The Stringer (4 page)

The silence was drab and disappointing, and, I realized, always would be from that moment forward.

I turned just in time to see Mr. Landry, his yellowed skin loose and slack, charging toward me, shouting his one and only Word. Landry appeared to be made of balsa wood and tissue paper, but he smacked into me like a cannonball, knocking me backward. I landed on my back and slid a few inches while Landry grabbed hold of my shoulders, climbing on top of me and pinning me down with terrible, unexpected strength. If I could be so easily overpowered by an elderly man who was also recently dead, I figured it might be time to invest in a gym membership.

My freeze
mu
wore off, and the black kid leaped to his feet, blood running from each ear, and rounded on Hiram just as he spat out a neat spell that sent the kid hurtling away as if an invisible missile had slammed into him.

The kid, though, being demon-powered, bounced off the wall with a crack of shattered bone and came right back at Hiram, knocking the round man to the floor. Which was the last thing I saw before Mr. Landry, drooling cold, jellied spittle onto my face as he shouted his secret name, raised one fist and brought it down at my head.

II.

4.

“HEY,
BURRO
,
HEY!”

Way above me there was a pocket of acidic boiling water, waiting to sear and singe me, to rake itself across my nerves. But down deep in the black water, it was cool and I was safe. Someone was trying to wake me, to drag me up. A sweet young voice, and I hated it. I hated anyone who wanted to pull me up through the acid and burn me.

I tried to sink deeper, to swim away, to grow heavy.

“Ah, fucking . . . Come on,
burro
, hey! Come on, not much time!”

Whoever it was began shaking me. It was strange; I was aware of being shaken, aware that someone was trying to rouse me, but I was able to ignore them and remain unconscious, in a sense. If I could just ignore them long enough, they would go away.

“They are coming!” she hissed, and my perfect cold black sea began to agitate and brighten. “Soon!”

Something in her voice sank down like fishhooks and grabbed on to me, pulling me inexorably upward.

“Ah, fuck,” I hissed, refusing to open my eyes. “Stop that.”

The feeling of her hands disappeared, and a second later she slapped me across the face, hard enough to make stars pop up behind my eyelids. I sat up, opening my eyes and fighting the urge to vomit.

“Ah,
finally
.”

I felt tight and hot, like my skin was too small for my skeleton. The pain in my head slowly sank back to merely near-fatal levels, letting me think.

I was in a basement—no, a crawl space. The floor was dirt, the walls were brick, and the joists of the floor above were not even an inch above my head; if I'd been a little taller, sitting up would have put me right back on my ass. The whole place had a damp smell, and it was freezing. The moment I realized how cold it was, I began to shiver.

There was a small opening on the far wall right at my eye level, little more than a slit for ventilation. It let in just enough sunlight to see by, making it clear that I wasn't alone. Aside from the Girl, there were at least a dozen other people with me, all prone—either unconscious or dead.

I rolled over and scrambled to the nearest one. The Girl hissed in protest as I pushed her aside. I ignored her, inspecting the bodies around me, looking for Hiram, for Fallon, for
Mags
. I didn't remember a thing after I'd taken my hit, and the battle in Hiram's hallway hadn't exactly been going
well
for my side.

But none of the bodies were familiar. Sweating, head pounding, I turned back to look at my new friend. She was young, her long black hair hanging in her face, her jeans and T-shirt torn and dirty. Her face had the sunken look of someone who hadn't eaten in a while. As I stared blearily at her, she held a finger to her lips.

“
Quieto
,” she whispered. “They will be back.”

I struggled to collect myself. My brain felt scrambled, and I had to swallow three times before I could remember how to make sounds. “Where?”

She shook her head. “I don't know. Can you move? You gotta move, man. They're coming.”

“Who?”

She grimaced. “You wake up in a fucking
basement
after taking a beating, and you got questions.”

She was right: The time for questions was later. Preferably years later, when I was sitting on a beach somewhere with Mags after we'd finally pulled some grift that paid.

Mags.
Forget
my
survival, I had to get out to make sure Pitr Mags didn't starve to death hiding in Hiram's closet, whimpering.

“How long?” I croaked.

“You? Couple of hours. Me—if maybe I can think you give a shit—three days.” She shoved me. “Come
on
,
burro
, they will come soon.”

I nodded. I didn't really need to know who
they
were. No matter what the answer was, I wanted to be somewhere else when it came. “Where's out?”

