by Kami Garcia
Now X knew he was dealing with a monster.
Earl Roy would be holed up in the basement. When X tried the door, it was locked from the inside. He had two choices—break it down and protect Fox Mulder, the directive from Cigarette Smoking Man, or follow organization protocol and protect his identity. He knew which option his boss would expect him to make.
But how could he leave the kid?
X took a deep breath and thought about the boy trapped downstairs with a monster. Then he thought about another kid—a boy who stood in the corner for hours until he dropped from exhaustion, while his father got piss-drunk and berated him. A boy who put himself through college and joined the organization. There were sacrifices he wasn’t willing to make.
X made his choice.
He walked into the kitchen and found an ancient black rotary phone. He dialed the number everyone knew by heart.
Then he turned around and walked out the back door.
CHAPTER 21
Earl Roy’s Residence
9:59 P.M.
“Law chooses the sinners.” The voice sounded loud and faraway at the same time.
Mulder’s head felt heavy.
Was he dreaming?
No. That wasn’t right.…
Mulder sucked in a deep breath. What was that smell? Perfume? Flowers? He tried to stretch, but he couldn’t move his arms.
Something was wrong.
Another sound permeated the fog clouding his thoughts—a warbling chatter. “Sing for me, and I’ll give you more steak,” said a man with a gravelly voice. It was the same voice Mulder had just heard. He forced his eyes open and immediately regretted it. The soft light in the room blinded him, as if he were staring at the sun. Mulder tried to shield his eyes, but he couldn’t bring his arms up in front of him. It took a second for it to register that his wrists were bound behind his back, and he was staring at thin metal bars.
Then he remembered—walking through Earl Roy’s house and turning on the light, Phoebe and Gimble coming toward him, feeling an arm around his throat, and Billy Christian’s face behind broken glass.
Mulder was in some kind of a metal cage. If he slouched, he could sit up without bumping his head. He bent down to read a ripped silver sticker near the bottom of the cage: HAPPY DOG HOUSES.
He was in a dog kennel.
Realization set in—along with panic. The man who had choked him out and locked him in there had already murdered one child and kidnapped another. What would he do to Mulder, an intruder who’d broken into his house?
Kill me.
He couldn’t afford to think that way. Gimble and Phoebe must have seen Earl Roy grab him, so the police were probably already on their way.
I’m going to make it out of here, and Sarah will, too.
Mulder surveyed his surroundings. The combination of the rough stone walls and thick pillar candles bathing the room in yellow light, the place looked like a cross between a medieval castle and the headquarters of a secret society.
The chaos symbol, or the Symbol of Eight as the Illuminates called it, was hand-painted on the wall in black paint that had dripped in places, leaving long streaks running down to the floor. The opposite wall was covered with writing and a single arrow pointing straight up, and white rose petals littered the smooth stone floor.
Across the room, a fancy gilded birdcage hung from the ceiling with a black-and-white bird inside that alternated between chattering and the warbling call he’d heard a minute ago. It looked exactly like the magpie Mulder had seen lying on Billy Christian’s chest in the cemetery.
Earl Roy was nowhere in sight.
Muffled sounds echoed from the other side of the wall—footsteps, a bell ringing, scraping, and the same gravelly voice, muttering and singing. Mulder maneuvered back down onto his side to make it appear as if he were still unconscious. The angle allowed him to peek up from the bottom of the cage and keep watch.
A broad-shouldered man backed into the room, dragging something. The soles of his heavy work boots thudded against the stone floor, each step slow and deliberate. The top half of his blue coveralls hung around his waist, and the back of his white undershirt was stained with sweat. He was holding the top of a fancy gold chair like the ones upstairs, tilting it back carefully as he pulled it into the room.
Earl Roy had something white all over his arms and hands. It wasn’t chalky like baby powder. It looked more like house paint. But the man had his back to Mulder, so he couldn’t see much without sitting up. The magpie chattered, and Earl Roy lowered the front legs of the chair and left it facing the wall.
He turned and pointed at the cage. “Don’t test me.”
