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can figure out Stoker’s next target, so can they; the one advantage I have is that Easter Island is a legal territory of Chile, and Chile isn’t a signatory to the Transnational Supernatural Crimes and Activities Act. So even if they figure out where I’ve gone, they’ll still have to deal with a certain amount of red tape before they can come after me—unless Cassius decides stopping Stoker is worth causing an international incident, which could very well be the case.

I pull out my flask and slug back some Urthbone, then try to get some sleep—who knows when I’ll have another chance. This turns out to be a bad combination, as the emotional spectrum of every thrope on the plane seems eager to seep into my psyche as I drift off. I have disjointed, savage dreams, where every person I’ve ever known transforms into a werewolf and then chases me down an endless hallway lined with coffin-shaped mirrors. The one that catches me is Roger, and he keeps saying, “I told you so. I told you so,” over and over as he claws me apart. . . .

No one’s waiting to arrest me when I get off the plane in Santiago. I don’t even leave the airport, booking a charter flight straight to Easter Island. I run into some difficulty there, as it turns out the place is in fact a protected human sanctuary, one of the last such places on the face of the Earth. Thropes and pires traveling there have to have a special visa, and the thrope at the counter won’t take my booking without one until I go to the bathroom and scrub off every trace of the wolf pheromone. She sniffs me carefully, even transforming into a half-were state to hone her acuity, but finally accepts that I am in fact not a thrope.

Easter Island—or Rapa Nui, its Polynesian name—is extremely isolated. In the past, the Polynesians have also called it Tepito o he Henua and Mata-ki-te-rangi; the first means Navel of the World, the second Eyes That Talk to the Sky. The latter is probably a reference to the giant stone figures, the moai, that guard the coastline.

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I don’t know much about the Easter Island of my world, but here it’s a place with a nasty history: slave raids, tribal wars, cannibalism. Virtually the entire population was massacred at one point, and disease from the mainland has decimated them more than once.

But not the sorcerous post-war plague inflicted by the Allies. That didn’t kill a single person there.

I don’t know why, but I suspect Stoker does. I also think this might be his last ritual murder; it completes the global loop he’s established, and the site obviously has some kind of major arcane significance. The other locations were all remote, a few were important in a historical or political way, but this place is different. It’s a specifically human outpost, full of human history, and I know that’s no coincidence.

The pilot of the floatplane I charter is human too, a grizzled old man named Diego with more white stubble on his cheeks and chin than hair on his head. He doesn’t want to know why I want to go to the island, he doesn’t want to know why I want to leave immediately, he doesn’t want to talk much at all. He communicates mainly in grunts, nods, and a few rapid-fire words in Spanish, and as soon as the plane’s in the air it’s like I cease to exist.

It’s over two thousand miles from the Chilean coast to Rapa Nui; the little chunk of volcanic rock I’m heading to is one of the remotest places on Earth. Only about five hundred people live there, but it’s still one of the largest human settlements left. It’s a five-hour flight from Chile, and by the time we get there I’ve been traveling for almost twenty-four hours; I’m relieved to finally see the triangular shape of the island appear beneath us, a dormant volcano at each of the three points.

The plane taxis to a stop at a wooden pier jutting out into the bay. Several small boats and one large motor launch are tied up there already, but no one comes out to greet us.
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With a population of only half a thousand people, I would have figured visitors would be a bigger deal—but from what I can see, nobody’s even noticed we’ve arrived.

Diego starts refueling immediately. I get the impression he’ll be leaving about thirty seconds after he’s finished.

I shoulder my pack and head off down the pier. Despite the long trip, I feel weirdly pumped up; there’s something about the atmosphere, some kind of building charge in the air that makes me want to break into a run or maybe climb a tree and beat my chest. Not that there seem to be any trees; one of the disasters that befell the place was an ecological collapse that followed its complete deforestation. Others included bloody civil wars, famine, and the rise of strange religious cults that promised salvation from the island’s problems. It was like a weird little microcosm of humanity itself, running through a condensed version of all the bad decisions the rest of the world made.

At the base of the pier is the island’s only village, Hanga Roa. The buildings are all one story, quarried stone with wooden roofs. The roads aren’t paved.

And it’s utterly, completely empty.

No dogs, no birds, not even insect noise. It’s like walking onto an elaborate movie set inside a sealed building, one that just happens to contain the Pacific Ocean. I walk down the main street and hear the roar of the seaplane starting up behind me—Diego isn’t sticking around, either.

One of the giant stone heads that Easter Island is famous for stands in the middle of town. I look up into his obsidian eyes and ask, “Okay, big guy—where am I supposed to go now?”

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There’s a rumble of distant thunder, even though the sky is clear. I realize that it’s neither thunder nor distant; the sound is coming from the stone head itself, and forming into words.

“The one you seek waits for you at Orongo.”

Right. Considering who my partner is, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by a talking statue. “Okay. I guess that’s where everyone else is, too?”

“No. They hide in the caves on the other side of the island. They do not wish to be destroyed by the powerful forces about to be unleashed.”

And now the stone head—which actually has a body, too, just a much smaller one—

does more than talk. It moves from its hands-on-knees crouching position to fully upright and takes a step toward me.

“Come. I will take you to Orongo.”

“After you.”

It takes a step past me, moving more like something made out of foam rubber than solid rock. The fist that catches me on the side of the head doesn’t feel like rock either, but it definitely isn’t foam rubber.

Out go the lights. Nap time.

