Authors: Tim Pratt
I rubbed my eyes. “Listen. The vessel—you can’t even get it. Grace put it behind magical walls we can’t breach. He was crazy at the end. You don’t understand that because you’re going a little bit crazy yourself maybe—”
“Every magical barrier has a key,” she said. “Nothing can be sealed forever. Father taught me that. Change is the only constant. Imperfection is inevitable, and every spell has a crack and a flaw. You are too weak and stupid to find the key, that is all. It’s not your fault. You’re just too human.”
“Okay. I tried.” I stood up. “Stay the hell away from me, Firstborn, or I’ll let the Trips turn your brain into mush, okay?”
“I can defend myself from them. I am very old, Rebekah. I know things that would drive you mad if you even glimpsed them in a dream. Save yourself immeasurable grief, and renounce your inheritance now. I will spare your life and limbs if you do.”
You know, I was tempted. Just wash my hands of all this shit. But, one: I don’t like bullies. And, two: there was Trey to consider. If I gave up my inheritance, he’d be in thrall to the Firstborn as Grace’s new rightful heir. I wasn’t sure what we were to each other anymore, but whether we were friends or lovers-in-waiting or allies of circumstance, I needed to protect him from that fate.
“Stay. Away.” I tied her wrists and ankles with the longest bits of rope the Trips had left behind, and the whole time she stared at me like a snake about to eat a rodent. When she was secure enough that I thought she couldn’t jump through the mirror and murder us right away, I withdrew and beckoned Trey. We stepped through the portal, into the cave.
Trey immediately tipped the mirror over, face down, and started lugging heavy rocks and dropping them on top.
“You want to seal her in?” I said.
He shrugged. “I doubt it’ll work in the long term—she’ll push her way out eventually—but it might buy us a little time.” I stood there for a moment, then helped him heap more rocks on the mirror, because why not? Anything to delay her. Maybe she’d lose her mind and memory enough to forget she wanted to torment me. Faint hope, but better than nothing.
We put our weapons back in the duffel bag, held hands, and let
The Book of Grace
take us home.
“I’m just sorry I didn’t get to crack her in the kneecap with the family hurley,” Trey said.
I nodded. “I see where you’re coming from, but I just kind of feel sorry for her, now. Empathizing with someone who wants to kill you is probably a bad idea, but I can’t help myself.” I poured us a couple of big glasses of red wine and we leaned against the counter in the kitchen, sipping. The silence between us was seventy percent companionable and thirty percent fraught.
“I should get some sleep,” I said after a while. “It’ll be morning way too soon.”
He nodded and put his glass down, the wine hardly touched. “Me too.”
“Thanks for everything you did tonight.”
Trey shrugged. “We did some good. Having levitating triplets with psychic powers owe you a favor is probably a good thing.”
“Come by tomorrow? Continue our fruitless search for the key to the locked room, have a late lunch, resume fruitless search?”
“I should go into the office for a little while—you’re not my only client, just the only one I’m compelled to obey. But I can come help search in the afternoon. At least, from what the Firstborn said, there probably
is
a key.”
“I’m not sure she’s the world’s most reliable narrator.” I walked him to the door, and there was an awkward moment when we might have kissed good-bye that turned into a vastly more awkward one-armed half hug, and then he was gone. I closed the door and rested my head against the wood and said aloud, “I need a vacation.”
Which gave me a pretty good idea.
When Trey showed up on my doorstep the next day I ushered him into the kitchen. “Good, you’re wearing decent walking shoes. You have any cash?”
“Uh, some, why—”
“I don’t want to use credit cards because it’ll trigger the fraud-detection software or whatever at the bank, and our accounts will get frozen.” I looked through the backpack I had on the counter. “Let’s see, I’ve got sunscreen, a bottle of water, a book in case you have to go pee and I get bored waiting for you, a couple of granola bars, a flashlight, a scarf because you never know, a swimsuit because ditto—hmm, you don’t have a suit, but that’s okay, we can buy you one if we need to—is there anything else I need?”
“I feel like I walked in on a conversation already in progress,” Trey said. “Care to fill me in?”
“We worked hard last night. Threatening violence, rescuing a kidnap victim: that’ll wear anybody out. So today we’re going on vacation.”
“Huh. Where to?”
