Ellen clenched her hands into frustrated fists, her voice cracking.
“I thought,” she said, forcing the words out, “it would be safe to have a baby.”
“But once the abductions started,” I said, “you knew.”
“Oh, we knew. Our first plan didn’t work. Find the last returned child and stop him. Just . . . I don’t know. Stop him, any way we could. But that bastard Jeremiah shredded the original police report before he died. He covered up every mention of the abduction, and we couldn’t figure out who it was.”
“His name was Willie Grandeen,” Jessie said.
Ellen tilted her head. “You said ‘was.’”
“He killed himself today.”
“He killed himself.” Ellen sighed, leaning back against the attic wall. Her head thumped against the grainy wood. “He marked my baby girl. He gave her to that monster. Then he killed himself. Bastard.”
“So that was your first plan,” I said. “What was the second?”
“Nyx,” she said with a bitter curl of her lip. “That was Mitchum’s idea. He read about the Chainmen in one of his father’s grimoires. You see, Edwin Kite is a fugitive in hell’s eyes: he broke his deal with Adramelech, and even stole some of the demon’s power. We thought if we could get the Chainmen’s attention, they’d kill Edwin for us and end this nightmare for good. I found the summoning ritual. Didn’t know what to expect, but Nyx answered the call. Once we found out her price, it was too late.”
“What’s her price?”
“When Nyx goes back to hell, she has to bring two souls with her: the one she’s hunting, and the one who called her name.” Ellen folded her arms. “Jacob volunteered. Said it’s what any father would do for his little girl. I said there’s no way she’s growing up without her daddy.”
The suitcases, the cardboard boxes—now it all made sense.
“You’re running,” I said.
“What else can we do?”
Jessie rubbed the back of her neck, thinking. “If Nyx doesn’t get Kite, do you still have to pay up?”
“No, but Nyx doesn’t fail,” Ellen said. “Ever. At least, that’s the story. I guess she’ll be hunting us next. At least my baby will be all right.”
I scuffed the toe of my shoe against a faint line of chalk residue.
“You mentioned the House of Closets. What do you know about it?”
“Only what’s been passed down through the family. Hints and whispers. They say it was the key to Edwin’s betrayal. When he sold his soul to Adramelech, he crafted these elaborate designs for a mansion in . . . well, I don’t know where it is or how it works, only that it isn’t here. He tricked the demon into infusing his own power into the building.”
“So why doesn’t Adramelech just take it back?” Jessie asked her.
“Edwin designed the house as a trap. It’s a siphon. Power flows only one way: inward, straight to him. He barred Adramelech from coming in after him, then took his precautions a step even farther. According to Jeremiah’s journals, he merged with it. He became part of the house itself. He can’t be removed. Can’t be. The only way Edwin Kite can leave the House of Closets is under his own power and by his own free will.”
“But you think Nyx has a way to get at him anyway,” I said.
Ellen shrugged. “She thinks she does. You’ve met her, I assume. Do you doubt she can do it, if she says she can?”
“Excuse us a moment,” I said and tugged Jessie’s sleeve. We walked over to the far corner of the attic, conferring in low voices.
“What do you think?” I asked her.
“Nyx wouldn’t take a job if she wasn’t certain she could pull it off. You heard her at the paper mill: she’s a little obsessed with coming in first place.”
“And if she nails Kite,” I said, jerking my head toward Ellen, “how much of a chance do you think these people have of getting away without paying her?”
“Somewhere south of zero and none. About the same as our chances of getting Kite first, considering we can’t reach him.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not.”
Finding a demon-crafted house that doesn’t exist anywhere on Earth—let alone getting inside—is a little outside my wheelhouse. I’m good at what I do, but there’s magic and then there’s magic. Still, the inklings of an idea came to me as I looked over at Ellen’s shrine.
I can’t say it was a good idea, or even a sane one, but you work with what you have.
“Ellen.” She looked away from the darkening window, toward me. “What do you know about the beacons?”
