The Twisted Path, a Twenty Palaces Novella

By Harry Connolly

Ray Lilly has been summoned to the headquarters of the Twenty Palace Society to answer one question: How has he managed to survive mission after mission fighting alongside his boss, Annalise? He doesn't have the power of a full peer of the society. He's a wooden man. An assistant. A diversion. The other peers want to know what's going on, so it's off to Europe for a trip to the First Palace. And no place in the world is safer than inside the headquarters of the Twenty Palace Society, right?

Right?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harry Connolly
• Release date: Dec 17, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370776269

Harry Connolly

Child of Fire, Harry Connolly's debut novel and the first in The Twenty Palaces series, was named to Publishers Weekly's Best 100 Novels of 2009. The sequel, Game of Cages, was released in 2010 and the third book, Circle of Enemies, came out in the fall of 2011.Harry lives in Seattle with his beloved wife, his beloved son, and his beloved library system. You can find him online at: http://www.harryjconnolly.com

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The Twisted Path

Harry Connolly

Copyright © 2017 Harry Connolly

All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

Cover photo copyright © 2015 MaryAnn Kuchera

Cover design by Harry Connolly V

ALSO BY HARRY CONNOLLY

The Twenty Palaces Series:

Twenty Palaces

Child of Fire

Game of Cages

Circle of Enemies

The Great Way Trilogy:

The Way into Chaos

The Way into Magic

The Way into Darkness

Standalone Works:

A Key, An Egg, An Unfortunate Remark

Bad Little Girls Die Horrible Deaths,

and Other Tales of Dark Fantasy

Spirit of the Century Presents: King Khan

For every fan of Ray and Annalise.

Thank you.

After:

I laid my clammy, sweating hand on the door lever and pushed. It was a good door, made of dark wood with a tight grain that suggested strength born of tough years. The door’s recessed panels were like windows without panes and the lever was the color of gold…or maybe it was actual gold. I had no way to tell.

Be casual. I stepped through and let the door swing shut on the leather chairs and plush carpeting of that room. The hall was as bleak and depressing as an old high school but more cramped. The floor was bare concrete, pitted and stained by decades of neglect. The ceiling was coated with something that looked like it had been chewed by wasps.

Along one wall were more doors, each as fancy as the one I’d just walked through. The other side held the sole source of light: large, clouded windows that let in the afternoon sun without letting anyone see in or out.

I was inside the First Palace, headquarters of the Twenty Palace Society, and I was in trouble.

Standing midway down the hall, staring at the glass as though she had X-ray vision, was Annalise, my boss. One of the peers of the society, she’d brought me in under complicated circumstances, and she’d cast most of the spells currently tattooed onto my body.

Whatever power they gave me, hers dwarfed it.

She glanced at me as I approached, then turned back toward the window. A crack in the sill let in a shaft of daylight, and I stood beside her for a moment, watching sunlight shine into the room and swirling dust motes get sucked out.

Boss, I said, we should get the fuck out of here. I’m pretty sure you have a predator inside the society.

Before:

There’s a guy out there in the world with the same name as me, and he’s a real asshole. He’s broken into houses, burned down buildings and killed people. He’s killed a lot of people.

Every time a cop runs my ID, the asshole’s name pops up, and I end up looking down the barrel of a gun. Once everything gets straightened out, it’s all Sorry, Mr. Lilly, but I’m sure you understand. And I do. I really do. The guy they confuse me with has done terrible shit.

Then they look me over one more time. They look over my boss. They check out our tattoos, her ragged clothes, and the expressions on our faces. They have second thoughts. For a moment or two, anyway. Could it really be a mixup? Finally, they shake their heads and walk away.

So far, none of them have pulled the trigger. So far.

But if one of those cops does, finally, put a bullet in my brain, I can’t exactly say it’d be unfair. That asshole with my name who’s done all those shitty things? That’s me.

My name is Raymond Lilly, and I’m on the twisted path.

And according to Annalise, the next step on that path was to get on an international flight. Somehow.

But first Annalise wanted to see Atlanta again, so Atlanta it was. I didn’t mind. I liked driving, and the long hours spent riding from LA to the east coast—not including the little job we did in Vegas—was my idea of relaxation. It was a chance to get my head straight.

I needed it. Like I said, I’ve killed people. Some were friends.

We parked her van in the garage of a little house on the outskirts of Macon sometime before midnight. The place smelled as though the windows had been shuttered for months, but if it bothered Annalise, she didn’t show it. We took turns showering. The back bedroom had a suitcase full of clothes in my size. Somebody in the society knew my inseam, which was creepy as hell. In the morning, we rode a Greyhound to Atlanta. My boss retrieved an envelope from a bus terminal locker and we took a cab to the airport.

The envelope contained a pair of passports. Annalise looked at me, looked at the cabbie, then looked at me again. I got the message: Take this and shut the fuck up.

The birthday was the same as mine but the address was local to Macon. I memorized it. The name was Raymond Rose. I hated it.

It was worth twenty-five years of federal time to get busted with a fake passport, but the society’s fake paper passed scrutiny. We flew to New York, then London, then Lisbon in the fading day.

Apparently, the other peers of the Twenty Palace Society wanted a look at me. And when they snapped their fingers, I hopped.

From the air, Lisbon looked like a sprawl of orange roofs atop white walls, but from the ground, it looked like any other city at night. Except for the fucking sidewalks.

We spent the night in the Hotel Roma, which didn’t look all that Roman but what the hell. The bed was huge but Annalise pointed me at the couch. At five foot nothing, she could have fit on the couch easily, but she was the boss and I was the one laying cushions on the floor.

When I woke, I went onto the green-tiled balcony and looked at the city in the morning light.

Fucking Europe, man.

Two years ago, I was an ex-con from LA, a former runaway trying to put a life of stealing cars behind me. Even before I met Annalise, I was the sort of idiot who didn’t expect to live to thirty. I never thought of myself as a guy who would go to Europe.

And maybe I hadn’t. Raymond Rose was standing in a hotel in Portugal, not Ray Lilly.

We left the hotel without breakfast. In the daylight, the city looked a little less like the cities I was used to. It was disorienting to see all the store and street signs in Portuguese. Every jumble of letters was like a lock I couldn’t pick. I wondered if it had been like this for Fidel Robles’s parents when they snuck into California on the back of a truck.

Poor Robbie. I missed him. He’d tried to murder me, but I missed him.

Annalise walked like she knew where she was going, so I tagged along. For once, I was glad she didn’t expect me to drive, not when every traffic sign was like a secret code.

I had no idea where we were going, and not too long ago, that would have annoyed the shit out of me. Annalise wasn’t the type