Above the creaks, a pair of low whispers sounded.
16
I rose from beside Lazlo’s body, light radiating from my protective shield, and adjusted my grip on my sword. Shadows shifted on the wooden steps as the whispers grew. I remembered what Olga had said about no one coming here because of the ghosts. You will know them by their whispers, she’d said.
If Lazlo’s soul had been sacrificed to the Whisperer, then a conduit now existed between his body and Dhuul’s realm. Maybe no more than a seam, but enough for shadow entities to come and go, to feed on the lingering magic, of which there were still traces.
Those were the ghosts the villagers had seen. And now I was seeing them.
I shuffled back. Though immaterial, the man-sized beings were horrid. They descended on tentacled legs. More tentacles writhed from their shapeless bodies of matted hair and sharp beaks. They slowed as they neared the bottom of the steps, their whispers alien and wet. Multiple sets of pale eyes glowed into view, all of them watching me.
“Vigore!” I shouted.
In my fear, my force invocation lacked control. It rammed into the stairs, sending splintered timber ricocheting from the walls and off my shield. Shrieks sounded. I jumped back as something lashed out—a tentacle. It grazed my neck, suckers grasping for purchase, before recoiling back into the darkness behind the ruined staircase. The skin where it had touched me burned like fire.
My shield didn’t stop that thing, I thought in horror.
I backed from the shadowy creatures as they crawled from the ruins, their whispers turning to low hisses.
“Illuminare!” I called, channeling power through my coin pendant.
The coin glowed, limning the creatures in blue light. They slowed, eyes squinting away. The coin held an enchantment to ward off shadow creatures, but these shadows were from much farther down. The enchantment seemed to have a stalling effect, but it wasn’t stopping them.
Another tentacle lashed out. I grunted and brought my sword up in a parrying motion. The blade sliced harmlessly through the tentacle. The tip of the tentacle affixed to my chest, the contact like boiling acid. I screamed as I felt my soul lurch inside me, yanked toward the point of contact. I dug into my pockets, searching for … there!
I yanked out the glass vial Arianna had given me. Pulling the stopper free with my teeth, I splashed the creature with the clear liquid inside. The creature withdrew with a screaming hiss, its tentacle releasing me. I advanced on the two of them, splashing more liquid. Steam spewed from their forms.
“Go!” I commanded, my voice trembling from the pain in my chest. “Go back to your cursed realm.”
I splashed several more times. How much of this stuff would it take to banish them? The creatures had retreated, screaming, to the far corner of the cellar when I realized the vial was almost empty. Need to make tracks, I decided, easing back and recovering my sword.
The stairs were gone, but I could use a force invocation to launch myself like I’d done in the Refuge. I stood beneath the hole where the trap door had been, aimed my blade at the ground—and cried out as a tentacle whipped around my ankle. Fire enveloped my lower leg, and I could feel blood soaking into my sock.
A second tentacle seized my sword and wrenched it away. I heard it clatter off somewhere. Another tentacle wrapped around my staff. The light from the opal sputtered as the creature and I struggled for possession. Multiple pale eyes emerged from the shadows.
You’re not thinking, I chided myself through the pain. Don’t have to banish them … just have to close their portal.
My gaze shifted to Lazlo’s body. Burning it would shut the door on this end.
I plunged my free hand into another pocket and withdrew a vial of dragon sand. The tentacle around my ankle flexed. I landed prone with a grunt, out of range of Lazlo. Pain seared my stomach as a tentacle snaked underneath me. I could feel its suckers opening and closing.
Not suckers, I realized in horror. Mouths.
Each mouth had a ring of spiny teeth, and they were tearing at my soul, trying to suck it out. I imagined my body buried in toadstools, my soul trapped in a pit, in endless pain. Desperate not to meet my mentor’s fate, I clawed at the wooden floorboards.
