Child of Fire (37 page)

I summoned my ghost knife. It flew into my hand. Of course I had killed them. Damn.

The door behind me opened. I spun, catching a quick glimpse of the two men entering through the doorway we had just used. Both held their Uzis at the ready. I threw the ghost knife again and ducked into the flames, throwing myself flat on the floor.

The bullets zipped above me. Then I heard a bang, as if one of the Uzis had jammed and backfired, and the two men cried out. All gunfire in the room stopped. Just then, the green fire evaporated. I looked around the room. The two guards who had entered behind us were smoking skeletons. One of the submachine guns in their hands had burst open.

“You did good,” Annalise said, her back to me. The room seemed strangely quiet after all the gunfire, but
there was a terrible stench of burned plastic and roasted flesh in the air.

“It doesn’t feel like good,” I said. I glanced over to where she had been fighting. The other four guards were also smoking bones. So was Able Katz.

I should have been sick, but I had already passed that point. Maybe if there had been one body, or two, I could have puked my guts out and cried like a little girl, but these were too much. It didn’t seem real.

“At least for them, it was quick.” Annalise turned toward me. Her right eye was gone. She had only an empty socket there. Just below that empty socket, in her cheekbone, was a second bullet hole.

“Holy … !” I shouted. I backed away from her. She had two bullets in her head, with no exit wounds, but she was walking around as if nothing had happened. What the hell was she? Was she even alive?

“I know,” she said. “It sucks when this happens.” She reached up and gingerly touched her face with her stiff, inflamed hand. One of her fingers slipped into her ruined eye socket.

That did it. I heaved a thin, acid stream onto the carpet.

“Oh, knock it off,” she snapped. “You’re not the one who got shot. Let’s go.”

She charged through the doorway, kicking the smoking bones out of her way.

Holy God, what was I doing here? What was she?

I was about to follow her, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t step over the bones of the men we’d just killed.

“What are you waiting for?” she snapped at me.

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t help picturing the guards’ wives and children, their mothers and fathers.

The smashed-up computer lay in a heap beside one of the bodies. I strode over to it and lifted the webcam. The little red light was still on, but I didn’t know if it was still sending images.

“This is your fault,” I said to the camera. “You put these people here. You asked them to die for you. You—”

Something smashed the camera out of my hand. It was a scorched human skull.

“For God’s sake!” Annalise hissed. “This is why you’ll never be more than a wooden man, Ray. You’re too fucking soft. Don’t talk to the targets. Don’t taunt them. Don’t be their fucking friends. It just makes things harder. Be a fucking professional. Treat them like objects.” She held up the skull and waved it in front of my face. “They’re glass figurines, Ray, and nothing more—some are very pretty, some not so much. But it’s your job to break some of those figurines, and you can never tell right away which ones that’ll be.”

I stepped away from the skull. “Don’t—”

She stepped toward me, and for a moment I thought she was going to rub the blackened bone against my face. “Does this bother you? Get over it. This is what we do. We make corpses. And maybe, if we make enough of them …”

She broke off. Her hand was shaking. She let the skull fall to the floor and cradled her hand against her chest. Her pain must have been intense. She scowled at the floor. I saw anger in her expression, and resentment, too. And regret.

The overhead sprinkler system turned on. I looked up to see water dousing the flames Able had blasted onto the ceiling. Annalise and I stood in the downpour while brilliant sunlight shone through the broken window.

“Boss—”

“Could you kill a priest, Ray? Could you kill a priest who only wanted to help terminally ill children? Could you kill a mother who was trying to protect her kids? Could you kill a five-year-old girl whose only crime is that some idiot adult cast a spell on her? I could. I’ve done all those things.”

“Annalise—”

“You’re good at this, Ray. You’re good at this job. And the society needs good people, more than ever. But you’re useless if you stop right before the finish line to moralize. We have a planet full of people to save. Get it? If someone gets between you and your target, there’s a planet full of people who will die if you can’t bring yourself to do your job.”

She clamped her mouth shut and turned away. I had the impression that she had a lot more to say, but she had to hold it back. She sealed it all off with anger.

