Part 6 (2/2)
”It was a tax issue.” Harlan stared at the far wall as he spoke, like he was confessing something. ”We had auditors breathing down our necks. It was the IRS, you know? When those guys start thinking you're hiding something, they get . . . It was a walkthrough. In and out, five minutes at most. No one took anything, no one touched anything. No one sat down on a chair. Nothing.”
”And?” I said, but I knew. Harlan had freaked out. The records said it was a bigger place than was there. When he'd come back and seen what Uncle Eric had paid for, it matched the paperwork, but not the floor plan. He drew the conclusion that they'd overcharged him.
To Harlan, it looked, at best, like a million-dollar oopsy. At worst, it was real estate fraud. Oonis.h.i.+ was right. People see what they expect to see.
”The statute of limitations for a contract in Illinois is ten years,” Harlan said the same way I imagined war prisoners giving name, rank, and serial number. ”I'm not saying we don't want to make this right, I'm only saying that litigation won't help anyone.”
”I don't think we need to go there,” I said.
He was like a prisoner whose guard had just opened the gate. His gaze s.h.i.+fted between the four of us in quick, birdlike movements. His voice squeaked a little.
”We don't?”
”Windows are on the east,” Aubrey said, already running down the same road with me. ”Hallway's on the west, so that means north or south.”
”Bathroom and the master bedroom pretty much eat the south walls,” I said. ”No place to put doors or a hallway. I'm betting north.”
Ex pursed his lips.
”Works for me,” he said.
I stood up, and we headed out together. Chogyi Jake paused in the doorway, looking back at the confused Harlan.
”Mr. Jeffers,” he said, ”I a.s.sume there's a super on site? A handyman for simple jobs?”
”Yes. Sure.”
”I don't suppose we could borrow a sledgehammer?”
It turns out-I'm not making this up-there's a construction tool called a stud finder. Had I known about these during my brief run as a college coed, I'm pretty sure my dorm mate would have been carrying one around the Northern Lounge, holding it up to guys, and saying Nope, not you. Instead, my first experience with one involved Ex slowly going over the southern wall of the living and dining rooms, marking the white plaster in thick pencil, while Aubrey, Chogyi Jake, and I moved all the furniture into the kitchen and three bedrooms. Empty, the living room took on the smallest echo. Our footsteps and voices had a new, unfamiliar depth. Just behind where the cow-skin couch had been, the marks made the unmistakable shape of a door frame.
In the absence of dust masks, Aubrey sacrificed one of the sheets, ripping strips from it with a sound like paper tearing. We all tied squares of five-hundred-count white percale over our mouths and noses. We looked like angelic bank robbers. Ex hefted the borrowed sledgehammer.
”We could just go through the walls,” I said.
”If we're right, I a.s.sume Eric protected that as well. Besides, I don't know where the wiring is,” Ex said.
”You don't know that doorway isn't trapped,” Aubrey pointed out.
Ex shrugged and slowly bounced the handle of the sledgehammer against his open hand in antic.i.p.ation of the architectural violence ahead.
”How likely is it that we're about to introduce ourselves to the neighbors?” I asked.
”We could wait,” Chogyi Jake said. ”If whoever lives next door would let us in, it wouldn't be hard to take the dimensions of their rooms and see if there's the expected gap.”
I was tempted, but not because I had any doubt about what we'd find. The truth was, plastering over whole rooms so that they didn't seem to exist felt like exactly the kind of thing Eric would have done. I hoped whatever we found would shed some light on the incidents at Grace Memorial. And still, there was some small, quiet part of my mind that hesitated. Ex lifted his pale brows as if asking a question. Or permission.
”Let's do this,” I said.
The first blow cracked the wall, a spiderweb appearing out of nothing. Ex swung again. Fine dust rose in the air. It smelled hot to me. The room itself shuddered, and bits of Sheetrock fell away, hanging on by a thin membrane of old wallpaper and tape. With the morning sun still spilling through the windows, the white wall seemed to glow, the darkness beyond it as thick as ink. Ex kept swinging, debris piling up around his ankles, as the doorway came free. One swing went in farther than the ones before, pa.s.sing through the wall and into whatever lay beyond. The unmistakable crash of metal stopped him. We came close. Aubrey had his cell phone out, the dim glow from the screen pus.h.i.+ng into the blackness.
