Changes

Chapter 11

I tore the rug from the trapdoor again. I’d packed almost all of my questionable materials into a large nylon gym bag. I slung it over my shoulder, grabbed my duster, staff, and blasting rod, and nearly killed myself trying to go down the ladder too quickly. I stopped a couple of steps from the bottom and reached up to close the trapdoor again. There was a pair of simple bolts on the lower side of the door, so that I or the grasshopper could signal the other that something delicate was in progress, and distractions might be dangerous. I locked the door firmly.

“What’s going on?” blurted Bob from his shelf.

“Bob, I need the wards down now.”

“Why don’t you just—”

“Because they’ll come back up five minutes after I’ve used the disarming spell. I need them down. Get off your bony ass and do it!”

“But that will knock them out for at least a week—”

“I know. Go do it, and hurry! You have my permission to leave the skull for that purpose.”

“Aye-aye, O captain, my captain,” Bob said sourly. A small cloud of orange sparkling light flowed out of the skull’s eye sockets and rushed upstairs through the cracks at the edge of the trapdoor.

I immediately started dumping things into my bag. I was making a mess doing it, too, but there was no help for that.

Less than half a minute later, Bob returned and flowed back into the skull again. “There’re a bunch of guys in suits and uniforms knocking on the door, Harry.”

“I know.”

“Why?” he asked. “What’s going on?”

“Trouble,” I said. “What do I have in here that’s illegal?”

“Do I look like an attorney? These ain’t law books I’m surrounded by.”

There was a heavy slam of impact from upstairs. Whoever was up there was trying a ram on the door. Good luck with that, boys. I’d had my door knocked down before. I had installed a heavy metal security door that nothing short of explosives was going to overcome.

“Where’s the ghost dust?” I asked.

“One shelf over, two up, cigar tin in a brown cardboard box,” Bob said promptly.

“Thanks,” I said. “That section of rhino horn?”

“Under the shelf to your left, plastic storage bin.”

So it went, with Bob’s flawless memory speeding the process. I wound up stuffing the bag full. Then I tore the Paranet map off the wall and added it to the bag, and tossed the directory of contact numbers for its members in next to it. The last thing I needed was the FBI deciding that I was the hub of a network of terrorist cells.

Bob’s skull went in, too. I zipped the bag closed, leaving just enough opening for Bob to see out. Last, I took the two Swords (at least one of which had been used in murders in the Chicago area), slipped them through some straps on the side of the bag, and then hurriedly duct-taped them into place, just to be sure I wouldn’t lose them. Then I drew on my duster and slung the bag’s strap over my shoulder with a grunt. The thing was heavy.

Bangs and bumps continued upstairs. There was a sudden, sharp cracking sound. I winced. The door and its frame might be industrial-strength, but the house they were attached to was a wooden antique from the previous turn of the century. It sounded like something had begun to give.

“I told you,” Bob said. “You should have found out what was on the other side from here long before now.”

“And I told you,” I replied, “that the last thing I wanted to do was thin the barrier between my own home and the bloody Nevernever by going through it and then attracting the attention of whatever hungry boogity-boo was on the other side.”

“And you were wrong,” Bob said smugly. “And I told you so.”

There was a tremendous crash upstairs, and someone shouted, “FBI!” at the same time someone else was shouting, “Chicago PD!”

An instant later, someone let out a startled curse and a gun went off.

“What was that?” screamed a rather high-pitched voice.

“A cat,” said Agent Tilly’s voice, dripping with disdain. “You opened fire on a freaking cat. And missed.”

Mister. My heart pounded in my chest. I’d forgotten all about him. But, true to his nature, Mister seemed to have taken care of his own daring escape.

There were chuckles from several voices.

“It isn’t funny,” snapped the other voice. It was Rudolph, all right. “This guy is dangerous.”

“Clear,” called a voice from another room—which meant my bedroom and bathroom, since it was the only other room available. “Nothing in here.”

“Dammit,” Rudolph said. “He’s here somewhere. Are you sure your men spotted him through the window?”

“They saw someone moving around in here not five minutes ago. Doesn’t mean it was him.” There was a pause and then Agent Tilly said, “Or, gee. Maybe he’s down in the subbasement under that trapdoor over there.”

“You still have men in place at the windows?” Rudolph asked.

“Yes,” Tilly said wearily. He raised his voice a bit, as if speaking to someone on the far side of a large room. “This place is buttoned up. There’s nowhere for him to go. Let’s just hope he shows himself and gives himself up quietly. We’ll be sure to respect all his rights and everything, and if he cooperates, this could be over pretty quickly.”

I paused. I had some choices to make.

I could still do as Tilly suggested. In the long run, it was obviously the best choice for me. I’d be questioned and cleared by anyone reasonable (i.e., not Rudolph). I could even point them at the duchess’s business interests and turn them loose to become a thorn in her side. After that, I would be back to the status quo of wary cooperation with the authorities—but that process would take precious time. A couple of days at the very least.

I didn’t have that kind of time.

Agent Tilly struck me as someone not entirely unreasonable. But if I approached him now, protesting my innocence, and then vanished, I’d be up for resisting arrest at the very least. Even if everything else in this mess panned out in my favor, that could get me jail time, which I wished to avoid. Besides. There wasn’t anything Tilly could do for Maggie.

And, I had to admit it, I was angry. This was my home, dammit. You don’t just break down the door of a man’s home on the say-so of a snake like Rudolph. I had plenty of anger already stored up, but hearing those voices in my living room added another large lump to the mound. I doubted my ability to remain polite for very long.

So instead of stopping to talk, I turned to the summoning circle, stepped into it, summoned up my will, and whispered, “Aparturum.”