She shrugged. “The Returned uses them to tell the Bogeyman where to strike. That’s all I know. They were a passion project of Jeremiah Kite’s—there’s reams of pages about them in his journals—but the symbolism and the math . . . it’s like trying to unravel higher calculus when all you know is how to add and subtract.”
“Those journals—may we have them, please?”
“If you think it’ll help,” she said. “Jeremiah thought he could reverse-engineer the spell. Turn it into a two-way gate so he could go meet Edwin and ‘learn at the feet of the master.’ As far as I can tell, he never pulled it off.”
Jessie gave me a side-eyed glance. “Are you that good?”
“Not even close,” I murmured, “but maybe I don’t have to be. We just need to get a little creative.”
Ellen dug out the books: four of them in all, thumb thick, with cracked black-leather covers. I opened one, the old binding glue splitting and flaking, and gazed upon a dense sea of cramped handwriting. My eyes glazed as I tried to follow Jeremiah’s stream-of-consciousness ramblings. Maybe that was for the best. What little I did read made my skin crawl.
She bundled the books into my arms and asked, “Now what?”
“Now you stay put,” I said.
“We can’t,” she said. “Are you crazy? Once Nyx gets Edwin Kite, she’s coming back for Jacob. We can’t be here when she does.”
“Ellen,” I said, “if Nyx can capture a two-hundred-year-old sorcerer who’s hiding out in another dimension, how much of a chance do you think you and your husband have? Edwin has an otherworldly stronghold. You have a Subaru.”
Her shoulders sank. I could feel her hope sinking with them.
“That doesn’t mean we can just stay here and wait for her,” she protested, but her voice had lost its strength.
“That’s exactly what it means, and I’ll tell you why. First, she’s not coming back, because we’re going to catch Edwin before she does. Second, if all of this has taught you anything, it should be that once you make a bargain with a demon, you don’t screw with the terms. If you run, Nyx will know. It’s not just your husband’s life at stake: it’s yours and your child’s, too.”
“Do you really think you can beat her?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I really do.”
Sometimes you have to try and sound more confident than you feel. What we really had was a chance. Just a chance, bordering on a long shot, but it was the only chance we—and the Garner family—had left.
THIRTY-SEVEN
On our way out, in the freshly fallen dark, Jessie flashed her penlight across the Garners’ lawn. We found the third wicker ball down at the edge of the grass, sitting cold and still in the shadow of an oak tree.
“Bag it,” I said. “Then we need to run by the motel and grab the other two beacons.”
“You’re thinking about something,” Jessie told me. “I can hear the hamster wheel rattling.”
“Jeremiah Kite had the right idea: to take the basic idea behind the beacons and turn them into a door that works in both directions. He just wasn’t skilled enough to pull it off. Neither am I, but I think I’m a little more creative than he was. We’re going to need help from a contact of mine. Chicago is . . . what, an hour, hour and ten from here?”
I tossed her the keys to the SUV.
“How fast can you get us there?”
Jessie snatched the keys from the air. “We�
�ll be there and back in an hour.”
She wasn’t quite that fast, but we still made damn good time as we wound along the coast of Lake Michigan, carving down long and lonely stretches of highway.
“You’re holding your cards close to the vest,” Jessie said, leaning toward the steering wheel as she leaned on the gas. “How about a little hint?”
“Edwin learned to mark his servants, like a demon, right? But we don’t know how tight the bond between him and Willie really was. Willie said Edwin always contacted him in dreams, never while he was awake.”
“Okay, I’m with you so far.”
“There’s a good chance, at least until he tries to reach out to him again, that Edwin doesn’t know Willie is dead. He’ll figure it out pretty quick—maybe tonight, even—so we don’t have much time.”
“Sounds about right, but what can we do with that?”
“I’m thinking ‘Willie’ needs to summon the Bogeyman one last time,” I said. “And when he shows up, he’s going to have a nasty surprise waiting for him.”