She gestured and started to crawl. I scurried after her, swallowing bile and trying to ignore the head-splitting flashes of pain. Her clothes were loose on her, like she'd shrunk. She led me to a trapdoor set in the floor above. I gave it a tentative push, but it refused to budge.

“Locks,” she whispered. “Lots of them.”

I nodded again. I wanted to say that today was her lucky day, because the Intro 101 class of
How to Be Idimustari
was bleeding to open locks. I started searching the dirt, scooping through it with my hands. My lifestyle meant that my knowledge of basements, crawl spaces, and other dark places was extensive. Contractors tended to drop their garbage in them as they worked. In a matter of seconds, I had a nasty piece of green glass, the remnants of a long-ago beer enjoyed by a long-dead bricklayer, and used it to slice a deep cut on my forearm.

The Girl recoiled. “Of
course
you're
crazy
!”

With some gas in the air, it would be easy to snap the locks, but I needed a light touch. Sending the trapdoor sailing into the air as though we'd lit a stick of dynamite under it might bring unwanted attention. I looked at the Girl.

“What's your name?” I whispered.

She hesitated. “Larissa.”

“Okay, Larissa,” I said, wasting gas—my
own
gas, which was pretty much the second hard lesson you learned when you bonded
urtuku:
Wasting your own gas was fucking suicide. “There isn't time to have a conversation. Whatever happens, stick right next to me. We're getting the fuck out of here.”

A series of expressions passed over her face, one after the other. Then she frowned. Then she nodded. “All right,
burro
.”

I nodded and spoke four Words. There was the slight
snick
of bolts being thrown.

“
What the man
?
”

“Come on,” I whispered, squatting under the trap and slowly putting my shoulder to it, then lifting it up. I paused and glanced at her. “Be
quiet
.”

“Fuck you,” she whispered. “Tell me to be quiet like I haven't been locked in a fucking
basement
for three days, drinking runoff?
Babaca
.”

I nodded, shouldering the trap all the way up and poking my head up. I had a distinct flash: The last few years of my life ever since I'd refused to bleed the girl in Hiram's apartment, ever since he'd angrily cast me out—
If you will not do as you are told, if you will not do as you must, then you are
wasting
my
time
!
—was a steep downward line on the graph.

The trap led up into an interior room, an empty drywall cube without furniture or windows. It was dark; the only light was leaking in under the only door, outlining it in gold. I palmed my shard of glass and pulled myself up, the scrape of my shoes on the scuffed wooden floor sounding incredibly loud. I rolled onto my belly and dangled my arms down into the black square of the trap until I felt the girl's hands slip into mine. She weighed nothing, so helping her up into the room was easy. She scrambled to her feet and crouched there, animal-like, her big eyes wide and white in the gloom.

I rolled onto my feet, fingered the shard of glass—my sole asset in more ways than one—and crept toward the door.

It wasn't locked. I cracked it open and was momentarily blinded by the bright golden light provided by several kerosene lamps, the sort you took on camping trips or kept in abandoned mines or . . . fucking hell
serial killer murder houses
.

They hung from nails on the walls, providing a flickering, greasy light that my eyes worked overtime to downgrade from painfully bright to barely bright enough. Well-lit, Larissa looked even worse. She was bone-skinny and covered in bruises, her torn clothes hanging off her, and she was younger than I'd thought, just a kid. I had a brief flash of canvas sneakers with pink marker doodles all over them, and I resisted the urge to reach out and put my hand on her shoulder.

The hall was narrow, with white beadboard walls and wide-plank floors under a well-worn, filthy red runner. Under the oil smell of the lamps it smelled like mothballs and peppermint. I remembered my ancient granna's house, where I'd been taken exactly three times as a small child when Mom and Dad were still trying to make it happen, when Dad's frequent disappearances and my frequent kidnappings at his drunken, palsied hands were in the future. Always too fucking dark, always stuffy, as if the windows had never been opened. The smell of that ancient house had risen from the grave to assault my nose once again.

There was a door on our left and stairs on our right. There was a door in front of us as well—based on the placement, it was the main entrance, but someone had taken the precaution of nailing six planks across it, along with a slab of plywood over the glass.

“There is no way we go upstairs,” Larissa whispered urgently. “There is
no way
. Can you open the door? Like you did with the trapdoor? With your
magia
?”

