He thumped his chest. “I’ll tell you what I understand, Harmony. Your father was my best friend in the whole world, and that son of a bitch cut his throat open with a razor blade. If this guy is still alive, I need to settle accounts. I need to. Please. Don’t shut me out now.”
I looked to Jessie. No help there. April tilted her head ever so slightly.
“It’s your call,” April told me. “We’ll back you either way.”
I thought back to the night my father died. Blanket around my shoulders, mug of hot chocolate clutched in my small, trembling hands, and Barry. Barry, showing me his badge, telling me what it meant.
“You do what we tell you,” I said to Barry, “when we tell you. No questions. No hesitation. Agreed?”
He nodded slowly. Taking that in.
I put my hands on my hips and looked toward the house. “All right, let’s get to work. I want every single closet in that house, except for one of the upstairs bedrooms, boarded over tight.”
“Why are we—” Barry started to ask.
I held up a finger. “No questions.”
“Your luggage is in the trunk,” April said.
I walked around the back of the squad car and lifted the lid. They’d bought me a shoulder bag from the hardware store, just a simple beige canvas satchel, and I loaded it with some odds and ends from my suitcase: a canister of sea salt, some colored ribbons, bits and pieces of art I could weave into a spell with a little time to prepare.
I didn’t think time to prepare was a luxury I’d be granted on the other side of the closet door, but we needed every edge we could get.
I picked up one last thing, scooping it up from where it nestled in the bottom of the suitcase. My sister’s teddy bear. It sat in the palm of my hand, its tiny paws open wide for a hug. I added it to the bag.
I popped the collar of my blouse, slipped my tie off, and rolled it neatly. I replaced it with a new one, made of stiff polyester and glossy black.
“Wardrobe change?” Jessie asked me as she walked by, raising an eyebrow.
I turned my collar back down and tugged the tie’s knot tightly at my throat.
“It was my father’s,” I told her.
The night came alive with the sounds of banging hammers and clanking wood. Cody, Kevin, Barry, and I all got busy, each picking a closet door and nailing up slabs of lumber to keep them sealed shut. I hammered fast, throwing up two-by-fours at irregular intervals as I worked my way down the door, building my emergency barricade. I’d almost gotten to the bottom of the door, arms aching as I knelt down for the last plank, when I heard April’s voice from the doorway.
“Agent Black? There’s . . . someone here to see you.”
Fontaine, back in his borrowed corpse, leaned in the doorway with his ankles crossed. He looked like a dead man imitating Gene Kelly.
I stood, holding the claw hammer loosely in my hand. Feeling its weight. Fontaine’s gaze drifted down to the business end.
“Oh, my,” he drawled, “I do hope that’s not for me.”
“That depends entirely on you.”
He uncrossed his ankles and strode into the room, his fingertips trailing along the back of April’s wheelchair. She glowered and rolled back.
“Now, now,” he said, “such hostility. You called me, after all.”
That I had.
I’d done it on the drive back to Talbot Cove, fishing the business card he’d given us at the diner—the one that simply read FONTAINE in crisp black type—out of my wallet. I knew I’d held on to it for a reason. Stroking the raised type with my fingertips, I conjured up a spark of magic. Just a single musical note, the chiming of a crystal bell. The note rang out as it sank into the card, then soared off to find its owner.
“Nyx has taken hostages,” I said. “A couple and their baby. If we don’t hand over Edwin Kite at sunrise, she’ll kill all three of them. If we do hand him over, she’ll kill one of them and take his soul to hell along with Edwin’s.”
“Sounds like you’re in a pickle of a perplexing predicament, Agent. But I don’t see what any of that has to do with little ol’ me.”
“What if I told you I had a plan that would let both of us get what we want? You can’t pull it off without me, and I can’t pull it off without you.”
“I would say . . . you have my undivided attention.” He threw his arms wide, smiling like a showman. “But are you sure about making a deal with a demon? Are you allowed? Should I wait while you call and ask for permission? I declare, I certainly wouldn’t want to get a sweet young lady such as yourself into any trouble.”
