William made a mental inventory of some twenty-odd items he’d pulled out of the Mirror’s bag of tricks and hid in his clothes this morning. Not much he could part with. “A knife,” he said.
“Fine. I’ll bet my knife against your knife that I can walk through there unharmed.”
William glanced at the eighty-yard clearing separating them from the house. It would be suicide. “No.”
Kaldar rolled his eyes. “It’s not the same without a bet.”
Cerise would skin him alive if he got her cousin blown up. It would be very entertaining. Therapeutic even. But it would make her cry. “No.”
“William, I need a bet; otherwise, it won’t work. You have nothing to lose. Just bet me the damn knife.”
William took out his backup knife and thrust it into the ground at his feet. “Knock yourself out.”
Kaldar dropped his own blade to the ground and picked up the knife. His fingers ran along the blade, caressing the metal. He closed his eyes and walked into the field.
His foot hovered over a spot; he turned, his eyes still closed, and veered left, then right. The toe of his right boot almost touched a patch of suspicious ground, then Kaldar swayed and spun away. He kept moving forward, lurching like he was drunk, jumped with liquid grace, froze, poised on the ball of his left foot, and conquered the last ten feet at a straight run.
He spun around, hands raised, self-indulgent smile stretching his lips. “Ah?”
A shadow flickered behind him. William leapt to his feet and fired twice. The first shot caught the agent’s eye, punching him off his feet. The second bolt went wide as a smooth, spotted tangle of a body clutched Kaldar about his shoulders and pulled him up to the second-floor window.
Embelys, William’s memory told him. The serpent. No time to waste.
William tossed a handful of the Mirror’s bombs into the clearing. The tiny spheres detonated with an ear-shattering boom. Geysers of dirt and plant roots blossomed, hurling debris into the air. Guided by his instinct, William dashed forward as the dirt rained on his shoulders, pulling his favorite knife as he ran.
He sensed the enemy ahead and thrust through the dirt with his knife. The agent whipped around, her hair a whirlwind of tiny braids above her muscled shoulders. A tide of red from the severed femoral vein drenched her leg. She gasped and went down. He didn’t wait for her death.
Shapes broke free of the brush behind the clearing savaged by his bombs. He caught a glimpse of Cerise out of the corner of his eye but kept moving.
The house loomed before him. William jumped, caught the edge of the balcony, and pulled himself up, to where Kaldar’s body had broken the wooden rail. A shattered window lay on the balcony’s floorboards in a spray of glittering glass. He leaped over the razor-sharp dew, dived into the room, rolling as he hit the floor, and came to his feet, the blade poised for a strike.
The faint sounds of a choked struggle tagged his hearing. They came from the room to his left. His kick broke the wall. He lunged inside. An agent spun at him from the right. William ducked the kick, thrust into the man’s armpit, cut the throat of the second attacker and paused as the bodies fell.
A gasp came from the right. “William!”
Embelys’s massive bulk fastened Kaldar to the wall. Her coil thrust through the paneling and twisted about his waist and shoulders, pinning his right arm to his side. His left arm lay on top of Embelys’s chest, where her body bent before catching a thick iron rod affixed to the ceiling. The pattern on her coils was pallid and dull. Her head hung limply to the side. A long streak of blood stretched to the floor from her neck, where William’s knife protruded from her flesh.
“Thanks for the knife.” Kaldar’s face went red with effort. “Help me get the whore off of me.”
A tremor echoed through the house. It reverberated through William’s skull, shaking his teeth as if they were loose in his jaw.
“I could use some help,” Kaldar’s voice rasped.
Another tremor pulsed, like the toll of a colossal bell, and William staggered from the pressure.
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
Inside William, the wild raised its ears. Someone was calling him. He turned toward the door. The call resonated through his skull, directly in his mind, bypassing his ears. If this was magic, he’d never met it before.
“Be still and don’t make noise.”
“Don’t go! Help me, damn it!” Kaldar punched Embelys’s corpse with his free fist. “Sonovabitch!”
A cry full of pain and longing echoed through William’s head. He ran through the door and to the hallway, heading toward the source of the screaming. The intensity of the mental wail was enough to make his heart skip a beat.
A door came into his view at the end of the hallway, a dark rectangle shivering with tiny magic aftershocks. The source of the call lay behind it. William broke into a run.
The Hand’s magic danced on the door’s surface, breaking into smoke-thin coils of pale green. He kicked the door. It flew open.
A sweet scent filled his nostrils, heady and liquid-thick, like the odor of old buckwheat honey. Something stirred within the room, outside his field of vision. William bared his teeth, stepped inside, and closed the door behind him.
An enormous flower bloomed in the corner of the room. Its roots, thin and studded with chunky tuber-like vesicles, spread across the floor and walls in a reddish net, leaving only the windows bare. The roots swirled together into a thick squat stem, from which protruded three wide leaves. Red liquid pumped through the veins of the leaves, adding a pink tint to the sections of green.
Three massive petals, gray and spotted with flecks of green, rose above the leaves. They were closed, hiding the center of the flower like hands folded in prayer.
A jerky quickening ran through the network of roots. William stepped back.