“It happens,” Jessie told me. “This isn’t the movies. Lot of times the bad guy gets away, or at least he doesn’t get what he deserves. All we can do is try our best.”
I slid the key into the ignition. The Crown Vic’s engine fired up with a sickly rattle.
“I was hunting this perp in Vegas,” I told her as I backed the car up. “Daniel Faust. Sorcerer, mobster, all-around nasty piece of work. Typical sociopath occultist. Dime a dozen, right?”
“I’ve put a few down myself,” Jessie said.
I shifted the car into drive and steered out of the parking lot. Cold air billowed in through the broken window, stroking the side of my face with icy fingers.
“This was . . . different, though. Something about him just got under my skin. He was this force of raw chaos. Wherever he went, people died, things broke down, systems broke down. I realized, at the end, that’s what he was to me. A symbol. My order against his chaos. Taking him down should have been proof that order is better. That our way is better. I built it up in my head as this epic showdown. Guns at high noon.”
“And was it?”
I shook my head. “Not even close. In the end? He got handed to me on a silver platter, and I’m pretty damn sure it was a frame job. It was just . . . wrong.”
“But you did take him down, right? One more psycho with magic powers off the street is a pretty good deal for everybody.”
“That’s what Linder says. I don’t know. It just wasn’t what I wanted.”
Jessie smiled. “Since when does anybody in this life get what they want? You fight your hardest, you make sure you can look at yourself in the mirror every morning, and you take whatever scraps of happiness come your way. That’s my philosophy, anyhow.”
We drove for a while. I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel, trying to jam together two corner pieces of the same jigsaw puzzle and wondering why they wouldn’t fit.
“It’s not Mitchum Kite,” I said.
“What isn’t?”
“He’s the most obvious suspect, right? Back in the ’80s, his father was behind the Bogeyman case. He inherited Jeremiah’s money, power, and even his political office—why not inherit his magic, too?”
“Sure,” Jessie said, “it scans.”
“But it doesn’t. Fontaine’s in town because of the new abductions. He made it sound like he’s after whoever is controlling the Bogeyman. He also said Nyx is hunting the same target.”
Jessie nodded slowly. “Mitchum is either controlling Nyx or controlling the Bogeyman. He can’t be Nyx’s boss and her target.”
“Bingo. And I think we can agree, given the evidence, that he sent Nyx to kill us. So he’s not our perp.”
“I’m still kicking his ass,” Jessie said.
“Well, that’s a given. He’s just not the end of our hit list. So at some point, the secret to conjuring the Bogeyman slipped away from the Kite family. You know what else is bugging me? Revenge. Or the lack thereof.”
“Oh, what Barry said, about your dad being the only victim who crossed the Kites?”
“For starters,” I said. “Jeremiah was a pretty bad guy, right? But Barry mentioned that he used mob ties to get things done, like sending thugs after those union organizers. Now, if you had control over an undetectable, unstoppable monster . . . wouldn’t you use it all the time? Why risk going down with some loose-lipped mobster when you can cast a spell instead?”
“So payback isn’t the motive. What does that leave us?”
We coasted down a long forest road, across a blanket of fallen autumn leaves.
“Nowhere,” I said. “Leaves us nowhere. But I have a feeling Mitchum Kite will have some answers for us.”
We had a few hours to kill, so we headed back to the Talbot Motor Lodge to bring April and Kevin up to speed.
“An incarnate,” Kevin said. “An actual freaking incarnate, and you fought it. Badass.”
Jessie sat cross-legged on one of the queen beds. “We didn’t fight it so much as ran like hell, but I got a few shots in.”
“Yeah,” I said, pacing the room, “my eardrums have finally stopped ringing. Thanks for that. I think you pissed her off.”
“I hope so. It’s important to make a good first impression. And you’d better have some fine tricks up your sleeve, because Mitchum’s not gonna be at the paper mill alone.”
“I’m working on that.”
I didn’t want to say I wasn’t up to the challenge . . . but as far as I knew, I just wasn’t up to the challenge. I can hold my own in a duel against another magician, and I’ve cast out my fair share of demonic hijackers, but a monster from hell that can take two bullets to the face and keep on coming? I wasn’t ashamed to feel outclassed. Who wouldn’t feel outclassed against something like that?