I shook my head. I was studying the Wards that had been laid on the front door in addition to the physical barriers. They were dense; I'd never seen work so complex. The Wards Hiram had shown me had been simple and straightforward; he'd never gotten around to teaching me anything sophisticated. It would take me hours to parse through each twist and turn in the patterns, and even then I wouldn't know how to begin untying the threads.

Larissa offered me an unimpressed grunt.

I turned my attention to the door on our left. No Wards there. It wasn't even locked, the knob turning easily in my hand. As I cracked it open, music and voices could be heard, distant and muffled. Before us was an unoccupied sitting room lit by a fire set in a massive stone fireplace on the opposite wall. The windows in the front had been boarded up—and Warded. A trio of large comfortable-looking leather chairs ringed a coffee table, where a decanter of whiskey, an old-fashioned water siphon, and several large crystal tumblers had been set.

We crept inside, closing the door softly behind us. The room felt hot, and the air was thick and hard to breathe, like I was underwater and breathing through a straw. My head ached, my vision pulsed with my heartbeat, and my stomach kept flipping and sending warning signals to my brain. My legs were shaky, too, and I wondered how much more I'd be able to bleed before falling over.

There were two doors off to our left as we entered, no Wards. The voices and music drifted in from some other room, muted and muffled; the fire crackled and popped. The song was scratchy and tinny, doleful horns and stately keys. I wanted nothing more than light and air, to see and to breathe, and the more I thought about it, the tighter and hotter the room became.

Larissa moved forward quickly, silent because she weighed nothing. She listened at each door while I stood there, encased in the hot jellied air. Then she turned and jerked her thumb at the leftmost one.

I followed as she stepped through, and we were in the kitchen. It was done up in all white, but the white had faded like an old photo. An enormous stove, black and charred, dominated one wall, and everything else was cabinets and marble counters. There was no refrigerator, no microwave—no appliances at all, in fact. There were, I noticed, no outlets anywhere. The room was lit by more kerosene lanterns, the queasy smell of the fuel making my head spin and making the faint music swirl into a circus dirge.

Then I spied it: A window over the sink. It was boarded up like the others but had no Wards. Outside, it was too dark to see anything; I pointed at it, and Larissa nodded, crossing the room and climbing up on the countertop, her skinny frame lithe and agile. She began tugging ineffectually at the planks until I tapped her foot and motioned her down.

Working in silence, I cut precisely into my arm, working the same scar. The gas in the air was immediate, and a risk—I spoke quickly, spitting out the Words and making the nails pop out one by one. The first plank fell, and I caught it and set it gently on the counter.

The music stopped. The voices stopped.

I heard Larissa catch her breath, but my spell kept working and the nails kept popping. I caught the second plank and set it aside just as softly. Then the voices came back, grew louder, and we heard a door squealing open in the next room.

I turned, letting the last plank crash to the floor while I squeezed a fresh bleed from my newest wound and spoke three more Words, throwing the sloppiest barrier ever created onto the kitchen door. I looked at Larissa, who stood shivering, her bare feet filthy.

“Go!” I shouted. “Now! That won't hold for long!”

She sprang into motion, scrambling back onto the counter and throwing the window open just as someone tried the door and then put a shoulder to it, beating against it savagely, howling. Even in the weak light, I could see the hinges jumping with each impact.

I turned and found Larissa halfway out the window, crouched under its sash, staring back at me.

“Mister—”

I barked one Word:
sutaka
. With a yelp, she tumbled out the window, the sash crashing down behind her, as the door behind me smashed open with an explosion of snapping wood and tearing metal. Woozy, as the spell drained me, I turned just in time for good old Mr. Landry to hit me in the head hard enough to spin me around and drop me to the floor, my own blood spraying in a mist.

He leaped on me and slapped one cold, slack hand over my mouth before I could cast again, then lifted me bodily off the floor. He carried me back out through the ruined door into the sitting room, and spun smartly, carrying me through the second door into a small office or den, dark and dense with bookshelves, lit by yet more kerosene lamps. A small desk and two chairs had been crammed into the space. In one sat a tidy older woman, handsome and slim, wearing trousers and a comfortable-looking sweater, her gray hair done in a neat bun. A pair of pink reading glasses perched on the end of her nose as she worked a pile of knitting in her lap, pink and yellow yarn, needles flashing.