Suddenly Annalise seemed very human to me, despite the grotesque injuries to her face. And she was right. If we stopped now, more little kids were going to die. Charles Hammer needed killing.

She marched into the hall. “Come on. We have to search the house.” I bent and touched one of the unfired Uzis. It was, as expected, cool to the touch. I lifted it and draped the strap over my neck. It was a weapon, but it didn’t make me feel any more confident about the coming fight.

I followed her into the hallway. There were three doors along the far side. I charged into the first one. It was an empty bathroom. Annalise opened the next. It was a laundry room and pantry. Farther down the hall was the kitchen, complete with gas range and walk-in fridge. Beyond that was a set of stairs leading to the second floor.

The upstairs was just a single room, broken up by a couple of support columns. There was a small cluster of exercise equipment, some bookshelves, some closets, a terrace with a monstrous charcoal grill, and an open futon against the far wall.

“This way,” Annalise said. She kicked open a door. It led to a ten-foot-long covered causeway that connected to the entrance of the tower. We strode across it, looking down at the jagged black rocks twenty feet below.

The tower was made of gray stone blocks. It was dark inside, with only a single electric light burning above.

Annalise sprinted up the wooden stairs. I followed as closely as I could with my injured leg. She seemed to have forgotten that I was supposed to be her decoy.

We ran up the spiraling stairs, never pausing at the landings or glancing out the windows. Annalise tugged a ribbon free, but I couldn’t see what it was. My shoe was filling with blood, and I started to fall behind.

Annalise finally reached the ladder at the top of the stairs. She climbed up, threw her shoulder into the trapdoor above us, and broke through it.

She flinched, turning her face down toward me. There was the boom of a shotgun. Annalise’s head snapped back, and I knew she had taken the blast in the side of her face. The ribbon fell from her fingers, and she sagged toward me for a moment. I heard the gunman rack a new shell into the shotgun.

Instead of falling off the ladder and through the center of the tower, Annalise stood up straight again. She was still fighting.

“No!” someone shouted in disbelief. “No!”

Annalise was halfway through the trap. She covered her face as another blast struck. This time, she had braced herself and didn’t even flinch.

Whoever was up there racked the shotgun once more. Annalise climbed out of the trapdoor. I was right behind her.

Charles Hammer backed toward the other end of the room. Annalise ran at him. He aimed the shotgun low, blasting at her feet. Her legs went out from under her, and she fell onto her hands. I heard her hiss in pain.

I gained the tower room. I saw books all around me, and another silver hoop in the middle of the room. This one was bent and twisted into a variety of strange sigils.

On the other side of that hoop stood Charles Hammer.
He looked like a sick man. His skin was sallow, his hair was greasy, and he had bags under his eyes. The room smelled like old socks and gunpowder.

Annalise stood. I slipped my ghost knife between my teeth and lifted the Uzi. No sense in being fancy about it.

Hammer’s eyes rolled back into his head. His mouth dropped open and he took a deep breath. My iron gate twinged painfully. It felt as though someone had reached under my skin and made a fist.

I squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. It felt stuck. I squeezed it as hard as I could, but the weapon still wouldn’t fire. I realized that the safety had to be on, but I had no idea where the safety was.

Charles blasted a column of fire from his mouth. Annalise threw herself at me, knocking me back through the trapdoor. I fell off the ladder just as the flames engulfed Annalise from head to toe.

I heard her scream. I was screaming, too. I tumbled down the stairs, wrenching my arm against the railing as I yanked myself to a stop. My legs dangled over the edge, with the long, long drop through the tower below them.

I pulled myself onto the steps, untangling the gun as I did. The fire still blasted over the top of the stairs. There was no way to enter the room above without charging straight through the flames. I held up the gun, found what looked like the safety, and flipped it. My iron gate throbbed.

Then the jet of flames stopped. I heard a sick, choking noise. What the hell, I thought. I charged up the stairs, screaming.

Everything in the room was charred and blackened. The acrid stink of smoke burned my nose and eyes. I couldn’t see Annalise anywhere. Hammer stumbled back against the tower window, clutching at his throat.

