I sighed. "I can guess, but it would be better if you just told me. Was he another one of your wooden men?"

"No," she answered quickly. "You're my wooden man. I've never had another."

"Okay," I said. I still didn't know what a wooden man was. "Then what was he doing? Casing the town?"

"Pretty much," she answered. "There aren't enough peers in the society to check out every strange report, so we have investigators who check things out. Hammer Bay..." She trailed off. Then she ate a piece of beef. With most people, you could let the silence play out and they'd eventually feel the need to fill it. But Annalise wasn't a people person. She was used to long silences.

"What about Hammer Bay?" I asked.

"We've investigated Hammer Bay before," she said. "We never found a reason to do an action, but we've had people here."

"What made you send them?"

"This time it was the success of the toy company. 'Toy Company Breaks All the Rules to Succeed' was the headline, I think. I have the clipping in the van." She lifted a hunk of beef and gulped it down. "We end up investigating a lot of that sort of thing-businesses that should fail but rake in tons of money instead. People who get rich quick. People who win lotteries."

"Lotteries? Really?"

She shrugged. "There are still a couple of luck spells floating around. They mostly don't work anymore, but when they do a lottery is usually involved."

A dozen questions presented themselves. Before I could choose one, she spoke up. "A hundred dollars doesn't sound like a lot of money. How did you know?"

"Something the cook at the diner said about all the different kinds of insurance he has to carry. And the Dubois brothers didn't buy those trucks on a small-town cop's salary. Besides, if they extort too much, eventually someone calls the state cops or the FBI. A hundred bucks is irritating, but not enough to fight the local bullies over. And if you're tapping twenty or thirty businesses, it adds up."

"I guess so."

"At Hammer Bay Toys, did you notice anything strange about the fire?" I asked.

"You mean aside from the fact that it shot out of the mouths of a bunch of middle-aged paper pushers?"

I laughed. This was practically a bonding moment. "Not just that. When the fire came near me, it felt like it had already happened. Do you know what I mean? It was like I was watching the fire right in front of my eyes, but at the same time the fire was something that had happened to me a long time ago. Kinda."

"Like you were feeling it and remembering it at the same time," Annalise said.

"Yes," I said. "I felt the same thing when I was standing next to the boy, Justin. It was as though the fire was reaching around the moment I was in and coming at me from the side."

Annalise stared at her hands and flexed them. She moved them pretty well, but she would have stopped eating if the pain was gone completely. "Not just in that moment. The fire seemed to strike at me in the past," she said. "It might have gone back and struck when I was just a kid, before Eli, before I had any of these protections."

I mentally filed the name Eli away. "It attacked you in the past to hurt you now? Is that even possible?"

She shrugged. "If it happened, it's possible."

"But then, wouldn't you have had this pain all of your life? Wouldn't you remember having chronic pain?"

She waved off my objections, tossed another piece of meat into her mouth, and spoke while she chewed. "I'm just guessing, but I'm not saying the fire burned me while I was a little girl at the b.u.t.ter churn. I'm saying it came at me from the past. Maybe the future. Not everything experiences s.p.a.ce and time the way we do. Some predators can be pretty strange."

"b.u.t.ter churn?"

"I'm older than I look, remember?"

I remembered. She looked to be about twenty-three or twenty-four years old. "Are we talking Little House on the Prairie old or Ye Knights of Olde old?"

She shook her head and looked away. "Just keep cutting." Her voice had a ghost of humor in it.

I wasn't sure what exactly had changed between us, but I was glad of it. Not just because I didn't want Annalise to kill me, although I'd be a liar if I said that didn't matter. The truth was that I wanted her on my side. She knew more about magic than I could ever guess, and she could handle herself.

She had power. I had to admit, I was drawn to that power. It was alluring. I wanted to be next to it, maybe leech off some of it for myself.

I tried to picture us in thirty years, when I was in my late fifties, still driving her around. Would she still look like she did now? I'd probably look like her father.

Unless she did for me what ever it took to make a person stay young...

No. I shook that thought away. Annalise wouldn't even tell me who she talked to on her cell phone. She certainly wasn't going to share the secret of her long life with me.

I was not going to spend my time daydreaming about something I would never get. That was poison.