Twice in my career, I’d faced an incarnate and lived to talk about it. That said, I’d survived by running away as fast as my wheels could take me.
This time, running wasn’t an option.
The speakers of Kevin’s laptop let out a faint ping. He swiveled in his chair, taking a look.
“Cool,” he said. “One of my contacts is running a search on that Cold Spectrum thing Douglas Bredford mentioned. I’ll let you know if he digs anything up.”
“Complete waste of time,” Jessie said. “Bredford’s a sad, old drunk telling sad, old drunk stories. Stay focused on this case, okay?”
April sat at the table by the window. Both wicker balls were sitting side by side next to a stack of reference books and a paper cup of coffee. “I’ve been studying the summoning tokens. I am . . . uncomfortable with the implications.”
“I hate it when you use that word,” Jessie said. “Your feeling uncomfortable usually means we’re about to be hip-deep in corpses.”
“These glyphs carved into the wicker strips? They’re Sumerian, circa the fourth millennium BCE. Mathematical symbols.”
“Ancient math?” Jessie said. “You’re about to make my head hurt, aren’t you?”
Kevin grinned. “The Sumerians practically invented math. Well, them and the Egyptians. Instead of a base-ten system like ours, theirs was base sixty. They invented quadratic equations, too.”
“Yep.” Jessie grimaced and pinched the bridge of her nose. “I knew it. Pain. Incoming.”
April ran one finger along the face of a ball, tracing the elaborately woven wicker strip. “The curves seem to correspond to the equation written upon them. It all feeds together. And the two balls do not match. They share commonalities, but the mathematics are starkly different, and the weave isn’t the same, either.”
“But they both tell the Bogeyman where to take his next victim,” I said.
“Hence my uncomfortable theory. I’ve seen work like this before, generally connected to ancient necromancy. The idea of ferrying spirits to, and from, the lands of the dead.”
“The Bogeyman’s undead?” Jessie asked.
“No. No, it’s not exactly the same. More to the point, this symbolism is tied to spells of travel. To the idea of forcibly sundering barriers between space and time. We’ve been going under the assumption that the Bogeyman makes its lair somewhere close to Talbot Cove, perhaps a cave or a clump of thick forest nearby.”
I nodded. “That’s right.”
“We need to consider,” April said, “that the Bogeyman’s lair may not be on Earth at all.”
Jessie whistled. “Because we needed more complications.”
“It’s geographical,” I said, snapping my fingers. “The math is different because the places they were put is different. The balls aren’t made to target the victims—they’re made to target the houses. Like a landing beacon for an airplane.”
“My thought exactly,” April said. “It doesn’t bring us any closer to finding their creator, but the knowledge could prove useful.”
I checked my watch. “While we’re out, can you two dig up anything you can find on Mitchum Kite’s background? We need to get going.”
“Got a few hours
yet,” Jessie said.
“We have to stop at the grocery store on the way, to pick up a few things. I’ve got an idea.”
TWENTY-FOUR
They’d built the route to the paper mill wide, to accommodate logging trucks, but years of disuse had seen the forest slowly creep back to reclaim its own. We rumbled along the desolate road with nothing but the wind and distant birdsong to keep us company.
Then the birdsong stopped.
As we rounded a bend and hugged the shoreline, barely ten yards from a beach of dirty sand and jagged rock, the old mill rose up before us. The great waterwheel still stood on one side of the cavernous factory, chained fast against the currents and broken down under the powers of time and tide.
Given enough time, my mother once told me, as we sat cross-legged on the rocky shore behind her house, a trickle of water can carve the Grand Canyon. Fire burns fast, and dies just as quickly. Given enough time, water always wins.
The parking lot stood cracked and broken, the white lines faded to ghostly blotches of paint. I pulled the car up to the big double doors out front, stopping in front of a battered sign that read, EMPLYE OF TH MONTH.
“Don’t you want to hide the car?” Jessie asked.
“Nah. Let ’em know we’re here.”
