“Yeah? Who you lookin’ for?”
“That man and woman I told you about. The ones we read about online last week.”
“Oh, yeah. That investigator guy and his buddy, the witch. Think he’s fucking her?”
“I wouldn’t presume to know, or care, my dear. But if the scrying should reveal any intimate details of their lives, I’ll be sure to share them with you.”
“Yeah, okay. Um, the guys and me were gonna take the van and check out some of the strip clubs downtown. That okay?”
“Fine – just don’t do anything stupid. If you get yourselves arrested – for any reason – you will cease to be of use to me. Understand?
She brought up her hands in a placating gesture. “Yeah, sure, don’t worry. We even got a designated driver – Jeremy. I promised to buy him a lap dance from some cunt in one of the clubs, if he just drinks coke all evening.”
“Very wise, I’m sure.”
“Yeah, well, you want anything before I go – a blowjob, or maybe a quick fuck? I could bend over that workbench thing there, if you want.”
“No thank you, my dear. You run along with the others and have a good time. But be back by sunrise, or I shall become quite vexed with you, understand?”
Elektra unconsciously took a step back. She knew what “vexed” could mean with this man. He sometimes scared her worse than her father ever had. “Sure, we’ll be back long before then – I promise.”
“All right then, I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Okay – see ya.”
He was glad the children, as he sometimes thought of them, were leaving for a while. Scrying took a great deal of concentration, and that required silence.
Ware filled the dark blue basin he’d bought at Target with water, within an inch of the brim. Then he dropped in small amounts of rosemary, belladonna, and earth from a baby’s grave that he had harvested himself the day before, being forced to use a blowtorch on the frozen ground.
He closed his eyes, gradually cleared his mind of extraneous thoughts, then addressed the one he thought of as his spirit guide.
O Lord Asmodeus, give me sight.
O Lord Asmodeus, give me vision.
Give me the power to see beyond these walls.
Give me power to see your enemies, who are also my enemies.
Let me see the dwelling places of your enemies, the man Quincey Harker Morris and the woman, Elizabeth Catherine Chastain. Let me know their whereabouts and their movements.
Then let me destroy them.
Ware slowly passed his left hand, palm down, over the water five times, then waited. Slowly, images began to appear on the surface of the water. Images of a city at night. Images that moved. He stared at what was being revealed to him, glancing occasionally at the photos he’d downloaded from the internet of a man with black hair and a heavy beard, and a woman with brown hair and eyes the color of arctic seas.
In a few minutes, he saw what he was looking for.
He had found them. And they were together.
Twenty-Six
IT WAS JUST after seven in the evening when Robert Sutorius opened his front door, already alerted by his security system about what he would find there. Morris and Chastain had brought another woman with them this time – a woman, he had to admit, of amazing beauty.
But he still managed a dour tone as he said, “Back again so soon? I must say I’m surprised.”
“You said you’d be willing to discuss a straight business proposition – an assignment involving the work you specialize in. Well, we’ve got one – or more precisely, this lady has.”
Morris turned to the beautiful blonde. “Ashley Stone, let me present Robert Sutorius, the man I told you about.”
Sutorius said, “How do you do?” then, with difficulty tore his eyes away from the woman and looked at Morris. “If this lady has business with me, then what are you two doing here?”
“Two reasons,” Morris said. “One is, you said you don’t usually see people without an appointment, and there’s a time factor involved with this assignment. Ashley needed to see you today.”
“The other reason,” Libby Chastain said, “is that the three of us are partners in this new enterprise. The partnership was our compensation for introducing our new friend here to the best – maybe the only – occult burglar in the world.”
Sutorius pursed his lips and tried to keep his eyes focused on Chastain. Although she wasn’t bad looking, next to the other woman, she was a hag. But if Sutorius tried to address the other woman, he found his concentration slipping in favor of the kind of erotic fantasies he hadn’t entertained since his teens. So he said to Chastain, “Well, the scanner shows that none of you are carrying a weapon – I see you’ve even left your little knife behind today, Morris. And since magic is worthless in here... you may as well come in.”