And yet...

I looked at her again. She was so small. With her jacket off I could see her tattooed arms poking out of her short-sleeved s.h.i.+rt. They were so skinny that they made me queasy. She looked like she was wasting away. Her thin muscles rolled back and forth under her skin as she lifted a piece of beef to her mouth. Her elbows were like knots in a rope.

She had been scrawny from the first moment I saw her, but she looked worse now than ever. I wondered if her injury was burning the flesh off of her.

How long would she live with the pain in her hands? Would she have to go centuries like this, devouring a side of beef every day?

If the fire was coming at her from the future as well as the past, if it was always a second or two ahead of whatever cure she administered, she might never be free of it. Unless it killed her.

Annalise cleared her throat. "I'm going to tell you a story," she said.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

"Okay," I said. I kept cutting meat, although it was nearly gone now.

"A long time ago, before most of the world was writing down its history, there was a powerful sorcerer. He was a primary, a dreamer, and his power was immense. I'm not much for history, so I don't remember his name. Let's call him Simon.

"Simon lived on a mountainside, in a huge palace. There were fertile fields all around, and Simon had a lot of villages and farmers working the land and paying him for the privilege. He wasn't a good man by today's standards, but for the time I suppose he was. And he protected his people.

"On the other side of a mountain range lived another sorcerer, Thomas. He wasn't a primary, but he still had a lot of power. And he summoned predators. Lots of them.

"At the time, the custom between sorcerers was live and let live, but Thomas was getting on Simon's nerves. His predators were killing Simon's villagers, turning them into vampires and other nasty s.h.i.+t, and stealing them away to work for him.

"Simon grew pretty annoyed, right? He sent a message to Thomas telling him to leave his lands and his people alone and get rid of his predators.

"Thomas, not surprisingly, refused. He said that he needed his predators for protection, and that he was doing nothing wrong himself. If some of his creatures roamed into Simon's lands to feed, there was nothing he could do about it.

"However, he did offer to leave the area, if he could take a copy of Simon's spell book with him.

"Simon immediately decided to kill Thomas."

I realized that she had stopped eating. I kept cutting and piling the meat on the butcher paper.

"So Simon gathered up a bunch of his spells and headed out. His lands were ruined and his people scattered. When he reached the edges of his enemy's lands, he began to fight.

"Now, Simon was powerful, but he couldn't get through. Before he could reach Thomas's palace, he was swarmed by predators: Floating Storms, Claw-in-Shadows, all sorts of things, not to mention his own villagers under the influence of Puppet Strings or transformed into vampires.

"He was driven back three times, each time expending more of his spells. He realized that he wasn't going to be able to take out Thomas this way, so he went into the forest and cut down a stand of poplar trees. Then he lashed the pieces of wood together. He put a spell on them to make them walk like men and swing their arms in a feeble imitation of an attack.

"When he had made enough, he sent them against Thomas's defenses. The predators swarmed them, destroying them wherever they found them.

"And in the confusion, Simon snuck into Thomas's palace and faced him one to one. Thomas didn't have a chance."

I had finished cutting the meat. It was there for Annalise whenever she wanted it. I wiped my ghost knife against the edge of the butcher paper. It didn't come very clean, but I didn't care. I dropped it, still wet with raw beef, onto the table.

I didn't look at her. I just stared at the pile of cut-up meat.

"Simon himself was never part of the Twenty Palace Society, but his student and heir was one of the founding members. And he shared the tactic of using wooden men with the rest of the peers. It's a tactic that has continued down through the centuries."

And that was the end.

Right about then, I thought, would have been the time for her to say, Do you understand, Ray? or I'm sorry, Ray or But it doesn't have to be that way for you, Ray.

She didn't say any of those things. She just picked up another piece of raw beef and started chewing.

"Excuse me," I said, and I went out of the room.

The fresh, salt air was bracing. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I must have been an idiot not to have seen it sooner.

The worst part was that I had volunteered. I'd asked to work for her. I hadn't understood at the time that it meant I would be a decoy, that I would be cannon fodder, but I had volunteered.

She had asked if I would be her wooden man, and I had said yes. She'd never explained what it meant. She had tricked me.