I slung the backpack over my shoulders and then picked up
The Book of Grace
from the counter. “Oh, you know. Anywhere we want to.”
Minutes later we were sitting on a low wall beside
Crown Fountain
in Chicago, an art installation in Millennium Park that doubles as a place for kids to play in the water, at least when the weather is warm. The sky was that early-autumn Chicago gray, and there were tourists and people on their lunch breaks ambling around. “I used to come here a lot when I was in school, watch kids play, eat my lunch.”
“I can see the appeal.” We watched the immense faces displayed on the columns change and shift and spit water for a while, then strolled around—holding hands, because look, I’m not made of
stone
. I took him to see the Bean. (
Cloud Gate
, if you want to get fancy—the big mirrored amorphous blob of a sculpture, thronged as always with tourists photographing their distorted reflections.) Then, because I was apocalyptically famished, we went over to one of my favorite pizza places for a few slices of deep-dish, which Trey appallingly did not appreciate: “This isn’t pizza. This is basically lasagna with no noodles.” We stopped holding hands for a bit after that. We walked again, and I hit a hot dog vendor so I could get a Chicago dog.
“There are too many vegetables on that hot dog,” Trey said, and I considered—just for a moment—commanding him to eat the hot dog. “Also, I bow to the power of your appetite. I am still crammed full of that stuff you mistakenly call pizza.”
I licked my fingers, still ravenous, but I’d taken the edge off. “I think using the book must suck calories out of my body or something. I am
starving
. I guess having to eat constantly isn’t such a bad price for using magic, at least compared to coming unstuck in time.”
“How’s that been, anyway?”
“Better. I lost maybe a couple minutes this morning. I don’t remember brushing my teeth, but there was spit in the sink and I felt all minty fresh, so. I think I’ll hold off looking into the future for a while, if I can avoid it. Even though it’d be nice to see if shaking down the Eldest Daughter changed any of those possible futures. Losing hours at a time was deeply freaky.”
Thinking about the Eldest Daughter bummed me out, which was not the point of this jaunt, so we moved on to a little square that I always found immensely peaceful, shaded by trees, with the burble of a nearby fountain for a soundtrack.
“Want to go to a museum?” Trey asked, lounging with me on a bench. “I hear you’ve got one or two decent ones in this city. Or we could visit your friend Charlie.”
I took his hand in mine. “Nah. Not today.” Trey had stepped up for me the night before, and I wanted to give him my whole attention. “As for museums, I might see someone I know, and if I do, Mom and Dad might hear about it, and if they think I came to Chicago without visiting, they’ll cut me out of the will.” I winced. “Wow. Choice of words, huh?”
“You do have a way with them,” Trey agreed. “So what do you want to do next?”
“It was nice to come home, but let’s go someplace new. You pick.”
“I hear good things about Bali.”
It was the middle of the night in Bali, and we sat together on a dark beach in the warm sand, listening to the waves rumble in and out. Maybe there was a kiss or two. I’m not only not made of stone, I’m apparently not even made of some soft metal like gold or tin. I remained strong in my resolution that we couldn’t
date
while he was supernaturally bound to serve me, but hey, a kiss is just a kiss.
Next we went to Paris. Trey had never been, and I’d only spent a couple of days there during my study abroad trip to Italy. We hit the airport first to exchange some dollars for euros, then went to a little bistro and ate steak frites at a table on the sidewalk, watching the fashionable French people and the vastly less fashionable tourists stroll by.
“Teleportation is going to make me fat.” Trey popped the last fry into his mouth. “You’re eating for two—you, and the magic book. I don’t have that excuse.”
“Poor thing. I missed the part where I forced you to eat again. But, sure—let’s get some exercise. Find a place where it’s warm, and daytime, and where the swimming is good.”
Midafternoon in Tahiti in September. Eighty-five degrees, breeze rustling through palm trees, white sand beach, emerald- or sapphire-colored water, depending on how it catches the perfect, pure sunlight. A boy who looks pretty good with his shirt off floating in the water next to you, everything silent and serene, every care in the world thousands of miles away.
What I’m saying is, it’s nice. I recommend it.
Standing atop the Great Wall of China, our legs still damp with ocean water, Trey let out an immense yawn.
“We don’t have to go
everywhere
today,” I said.