“All right,” she said, getting out and walking around to the trunk. She came back with a pair of bolt cutters. “Now we’re having fun.”
Thick chains wrapped around the door handles, right next to a bright-orange PROPERTY CONDEMNED BY COUNTY ORDER sticker, but the bolt cutters popped the padlock clamp like it was made of plastic. We unfurled the chains and let ourselves in.
Sunlight streamed down, stretching its fingers through broken skylights and spots here and there, where the ceiling had caved in. Pigeons roosted up in tangles of naked rebar, a good fifty feet above our heads, and their droppings spattered the waterlogged concrete floor. The dusty air smelled like dank mildew.
When the plant shut down, the Kites must have sold off everything for salvage and scrap. Empty bays with concrete frames lined the walls, with rusted pipes and disconnected fixtures jutting from the unpainted rock. A supervisor’s office overlooked the factory floor from twenty feet up, but even the staircase to get there was gone; only a few bolt holes remained to show where it once stood.
“Well,” Jessie said, “if we’re ever in need of some creepy-ass waterfront property, I know where we can get a good deal.”
At the far end of the building, a broad staircase next to a smooth loading ramp dipped down into darkness. Storage space, I figured. Someplace to keep the paper pallets dry and cool. All the same, I wasn’t in a hurry to go down there. I walked back out to the car for the groceries I’d picked up. Nothing too extravagant, just a canister of sea salt and a few dried herbs from the cooking aisle, plus a plastic bag to mix it all together. That and four white pillar candles made from beeswax.
Jessie stood guard as I did my work. By the time I was done preparing for Mitchum’s arrival, the sun was sinking fast and those fingers of light pushing though the tattered roof had turned crooked and gray. Night wasn’t far away. We didn’t have long to wait.
We heard Mitchum’s BMW pull up outside. Then a long, long pause before the car door slammed. He was either deciding whether or not to risk coming inside, or calling for backup. Maybe both.
The double doors squealed as he pulled them open, striding into the factory twilight. Jessie and I stood side by side in the heart of the room, waiting for him in a ring of candles. They marked the cardinal points of a five-foot concentric circle, drawn with herbs and salt, anointed by my craft. We stood inside its bounds, the inner ring adorned with carefully laid glyphs drawn from memory.
“You shouldn’t have come here,” was all he had to say. He didn’t look nervous.
“And you shouldn’t have tried to kill us,” Jessie said, pulling her Glock. “Wanna guess which decision was the worse one?”
“Oh,” Mitchum said, “I’m thinking yours was.”
He put his fingers to his lips and whistled. Nyx answered.
The demoness plunged through a hole in the roof, streaking down like a comet of blue fire. The factory floor shuddered when she slammed down, landing in a crouch, her cloven hooves driving half an inch into the concrete and scorching it black. She slowly rose to her full height—at least seven feet—and her tail whipped the air as she turned her molten-copper gaze upon us. Her chitin gleamed, covering her body like the armor of some hell-bound knight.
“There they are,” Mitchum said, pointing at us. “Kill them! What are you waiting for?”
“Khlegota aham-ahaz t’nala,” she hissed. The words sounded like they came from two tongues at once, squirming wetly against each other, and a wave of nausea washed over me.
“I don’t understand,” Mitchum said. “Speak English, damn it.”
Nyx spun and grabbed the collar of Mitchum’s shirt, hauling him close. When she spoke next, her words came out in sonorous, perfect English, dripping with ice and hatred.
“Watch your mouth.”
She shoved him, sending him sprawling to the floor. While he sputtered and grabbed at his shirt—the fabric singed and torn by her claws—Nyx strode toward us.
Jessie shot a nervous glance at the circle of salt. “You’re good at this, right? Because now is not the time to find out you flunked out of witch school. And if the plan was for me to wrestle that thing, I’d have appreciated a heads-up.”
“Relax,” I murmured. I stood at the circle’s edge. Nyx walked around the outer ring, sniffing the air, probing, testing, then came face-to-face with me.
I stood my ground.
She lashed out her fist, fast as a rattlesnake’s bite, straight for my face. The air rippled with a sound like thunder, and her claws bounced off the invisible barrier between us.
