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.
Behind her stood a large man with the beefy look of a Bleeder: tall, fat, and with scars crisscrossing his arms in a complex pattern. He wore black pants, a black sleeveless shirt, and a black hood on his head. He stood perfectly still, at attention. Whoever this woman was, she was power: saganustari, at least, possibly higher up on the food chain.
She didn’t look up as we crashed into the room, or when Landry tossed me casually into the other chair and then slipped behind me and wrapped his bony arm around my throat, exerting expert pressure and cutting off my breathing.
My eyes bugged out and I strained ineffectually against him as the woman looked up from her knitting. She slid the glasses off her face so they hung around her neck on a silver chain and cupped her hands in her lap. As I choked, she ran her eyes up and down me and offered a half-smile.
“So good of you,” she said, sounding like everybody’s grandmother. “Can I offer you some tea?”
5.