eating you, you know?”

He was shouting. And she was so small, so shrunken, propped up on the pillow with her legs and hips covered in blankets, almost as if the bed was gobbling her up as well. It would serve her right. It was better than she deserved, getting his friends killed like that.

“You don’t understand. You
can’t
understand.”

Hart had to join her on the bed to hear. All the strength had gone from her again. If he opened the window, the breeze might have picked her up and carried her away.

“I was seventeen, I told you that. He kept me for a hundred years and that was bad. But then he cut me loose, and for a hundred more all I wanted—all I wanted
all the time
—was him. I couldn’t think, I wasn’t myself. But at the same time, I was. I was walking and talking, caught in a fog, but I couldn’t free myself. I couldn’t even
want
to free myself.”

“So you’re angry? That’s your excuse?”

“I have to be angry. If I stop hating him, I’ll fall back into the fog. Back into him.”

Hart shook his head. “No go, princess. I’m sorry if he did wrong by you, but that doesn’t give you the right to get my friends killed. And make no mistake, that’s exactly what you did. Sending soldiers into hostile territory with lousy intel, well, you don’t have to pull the trigger to be the one lining up the crosshairs.”

“You won’t listen,” she said. “And I understand, but you have to understand, too. I was in New York in 1920. Something . . . happened. It knocked me loose, but there was a price. A cost. I was free and I was myself again, but I’m dancing on the edge of a blade. The tiniest nudge, the slightest breeze, and I’ll be lost again.”

“Boo hoo.”

“You don’t have to be cruel,” she said. He kept his response to himself, so she continued with a question. “Do you know what a glamour is, Mister Hart?”

“Women’s magazine?”

“It’s magic. Very powerful magic. My friend, Rossi, he wore a glamour. It let him live someplace he shouldn’t have been able to live. Let him walk around like everyone else. He took care of me for a century, but I still don’t know what was under his glamour.”

“And he died in New York?”

“Yes. He left me some things. One of them was this.” She held out her right hand. He saw a gold ring with a small, dull emerald set in its face on her middle finger.

“His class ring?”

“It was his glamour. A very powerful glamour, as it turns out. He left it for me. I think he knew I’d need it.”

“Listen: I’m glad you got a nice piece of jewelry out of the deal but none of this is screaming
it’s not my fault your friends are dead.
Is there a point? Are you going somewhere with this or are you just changing the subject again?”

“Both, actually.”

She turned the ring once around her finger. Then she pulled it off in a single quick motion.

The old woman was a corpse. There was no other way to put it: she was a corpse. Her skin was gray and dark, pulled taut over her bones. Her eyes had sunk deep into the recesses of her skull. Her teeth had long since gone yellow. Many were cracked or outright missing. And her hair, somehow that was the worst of all: her full, lively braid of twisted gray had been replaced by a desiccated mockery. It had the texture of a wire brush, sticking out in all directions, but was at the same time wispy and insubstantial.

“He kept me young at first,” Ellie MacReady said, her voice like sandpaper against rough stone. “But that spell broke. Rossi knew it would; he was ready for me. His glamour lets me act. And now that I know the Peace is real, next time I can come back and kill him. And maybe then I can finally die.”

“Ready, Doctor Beauregard?”

Bo took a deep breath as Ellie, unseen, watched. “I hate this, you know?”

“You don’t have to,” the technician said. “Just use a screen.”

“She’ll ignore me. Especially today.”