Plus-One (Windrose Chronicles) Read online

  A golden retriever had bounded up to greet them in a flurry of ecstasy the moment Joanna got out of the car. The shorter of Durango’s two dogs – a massive Presa Canario with cropped ears and a muzzle criss-crossed with scars – hung back behind its master’s legs and regarded the visitors with worried eyes.

  Once they’d taken lawn-chairs under the back-yard awning, the former fighter-dog evinced a puppy-like eagerness for affection, rolling at Antryg’s feet and panting with delight as the Joanna rubbed his belly. “He’s a damn good dog,” said Durango, grinning affectionately down at his pet. “Kind of a pussy… when the wind gets up and my Mama’s Pekingese gets out – my Mama lives just up the road – she’ll come over here and get in under the fence and boss him around something pitiful. Once he’d got out of the vet’s I was a little worried, havin’ him around Buddy—” He thumped the retriever affectionately on its side. “But they’re like brothers. My sister’s kids love him, but when they’re over here I watch him like a hawk, even though I know to the marrow of my bones he’d no more harm them than my wife’s parakeets would. Hell, they got more to fear of bein’ bit from that mean little bitch of Mama’s than from Ravage here. But Ann – my wife – says it’s like when a man’s got a record. It follows him. And you can’t take chances if there’s kids involved, no matter what you think you know about him.”

  Ravage shoved his nose against Joanna’s foot and licked her instep, then sighed happily when she scratched his scarred, enormous head.

  “And you can see by the scars,” added Durango, “that he was a fighter. And it wasn’t havin’ him fixed that changed him, by the way. He was like this before that. I think that’s why the coyotes tore him up so bad.”

  “Maybe he did get religion,” Joanna said. “Saw the light.”

  The chef shook his head. “Animals is born in the light,” he said. “They grow up seein’ it. Whatever happened to him, it’s like it rewound him back to what he’d have been, if he’d been allowed to grow up normally.”

  “Not exactly.” Antryg put a gentle hand under Ravage’s chin, raised the dog’s head so that for a moment he could look into its eyes. The big dog met his gaze steadily for a moment, then ducked its glance away, as a dog will before its alpha, and with a soft whine licked his hand. The wizard stroked its scarred and bitten ears reassuringly, and made kissing noises. To Durango he said, “He’s had something taken away from him, the anger that every creature needs—” Antryg’s eyes moved from the dog’s, to meet those of the man, “—to keep himself alive in the jungle.”

  The chef looked aside, as if averting his eyes from his own jungle days. Ravage heaved himself up, and put a paw on his master’s knee, as if making sure he was all right; Durango draped an arm around him and thumped his side as he’d thumped Buddy’s. Joanna had the feeling the big dog would have climbed in his lap if the lawn-chair would have borne the double weight.

  “For the rest of his life he’ll need to be looked after,” Antryg went on, “because in certain ways he can’t look after himself. As long as he lives, he will have to depend on the kindness of humankind.”

  “That is one harsh fate,” said Durango softly, “to lay on some innocent soul.” He tightened his grip on Ravage in a rough hug. “But don’t you worry, miho. Ann and Buddy and me’ll have your back.”

  Ravage licked his face with a tongue the size of a washcloth.

  The chef’s bright blue-green gaze returned to Antryg: “Ms. Bannister said you two was paranormal investigators. This have anything to do with that haunt the maids have seen on the twelfth floor?”

  ***

  The Medici Suite was the largest of the twelfth-floor “high-roller” suites, and was notable – Troy Durango told them – for having a sort of mini-casino of its own: two private blackjack tables and a roulette wheel, for large parties. It also had its own kitchen – “They’ll usually hire a chef from the hotel, and man some of those suits are lousy tippers!” – and its own garden, nearly three-quarters of an acre of landscaped Mediterranean acanthus and salvia culminating in a rock-bound swimming-pool that overlooked the desert to the south.

  “Place been closed for almost a year because of the fire,” said the chef. “But three of the maids say they’ve seen a ghost there, a man in a gray suit. One of ‘em said he said Hi to her in Spanish.”