He stepped back and allowed them entrance. “You can leave your coats on that sofa there,” he said. “We’ll talk in my office.”
Through the hobbit door they all went, and soon were seated around the elaborately carved coffee table.
Sutorius looked at Ashley and said, “So, Ms., er, Stone – how can I put my talents and experience to work for you?”
“Before we get to that, Mr. Sutorius, I need to explain something,” Ashley said. “The fact is, I’ve come a very long way to see you.”
“Oh? You don’t live in New York?” Even though the blonde had not said anything remotely sexual, Sutorius found himself growing an erection of such engorgement that he hoped it would not show through his trousers and embarrass him.
“I do now,” Ashley said. “But until recently, I lived far away from here, and I stayed there for a very long time. The place has different names, depending on what religious tradition you follow – Hades, Eblis, Gehenna, or just plain Hell – you know, the neighborhood where the worn dieth not, and the fire is not quenched. That last bit is from Mark, 9:48, by the way.” She gave him a brilliant smile. “See? Shakespeare was right – we can quote Scripture to our own purposes.”
Sutorius’s befuddlement might have been comical, under other circumstances. He blinked five or six times, leaned forward, and said, “Excuse me? What on earth are you talking about?”
“I’m not talking about anything on Earth, silly man. That’s my point. But perhaps it will be simpler just to show you what I really look like.”
Morris and Chastain had unobtrusively turned their heads away, and now they closed their eyes. Both of them had seen Ashley in her natural, demonic state, and, to a certain extent, were hardened to the sight. But that did not mean they enjoyed it.
And the key feature of what was about to happen is that it did not involve magic. Although Ashley could work black magic with the best (or worst) of them, what she was doing now involved no spells, charms, or incantations. She was simply showing what she really was.
Ashley let Sutorius look upon her true form for exactly two seconds, a time period that was carefully calibrated. Too long an exposure – say, five seconds or more – could drive the average human incurably insane. Neither Morris nor Chastain would sanction that – and, besides, Sutorius could not tell them what they wanted to know if his mind were gone.
The similarity of real demons to the Elder Gods of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos were not lost on Ashley. She had once told Libby, “I never ran into Lovecraft in Hell. From what I’ve read about him, he’s certainly there – but it’s a huge place, and not terribly well organized. I’ve always wanted to ask him if he got a glimpse of one of us before he started writing about Azathoth, Cthulhu, and all those guys – not to mention the effect they usually have, in his stories, on the humans who get a look at them.”
In the case of Robert Sutorius, a two-second sight of Ashur Badaktu in all her glory (if that’s what it was) was enough to send him to the floor on his knees, hands pressed tightly over his eyes, sobbing uncontrollably. Soon thereafter he vomited, although he apparently hadn’t eaten a big breakfast, for which Mor
ris and Chastain were thankful.
After a while, the sobbing abated, but Sutorius remained on his knees, eyes still covered tightly, rocking back and forth and whimpering. Morris stood up, went over to the stricken man, and felt under his coat for the pistol that Sutorius had displayed the other day. He found it, slipped the gun into his jacket pocket, then said to Libby, “Give me a hand, would you?”
Libby approached Sutorius from the other side. She and Morris each grabbed an arm and, at Morris’s signal, lifted the man back into his chair. Libby sat down again, while Morris, as they’d agreed, prepared to play the heavy. He reminded himself of the stakes that could be riding on the recovery of the Corpus Hermeticum. Then he took a deep breath, yanked Sutorius’s hands away and slapped him across the face, hard. Then he slapped him again, equally as hard, with the other hand.
“I want your attention,” Morris told him. He leaned forward until his face was a few inches from Sutorius’s own. “Do I have your complete attention?”