Mulder saw Earl Roy’s face and froze. A pair of blue eyes stared out from a mask of white that covered every inch of the man’s face and blended into his hairline and down his neck in sloppy strokes. The opaque color and greasy texture reminded Mulder of the makeup clowns and mimes used to paint their faces.
Or the cover of Stormbringer.
An albino warrior.
Earl Roy had transformed himself into the image of the Eternal Champion, Elric from the book. The effect erased the killer’s features, except for the panicked blue eyes darting around the room.
“Four more days,” Earl Roy said to himself, using the hushed tone of someone keeping a secret—or trying to talk himself out of doing something rash. “You can wait four more days to destroy the demon. You’ve done it before.”
Four more days.
He was talking about day eight, when he killed the kids.
Mulder’s logical side told him to stay quiet and hope that Earl Roy left the room long enough for Mulder to work his hands free. But logic almost never won out with him. He acted on instinct. Right now, his gut was telling him to get as much information about Earl Roy as possible.
Initiating a conversation with an unstable man seemed risky, but he wasn’t about to sit in a dog kennel and do nothing.
“What happens in four days?” Mulder asked, his voice not much louder than a whisper.
“The cycle will begin again.” Earl Roy didn’t look at him, but at least he didn’t seem irritated that Mulder had spoken to him.
Mulder scooted to the side of the cage that was closer to Earl Roy, and he saw something dangling from the seat of the chair.
Two small feet.
“Leave me alone. It’s not your decision,” Earl Roy said, facing the birdcage and the back of the chair. Was he talking to the bird again? He turned the chair around, leaving streaks of white greasepaint on the blue velvet.
Sarah Lowe was propped up in the gold chair, her small body nestled against velvet. She was dressed in a white gown, with her blond hair neatly brushed and a garland of white roses draped over her shoulders like a mantle. The top of the chair was decorated with silver Christmas tinsel and cheap gift-wrap bows like a makeshift throne. Strips of fabric were wrapped around her chest and wrists and tied in loopy bows, securing her to the chair.
The child’s eyes were shut, but Mulder saw her shoulders quiver as if she was having a bad dream. She looked drugged, most likely with a sedative like the one listed on Billy Christian’s autopsy report.
“The vessel is making an honorable sacrifice. You want a gift?” Earl Roy stood in front of Sarah, looking disgusted. “In four days, I’ll give you the gift you deserve.”
What the hell is going on?
Earl Roy stormed out of the room. Mulder heard the bell again and more shuffling. He caught a glimpse of something pink near the doorway.
No …
Mulder tasted bile in the back of his throat. Earl Roy was pushing a child-sized pink bicycle with rainbow-colored streamers and a shiny gold bell. Mulder’s mind flashed back to the scrap pile of bikes behind the house. Had those been “gifts” for other children once?
“Here it is,” Earl Roy said proudly as he presented the bike to the drugged child.
Play along. Get him talking again.
Mulder cleared his throat. “That’s
a really nice bike,” he said, fighting to stay calm. “Are you going to let her ride it?”
“I never had a bike.” The killer turned toward Mulder, but he didn’t make eye contact. “My father said bikes were expensive. Special things for special people.” He wandered over to the pink bicycle and rang the gold bell. “He said I wasn’t special enough to have one.” His painted white lips formed a hard line, and he shook his head. “Me. The only human who can see the sword.”
Mulder had Earl Roy talking. But now that he did, how was he supposed to respond? He needed the Major to translate.
“If you let the drugs wear off, Sarah can ride the bike when she wakes up,” Mulder said. “You didn’t give her anything that will hurt her, did you?”
Earl Roy gestured at the little girl, confused by the question. “Stormbringer doesn’t need protection.”
Why is he calling her Stormbringer?
In the books, Stormbringer was a demon that took the form of a sword—not a child.
Was Earl Roy hallucinating? He was definitely delusional. But he believed every word he was saying.
And there is power in belief.
“But the little girl in that chair isn’t a sword,” Mulder said.