I grunted as part of a fingernail tore off. The tentacles were winning. They flipped me onto my back and began dragging me toward the creatures’ gaping beaks. As I passed beneath the cellar doorway, rain spattered over my face. I squinted against it. In the fog of pain, it took me a moment to realize someone’s silhouette was framed in the doorway.
A deafening blast broke through the cellar. The creature holding me screamed. Its tentacles recoiled, releasing me. Another blast went off, but I was on hands and knees now, crawling toward Lazlo’s body. I reached him and shook a dose of dragon sand over him.
“Fuoco!” I shouted.
I reared back, forearms to my face, as searing flames billowed from his body. The creatures’ screams turned to piercing shrieks. I turned in time to see their shadow forms breaking apart as the fire from the dragon sand consumed Lazlo’s body, slamming closed the portal.
I recovered my sword and looked up. A thick rope now dangled through the cellar doorway. Sheathing my sword and sliding the cane through my belt, I seized the end of the rope.
“Got it,” I called.
In a jerky motion, I began to rise. After ten or so feet, I was able to reach up and grab the doorway frame. Grunting, I pulled myself through. Olga, who was larger than she had appeared in the truck was staring down at me, rain dripping from the bill of her newsboy hat.
“I heard screams. I thought you fell into ruins.”
“Thanks.” I gained my feet, the places where the tentacles had seized me still burning like a bitch. My soul didn’t feel quite right, either. Like it had been gashed and torn. As I whispered a healing incantation, Olga slung the rope in manly loops around an arm. My gaze moved to the shotgun she had leaned against a charred length of timber.
“What was in that?” I asked.
“Rock salt,” she answered.
I nodded. Sometimes the best deterrents against evil were the most basic.
When Olga finished gathering the rope, she stuck her arm through the coil, pushed it up to her shoulder, and grabbed her shotgun. In rubber boots similar to Lazlo’s, she marched from the ruins. I took a final look around, my eyes falling at last to the cellar, where Lazlo’s remains continued to flicker. Pain and rage stormed through me. Murdered.
But by whom? Lich or Marlow?
By the time I caught up to Olga, the rain was falling harder.
“Do you have place to stay?” she asked.
A pack of lean dogs ran up to the truck as we pulled into the yard in front of Olga’s house. They began barking when they saw Olga had brought company, but when she shouted several harsh words in Romanian, they stopped and sniffed tentatively toward my crotch as I got out.
“I really appreciate this,” I said.
“There is extra room,” she replied.
Though it had stopped raining, water dripped from my pack as I grabbed it from the back of the truck, shouldered it, and followed her toward the one-story farmhouse. She lived on the outskirts of Bacau, not far from the train station. More important than a spare bed, she had a working phone.
Blocking the dogs with her body, she opened the door for me and then followed me inside, closing the door to their whines and whimpers.
“My father,” Olga said, nodding into a living room where an older man in a stained T-shirt sat in a recliner in front of a television. When he squinted over at us, I raised a hand in greeting. He took a gulp from a mug and turned his face back to the glowing screen.
“Always drunk,” Olga explained, not bothering to lower her voice. “Give me pack. Phone is in kitchen.”
I did as she said and found the wall-mounted phone. Fortunately, it was a rotary dial, like my own. I pulled James’s number from my wallet along with a phone card. After a minute of dialing, the line began t
o ring.
“Yeah,” he answered.
“James, it’s Everson.”
“Dude,” he said over the scratchy line. “Holy shit.”
My heart thudded. “What’s going on?”
“Alright, so I drove up to the Catskills yesterday, and the house is toast.”
“Burned down?” I asked, already knowing.
“To the foundation. Neighbors said it happened a couple of years ago. They had no idea what ’came of Elsie. I went to the local police station and asked there, but they didn’t know anything either. Not what started the fire or wherever Elsie might have gone. Her body wasn’t found among the ruins. It’s like she just dropped off the map.”
I wondered if there was a clump of toadstools in Elsie’s shape somewhere on the property, Elsie’s soul in the pit with Lazlo.
