Poison Sleep (21 page)

“Look, about this afternoon,” Rondeau began, and Marla waved her hand.

“Explain later. I need to know what’s happened while I’m gone. And if you tell me ‘nothing’ I’ll kiss you on the cheek.”

“Ah,” Rondeau said. “Well, no, it’s not nothing. It’s a lot of things. Phone’s been ringing off the hook. It’s getting wild out there, Marla. A couple of
castles
appeared in the middle of traffic downtown. People are passing out right on the street, and when they wake up, they’re talking about crazy shit, places full of fire, places full of monsters, places full of nicer things, too, but mostly what I’ve been hearing about is the bad things. There are creatures running around down by the docks, things with too many legs and not enough eyes, and the Bay Witch says there are things
under
the water, too, and that there’s some kind of ruined palace down there, deserted as far as she can tell, but with a big black stone door that doesn’t open, and she hears a kind of thumping behind it. Ernesto called to say there’s a black tower in his junkyard—”

“Interesting,” Marla murmured, and waved her hand for Rondeau to continue.

“Viscarro called from the Bank of the Catacombs to say two extra vaults have appeared, and the doors won’t even open for
him,
and he’s pissed. The little border gods say something’s straining against the edges of the city from the
inside,
and they wonder if they should try to expel it, or what—I told them to just hang tough until I heard from you. That moron Granger says sinkholes are appearing in the park, and do we have a magic shovel he can borrow to fill them in faster? The Chamberlain even called down from the Heights to say the ghosts of the founding fathers are sensing a disturbance in the ether, and she’s worried about property values. The—”

“Wait,” Marla said. “Tell me who
hasn’t
called.”

“Gregor,” he said promptly, then winced.

“Huh. And one of those towers appeared
right next to
his building. You’d think he would’ve been the first guy on the phone. Kinda…suspicious.”

“Ah. I might have an explanation for that,” Rondeau said.

Marla raised an eyebrow. “Do tell.”

“The reason I missed the meeting is Nicolette kidnapped me.”

Marla sat up straighter. “What? Why, to get to me?”

“Oh, no. When Gregor found out she’d taken me, he threw a hissy fit and sent me on my way, and probably gave her hell. He seemed pretty terrified that you’d be pissed.”

“He may have good reason. So why
did
she take you?”

Rondeau looked down. “I mentioned that bad run of luck I had gambling….”

“Shit, Rondeau, how much do you owe her?”

“See, the bitch of it is the compound interest…. She wants my club. This club. That’d just about cover it. I think she must want the special conference room.”

Marla put her head in her hands. “I don’t know why I ever stop slapping you, even for a minute.”

Rondeau cleared his throat. “Yeah, so she was pressuring me, and I invoked your name, you know, to encourage her to give me a little more time, but I guess she got impatient, so…but Gregor told her to ease off, not to bother me, because bothering me bothers
you
.”

Marla frowned. “It’s not like him to be that considerate, but fuck it. We’ve all got bigger things on our minds.
If
we get through the next few days in one piece, we’ll figure out a way for you to square things without losing the club. Maybe you can do some work for Nicolette. Ted, you fill Rondeau in on what happened to us today, okay? You took notes, right? I’ve got to make some calls.”

“Want me to make them?” Ted said. He sounded exhausted, and it was a wonder he hadn’t pissed himself during their long fall—or maybe he had, and the wind had dried it. Marla shook her head. “No. These calls, I have to make on my own.”

She headed upstairs as Ted began to tell Rondeau about their adventures in dreamland. He’d probably get St. John Austen’s speech word-for-word. Ted wasn’t magical, but he was pulling his weight anyway. She called Hamil from her office. “We need a gathering,” she said. “
Everybody.”
Hamil said he’d see to it—he didn’t need to ask why.

She sat at her desk, wondering if she should call Joshua. She wanted him for the comfort he gave, and she wanted to make sure he was okay, but she was afraid that calling him would be a show of weakness she couldn’t afford. She would need him for the meeting, but Hamil knew that, and would make the arrangements. She’d just wait.

Hamil called back twenty minutes later. “Gregor says he can’t come, something about a delicate spell that needs his physical presence in the building.”

“Fuck that,” Marla said. “Tell him we’ll meet at his place, then.”

Hamil didn’t speak for a moment. “And if he refuses?”

Marla picked up a silver letter opener from her desk. It gleamed in the lamplight. Anything could be dangerous in the right hands. “Tell him I’m not asking. It’s a matter of Felport’s security, so he doesn’t
get
to say no.” She hung up, sighed, and called Langford.

“Your city is undergoing some unpleasant transformations,” he said.