The inside of his mouth was as black as the room
around me. The fire had cooked him as it came out. But as I watched, his lips turned pink, and his mouth and throat healed as quickly as Arlene’s ravaged throat had.

I shot him.

I tried to fire a short burst up the center of his body, from crotch to forehead, but the Uzi kicked like crazy, and the trail of bullets tore through his shoulder instead. Charles Hammer the Third stumbled back and fell out the tower window.

I ran across the room, feeling the burned wood wobble dangerously under my feet. I reached the window before he struck the rocks below. I saw him hit. Hard. He was still.

I noticed a piece of silver wire set into the windowsill. It ran from the hoop on the floor out the window and then down the side of the tower. I wondered what was at the other end. I also wondered when my iron gate was going to stop throbbing.

Then I saw Hammer lift his arm. Damn. The gun and the rocks hadn’t finished him. He wasn’t dead.

I turned back to the trapdoor, wondering if Annalise had managed to leap out a window, too, when I saw her. I had run right past her without recognizing her.

She was burned. Her skin and clothes were blackened and shriveled. She was not burned down to her bones, she was too tough for that, but her mouth gaped wide and her little hands were curled into fists. She held them as though she was about to knock my head off. She was absolutely still. She was gone.

I knelt beside her and touched her face. Her skin crumpled like burned paper, and hot grease scorched my fingertips.

Damn damn damn. I wanted her back.

I ran down the tower stairs. I didn’t know how much time I had before he healed himself, but I knew it wasn’t much. My mind was racing, wondering why Annalise had deliberately sacrificed her life for mine, wondering whether the ghost knife or the silver blade I’d taken from behind the door would do the job the Uzi couldn’t, whether my iron gate would ever stop hurting, and whether the pain from my iron gate meant that more kids were burning to death even as I ran after their killer.

I reached the bottom of the stairs.

Through the thick Plexi enclosure around the causeway, I saw Charles Hammer struggling across the huge black rocks. Then I noticed the tumble of broken gray stones among the volcanic black. That was where the rest of the castle had collapsed.

There was a twenty-foot drop below the causeway, and I knew I couldn’t jump down onto the jagged black rocks. I slid the ghost knife through the Plexi, cutting out a section that was eight feet by five feet. It fell across the rocks.

I lowered myself out the hole and dropped onto the plastic. It bowed under my weight but didn’t snap. I scrambled across it and out onto the rocks.

Hammer was a good thirty yards ahead of me. He seemed to be heading southeast, although I couldn’t imagine where he was running. The town was to the northeast; if he wanted help or protection from the people of Hammer Bay, he was headed the wrong way. As far as I could tell, the only thing to the southeast was forest and mountain.

I kept after him, my ghost knife between my teeth, silver knife in my pocket, and the Uzi banging against my knee as I leaped from rock to rock. I considered dumping the gun. It had already proven less than useful, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I needed all the weapons I could get.

Annalise had told me not to go after Hammer by myself. She had said he was too much for me. She was probably right. But I had just touched her burned face. I couldn’t let that go. I couldn’t run away.

I focused on the rocks, trying to increase my speed to shut off my thoughts. Now wasn’t the time to think about my boss. Now was the time to figure out what Charles Hammer had become, where his silver wire led, and how hard I was going to kill him.

I looked up from the rocks I’d been navigating. Hammer had vanished. Cursing furiously, I tried to rush toward the spot where I’d seen him last. I hoped he had entered a cave or fallen down a well. If he had turned invisible or something, I really was out of my league, and I was headed in the wrong direction.

But I kept going forward, hopping from rock to rock, occasionally looking up to see if he had reappeared from behind some low hill of stones.

I jumped over a rock and stumbled across a flat pile of stones. It was a collapsed wall, and I could see a piece of gray, pitted wooden furniture jutting out from behind the rocks. Beside it was a small pile of broken crockery. I was standing on the collapsed castle.

I hopped the last few rocks to the spot where Hammer had vanished. Nothing. I couldn’t see a thing there, except for a strip of faded red cloth and a smashed grandfather clock that had spent decades exposed to the weather. I looked all around. If he had turned invisible, he could come right up behind me and burn me to a cinder before I even knew he was there.