“Did anyone talk about hauntings?” I asked.
“How did you know?”
“Just a hunch.”
“Yeah, police said that not long after the fire, a couple kids drove up there to neck in a convertible. Bodies were found the next morning, both of ’em strangled, necks black and blue. Something similar happened to a hiker.”
I rubbed the spot on my neck where the tentacle had lashed me.
“They never found the perp, so rumors about angry spirits started popping up,” he continued. “When I was walking around that place, something felt off to me, foul. Couldn’t nail it down, though.”
I could hear my blood swishing in my ears. Two high-level members of the Order slain in the last few years, houses burned to the ground, murderous creatures set loose. But still the same question: Lich or Marlow?
“What did you find in Romania?” James asked.
“Same thing,” I said hollowly. “Lazlo’s house was torched. His remains were in the cellar. Something used them as a portal to attack me, shadow creatures from Dhuul’s realm. Probably the same things that killed those kids in the Catskills.”
James was lucky they hadn’t attacked him.
“What in the hell are we dealing with?” he asked.
“Whisperer shit,” I said. “Nightmares from that realm are coming through. Right now the seams are few and far between, and the shadow creatures seem to be staying in proximity to the bodies, but if whoever’s behind it completes the portal, it’s going to get really ugly. ”
“And you still don’t know whether it’s the bluff or the double bluff?”
The liquid in Arianna's vial had repelled the creatures. But was that all part of the setup to engender my trust?
“I don’t,” I admitted.
“And nothing from the Order?”
“Not a peep.”
“Maybe that’s your answer,” he offered.
“Or maybe that’s just the Order being the Order.”
“So what do we do?” James asked. “Just wait around?”
“I’m going to make another call. I’ll find you when I get back to the States.”
“I can send an update to the Order,” he offered.
“Yeah, please do.” Though I wondered if there was any point.
We hung up and I dialed Detective Vega.
“Croft,” she said. “I’ve been trying to reach you all day.”
“I must be out of satellite range.” I checked the pager—no signal—and put it away again. “Were you able to take a look at those files?”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. For most of them, the names weren’t unique enough to be reliable identifiers. I couldn’t pull up anything on those. But on the ones that were unique, there’s nothing.”
“Nothing?” I said. “What do you mean nothing?”
“They’re not in the records databases. No addresses, phone numbers, voter registrations, utility bills, court records. There’s nothing, Croft. That’s what I’m telling you. It’s like they don’t exist.”
“They’re dead?”
“More like never born. Could this Chicory have, I don’t know, made them up?”
My lips pursed as I considered the question. I’d found my file, James’s file. His wasn’t made up … or was it? “Hey, did the department do a background check on James before you contracted him?”
“Hold on.” Through the buzzing line, a keyboard clacked. I awaited the verdict, my hand clenching the phone until it throbbed. After another few minutes, she said, “Yeah, he’s on here. And I just double-checked the public records. He’s legit.”
I relaxed my grip. “Good. But the others…?”
“Nothing,” she repeated.
I tried to think about it from two perspectives. In the Chicory as Lich case, he would have left the files out, knowing I would track down James—whom he had warned of my arrival in advance. The remaining files would be fakes, denying me access to the magic-using community. But in the Chicory as Chicory case, my mentor might have done the exact same thing, knowing that if I was captured by the Front, I’d be carrying Whisperer magic. Like someone infected with a virus, I would have to be quarantined, possibly even killed, so as not to infect other magic-users.
By winning over James, had I done just that?
“There’s no info on Chicory’s license plate either,” Vega said. “It’s a made-up number.”
That didn’t surprise me. Knowing Chicory, he’d probably enchanted it into inconspicuousness to avoid the hassle of registration. But did I know Chicory? I blew out my breath in frustration.
“Dare I ask how things are going?” Vega asked.
“Not good,” I said, looking around the kitchen. Simple folk charms adorned several shelves, and I noticed someone had lined the window sills with salt. “How about there? I mean, apart from the files.”