“I noticed. Any luck finding Genevieve?”

“She’s in the city. Intermittently, though, and not for long. I’m narrowing the parameters. I have my search protocol slaved to a minor oracle, and so far it’s been hit-or-miss at predicting her next location, only accurate five percent more often than chance. Wait, six percent now. It’s getting more accurate on an exponential curve, though, so by…hmm…tomorrow in the early afternoon I should be able to predict her next appearance with better than ninety percent accuracy.”

Marla whistled. That was better than she’d hoped for. “Langford, you’re a genius.”

“Sometimes, when the wind is right,” he said. “Get a strike team ready to mobilize. I may not be able to give you a lot of advance notice about her materialization.” He paused. “And, of course, all bets are off if an army of monsters from a nightmare destroys my lab.”

“Get all your defenses online,” she said.

He cleared his throat. “That’s
expensive
.”

“I’ll pay the bill.”

“Yes, ma’am. Do you still want me to come to your meeting?”

“No, I guess not. I figured I’d need you as a science advisor to assure them that everything we
could
do was being done, but you gave me an actual timetable, so I’ll be able to shut them up.”

“Knock ’em dead,” he said.

“How about our buddy Zealand? Have you tracked him down?”

“Not yet. He is very effectively hidden. He hasn’t left the city, but beyond that, who knows. There are a few places in the city that are impervious to scrying, and he must have found one of them.”

She sighed. “Which means he was hired by a sorcerer, who’s now hiding him. Well, I’m not surprised, but it sucks. You’ll keep trying? He has to go out
sometime.
”

“Yes, of course. I’ll let you know if he turns up.”

“Good enough,” she said, and hung up.

Hamil rang in soon after, to tell her the meeting was set for nine o’clock at Gregor’s, and he would meet her there. She thanked him, stood up, paced around the office, looked out the window at the snow, tried not to think about the crazy shit that might be happening out there, and even tried meditating, but she just couldn’t get her head straight.

Screw it. She’d call Joshua, too, even though Hamil had already confirmed he would be at the meeting. After the day she’d had, she deserved a little lovetalk.

But his phone just rang and rang, and he never picked up, and she couldn’t think of anything to say to his voicemail that wouldn’t sound desperate and weak.

Zealand spent an hour at a construction site, seeing what his mold could do. It wasn’t all that disgusting, really. He felt a bit like Spider-Man, but when he gave in to the temptation to sling a rope of vinelike mold at a steel girder and swing, he nearly crashed into a pile of rebar. He had more luck using the mold to tangle things up and pull them down. He startled a nest of rats, and the mold went after them without his conscious thought, spraying out from his hand and immobilizing them, and a few moments later, when the mold turned brown and blew away, there was nothing left beneath them but tiny white bones. Creepy, but creepy was Zealand’s stock and trade. At some point, the mold had migrated to his other hand as well, which was faintly disturbing, but meant he could send waves of crawling fungus in more than one direction at once. He slammed his cocooned fists into a heap of cinderblocks and punched them into powder, without feeling the impact on his hands, the force of the blow absorbed by his furry green gloves. The mold kept him warm, too. It was a surreal sort of superpower, but he welcomed any advantage when it came to fighting Marla.

“Not sure how it helps against knives, guns, and Tasers,” he said, musing, and the mold surprised him by crawling up his arms, under his clothes, across his chest, around his back, down his legs—covering him in a rippling green second skin that made his clothes flutter. “Huh,” he said. “Can you…hear me?” The mold didn’t respond, but how could it have? He thumped his own chest a couple of times without feeling any pain, but couldn’t think of a way to test the mold suit’s protective powers without endangering his life. “Guess I’ll just have to trust you,” he said. He checked his watch—the mold obligingly scurried aside—and saw it was going on eight o’clock. Marla surely had sorcerers magically searching for him, but that kind of work took time, so if he moved quickly, he should be able to proceed before being detected. He wondered if Nicolette and Gregor had missed him yet. He hoped not. He wanted to slip back into the building unnoticed and have a go at Reave, after he was done with Marla. It would be a long night, but something—adrenaline, or perhaps some quality of the mold—made him feel energized.

The mold shot out of his sleeves and snatched something out of the air. Zealand drew in the tentacle of green and frowned. The mold had caught a shuriken, a throwing star, blacked so it wouldn’t reflect light. He sighed. “Hello, brothers.”

“Zealand,” said Kardec, from somewhere near a heap of cinderblocks. “How nice of you to come out and play.”

“I’m impressed. How did you find me?”