I waved my staff from left to right, infusing the tool with my will, and reality rolled up along it like a scroll. Soft green light began to emanate from the empty air in front of me in a rectangular area seven feet tall and half as wide—a doorway between my apartment and the Nevernever. I had no idea what was on the other side.

The bolts to the trapdoor began to rattle. I heard someone call for a saw. The door wasn’t closely fitted. They’d be able to slip a saw blade through the crack and slice those two bolts in seconds.

I gathered up my power into a defensive barrier around me, running it through my shield bracelet, and gritted my teeth. My heart pounded against my chest. It was entirely possible that walking through that doorway between worlds would take me to the bottom of a lake of molten lava, or over the edge of a rushing waterfall. There was no way to know until I actually stepped into it.

“I told you so!” Bob chortled.

An electric engine buzzed above me and then abruptly died. Someone made puzzled sounds. Then a slender steel blade slipped through the crack in the door and someone started cutting through the bolts by hand.

I stepped out of the real world and into the Nevernever.

I was braced for whatever would happen. Freezing cold. Searing heat. Crushing depth of water—even utter vacuum. The sphere of force around me was airtight, and would keep me alive even in someplace like outer space, at least for a few moments.

I emerged into the Nevernever, my shields at full strength, my blasting rod ready to unleash hell, as the invisible sphere of force around me slammed into—

—a rather lovely bed of daisies.

My shields mashed them flat. The entire bed, in its little white planter, immediately resembled a pressed-flower collection.

I looked around slowly, my body tight and ready, my senses focused.

I was in a garden.

It looked like an Italian number. Only a minority of the shrubs and flowers were planted in raised beds. The others had been laid out to give the impression that they had grown naturally into the space they occupied. Grassy paths wound through the irregularly shaped garden, twisting and turning this way and that. A hummingbird the size of a silver dollar darted down and tucked its beak into a particularly bright flower, and then vanished again. A bee buzzed by—just a regular old bumblebee, not some giant mutant monster thing.

Don’t laugh. I’ve seen them over there.

I adjusted the shielding spell to allow air to pass through it and took a suspicious, cautious sniff. It might look like a nice place, but for all I knew the atmosphere was laced with chlorine gas.

It smelled like autumn sunshine, where the days might be balmy but the nights could carry a heavy nip. Letting the air in meant that sound had an easier time getting past my shield. Birds chirped lazily. Somewhere nearby, there was running water.

Bob started tittering. “Look out! Look out for the vicious mega-squirrel, boss!” he said, hardly able to speak clearly. “My gosh! That ficus is about to molest you!”

I glowered down at the skull and returned to watching my surroundings for a moment more. Then I carefully lowered the shields. They burned a hell of a lot of energy. If I tried to hold them up for more than a few moments, I’d find myself too weary to function.

Nothing happened.

It was just a sleepy afternoon in a very pleasant, pretty garden.

“You should have seen your face,” Bob said, still twitching with muffled laughter. “Like you were going to face an angry dragon or something.”

“Shut up,” I told him quietly. “This is the Nevernever. And it’s way too easy.”

“Not every place in the spirit world is a nightmare factory, Harry,” Bob scolded me. “It’s a universe of balance. For every place of darkness, there is also one of light.”

I turned another slow circle, checking for threats, before I took my staff and waved it from left to right again, shutting the gateway back to my laboratory. Then I returned to cautiously scanning the area.

“Stars and stones, Harry,” Bob said merrily. “I guess wearing that grey cloak for so long rubbed off on you. Paranoid much?”

I glowered and never stopped scanning. “Way. Too. Easy.”

Five minutes later, nothing had happened. It’s difficult to stay properly intimidated and paranoid when there is no evident threat and when the surroundings are so generally peaceful.

“Okay,” I said, finally. “Maybe you’re right. Either way, we need to get moving. Hopefully we can find somewhere one of us recognizes that can get us back to the Ways.”

“You want to leave a trail of bread crumbs or something?” Bob asked.

“That’s what you’re for,” I said. “Remember how to get back here.”

“Check,” he said. “Which way are we going?”

There were three paths. One wandered among high grasses and soaring trees. Another was pebbled and ran uphill, with plenty of large rocks figuring in the landscaping. The third had greenish cobblestones, and led through a field of nice low flowers that left lots of visibility around us. I went with option three, and started down the cobbled path.

After twenty or thirty paces, I started to get uneasy. There was no reason for it that I could see. It was pure instinct.

“Bob?” I asked after a moment. “What kinds of flowers are these?”

“Primroses,” the skull replied instantly.

I stopped in my tracks. “Oh. Crap.”

The earth shook.

The ground heaved around my feet, and along the primrose path ahead of me, the walking stones writhed and lifted up out of the soil. They proved to be the gently rounded crowns of segments of exoskeleton. Said segments belonged to the unthinkably large green centipede that had just begun shaking its way loose from the soil as we spoke. I watched in sickly fascination as the creature lifted its head from the soil, fifty feet away from us, and turned to look our way. Its mandibles clacked together several times, reminding me of an enormous set of shears. They were large enough to cut me in half at the waist.

I looked behind us and saw another fifty or sixty feet of the path ripping free, and looked down to see that the walking stone I stood upon was also part of the creature, albeit the last to unplant itself.

I fought to keep my balance as the stone ripped free, but I wound up being dumped into a bed of primroses while the enormous centipede’s head slithered left and right and rolled toward me at a truly alarming rate.

Its enormous eyes glittered brightly, and slime dripped from its hungrily snapping jaws. Its hundreds of legs each dug into the ground to propel its weight forward, their tips like tent stakes, biting the earth. It sounded almost like a freaking locomotive.

I looked from the centipede down to the skull. “I told you so!” I screamed. “Way! Too! Easy!”