Recessed behind the wall just enough so that the drywall could cover it, a black iron-mesh security door blocked a short hallway with a door on either side beyond it. Ex pulled away a hank of Sheetrock, and I could see where the security door's frame had been screwed into the flesh of the building with round-topped bolts that defied removal. The hinges were on the far side where we couldn't reach them. Even with the relatively little training and awareness I'd picked up in the last year, I could feel the wards and protections burning off the metal like heat. The two dead bolts were covered in thin black-etched symbols. I'd seen only one thing like it before. Eric's place in Los Angeles. The other DC1 property.
”Bingo,” I said.
EIGHT.
When I was about fifteen years old, I found a Rubik's Cube. You remember those? Hottest-selling toy of the 1980s? It's a cube with different colors on all six sides, with each side divided into nine squares. The whole thing's set up so you can rotate bits of it, scramble up the colors, and then-if you're really smart and patient-put it back the way it was before you messed things up. A sort of molded-plastic metaphor for everything else in life. I figured the best thing to do was steam off the colored stickers and put them back so that it looked solved. My older brother thought I was cheating. He solved it the old-fas.h.i.+oned way, by looking up the solution online. Even so, it took him three days the first time he solved it. He got to where he could do it in half an hour with only a little confusion and cursing. Once he understood what he was doing, it was easier. Not do-it-with-your-eyes-closed, but easier.
Breaking into Eric's secret fortress was like that too. It wasn't only that we'd been through defenses very much like it before. We were getting familiar with how Eric's mind had worked. Were there two obvious strategies to get past something? Look for a third. Stuck five layers into a problem? Go back two or three steps and see if the mistake wasn't that far back.
”Wait!” Aubrey said, and Ex and Chogyi Jake stopped chanting like someone had hit the pause b.u.t.ton. Aubrey leaned in close to the iron-mesh door and shook his head. ”It's not working.”
”It is,” Ex said. ”You're just reacting to the aversions.”
”I'm not,” Aubrey said.
”You're open to them,” Ex said. ”In the last year, you've used the Oath of the Abyss. You've been ridden. Twice. You have to expect that you're going to be more vulnerable to things like this.”
”Ex. Look at it,” Aubrey said.
Ex stepped out of the protective circle of red chalk drawn on the carpet, squinted at the runes and figures on the lock, and said something crude.
”Perhaps we should reconsider our approach,” Chogyi Jake said. ”What if we began with the Itiru meditations, and then invoked the Mark of Lavavoth?”
”Not Lavavoth. South-southwest is a red herring,” Ex said. ”I just don't know what it's distracting us from.”
It was a little after three in the afternoon, and the condo was trashed. Ex had stripped back as much of the drywall out of the hidden doorway as he could, and it left everything covered in a thin plaster dust. Everything smelled like it. The air tasted of it. On the plus side, we'd made more progress in the last three hours than we had in the first three days in Los Angeles. On the minus, the strain was telling. Tempers were starting to wear thin, my own included.
While I let the three of them work it out, I went to my bedroom. The black electronic key to the minivan sat on the table beside Aubrey's wallet and cell phone. I picked it up, tossed it twice in the air, and headed back into the occult construction site.
”I'm heading out for a while,” I said. ”Anyone need anything?”
”Green tea,” Chogyi Jake said at the same time Aubrey called out ”Cleaning supplies.” Ex only looked sour and stared at the sigils on the locks. I scooped up my backpack and my laptop case, and I left.
As the elevator sank down to the garage level, I let myself sag. I felt frustrated. I felt tired and on edge. I felt like some part of me that I couldn't quite control was pacing in the back of my head like a tiger in a cage. I stepped into the semiopen air of the parking garage, muggy air pressing at my face and the back of my neck. My footsteps echoed, and I realized I half expected someone to jump out of the shadows and attack. Or maybe a bunch of people, all breathing together. More than that, I sort of wished they would.
I got into the minivan with something like disappointment and realized I didn't actually know where I was going. I had the general intention of shopping or seeing the sights or doing something to burn off some of the growing energy, but I hadn't Googled directions to anyplace. I hadn't even asked Harlan where the best local deli was. My options were to go back in or go forward without a clear idea where I was headed.
Or call the local expert.
Kim answered on the fourth ring, and for a few seconds I thought she was her voice-mail message. By the time I regained my conversational footing, Kim was already delivering a status report.
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