“Special circumstances,” I said.
FORTY
I laid out the plan, and Fontaine liked it. He liked everything except for the part about helping us board up the closets.
“Manual labor? Mmm, I’ll sit that part out, darlin’. Just let me know when it’s showtime. I’ll go put on my dancing shoes.”
We got the job done without him. By the time the last board went up, my phone read 3:38 a.m. Just a few hours to sunrise, and something told me Nyx wouldn’t wait patiently if we were late. I stifled a yawn as I trudged downstairs. No time for that, I told myself. Can’t afford being tired.
We gathered the team in the empty living room, the stained carpet still bearing the imprints of repossessed furniture. Cody, at Jessie’s request, passed out the fruits of the Talbot Cove police armory: Remington 870 pump-action shotguns, with long, sleek barrels and sanded walnut stocks.
“Oh, yeah.” Jessie whistled and checked her sights. “That’s what I’m talking about.”
Cody almost held one out to April, then paused. “Are . . . you trained to use a firearm, ma’am?”
She just gave him a thin-lipped smile. Kevin leaned in and whispered in Cody’s ear. His eyes went wide. He handed her the shotgun.
“All right,” I said. “Jessie and I are going upstairs. I want you three down here near the foot of the staircase. If anything comes down that isn’t us, you know what to do.”
“Not sure I do,” Barry said.
April loaded her shotgun and racked the pump.
“That’s quite all right, Sheriff,” she said, “just follow my lead.”
“What about that guy?” Cody asked, gesturing toward the living room window. Out in the dark, in a rented sedan, I could just barely make out the form of Fontaine sitting silent and motionless behind the wheel.
“He’ll be ready when we need him,” I said. “Okay. This is it. Just one last thing to do.”
I took the clay cylinder and a handful of fat white chalk sticks out to the lawn, alone.
First, the chalk. Working under the glow of a distant corner streetlight, I crouched down and scratched out the rough curves of a circle on the asphalt. A circle at least twenty feet across, covering the street and rising up on to the sidewalk at its outermost curve, and ringed with swirling runes drawn from memory.
As I’d shown back at the paper mill, an arcane circle could keep a demon like Nyx out.
Done properly, it could keep her in, too.
I left the last few strokes of the circle unfinished. An open circuit, waiting to be sealed. Then I slid the beacon out of its plastic baggie. The engraved glyphs felt rough under my fingers, like damp stone, and thrummed with faint power.
This is it, I thought. No turning back.
I took a deep breath, drew a trickle of energy into my hands, and let it flow as I slammed the cylinder against the overgrown grass. A pulse rippled out into the night, silent and swift, as a sudden gust of wind ruffled my hair and rattled windows in its wake.
Then it was gone. Message delivered.
I stood up, slid my canvas satchel higher up on my shoulder, and held my shotgun in both hands as I marched back toward the house.
Time for war.
Jessie and I climbed the stairs in silence, taking our positions. She stood in the shadows of the empty master bedroom, the only one with an unsealed closet, and put her back to the corner. I covered the roo
m from the open doorway so I could watch the hall at the same time.
It came to the hall first.
I felt it before I heard it, a creeping dread that set my teeth on edge. Then the linen closet doorknob slowly turned. From the inside.
The door rattled, thumping against the nailed-up boards. It thumped, hard, an aggressive shove. Then silence.
Come back, I thought. Come back and try again. Test your luck.
It obliged me. Downstairs, this time, trying to come in through the closet in the foyer.
“What the—” I heard Barry say.
“Shh,” snapped April.
The rattling stopped.
I glanced over at Jessie. She brought her shotgun up, training it on the bedroom closet door. Eyes hard and gleaming like stained glass in the shadows.
The closet doorknob turned.
The door swung wide with a creaking groan, and I heard the Bogeyman’s voice call out. A rasping, rattling singsong.
“Little one, liiiiiiittle one . . . come to Mama.”
It was my voice.
With no parent to copy, the Bogeyman’s protective coloration mimicked the closest body in sight. Mine. I stood in the closet, hunched forward, nails like iron razors at the end of limp, dangling arms. Two trickles of blood ran down from my cold, coal-black eyes.