“Yes, yes, all right!” Sutorius cried. “What do you want?”
“What I want,” Morris said, “is for you to understand the situation you find yourself in. That lady over there–” He pointed at Ashley, who was watching the proceedings with great interest “–isn’t a lady at all. She’s not even human. She’s a demon, the real deal. I don’t really need to explain to you what that means, do I – a guy who does the kind of work you do?”
“No, of course not,” Sutorius croaked. “I’ve just never seen one before. And I didn’t know they could... take human form like that.”
“There’s probably lots of things you don’t know about demons,” Morris said. “But here’s something you’d better understand, if you haven’t already – demons have no conscience, no scruple, no pity. None. And here’s something else to keep in mind, too – they enjoy human suffering. Do you understand?”
“Yes, I know, all the books say the same thing. I understand. Why are you doing this?”
“Because I want you to understand your options, and you’ve only got two of ’em, podner. We’ve got a few very specific questions for you, about a job you did recently. Option one–” Morris held a single finger in front of Sutorius’s face. “You answer our questions, truthfully, fully, and accurately. Then we’ll leave, and you’ll never see any of us again. You can take a nap, call a priest, get drunk, do whatever you want. It’ll be over.”
Morris held up a second finger. “Option two: we’ll tie you securely to that chair, then Libby and I will go for a long walk – leaving you here, alone and helpless, with a demon. We’ll be gone about an hour, but it’ll seem like a lifetime to you. Then, when we get back, I’ll ask my questions again, and you can decide whether you feel like answering. Hell, you’ll probably beg me to let you answer.”
Morris straightened up and turned to Ashley. “You remember what you promised, if we leave him with you?”
“Certainly,” Ashley said. “There has to be enough of him left to answer questions. That means I can’t take his tongue, or inflict too much brain damage. And I have to leave most of his teeth intact.” She might have been at a garden club meeting, discussing the best way to transplant begonias.
Morris turned back to Sutorius. “You understand? That means everything else – every other part of your body – is fair game. She can do whatever she wants.”
Sutorius tried to speak. “Listen, I–”
“I’m not quite finished,” Morris told him. “Let’s say you’re a real tough guy, and even after everything Ashley’s gonna do to you, you still won’t talk. Well, then we’ll just have to give up on you. But before we leave, we’ll give you another nice, long look at this demon in her true form.”
“They sometimes try to close their eyes,” Ashley said. “But slicing off the eyelids takes care of that nicely. I’m sure we can find a razorblade, or a nice sharp paring knife, around here someplace.”
“Please...” Sutorius had started to cry again. “Please, don’t let her touch me. I’ll tell you anything you want to know – anything. Just keep her the hell away from me!”
Twenty-Seven
IT TAKES A long time, even for a skilled practitioner, to conjure lightning. It was especially onerous for a wizard to arrange for lightning to strike somewhere far away, a destination visible only through a scrying spell. But it can be done, and Ware knew how to do it.
It was good – for their sakes, as well as his – that Ware’s young associates were gone for the evening. If one of them had interrupted him once he was deep in the spell to cast lightning on the interfering Morris and Chastain, Ware would probably have killed him – or her.
Actually, Morris and Chastain hadn’t interfered with any of his plans – yet. But if they’d been set on his trail by the FBI, it was only a matter of time before they became a nuisance. After all, he knew their reputation. One black magic practitioner whom he’d recently asked about the pair had said that together they seemed to constitute a “magical monkey wrench.” They seemed to have a knack for getting in the middle of one’s painstaking plans and somehow disrupting them. Well, they weren’t going to interfere with Ware’s plan – the stakes were too high, and he had already sacrificed too much.
He kept track of his targets this evening as they traveled by taxi from Chastain’s condo in Manhattan to a large, square house in Brooklyn, a place whose exterior and surroundings were well lit by the nearby streetlights. Ware could see everything clearly.