As the highway curved north and the Chicago skyline rose up in the distance, traffic became a slow-moving sea of scarlet brake lights. We cruised along, weaving from lane to lane, until we hit the off-ramp for Lake Shore Drive. We hugged the coast—black waters on our right, and canyons of granite and steel on our left.
The city at night became a carnival of harsh white light. Spotlights, skyscraper lights, antennae topped with pinpricks the color of ice or frost blue. The electric power blotted out the stars, turning the sky black, but the night had to struggle for a foothold here. Chicago was too busy to sleep.
The Field Museum stood stony and proud, like a temple to the Greek gods in the heart of the American Midwest. Eighty-foot banners dangled from the eaves atop towering ionic pillars. We were far too late for a tour—the museum closed at five—but I knew at least one employee would be working late. As we looked for a parking spot, I gave her a call.
“Not the front doors,” she said. “Circle around the campus and you’ll find a side door for the research wing. Just knock. I’ll tell the guard to expect you.”
We were knocking on the glass for a while, standing next to a row of manicured bushes that shivered in the wind. Eventually a guard in a pressed blue uniform wandered by. He gave us a wave before he scurried over to unlock the door.
I showed him my ID. “We’re here to see Dr. Khoury. She’s expecting us.”
“Sure, sure,” he said, pointing. “Just go up the hall that way. Soon as you come to a security grate, take a left. She’s in the conservators’ workshop. Can’t miss it.”
There’s something magical about a museum at night. As we passed the steel grates barring us from the main hall and the shadowed exhibits beyond, I craned my neck to see everything I could.
“So where’d you meet this doctor?” Jessie asked. “She a friendly?”
“Not a registered friendly, per se,” I said.
She gave me a look.
“So what you’re saying is, you kept her out of your reports.”
I shrugged. “It was a prerequisite for getting her help on a smuggling investigation. Halima Khoury is kind of a private person. Her intel was flawless, though. She’s an expert in—”
“No, no,” Jessie said, “back it up. What you’re saying is, you lied in your field report. After you acted all shocked that I lie to Linder all the time.”
“It was a very tiny lie of omission, three and a half years ago. And I’ve done it only once. Ever. And I felt bad about it.”
Jessie punched my arm. “You’re a rebel, Harmony Black.”
“Stop it.”
“Mmm-hmm. You are one badass rebel.”
A rubber wedge propped open the door to the conservators’ workshop. I slowed my step, hearing voices drift out from inside. Not happy voices.
“—why you’d think that I, of all the people in this city, would be harboring that creature,” Halima snapped.
The man who answered her was slick, cultured, his words edged with a breezy British accent. “I don’t think that. The fact remains, Doctor, that you’ve known Damien Ecko longer than anyone. You can understand why I’d want to speak with you.”
Damien Ecko. I remembered hearing Emmanuel Hirsch drop that name when I’d eavesdropped on his phone call back in Detroit. Whoever this Ecko was, he got around.
“Interrogate me, you mean. I am not subject to your laws, Royce, nor do I go seeking conflict with your people. This is my tiny corner of the city. My little dominion. All I ask is to be left to my work in peace.”
“Right, right, you have to be around when your girlfriend finally decides to wake up.”
“How dare you!” Halima shouted, her voice punctuated by the crash of breaking glass.
I didn’t have to say a word to Jessie. We moved as one, sweeping around the corner and into the workshop. It could have passed for a college science lab, the long room bathed in stark white light and lined with tables and cabinets. A clutter of projects in midcompletion filled every open surface, from tiny stone relics under glass to Tupperware beds of dirt and sand. Old hardcovers filled a rolling library cart, each one with a colored slip of paper sticking up from inside the front cover.
Halima looked exactly like I remembered her: almond skin and a long, narrow face, her body draped in a floor-length dress and a powder-blue headscarf. The man standing on the other side of a study table with his hands on his hips, I didn’t know. He could have passed for a retired model pushing the edge of forty, with an aquiline nose and pale green eyes. He wore a tailored gray suit, and the tail of a tattoo—a black, thorny rose vine, it looked like—snaked up from under the collar of his crisp dress shirt to end just beneath his left ear.