  ***

  The fire, Delia Bannister said when they got back to the hotel, had been the result of an electrical short, as far as anyone knew. It had broken out simultaneously in the kitchen, the suite parlor, and the mini-casino – the Urbino Room, it was called – and hadn’t done much damage. “The hotel engineers couldn’t find the short, or any faults in the wiring,” she said, handing Joanna a cup of coffee – china, and monogrammed – from the tray her assistant had brought to her office. “We’ve had two teams of specialists in as well. If the suite were rented more often it would be higher priority, but it’s an awkward size and doesn’t get much use, so the repair and remodeling hasn’t been done yet. You think it was this – this Plus-One – that caused the fires?”

  “I think it’s likely.” Joanna glanced at Antryg, who was sitting with his feet on Ms. Bannister’s desk, making an origami cootie-catcher out of a hotel brochure. “Fires are a fairly common poltergeist manifestation. Can a Plus-One manipulate electricity?” She nudged Antryg’s jeans-clad knee.

  “Some of them certainly can.” Carefully, he opened and shut the jaws of the little paper trap in a sequence of counting, and studied the visible inner facets so revealed. Then he glanced up, as if recalling where he was: “It depends on where this particular visitor comes from, and what he did back home. If he was a wizard we’re probably all right, because magic doesn’t exist in this world—”

  Ms. Bannister threw a startled glance first at him, then at Joanna.

  “If he was an electrician, we might be in trouble.”

  “Would you like to see the suite?” asked Ms. Bannister.

  “We will tonight,” said Antryg. “And we’d appreciate it, if you could arrange to have the twelfth floor – or at least that half of the twelfth floor – cleared. Do you use fog-machines in any of your theater shows? Excellent! We’ll need four of those, protective cover-alls, and the biggest flash-lights you’ve got… You wouldn’t happen to have any gas-masks, would you?”

  “Gas-masks…?”

  “Army surplus.” Joanna reached for the city directory she’d spotted on a corner of the office credenza. “And we’ll need battery back-ups for the fog-machines, if our friend can mess with the wiring.”

  “Good point,” agreed Antryg. “You wouldn’t happen to have access to a plan of the suite, would you, Delia? Splendid! And a list of what the workmen left up there? Oh, well. I’d rather take our friend by surprise,” he added, to the Banquet Director’s repeated offer of a reconnaissance mission. “And in any case, we’ve got a good deal of shopping to do this afternoon. Has the rat problem in this hotel increased or diminished since November of 1986?”

  Ms. Bannister started visibly: “Why do you ask?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I didn’t think…” She frowned, clearly troubled by the possible scope of the problem. “I didn’t think this had anything to do with… with the killings. Or with the fire, for that matter. But yes. The rats have become…” She shook her head. “When you’re in the hotel business, you get to know rats. How they behave, and what you can expect to be able to do about them… which isn’t much. But the rats here, it’s like they’ve become both bolder and stupider. You’ll see them, pretty much every time you go down to the basement, or just walking across the floor of the parking garage. We’ve had exterminators in and they got hundreds of them. Those that are left, it seems like they just wander into the traps.”

  Antryg beamed like a jack-o-lantern. “One less thing to worry about,” he said. “What about cockroaches?”

  She stared at him. “They’ve just about completely disappeared. How did you—?”

  Antryg
folded up his cootie-catcher and stuck it in a pocket. “Because it’s my job,” he explained, and got to his feet. “We should be back this evening—”

  “It’s four-thirty now.” Joanna checked her watch. There were, of course, no windows in Ms. Bannister’s office, though there was a clock on her desk. Time Doesn’t Exist in Las Vegas was a dictum that evidently did not extend to the hotel staff in pursuit of their duties. “If you have to leave before we get back—”

  “I’ll be here,” said Ms. Bannister. “I’ve already called my night-sitter to pick up my kids, and made arrangements for the hotel to comp your dinner. Whatever this thing is, if you can destroy it, or… or send it back to wherever it came from…”

  “I’m not certain we can do that.” Antryg turned back on his way to the door. “Because right now the greater part of it came from here. But I do hope to have a chat with it, and find out whether we’re dealing with one creature or two. I really hope it’s two,” he added, as Joanna collected her car-keys and sunglasses. “And that one of them is still sane.”

