“Remember what I said?” I pulled the dagger out of my belt and slipped it up my sleeve. I rolled my wrist, making sure to seat it safely against my bare skin.
“Run away with Lula,” Abbi said, “even though she doesn’t run away from anything. I remember what you said. It was dumb.”
“It’s smart. It’s important. Run, and use anything in your power to make her run too.”
“Oh,” Abbi said. “That’s different. Anything?”
“Anything, as long as it won’t harm her.”
“That’s different.” She nodded. “I’ll try. I can try. I won’t hurt her.”
“Good,” I said. “Thank you, pumpkin.”
She grinned at the name.
I stepped up to the back door and tried the handle. It turned easily in my hand. Mad Mat either wasn’t afraid of being disturbed or was expecting us.
“Come in, come in,” Mad Mat’s voice said from further in the house, as if he were putting on a dinner for friends. “You are exactly who I want to see. We’ve missed you.”
Lorde was already moving, sniffing the air to catch a scent of Lu. I followed right behind her, Abbi behind me.
The first room was a mud room, no washing machine or clothes dryer, just a utility sink.
Everything was white, the walls, ceiling, floor, including the sink, and shelves. Landlady white. The term filtered through my brain, and right behind it:Why would a god need a rental?
Lorde slipped out of the mudroom and into the kitchen. She scented the air, then headed down a dark hallway to the right. I turned that way, but Abbi scampered off across the kitchen opposite, scooting around the wall and into the next room in a flash.
Damn it.
The shadows around Lorde and me hadn’t changed, even though Abbi was out of eyesight. Her power was strong enough to span the distance.
“You’re late, in fact,” Mad Mat continued. “I expected you to return much more quickly. Especially for this event. Have I overestimated you? Come closer and let me clear the air.”
I thought Mad Mat was talking to me. But now I wasn’t as sure. His voice projected the way people spoke when they were on their phone’s speaker. As if talking louder would make the words clearer.
The walls were white, but the hallway dark, drenched in shadows. A row of picture nails peppered one wall, dull metallic sparks the only relief. The hallway ended at a closed door.
To the left, a threshold opened into the next room.
Dim yellow light flickered in that space. I stopped, still in shadow.
I signaled Lorde to stay down. A flick of her ear told me she understood. I pressed my back against the wall and leaned just enough to see into the room.
It was a smaller space than I had expected, which might serve as a living room. There was no furniture except a small Franklin stove in the corner, its black stove pipe jutting up to plunge into the wall.
The worn wall-to-wall carpet had been ripped back and rolled into a messy spiral, smashed against the vertical blinds, which canted sideways, slicing the darkness beyond the glass.
The exposed wooden floor was covered in symbols that pulsed and smoked and burned, magic twisted and bound in a way that made my headache spike and my throat seize.
There were ways to use magic, some healing and benign, others darker and violent.
This was a destruction of magic I’d never seen before, a chaos—
—a century ago, claws striking from the dark, fangs tearing, Lula’s scream—
—a violence that broke the laws of nature and forced reality to succumb—
—lying on the floor as monsters tore me apart, as Lula convulsed—