It looked over, saw me, and screamed.
The shriek split the air like nails on a chalkboard, drawing a knife across my eardrums as Jessie opened fire. Her shotgun roared, a booming thunderclap of death that caught the Bogeyman square in the gut and blasted the closet door into splintered scrap. The creature doubled over, clutching its stomach, convulsing as its form rippled and changed.
When it rose up again, flinging out gangly arms and sickle blades for fingers, it showed us what it really looked like.
The Bogeyman was a rag doll, a malformed puppet, with too-long arms and too-spindly legs, draped in rags and burlap tatters. Its hair fell down in long, filthy dreadlocks around a featureless porcelain mask. Jagged cracks ran along the creature’s mask, up to slits where mad, anguished eyes peered out at us.
Not at us. At me.
It remembers me.
It charged toward me like a steam train careening off the tracks, one blade-clawed hand reaching back for a killing blow. I was quick on the draw, but Jessie was quicker. Her second blast sent the creature sprawling to the dirty carpet, the rags on its hip shredded and drooling with burgundy blood.
It bounced back up, somersaulting like an acrobat, and ran for the closet.
The air inside the closet wasn’t right. A murky, swirling haze of gossamer fog. The Bogeyman plowed into the mist at full speed—and vanished.
“After it!” I shouted, racing for the closet. “Now!”
The fog started to recede, the portal between worlds closing in the creature’s wake. No time to think, no time to weigh the consequences. I held my breath, shut my eyes, and barreled on through.
Into the House of Closets.
My feet suddenly clattered against rough wooden floorboards. I stumbled to a stop. Jessie came in right behind me, almost knocking us both over, and clutched my shoulder to get her footing back.
We stood in a barren room, maybe ten feet across on either side. A bare floor, a bare ceiling, and walls covered in peeling, yellowed wallpaper. Victorian roses. I recognized it immediately: it was the same wallpaper from Mitchum Kite’s house. Edwin had re-created his family home.
It wasn’t an exact match, though. Light shone from a gas lamp on one wall, shrouded under dusty frosted glass. Beside it, a window looked out—into another room, exactly like this one. I looked behind us, trying to get my bearings.
The door we’d arrived through was gone.
“Shit,” Jessie muttered, echoing my thoughts.
The room wasn’t entirely empty. A doll sat discarded, propped up in the corner. Just a little rag doll, with a gingham dress and no face.
There were two ways out, identical doors facing each other on opposite sides of the room. I picked one at random, and Jessie covered me with her shotgun as I slowly swung it wide.
On the other side was a small, empty closet. And on the other side of the closet was another door.
We passed through and found ourselves in another empty room. Another window, looking out into another empty room. Another identical doll, abandoned in the corner. Another two closets, and another two doors on the opposite side.
By the seventh empty room we passed through, I started to get nervous.
“It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “At this point, we’ve doubled back and covered our own trail, but look at the floor. No footprints in the dust. The geography just . . . doesn’t work.”
Jessie hadn’t said a word. She stared ahead, steely eyed, clutching the shotgun at hip level like a gunslinger. As I glanced over at her, I saw her cheek twitch. A little involuntary flinch.
“The whispering needs to stop,” she growled.
“What whispering?”
She blinked at me. “You don’t hear it?”
Another three rooms, and I heard it, too.
Soft at first, so soft I thought it was my mind playing tricks on me, starved for input in the silence. As we stalked through Edwin’s lonely kingdom, though, they grew louder. A chorus of voices, whispering, pleading.
Children’s voices. Begging to go home.
I felt them as much as heard them. Feelings of loss washed over me, dread, memories of fears that didn’t belong to me. I was five years old, and I’d let go of my mother’s hand at the shopping mall. I stood alone in a crowd of giant strangers, knowing I’d never see her again. I took a wrong turn, walking home from school in wintertime, and found myself on an unfamiliar street in an unfamiliar town where all the windows were dark. The cold clawed at me, wind howling over snowdrifts taller than my head, stealing the breath from my lungs.
