The Silenced Tale, стр. 39

Elgar bites his tongue hard to keep his gorge from rising. “Thanks for that. I don’t think I . . . I could have—”

“Do you want me to come to the house with you, boss? I can change my plans. Let me call—”

“No, no, it’s okay,” Elgar says. “I think I need some time with the house to myself. You know . . . get used to it again. But when this is over, as a thank you, I’d like to . . . I don’t know, cook? And the boyfriend? He can come—”

Juan makes a noise. “No, I don’t think so. I’m figuring out that he’s kinda weird about authors. I’m not going to inflict that on you until I’m sure he’s a keeper.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

Quiet descends between them again, and as he always does when that happens, Juan feels compelled to fill it. Which, in the end, turns out to be worse for Elgar than sitting in the safe house alone, his mind spinning. Because, at least in the safety of his own head, Elgar can consider that magic and the world he created might have something to do with it all.

With no reason to assume magic is involved, Juan’s imagination keeps running toward obsessive fans, or angry authors who’re jealous of Elgar’s success, or, god forbid, that myopic rabid faction of spec-fic fandom that tried to hijack the Hugo Awards. And while they might be good guesses, Elgar fears, deep down in his not-inconsiderable amount of gut, that they are dead wrong.

What the real answer is, he still can’t admit to himself. He’s edging closer to it, mind circling like a vulture patiently coasting on updrafts, waiting for the wounded gazelle of thought to finally go still. It makes his head light—or maybe that’s the excess of coffee he’s been indulging in without Juan around to scold him. The rest of him is well-rested, as there isn’t much to do in this place but sleep and sit around, but his mind hasn’t stopped chugging the whole time. Like a perpetual motion machine, he can’t seem to find the brakes.

The drive to his house the next morning is quicker than he remembers the drive to the safe house being, and Jackson parks the unmarked car in the alleyway behind Elgar’s home. Elgar leads them in through the backyard, and up to the kitchen patio door. Jackson insists on being the first to enter the house. Once he’s swept through each room, checking them for anything amiss, he returns to the kitchen to wave Elgar and Riletti inside. His face, however, is grim.

“What did you find?” Riletti asks, as Elgar sets his bag down on the kitchen table.

“You found something?” Elgar yelps, unable to hold in his surprise. “But I thought . . . what happened?”

Jackson only waves down the hall, toward his—oh god, his office.

Panic strikes like a fist to his solar plexus, punching all the air out of Elgar’s lungs. A jittering kind of energy seizes his limbs, and he jerks down the hall, filled with horrified anticipation that makes his gait disjointed and wobbly. He braces himself with one hand on the wall, leaning hard, pressing his palm into the textured wallpaper as he slides across it.

What is it going to be this time? A jungle of threatening greenery? An ocean of blood? A body?

“Watch where you step,” Jackson says, trailing after him. The door, which Elgar knows he left closed when he left, is now hanging open. Elgar doesn’t know what Jackson means by the admonishment until he looks at his office floor. Glass fragments litter the carpet, from where the big bay window that looks out onto his side garden has been broken in. No, not “broken,” that word isn’t forceful enough. It’s smashed. Shattered. Exploded. Fragmentalized. Shards are sprayed all the way to the far wall.

The rest of the office is in a similar state. His precious cat-tunnel desk is in splinters so small, Elgar wouldn’t have been able to guess they used to be the desk if it wasn’t for the distinctive honey color of the wood. The paintings on his walls have been slashed and shredded with either parallel strokes from a knife, or some very sharp claws from a very large beast. His filing cabinet has been upended, the drawers pulled out and crumpled against the floor. Papers lie in ashy, smoldering drifts all over the floor. And the carpet is scorched; a section of fibers by the window is actually still smoking.

It looks as if a bomb, an actual bomb, has gone off in here.

And it must have happened when they were just blocks away, heading in this direction.

“Oh god,” Elgar chokes as Jackson crosses the room to stomp out the last of the embers on the carpet. “Did my neighbors not call 911? I mean, look at how hard someone must have hit that glass! It looks like someone put a sledgehammer through it! Look at the scorch marks! There had to have been noise.”

The only part of his office that is untouched is the bookshelf. The novels, comics, and reference books are all eerily, perfectly pristine, untouched by the blast that seems to have shredded the rest of the room, almost as if they had been shielded.

Something about them looks wrong, though, but he can’t place what. The shelf just looks . . . funny.

Jackson steps back out into the hallway, pulling his radio off his belt. Riletti, who’d followed them, steps around him and into the room to stand beside Elgar. Elgar moans, clutching at his hair like a distressed Regency suitor. It’s ridiculous. Laughable. Gelastic. But he doesn’t care what kind of picture he makes. God, he can’t breathe.

“How did this happen?” Jackson is shouting down the line. “When did this happen? There were eyes on the house twenty-four-seven!”

Elgar stumbles back, out of the office, hand over his eyes as if blocking out