I didn’t flinch. She let out what might have been a faint, raspy chuckle.
“Trapped yourself,” she said. “Can’t come in. You can’t come out.”
“Nope,” I said. “He’s the one who’s trapped.”
Behind Nyx, Mitchum pushed himself to his feet and straightened his shirt, trying to regain his lost dignity.
“How am I trapped?” he asked, wearing an ugly smirk.
Jessie leveled her pistol at him. “Because my partner here? She can banish Tall, Dark, and Spooky from inside this little circle.”
“That’s right,” I said to Nyx. “You can leave the factory, or I can blast you straight back to hell. Your call, but you are leaving.”
“Which leaves you alone with us,” Jessie said, keeping Mitchum in her sights, “and unless you can outrun a bullet, you’ll never reach the door before I take you down. Better start talking.”
“You—you can’t shoot me in the back,” Mitchum said, “and I’m unarmed!”
“You can’t imagine how little I care,” Jessie said.
I shrugged. “She really doesn’t. And I’m not inclined to stop her tonight.”
“Do you know who this one is?” Nyx asked me. It took me a second to realize what she was asking. She seemed to have a weird aversion to the word I.
“Sure. We had a chat with Fontaine. I understand you’re both after the same thing. So are we.”
Nyx held up a single claw. She reached out and dragged it along the barrier between us, slow and sinuous, as if tracing the flesh of my cheek. Tiny sparks of errant magic erupted in her talon’s wake and screeched like nails on a blackboard, turning amber and black as they drifted to the floor and faded.
“Why do you refuse your gift?” she asked.
“What gift?”
Nyx nodded toward Jessie. “She understands the blessing of wrath. Embraces it. She spread her legs for the King of Wolves and drank his filth.”
In the corner of my eye, I saw Jessie’s mouth twitch. The gun wavered in her hand.
“Go fuck yourself,” she snapped. “You don’t know anything about me.”
Nyx laughed. It sounded like barbed w
ire rasping across a sheet of sandpaper.
“Was complimenting you, pup. You have been blessed by the power of this one’s choir.” She turned her copper eyes back toward me. “But you? This one can taste your pain. A trail of sorrow and regret at your back like an oil slick. Could be your greatest weapon, but you fear losing control.”
“Seriously,” Jessie said. “Enough with the fortune-cookie bullshit. Harmony, you wanna get this banishment under way already?”
“You could forge your pain into a sword,” Nyx said, “and persecute your enemies. Triumph. Survive. But fear imprisons you. Fear of breaking rules. Fear of what people will think of you. Petty little fears.”
Nyx inched closer to the circle’s edge. The air blurred as she pressed her face to the magic barrier, inches from mine. When she spoke again, it was in a pitch-perfect parody of my own voice.
“This one feels . . . so sorry for you,” she said.
I thought back to what Fontaine had told us. “I’m not the only one who believes in rules. That’s the whole point of the Chainmen, right? You enforce hell’s laws.”
“It is so. We hold the line against chaos.”
“Well,” I said, “so do we. There are two missing children out there, somewhere, and we’re going to bring them home to their families. That’s our job. Nobody is going to stop us. Not Fontaine, not Mitchum, and not you.”
“Why are you even talking to them?” Mitchum demanded. “Do something.”
I glanced between Nyx and Mitchum. “Now, we intend to interrogate this man, because he has information we need. You can leave willingly, or I can cast you out. I think one choice is a lot less painful than the other, but I’ll let you decide. Call it professional courtesy.”
Mitchum fumed, pacing. “This is ridiculous. I don’t know what we even hired you for. Just kill these two bitches, and let’s go already.”
Nyx held up one claw, giving me an oddly apologetic look. “Moment, please.”
She turned, took two quick strides toward Mitchum, and ripped his throat out.
It all happened in a blur: just a whip-fast flash of her claws and then the mayor fell, clutching his throat, rivulets of blood flowing between his fingers like a river gushing through a broken dam. He looked as shocked as I felt. He twitched on the floor, flopping like a fish on dry land while he painted the concrete crimson.
Harmony Black (Harmony Black Series Book 1) Page 16