I was very small, and very alone, and the world didn’t care.
“What is he—oh God, Jessie. Oh God.”
“What?” she snapped, irritated.
I staggered to the closest wall, feeling unsteady, sick to my stomach, like I’d just chugged a bottle of some nasty bottom-shelf liquor. I put my ear to the wallpaper.
“The sound. It’s all around us . . . because it’s coming from the walls. He’s not burning his victims, like Adramelech did. He’s absorbing them. Jessie, they’re in the walls.”
I jumped out of the way just as Jessie swung the barrel of her shotgun around, leveling it toward me, and pulled the trigger.
The blast tore into the wall, shredding the old, rotted wood. Blood poured from the hole, guttering down the wallpaper in thick, dark rivulets. Beyond the wreckage, at the edges of the ragged hole in the wall, wet muscle and veins glistened.
The house was alive.
“You want to mess with my head?” Jessie screamed at the ceiling. “Fuck you!”
She fired again. Blood rained down from a fresh hole in the roof. I circled, keeping low, trying to stay behind her.
“Jessie, stop! Stop!”
Her shotgun clattered to the floor. She fell to her knees and pressed her palms to her eyes. I crouched beside her, resting a steadying hand on her back as she took deep, ragged breaths.
“It’s okay,” I said. “We can beat him, okay? Just keep it together.”
“It’s not okay,” she whispered. “He knows we’re here. I told you . . . my hearing is better than yours.”
“Edwin? You can hear him?”
She didn’t answer right away. She took a long, slow breath, her shoulders trembling.
“He wants me to hurt you.”
“Just keep it together. We can beat him—”
“I want to hurt you,” she said.
Her shoulders shook now. With laughter. A short, bitter, humorless chuckle.
“That’s what this place is,” she whispered. “Hurt or be hurt. It feeds on pain. And I’m trying, I’m trying so hard, but you need to do something for me, right now.�
��
“Name it. Anything.”
She pulled her hands from her face and looked up at me. Her eyes blazed like iced-over spotlights.
“Run.”
FORTY-ONE
Halima had warned us. Edwin Kite’s house represents his own evil, animal hungers made manifest. When your beast awakens, smelling blood, do you think it will fight against him . . . or for him?
She’d warned us, but I’d thought she was wrong. I thought we could beat him. I thought Jessie had more control over her inner demons than that.
And here I was, charging through closet door after closet door, as she hunted me down.
I ran blind, my lungs burning as I threw doors shut in my wake and charged through the empty house. I heard her behind me, bellowing, howling. A slamming crunch echoed a few rooms back, the sound of Jessie putting her fist through a wall.
Edwin doesn’t even have to show up to the fight, I thought. It’s only a matter of time before she runs me down. Can’t keep up this pace.
Jessie had dropped her shotgun, though, and I still had mine, clutched tight to my chest as I barreled through another identical door.
One way into each room, one way out. No way to lose her or slip away. I’ll have to kill her. Just turn around, wait for her to show up in the doorway, and take my shot. Only way to survive.
Then I thought about Willie.
It’s proof, he’d said, telling us Edwin’s sick philosophy. Because when it’s you or them? No matter how good you think you are, no matter how brave you think you are . . . you’ll always choose yourself.
No.
No, I wasn’t doing this. I wasn’t going to play the object lesson for some madman’s amusement. I wasn’t going to kill Jessie, and I wasn’t going to let her kill me, either. There had to be a third way. A better way.
Where could I go, though? One door ahead, one door behind—
—and one window.
I ran for it at full speed, hugged the shotgun tight, and threw myself into the window shoulder first. I tucked my chin against my chest as I crashed through to the room on the other side in a rain of broken glass. I thumped to the floor, rolling, gritting my teeth against the sting of a half-dozen fresh cuts. As I pushed myself up on my knees, I did a quick inventory. My jacket was torn, and I could feel sticky wet lines blossoming along my arm, back, and legs, but nothing life threatening. I’d live with the pain.
Harmony Black (Harmony Black Series Book 1) Page 26