But of course, that was bulls.h.i.+t. I had been bluffing from the moment I met her and had pretended to know more than I did. And I had been lying to her in other ways as well, all to save my friend. If I was up to my neck, it was my own d.a.m.n fault.

I was a decoy. Expendable. I had thrown my future away to save someone that I'd been forced to kill anyway. d.a.m.n.

I noticed the Escalade again, this time parked across the street. It would be harder to approach this time. I'd have to circle around two blocks to come up behind it, but what else did I have to do?

I went back into the motel room and asked Annalise if she had a second sc.r.a.p of wood with a magic-finder spell on it. She took it from her satchel and handed it to me without a word.

I held it up to the light by the window. It flared, all of the designs freezing in place and turning silver. Then it returned to its normal shade of black, with the designs slowly turning.

I touched the wood to the tattoos on the back of my hand. Annalise's magic made it glow with silver light, but after it acclimated to my touch, it returned to its normal slow churning. No powerful magic was close to us right now.

I picked up my ghost knife, rinsed it clean in the bathroom sink, and slipped it into my pocket.

I left Annalise in my room. I didn't have a way out the back, but I bet I could go through the manager's office to a back door, then an alley, then I could try to come up behind the Escalade again. This time I'd get close enough to check it for magic. If Charles Hammer was watching us, I suspected he'd make the sc.r.a.p of wood pop like a string of firecrackers again.

I walked slowly toward the office, wondering what I could offer Annalise to get her to release me from my promise. If I took out Charles Hammer by myself, or found a permanent cure for her hands, or pieced together the whole story of what was happening in Hammer Bay, maybe she would let me go home, or promote me to tin man or something.

That pointless line of thought was interrupted by a white cargo van that rumbled into the parking lot. It was a Dodge, and it looked remarkably like Annalise's, except that it was newer and had a pair of battered ladders lashed to the top. The back door opened.

Floyd's fireplug friend crouched there. He pointed a snub-nosed.38 revolver at me. "Hey, there, jackrabbit," he said. "This one is loaded."

Two more guys crouched in the back of the van. My mind registered that they were there, but I couldn't look away from that d.a.m.n gun.

"Your gun is drunk?" I said. My voice sounded much more calm than I felt.

"Get in. Someone wants to meet you."

I climbed into the van. They slammed the doors and my brain kicked in. They were all wearing construction boots. I looked directly at the fireplug. "Georgie," I said, "if Henstrick wanted to talk to me, she should have called. I would have liked a visit."

"Know my name, do you?" Georgie said. He smiled. "But you don't know everything."

The van bounced out of the parking lot. I glanced at the two other guys. Both held mean-looking hunting knives. If I knew everything, I wouldn't be in the back of this van.

"Get his wallet," Georgie said.

One of the other two, a trim ex-Marine type with dark bags under his eyes, placed the edge of his knife against the side of my neck. The third man sat well back out of everyone's way. The ex-Marine yanked my wallet out of my pocket.

"Raymond Milman Lilly," he read. "And here's Floyd's thirty bucks." He took the money out of my wallet and stuffed it into his breast pocket.

"Floyd is my bud," Georgie said. "I didn't like the way you left him."

"Really? Then why did you turn and walk away when I was beating his a.s.s?"

Georgie didn't take my bait. "Conditions were unfavorable at the time. I like them better now."

"I'll bet you do."

The ex-Marine pulled the wood sc.r.a.p out from my jacket pocket. We all looked at it. The design turned as slowly as ever. There was nothing magical about these fellows.

They stared, entranced. I tensed to spring at Georgie, but he sensed it, raised the gun, and leveled it at my face. "Be still," he said quietly.

"Whoa," the third man said, still entranced by the wood sc.r.a.p. "That's cool."

The ex-Marine rubbed his finger along the design and yanked it back. "Tingles," he said. "How does it do that?"

"Trade secret," I told him. "We're trying to convince Hammer Bay Toys to manufacture and market them under their banner."

The ex-Marine shrugged and set it down next to me, apparently forgetting that I was being held at gunpoint. He pressed the blade more tightly against my neck as he jammed his hand into my jacket pockets.

"How we doing back there?" the driver called.

"We're fine," Georgie answered. "How far are we?"