I don’t know how long I’m out for, but I open my eyes to the flicker of firelight. My head, oddly enough, doesn’t hurt. I half-expect to find myself tied to a wooden post with a bunch of kindling at my feet, but only the upright part is accurate. I’m on my feet, hands
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at my sides, not bound but for some reason unable to move. It feels as if I’m wrapped in invisible cling wrap.

“I thought you’d rather be standing,” Aristotle Stoker says. He’s sitting cross-legged on the ground before me, dressed in khaki shorts and leather sandals, his chest bare. There’s a small fire blazing beside him, and my knapsack a few feet away from that. He’s got my gun in his hands and is inspecting it carefully.

“A chair would have been nice, actually.”

He shrugs his massive shoulders. “Sorry. Creature comforts are in short supply out here.”

I try to move, find I can turn my head and wiggle my fingers. That should be enough to escape and overpower him, sure. “I suppose I have Miss Selkie to thank for my involuntary tree impersonation?”

He cracks open the Ruger’s chamber and extracts a bullet carefully before closing it again. “Yeah. She’s sorry about clocking you, tried to make up for it with a healing spell. You feel all right?”

“Dandy.”

“I’m glad you came. Didn’t know if you’d figure it out, but I’m not that surprised you did.”

He holds the bullet between thumb and forefinger, studying it. The silver glints in the campfire’s glow. “Really glad you came alone.”

“And if I hadn’t?”

“We wouldn’t be having this conversation. You wouldn’t be saying much of anything to anyone, come right down to it.” He sounds more regretful than threatening.
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“Where’s Selkie?”

“Around. It’s a shame you didn’t wake up sooner, Jace; now that it’s dark you can’t really appreciate the view.” He drops the bullet to the ground, then tosses the Ruger onto my knapsack and stands up. “Let me describe it for you. We’re on the lip of the Rano Kau crater, at the southwestern tip of the island. One side slopes down into the bowl of an extinct volcano, the bottom mostly filled by a freshwater lake. The other ends in a sheer cliff three hundred feet above the ocean. You can’t really see them, but there are over fifty stone houses around here, left over from when this was the focal point of the birdman cult.”

“Are you going to kill me, Aristotle? Because if you aren’t, I’d appreciate it if you’d turn off the quadriplegic force field.”

“I’m not going to kill you, Jace. Still not quite sure what you have in mind for me, but I don’t want you dead. With our numbers the way they are, killing someone like you would literally be a crime against humanity.”

In some ways, that’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me. Strangely enough, it doesn’t improve my mood. “Stoker—”

“Bear with me. You should know that Selkie’s sealed off the entire island. No supernatural creature—not thrope, pire, or lem—can come within a mile of the coast. If you’ve got some kind of last-minute rescue planned, you can forget it; for now, this is a humans-only zone.”

“I came on my own.”

“Why?”

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“To get some answers. So far, you’ve given me more of the truth than the people I’m supposed to be working for.”

“Truth. Truth is a nasty drug, Jace. Might seem like what you want, until you’ve swallowed it. By then it’s too late—you can’t unlearn it. Ignorance is a lot less painful.”

“Spare me the philosophical bullshit. Six million people burned alive to pay off an extradimensional deity—I don’t think it can get much uglier than that.”

“No?” He sighs. “I wish that were true. But all those people were strangers who died a long time ago, Jace. They’re history, not reality. You want to join my cause, you’re going to have to get a lot closer than that.”

He steps behind me, grabs me by my upper arms, and lifts. My feet leave the ground. I wonder for a second if he’s about to throw me off the cliff, but he’s just turning me around. He sets me back down facing the other way, and now I can see the stone altar that was behind me. There’s a man tied to it in a spread-eagled position, obviously Stoker’s next victim.

It’s Roger.

THIRTEEN

It can’t be.

I gape. I should probably pretend I don’t know him, that he means nothing to me, but the shock of seeing him is just too unexpected. At least I keep myself from blurting out his name.

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“Like Maureen told you, we can do all sorts of things.” Stoker still has me held by the upper arms; his hands are very warm, probably from the fire. “The next sacrifice has to be human, Jace. What do you think of who we picked?”

“That’s—that’s not Roger.”

“No,” Stoker admits. “It’s not. The sacrifice has to be a native of this dimension, for one thing. And it takes a huge amount of energy to yank someone from a parallel universe; bringing them here just to kill them seems like a waste of resources to me. Of course, you may feel differently.”

“He’s from here. He’s this universe’s Roger.”

“Yeah. This is a very different world from yours, Jace, but synchronicity is one of those metaphysical principles that reach across universal boundaries. Not everyone in your reality has a twin here, but Roger does. He’s not an FBI agent, though—he was working as a car salesman in California. Also dealing high-grade Bane to thrope high schoolers, but that was strictly a sideline.”

I swallow a dozen obvious questions. Selkie is the answer to all of them, of course. They’ve used sorcery to spy on my world, my history, my life—and come up with a victim they think I might actually approve of.

“He has to die, Jace. Not him, specifically, but definitely a human being. That’s just how the spell works.”

“That’s what this has all been about? A spell?”

“Not just any spell. A High Power Level Craft spell, very similar to the one the Allies used to contact Shub-Niggurath. But the call I’m placing is to a very different entity.”

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I shake my head. “And how is that supposed to save the human race? You planning on taking us all to another planet? Turning back time? Or am I way off-base and you’re planning some completely different kind of impossible weirdness?”

He lets go of me and moves toward the foot of the altar, where he’s got a video camera on a tripod. I don’t see the satellite broadcaster, but it has to be around someplace.