  ***

  When they returned to the Della Robbia at eight, the Strip was already clothed in neon and beginning to choke up with traffic. Slabs of light-bulbs transformed the darkness at street-level to daylight levels of brilliance; marquees blazed with the names of acts like LIDO DE PARIS and HOORAY FOR HOLLYWOOD. (“Is Wayne Newton still around?” “Who’s Wayne Newton?”) In between shopping for things like hydrochloric acid, silver nitrate and kosher salt, Joanna had had time to read the typed list of the deaths in the hotel since last November: a forty-year-old buyer for Macy’s, in Vegas on her honeymoon, fell from one of the hotel balconies into the rear parking lot; a young man in town for a car show was found, shockingly mutilated, in the empty rangeland about a hundred yards beyond the edge of the same lot. One of the maids, an illegal, found dead in the bath-tub of a room on the seventh floor, evidently having fallen backwards and hit her head on the tap.

  People who hadn’t done evil in the hotel, whatever else they might have gotten up to in their lives at home… “But all six of them couldn’t be evil,” said Joanna, as she parked as close to the stairway to their room as she possibly could. “Not evil enough to kill over.”

  “People can do a surprising amount of damage without being evil.” Antryg gathered up an assortment of plastic sacks from Eagle Surplus and Home Depot, and cast a swift, watchful glance at the parking lot around them. Under floods of electric glare it still, to Joanna’s eye, had a horrible creepiness, like the surface of another planet. “They may even be under the impression that they’re doing good. And the problem – as Ms. Bannister and the Council of Wizards have both pointed out to me – is one of judgment and degree: in whose opinion is it evil to abandon a dog in the desert? Or beat up a young man for trying to cheat the casino out of a few thousand dollars? Or strike her children or cheat on his wife or do whatever these other people might have done… if anything. If the killer isn’t simply striking at random, triggered by the color of their hair or the phase of the moon or its own hunger for the smell of fear.”

  “So what is going on?” The lights that illuminated the stairway were out. Joanna felt her skin crawl as they ascended – very quickly – to the long breezeway that she obscurely felt was safer than the parking lot itself. Though, in fact, at least two of the deaths had resulted from falls from breezeways higher than this one…

  “I don’t know. To find out, we’ll have to draw our friend to us. And with the whole hotel to hide in, the only way we can do that is to frighten him into attacking.”

  “I was afraid you were going to say that. We can’t just set up a dessert bar?”

  “Too late.” Antryg unlocked the door of room 219, signed Joanna to stay back for a moment—

  Crap, what makes me think I’d be safe IN the room?

  —and gathered his sword from where it stood by his side of the bed. They headed along the breezeway toward the hotel offices. “We didn’t buy ice cream.”

  ***

  Ms. Bannister had four fog machines, four backup batteries, two major-league sodium flashlights and two protective coveralls waiting for them on a utility dolly. She had changed into a coverall herself, ready to rumble, though her eyes widened when she saw the long katana in Antryg’s hand. “It’s best you stay down here,” said Antryg, as he slid into the slightly rubberized suit and slung the gas-mask around his neck, where he could get to it in a hurry.

  “You may need help.” The Banquet Director glanced at Joanna: five-foot-nothing and, despite her curvaceous figure, barely a hundred pounds.

  Joanna wanted to stamp her foot and tell her I am, too, a grown-up! I’ve slain monsters!

  “In case something goes wrong,” said Antryg gently, “I don’t want it to know who you are.”

  They ascended the service elevator in silence.

  As they reached the twelfth floor, Joanna said, “Is there really a portal through the Void up here?”

  Antryg replied immediately, “No. I’d sense it – and after nearly six years there would be at least three or four abominations at large, and that’s something even the Palermo Group couldn’t possibly keep quiet.”

  “I wouldn’t put it past them to try. And the thing that’s murdering people doesn’t count as an abomination?”