A third person had joined Morris and Chastain on the sidewalk in front of the house – a rather striking blonde woman. She had accompanied the meddlers inside the house, which meant she was about to become what the military likes to call “collateral damage.” The armed forces of several nations used that term, or one like it, because phrases like “a bunch of women and children blown to pieces by a bomb that missed its target” tended to upset the civilians back home.
The trio was still inside the house when Ware finally had his lightning prepared. All well and good – he would strike the roof with a bolt, almost certainly setting the whole place on fire. If Morris and Chastain tried to escape the blazing building, he had ready a second blast of lightning. He would burn them to cinders once they were outside.
Meteorologists throughout the New York City metro area were amazed to see a single storm cloud appear from nowhere to show up on their weather radar screens in the middle of a cold, clear night. Not only did such clouds rarely appear in winter, but they were almost always seen as part of a larger system, not a solitary soldier like the one hovering over the city. And such storm systems usually came together over bodies of water and worked their way inland, which meant their progress could be tracked via radar. An intense bundle of moisture didn’t just form spontaneously. Except, like magic, one had just done exactly that.
The weather watchers were further amazed when the renegade storm cloud let loose two bolts of lightning right into the middle of Brooklyn.
In his basement workroom far away, Ware took a deep breath, pointed at the scrying pool where the image of the house could be clearly seen, and screamed out a word of power. His efforts were immediately rewarded, as a bolt of lightning struck the Brooklyn house containing his enemies and did – nothing.
Ware stared at the scrying pool. He had seen the bolt of electricity, probably containing a billion or more volts of energy, hit the roof of the house – with no result whatsoever. By all rights, the place should be ablaze by now.
Well, whatever anomaly had caused the lightning to misfire, it could not possibly happen twice. Ware focused his concentration like an argon laser. Pointing again at the house’s image, he repeated the word of power, screeching it even louder this time.
Once again, his magic was successful. He saw the long, crackling to volt hit the house squarely. And nothing happened. It was as if the place was somehow immune to magic – and Ware knew that was impossible. He stared at the image of the undamaged dwelling for a few more seconds. Then, with a scream very differ
ent from the one he’d used to activate the lightning, he swept his arm across the table, sending the bowl crashing to the basement floor, where it smashed into a zillion little pieces, splashing water everywhere. What had just happened violated everything Ware knew about magic – and yet it had happened.
He stood there for ten minutes, spewing foul obscenities without once repeating himself. Then he stopped, went to the nearby sink, and splashed cold water on his face. He grabbed a towel, dried off, and went upstairs. He needed a drink, probably several. And he also needed to decide how best to deal with the extremely lucky Quincey Morris and Libby Chastain.
Nobody’s luck lasts forever, he thought, and theirs is about to run out.
Jeremy Bliss was up relatively early the next morning, since he hadn’t had a hangover to sleep off. He came into the living room to find Ware staring into the fire he had built in the small fireplace. Jeremy came in quietly, wanting to gauge Ware’s mood before saying anything – the black magician, to whom he’d given his allegiance, was sometimes grouchy first thing.
But this was apparently not such a morning. Catching movement from the corner of his eye, Ware looked up, saw who it was, and went back to staring into the fire.
“Good Morning, Jeremy,” he said absently. “Did you all have a nice debauch last night?”
“Yeah, I guess.” True to her word, Elektra had bought him a lap dance at one of the strip bars they’d cruised last night. But the bleach blonde with sagging fake tits, who called herself Destiny, apparently was not in the habit of showering between shows. Her body odor had squashed Jeremy’s libido like a bug. Instead of hoping to get off from the way she was rubbing her ample ass against his crotch, he had been relieved when the two-song set was finished. The tip Jeremy had given the dancer had reflected the amount of fun he’d had – in other words, not much.
“What’d you do last night?” Jeremy asked. “Anything interesting?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact. I tried to solve a problem that’s been bothering me, but I couldn’t get my solution to work satisfactorily.”
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