Vega gave a tired snort. “You’d think it’s a full moon. Crimes are up across the city.”
“Monsters?” I asked, thinking of the shadow beings.
“Nut cases,” she replied. “All the perps have psych issues of one kind or another, and we’re running out of places to stick them. The hospitals’ lockdown wards are at full capacity. There was a riot over at Bellevue last night. The patients went full zombie, biting anything in sight. Not even sleeping gas could subdue them. The police ended up having to shackle them.”
“Jeez,” I said, imagining the scene. I remembered what I’d told James about things getting uglier if the main portal to Dhuul were to open. Were we witnessing the beginning?
“You might want to stay put,” Vega said dryly.
“I’m actually flying back tomorrow morning. I’ll let you know if I learn anything else about the case. Right now, we’re still looking at Marlow or Chicory.”
“Are you leaning more toward one or the other?” Vega asked.
I thought about it for a moment. Either Connell and Arianna had told me the truth or they had screwed with my head so badly that I didn’t know which way was up. I wanted to tell Vega I was still leaning toward Marlow. Instead, I banged my forehead against the plaster wall twice.
“No,” I said.
17
That night I had horrible, disjointed dreams of death and decay.
Lazlo’s wolf-torn eye appeared from a mound of toadstools. I hurt, he repeated in a wet, whispering voice. I hurt, Everson. Shadowy tentacles lashed and grabbed me. I struggled to fight through them, to burn Lazlo’s remains and close the portal.
And then the scene changed to a locked psych ward. Patients with blood-smeared faces and limp robes moaned and shrieked on all sides. I looked around for my cane, but I didn’t have it. My coin pendant was gone from my chest. With insane eyes, the patients closed in. A stink of rot rose from them. I batted at their grasping hands, but there were too many of them.
Their eyes turned into fungus-filled sockets as they seized me and pulled me toward their gaping mouths. Mouths that became dark, fang-lined pits, plummeting to the very heart of madness.
I thrashed awake, blood roaring in my ears. I immediately sensed I wasn’t alone in the guest bedroom. I turned my head. A white T-shirt
with a swollen belly seemed to float in the center of the room. As my eyes adjusted, the rest of Olga’s father emerged from the gloom.
He groaned as he hefted an axe overhead.
“Vigore!” I shouted, swinging my cane toward him.
The force blast caught Olga’s father in the stomach and propelled him into the far wall. The axe fell, the blade burying itself in the middle of the wooden floor. Olga’s father began to sob. A moment later, footsteps ran down the hallway, and the bedroom light flicked on. I looked from Olga’s father to Olga, who stood in the doorway. I’d placed a locking spell over the door the night before, but it must have come apart during my nightmare.
Olga rushed to her father and helped him to his feet. “Come, Papa,” she said in scolding Romanian.
“Holy hell,” I breathed, sitting up on the side of the bed, my heart still galloping at full tilt.
Olga walked her sobbing father from the room, bits of plaster falling from the back of his head. There was a bowl-shaped indentation in the wall where he’d impacted. Olga returned a minute later.
“I am sorry,” she said. “The drinking has made him sick up here.” She tapped her temple as she pried the axe from the floor.
“You think?” I asked, my voice hard and shaky.
“I fix your breakfast then take you to train.”
I checked my watch and nodded. It wasn’t like I was going to fall back to sleep anyway.
Thirty minutes later I sat across from Olga, bowls of porridge in front of us. We ate in silence for several minutes.
“So how long has he been like that?” I asked softly, feeling bad for having raised my voice at her in the bedroom. From the back of the house, I could hear her father snoring deeply.
“He has been drinking long time,” she said. “But he turned sick a week ago.”
“What do you mean ‘turned sick’?”
“Getting up at night. Chasing dogs around yard. This was first time he carried axe.”
The Prof Croft Series: Books 0-4 (Prof Croft Box Sets Book 1) Page 88