  “It might.” Antryg led the way, pushing the dolly before him, down the hall toward the double doors of the Medici Suite. “It’s one reason I need to have a few words with our visitor… Plug that in, will you, my dear?” He unloaded a backup battery and, while Joanna was setting it up, manhandled one of the fog-machines from the cart. When Joanna had it connected he switched it on, unwrapped one of the blocks of dry ice and dropped it in. “With luck,” he said, “that’ll show up anything coming down the hall at us. Quickly,” he added, and opened the double doors to the suite. “Before it figures out what these things are.”

  They set up one in the parlor area of the suite – the floorspace of that single room was almost as large as the first house Joanna remembered as a child – another in the Urbino Room, and the third outside in the desert garden, as far from the sliding doors of the parlor as the extension cords would reach. “You’re my backup,” said Antryg, as the whitish-gray mists spread out over the floor of the suite and billowed softly around their feet. “If you see anything coming at me, hit it with a spray of HCl. It has to materialize before it can hurt either of us, and as I suspect its material flesh is drawn from vaporized cockroaches – don’t look like that, my dear, it’s a perfectly straightforward combination of hydrocarbons and oxygen – it’s going to be sensitive when it recombines.”

  “Yuck.”

  “I’m not asking you to touch it.”

  “You better not be.” She pulled her gas-mask on, pushed it up on her head, fair hair hanging out around it in an unruly ruffle. Her heart was pounding as she remembered the thing in the parking lot; the descriptions of some of the bodies that had been found. Like a shark attack, the police report had said of the talent agent. The Air Force captain found dead in the parking lot had been attributed to a puma. How do I get myself into situations like this?

  Silly question. If you didn’t hang around with Gandalf over there you’d be fine. She watched Antryg as he waded through the softly roiling smoke, periodically dropping a red-and-yellow yo-yo to the length of its string and flicking it back to hand, studying the movement of the wooden disks…

  “Here,” he said softly. He stood in the sitting area, a few yards back from the glass garden doors. With a few deft moves he executed a complicated Texas Star, and observed the back-and-forth movement of the yo-yo, spinning on its shortened string. Then he whipped it back to his hand, missed his grip, and knocked himself smartly in the forehead. “Ow! You never can tell how the gravity anomalies are going to fluctuate around these things.”

  “Gravity anomaly, hunh?”

  “Of course.” He wound up the string indignantly, and fished in his jeans pockets through the slits in the co
ver-all. Beyond the doors, the lights from the suite turned the artificial fog to a shifting sea of milk, disappearing into the darkness.

  “I thought you said there wasn’t a portal here.”

  “There isn’t.” Antryg knelt with the bottle of silver nitrate in his hand. “But this is where our friend came through, on a ley-line between Gaos Peak north of town, and Marble Spring.” With a watercolor brush – one of their stops had been an art supply store – he began to paint a circle on the bare subfloor where the carpets had been ripped out. As usual – Joanna had seen him perform similar tasks a hundred times – the seven-foot circle was perfect. “I suspect a Gate can be opened in certain conditions – at the correct phase of the moon, or with certain stars in certain positions—”

  He emptied a handful of kosher salt into his palm, and began to trace the silver line with an outer ring of salt…

  The lights went out.

  Both had switched their flashlights on upon entering the suite, but the shock of the darkness falling was disorienting, terrifying. Joanna swung around, the beam of her light skimming across the fog. She smelled it before she saw it, a rank foetor like dirty dishcloths; jerked her gas-mask down as Antryg rose, whipped sword from scabbard in a fluid whisper of silver—

  “There!”

  She hit the sprayer nozzle and the mist of acid smoked out, intersected with the whirling disturbance in the ground-fog. Terror smote her, like a screaming inside her skull: terror, disorientation, sick shock as if something were screaming at her in unleashed animal rage. The mist beside her – horrifyingly close – erupted into a maelstrom of turbulence fifteen feet across and she swept the whole area with the acid, even as pain lanced through her arm. She fell back, saw her sleeve ripped and blood welling underneath; sprayed again because she didn’t know what else to do.