“We have eyes everywhere. The sorcerers can peer into their scrying mirrors or crystal balls or bowls of mercury all they like, but we simply keep our eyes on the streets.”

“Mmm,” Zealand said. “Antiquated. Inefficient. Sounds like the slow assassins. Push off, gentlemen, and let me do my business, and you will be allowed to live.”

Kardec chuckled. “It was a nice trick, snatching the shuriken from the air by magic. I would have simply used my hands. You’ve been consorting with sorcerers too long. You’ve forgotten the fundamentals.”

Zealand lifted his hands and threw out a rope of fungus, smashing through the cinderblocks, powdering a few of them to dust. Kardec grunted, and Zealand raced in his direction, leaping over the blocks, but the slow assassin was gone. “You’re a bureaucrat,” Zealand said, looking around the dark construction site. “You haven’t been in top fighting form for years. I trust you brought a few others to help you?”

Someone gurgled behind him, and Zealand turned to find a black-clad man scrabbling at his own throat, trying to pry off the mold that choked him. Zealand smiled. The mold had sprung from the back of his neck. He did have eyes in the back of his head. The assassin fell, either dead or unconscious, and the mold drew back to Zealand’s body.

A great whizzing filled the air, and tentacles of fungus shot out from his hands, his throat, the cuffs of his trousers, through the buttons of his shirt, in all directions, snatching crossbow bolts, arrows, poison darts, and even a couple of bullets from the air. “The same back at you,” Zealand said, though he wasn’t sure it would work. He should have had more faith in the fungus, he realized, because the tentacles reared back and whipped their lethal projectiles through the air, back toward their original owners, and he heard a few gasps and cries that suggested at least some of the weapons hit their targets. “Really, brothers, you’re wasting my time,” Zealand said. “I’ll tell you what. I know the death of your operative was distressing. I certainly didn’t wish for that to happen. I’ll make a generous donation to your organization, what do you say?”

“Money is not our object,” Kardec said, perhaps from the direction of a backhoe, perhaps from behind those steel barrels. “You betrayed us. You must be punished. We must make an example of you.”

“I’m sure it’s hard, after all those centuries of being the most feared and dangerous killers in the world, to have me come along and outclass you,” Zealand mused. “Why don’t you
stalk
—me for twenty years, hmm? Let everyone know you’re pursuing me, and that my comeuppance will come—oh, yes, in a time of your choosing. You can save face that way. Truly, Kardec, you
annoy
me. How many of your men must I kill tonight to make you leave? I know each is a tremendous investment of time and effort. Why waste them just to waste
me
?”

“I will slit your throat, Zealand,” Kardec said levelly.

“Poor Kardec,” Zealand said, almost sad for him. “You want to be my nemesis, don’t you? My archenemy. But you’re so unimportant to me, I can scarcely believe I’m bothering to talk to you now. You think your pursuit of me is the story of my life, but you’re barely a subplot.” While the words were true, Zealand also hoped they would be upsetting enough to make Kardec attack him directly, so Zealand could kill him. The slow assassins were a conservative organization, and if Zealand killed one of their top operatives, they might hesitate to send another force against him. But Kardec didn’t answer, and Zealand sensed that he was now alone. They would wait for another opportunity. Well, good for them. Zealand hadn’t worried
too
much about his former brothers before, and now that he had the mold protecting him, they were barely an irritant. Still, Kardec and his killers had wasted Zealand’s valuable time, and he needed to get a move on, before Marla’s seers and diviners discovered him.

He walked the few blocks to Rondeau’s club, the mold shifting eagerly across his body. The building was nondescript, marked only with a sign that read “Juliana’s” over the door. It wouldn’t open until nine at the earliest, so—assuming Marla was here, as she usually was in the evenings—he had time to slip in and dispose of her without drawing a crowd. And if she wasn’t here, he’d beat her location out of Rondeau or one of her other associates. Charging in through the front door didn’t appeal, so he crept around the alleyway, looking for a side door with a lock he could pick. Unfortunately, the only door he found had no handle or lock on the outside, just a buzzer, which didn’t help him. He started to turn away when his hands began to tingle, and fine threads of mold spun down from his fingertips and began waving toward the door. He pressed his hand against the door, and the mold slithered through the cracks around the jamb; a moment later it clicked and opened far enough for him to hook his fingers on the edge and swing it wide. There was only darkness beyond the door, and the murmur of voices, and he slipped in quickly, letting the door shut behind him. A wire dangled loose above the emergency door, and he realized that it was alarmed. The mold had thought—could it
think
?—to pull loose the wires and prevent the alarm from sounding. Extraordinary. It was like having an accomplice he could carry with him.