The killer approached the cage, his white face inches from the thin metal bars. He curled his fingers around them. “You can’t see the blade glowing inside her. I’m the only one who can, because I am special.” He peeked over his shoulder again, as if he thought Sarah—or in his mind, the demon-sword, Stormbringer—was eavesdropping on their conversation. “In this world, the children are the vessels. That’s how Stormbringer torments me. It knows I don’t want to hurt innocents.”
Mulder thought about the end of the novel. The demon-sword turned on the Eternal Champion and killed him. Was Earl Roy afraid the same thing would happen to him?
“Is that the reason you kill the kids?” he asked. “To keep Stormbringer from hurting you?”
“The demon won’t hurt me. I feed it souls. It’s the Eternal Champion it wants.” Earl Roy wasn’t making sense.
Wasn’t he supposed to be the Eternal Champion?
But Earl Roy kept talking about the Eternal Champion like he was another person. Was the Champion a hallucination, like the glowing swords he saw inside the children? Or a voice in his head?
The magpie chattered, and Earl Roy glared at Sarah. “Don’t whisper your lies to the bird. It obeys the Eternal Champion, and it will transport the child’s soul to the next life, where it can find peace.” The lunatic was getting more agitated by the second. “Then I will bury the vessel’s body in a place of honor.”
Earl Roy pounded his fists against his temples—over and over. “Stay out of my head, Stormbringer, or I’ll sing the song. ‘As Chaos lays me down to sleep, I beg the Law my soul to keep.…’”
“Is that why you killed the adults? The ‘sinners’ whose bones you took? Like the slumlord and the psychiatrist? Did you kill them so you could feed Stormbringer their souls? I would understand if you did,” Mulder lied. “The demon told you to do it, right? And they were bad people anyway.”
“True. But that’s not my job, and I could never do it anyway.”
“Then who killed them?” Mulder asked.
“Law chooses the sinners.” Earl Roy tilted his head and gave Mulder a curious look. “The next person he picks could be anyone. Even you.”
Mulder pictured the Major’s map. He kept coming back to the distance between this house and the locations where the adult murder victims were discovered. Some of the crime scene locations, like the waterfront in DC, were a trek. Would a serial killer leave the kids alone for that long?
Mulder’s gut feeling kicked in, and he realized there was another possibility.…
Maybe we’ve had this all wrong.
He searched the killer’s empty eyes. “Are you the Eternal Champion?”
Earl Roy shook his head. “No.”
“But you kept talking about the Eternal Champion … and you have Stormbringer, his sword.” Mulder sounded crazy, but he couldn’t stop himself. “What about your skin? You painted it white like Elric’s. Why would you do that if you’re not the Eternal Champion?”
“Because I’m his protector.”
CHAPTER 22
Earl Roy’s Residence
10:27 P.M.
Mulder remembered that detail from the novel. “Right. The Eternal Champion always has a companion—a protector.”
“It’s my job to destroy Stormbringer before the demon becomes too powerful to control. The sword can’t be trusted. It will betray the Eternal Champion and kill him. But I figured out how to change the story.”
“How?” Mulder coaxed.
“The Eternal Champion never wields Stormbringer. The sword and the vessel stay with me.” Earl Roy dragged a hand over his face, smearing white paint down his cheek. “Until midnight on the eighth day, when I destroy it. But Stormbringer always comes back. It finds another vessel, and the Eternal Champion makes me retrieve it.”
“In the books, the Eternal Champion gets power from Stormbringer in exchange for feeding the sword souls,” Mulder pointed out. “If Stormbringer stays with you, then how does the Eternal Champion get the power he needs to restore the balance between Chaos and Law?”
“The Eternal Champion gives me the bones of the sinners, and I deliver them to Stormbringer.”
“But that’s not how it works in the books,” Mulder argued. “You can’t just rewrite the story. It’s already been written.”
“Shut up!” Earl Roy whipped around as if someone had called his name, rage flashing in his eyes. “You don’t know anything about the way things work. You shouldn’t even be here. Whatever happens isn’t my fault.” He walked over to the creepy throne and stopped in front of Sarah. He nodded as if she were speaking to him. “If I do it, you have to leave me alone. Just for a little while,” Earl Roy pleaded.