The man—Royce, she’d called him—slowly turned to look at a shattered pile of glass on the floor just behind him.
“Really?” he said, giving her a cocky smile. “Now we’re throwing things? Please, Doctor, everyone says you’re the voice of reason in this city. Do grow up.”
Halima’s fingernails dug into her palms.
“The museum is closed,” she told him. “You need to leave now.”
“As you wish. Just remember: there are rewards for cooperation. Find Ecko’s whereabouts for me, and I’ll gladly make a generous donation to, er”—he waved a hand, taking in the room—“whatever it is you people do here. It’s very cute, with the antiques and the placards and the learning about things. Not sure it beats television for sheer commercial appeal, but—”
“Leave!”
Royce gave her a wave and turned on his heel. As he strolled past us, his gaze slid right over me and looked Jessie up and down.
“Hello, ladies.”
“Good-bye, douche,” Jessie muttered in his wake, nudging out the plastic wedge and shutting the workshop door.
“I’m sorry,” I told Halima. “Is this a bad time?”
She chuckled, sounding tired. “No, far from it. You probably saved me from murdering more innocent test tubes. We’ve had an . . . exciting few weeks here. Local politics, nothing you need be concerned over.”
Jessie jerked her thumb back over her shoulder. “So who was he?”
Halima’s eyes twinkled. “That’s not what you came to see me about.”
It wasn’t the most graceful attempt at dodging a question, but I let her get away with it. I shook her hand. Her grip was firm, desert dry, with a texture almost like cheesecloth.
“Doctor, this is Jessie Temple, my new partner. Thank you for seeing us.”
“Of course,” she said, shaking Jessie’s hand. “It sounded like you two had an interesting conundrum for me. I’m always up for a good puzzle.”
Five minutes later, we stood behind her while she perched on a stool, studying one of the wicker balls under an oversize magnifying glass. The other two beacons sat to her left, next to Jeremiah Kite’s journals. She turned the ball in her hand, slowly, occasionally reaching over to adjust the magnifying glass’s boom arm.
“So far I can confirm your suspicions. Definitely Sumerian. Dimensional mathematics. Magics.” She snapped her finger. “Mathemagics.”
“Head,” Jessie groaned, “already hurting.”
I gestured to the other two balls. “Each of these beacons was keyed to a place. Willie, the person placing them, was no magician; he just did what he was told. So I figure they’re pretty much fire and forget. Plant ’em in the ground and they guide the Bogeyman to the closest house.”
“Where it arrives in a closet,” Halima said, “and leaves from the same place, yes? Or at least tries to?”
I thought back to the nanny cam video of the Gunderson house, where the recording ended with the same creaking closet door. I nodded.
“Odds are, this creature isn’t teleporting. It’s opening a very short-term gateway between worlds. Closets are just a convenient place to manifest it.”
“What difference does it make?” Jessie asked.
“Difference being, if it teleports, only it—and the victims in direct skin contact—make the trip. A gateway, though . . . well, theoretically anyone could jump through as long as it was still open.”
I rapped my fingernails on the stack of journals. “Jeremiah was wrong. He didn’t need to reverse-engineer the spell or come up with something new. He just needed to be there when the Bogeyman showed up.”
“And cross over before the gate sealed up again,” Halima said. “Correct.”
I looked to Jessie, the implications loud and clear.
“I thought if we could make a new beacon, we could at least lure out the Bogeyman and take him down. If we can be there when the gate opens, though? We can go after his master, too. This is our shot at Edwin Kite.”
“Hell, I’m game.” She looked to Halima. “What do you think, Doc? Can you re-create a working beacon?”
Halima thought about it. Her eyes narrowed as she studied the wound wicker strip, and she reached up to stroke her chin.
“Can I?” she finally said. “Most likely, yes. Will I?”
She shook her head.
“I am sorry, but no.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
Harmony Black (Harmony Black Series Book 1) Page 24