And decided . . . well, maybe the whole acceptance thing wasn’t quite enough.
Out in the field downtown, Balz walked side by side with Syphon through a bottom-feeder retail neighborhood, the storefronts locked with retractable grates and marked with 70% Off! sale signs that suggested cash flow was a perpetual issue for the grungy establishments. Lot of graffiti. Lot of random trash clustered by the wind, the urban equivalent of sand dunes in the desert. And the uneven concrete under their shitkickers was the kind of thing you had to keep checking—no matter how tight your swagger or how many weapons you strapped or how much leather was zippered onto your body, catching a steel toe on a crack could bring you back down to earth on so many different levels.
“Yeah, and then what happened?” Balz asked as he scanned from left to right.
“Nothing was in the coffin.”
Balz frowned and glanced at his cousin. Syphon was in his typical saunter, his dark hair freshly tinted with stripes of dark green. Given his orthorexic diet, one might assume he was actually turning into a smoothie. But no, he and Zypher had gone ham with the hair color over day.
Zypher had gone with some positively fetching dark purple undertones.
“What do you mean, nothing?” Balz prompted.
“Well, no body. But we’ve got some two-hundred-year-old oats if we want to play Russian roulette with gastroenteritis. And the Gift of Light or whatever it was? Nowhere, either. Rhage told me that they stood around the open coffin all what-the-hell. Tic Tac?”
Balz put his palm out, a shake-shake preceding a two-drop that went right into his mouth. “So now what?”
Idly, he glanced behind them. Ever since the Omega had bit it, these nightly patrols were nothing but strolls, and he missed the fighting.
“I don’t know. Wrath says we gotta find the Book another way—”
Balz stopped dead. “What?”
Syphon went a couple strides farther, halted, and looked back. “The Book. The one I told you about. The one Rehvenge came to the Brotherhood about—why are you looking at me like that?”
As a feeling of light-headedness made Balz think the cement under his feet was undulating, he turned blindly to the stores so he could pretend like something had caught his eye. You know, in a normal way.
“What about this Book,” he said evenly.
“I told you.”
“Tell me again.”
Syphon shrugged his big shoulders. “It’s some kind of book of spells. A female came up to Rehv looking for it, and he was all bad-news on that idea.”
“Just curious, what does the Book look like?”
“I don’t know. Rehv didn’t say. Got the feeling that you know it when you see it.”
Putting an unsteady hand to his eyes, Balz was vaguely aware that his cousin was continuing to talk, but he couldn’t hear the guy. And as he tried to pull himself together, he—
Purple palm print.
Frowning, he blinked a couple of times—and nothing changed about what he was staring at: He was apparently standing in front of a purple palm print the size of his chest. Over it, in blinking, neon cursive, was a flashing sign that read “PSYCHIC.”
Syphon stepped in between him and the window. “Where’d you go, Cousin?”
“I’m right here,” he muttered as he stepped around and tried the purple door.
When it opened, he wasn’t surprised, and not just because it was after dark and PSYCHICs probably didn’t quit at five, even in this kind of zip code: It was as if some kind of doorbell had been rung in reverse, not him seeking someone inside, but rather someone in there seeking him.
“What are you doing, Cousin,” Syphon demanded.
The staircase that was revealed was narrow and steep and painted purple, and Balz surmounted the steps urgently, like his name was being called up on the second floor. Like he had been here before, even though he hadn’t. Like this was the whole point of . . . everything.
Behind him, Syphon was having a lot to say.
Balz heard none of it.
There was a door on the top landing, marked with another laminated purple-palm symbol. And he was not surprised that before he had a thought about trying the knob, the portal swung open for him.
Fuck, it was dark in there. In fact, the pitch-black interior was so dense, so pervasive, it was like a tear in the fabric of time and space—
Syphon grabbed his arm and yanked. “No!”
“Let me go—”
“Don’t go in there—”
Everything happened so fast. One moment, the two of them were playing tug-o’-war with his arm, the next?
The lights flickered in the stairwell, and then something grabbed Syphon around the chest and peeled him back. But he did not fall. He became suspended in the air over the steep steps.
A shadow, that somehow had strength and substance, was clutching him like he was prey, claiming his fighter’s body. And Syphon was arching back and screaming in agony, his face running pale, his eyes peeling wide.