He nodded. “True. But it’s tempting, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. Maybe we’ll hit two or three other wonders of the modern world, and then head home for a nap, then hit the rest? And after that, dinner in the best restaurant in the world that’s open at whatever hour it happens to be?”
“I like the way you think.”
Eventually we got home for good, after midnight Meat Camp time, worn-out and overstimulated and drunk on wonders. We collapsed on the couch and sprawled there, side by side. “I think I overate,” I said. “But with my
brain
.”
“Maybe we should have spaced some of that out. It’s hard to properly appreciate the Sagrada Família when you just looked at the Hagia Sophia. Still. I am on the record as having mixed feelings about magic, Bekah, but screw it: magic is awesome.”
“I am starting to see the advantages. How am I ever going to get any work done again when I can go anywhere, anytime? Talk about distraction on demand.”
“I’m sure you’ll get used to it. Become jaded. Being able to go anywhere in an instant will become ho-hum and ordinary.”
I shook my head. “Since I don’t intend to live forever, I don’t see how I’ll have time to get tired of it.” I leaned against his shoulder, feeling peaceful. This couch wasn’t a beach in Tahiti, but it was pretty great, just then. “I’m still reeling with the possibilities, honestly. I mean, being able to go
anywhere
—”
I stopped talking. Then I groaned.
“Trey. I’m an idiot. I take some consolation in the fact that we’re
both
idiots, but still.” I opened up
The Book of Grace
on the coffee table and turned to the index.
“Bekah? Is everything okay?”
“Maybe. Maybe better than okay, if, if, if…” I knew exactly what I was looking for, but I didn’t know what it was
called
, so I muttered to myself, “The key to open the locked door…”
There it was, only in all caps and index style: Key to Open the Locked Door, the.
I showed Trey.
He whistled. “Bekah. Wow. Are you ready for this?”
“No, but I haven’t been ready for anything else since I came here, either. Hasn’t stopped me yet.” I turned to the page indicated by the index, and there was a drawing of an old-fashioned key with ornate scrollwork on the end. “Want to come with me?”
We stood up, he entwined his hand with mine, and I tapped the page.
The book teleported us…all the way to the dining room. I looked around and laughed. “Oh, hell. It’s in here somewhere?” I’d cleaned out the room, pretty much, but there were boxes and trunks shoved against one wall, stacked neatly and filled with the contents of every yard sale held in the region for five thousand weekends straight, it seemed like.
“At least we’ve narrowed it down to one room,” Trey said. “We can sort through these boxes by…this time tomorrow night, maybe. And hope the key actually looks like a key—”
“Nope. We’re going to be efficient, Trey. Grab a box and take it to the kitchen.” I took a box into the studio myself, and another to the downstairs bathroom, Trey hauled a couple upstairs to the bedrooms, and we lugged the trunk out to the living room. Then we reconvened, opened the book, and teleported again.
We ended up in the bedroom where Trey had slept during the few days he’d stayed with me. A banker’s box with weird mold stains waited for us on the carpet, so we knelt, took off the lid, and began sorting through the jumbled interior, looking for a key.
Ten minutes later, contemplating the constellation of junk arrayed around us, Trey shook his head. “No key, Bekah. Maybe the book is confused?”
I considered the assembled mess. A crystal doorknob—maybe that was it? I picked it up and gave it a twist, to no particular effect, so I put the knob down. Nothing else seemed superpromising. A rubber duckie, once yellow, sun-faded almost to white. A spool of scarlet thread. Empty film canisters. A mason jar with no lid. A lumpy homemade ashtray. Capless airplane liquor bottles that didn’t even smell of booze anymore. An empty Scotch tape dispenser. A windup toy monkey, missing one arm. A tangled ball of brown shoelaces. An old trackball computer mouse. A night-light in the shape of a seashell. A chipped porcelain rabbit. A plastic ring shaped like a spider. A miniature pagoda made of plastic. A monogrammed handkerchief with the initials M. Z. A fake diamond necklace. A Christmas ornament that was a frog wearing a Santa hat…
“What’s this?” I picked up a plastic object, rectangular, about as long as my hand, with a square button on top and a little bulb recessed into one end. “Some kind of ancient remote control? From back when televisions came in cabinets the size of wardrobes?”