Mulder’s stomach bottomed out. A deranged serial killer was bargaining with the psychotic voice in his head, and from what Mulder could tell, his soul was the bargaining chip.
Earl Roy slid on a pair of yellow rubber gloves and picked up a wide paintbrush like the kind Mulder’s mom used to paint their kitchen, and a glass container. He opened the container carefully and scooped out a brush full of brownish green pulp.
Aconite. The poison that killed Billy Christian.
Earl Roy must have mashed up the leaves.
“‘As Chaos lays me down to sleep, I beg the Law my soul to keep.…’”
“What are you doing?” Mulder squeezed himself into the back corner of the cage and desperately felt around for a rough piece of metal he could saw the ropes against. Logic told him he’d never have time to cut through even an inch, but it was a Hail Mary.
“It’s not my fault,” Earl Roy said as he walked toward the cage. “Stormbringer wants a soul. You weren’t supposed to be here.”
Mulder looked over at the little girl as he worked the ropes against the cage. He had failed again. Maybe Phoebe and Gimble would make it back here in time to save her.
Earl Roy bent down in front of the cage and unlocked it with one hand, holding the paintbrush in his other hand.
This is it.
If Mulder was going to die tonight, he wanted to die with an answer to the question that had never stopped haunting him.
“Did Samantha Mulder sacrifice herself, too? November 27, 1973. Chilmark, Massachusetts, 2790 Vine Street. Did you kidnap her?” he shouted.
“‘When in the dark of night I wake, show me the soul that I must take.’” Earl Roy reached inside the cage.
Mulder kicked, but the killer grabbed his leg and dragged him out on his back. Mulder’s hand scraped against a piece of rough metal, and his head hit the lip of the cage, then slammed against the stone floor.
Earl Roy froze and pointed a shaky finger at Mulder. “What’s on your hand?”
Is he talking to me?
“Is that…?” Earl Roy’s eyes went wild
. He let go of Mulder’s leg and scrambled backward, gagging and dry-heaving. Tossing the paintbrush aside, he struggled to peel off the yellow gloves. His eyes darted to the floor next to Mulder, and he gagged again, shielding his eyes with his arm.
Mulder looked around.
A red streak of blood was smeared on the floor.
He sat up and twisted so he could see his hands. One of them was bleeding. He must have cut it on the cage, but it was no big deal. At least not to him.
But Earl Roy was acting like Mulder had severed a limb. “Don’t look,” he tried to comfort himself.
Mulder turned so his bloody palm was facing Earl Roy. “At my hand? It will stop bleeding. I hope,” he added, using the kidnapper’s phobia against him.
“Clean it up. All of it.” Earl Roy kept his face shielded.
“I don’t know if I can,” Mulder said. “There’s sooo much blood.”
Earl Roy made the mistake of moving his arm and caught sight of the blood. He gagged again, and this time he puked down the front of his undershirt.
The truth hit Mulder so hard that he felt sick, too.
The killer who had mutilated the bodies of his adult victims to remove their bones wouldn’t throw up at the sight of blood.
The man cowering in front of him wasn’t capable of executing either of those tasks.
Which means there’s a second killer. The real Eternal Champion.
Earl Roy wiped his mouth on his sleeve and staggered out of the room. Mulder got on his knees and crawled toward the pair of yellow rubber gloves on the floor. He wanted to get to the paintbrush, but with his hands bound, he probably couldn’t slip the gloves on to pick it up. He still had to try. Even if he couldn’t stop Earl Roy, slowing the guy down was the next best thing.
But Mulder didn’t get anywhere near the gloves or the paintbrush, because Earl Roy returned a minute later carrying a heavy moving blanket and a stack of rags. He had something else in his other hand, but Mulder couldn’t see it.
Earl Roy opened one eye just enough to determine Mulder’s location and tossed the rags at him. “Clean it up now!” he roared. “All of it!”