“Come on,” I said to Angie, holding out my hand. But she shook her head.
“Need . . . to stay,” she said, fumbling for words.
I touched her face, tracing the curve of her scarred cheek. “No. No, Angie, you don’t. You don’t belong here; you never did. Come on. We have . . . we have people, out there. People who can help you.”
“Help,” she said, nodding. She gestured to the temple. Shades floated in the gathering dark, the temple fires dying one by one, and the whispers of despair swirled all around us. “Children still here. I have some of his . . . ” She shook her head, missing the word she wanted. “I help. Fix this place. Set them free.”
“When it’s done, will you—”
The violet light flickered. Angie shook her head, cutting me off.
“Door hard to keep open. Go. I fix this place.”
“Angie,” I said, “I love you. Mom loves you. Never forget that.”
She smiled. Maybe for the first time. Then she took hold of my shoulder . . . and shoved me into the light.
FORTY-THREE
“We’re back,” I called down from the second-floor hallway. “Coming down with a prisoner!”
Our team watched from the foot of the stairs as Edwin trudged down, followed by Jessie and me. Barry’s jaw dropped.
“Who the hell is that, and where did he come from? Where did the kids come from?”
“They were hiding in a closet,” Jessie said. The infant in her arms rubbed its eyes, squirming as it stirred. “Here, Kevin. I’ll trade you. Baby for a shotgun.”
He gave her a dubious look. “Uh, I’m not good with kids.”
“Neither am I, but I’m really good with shotguns. Take the kid.”
April opened her arms, taking the other baby on her lap, and passed me her weapon. Our job wasn’t done.
Cody rushed over to me, looking me up and down. “Harmony, you need an ambulance. You’re bleeding . . . what the hell happened up there?”
“Family reunion. C’mon. This is the tricky part.”
The first rays of morning filtered through the dying trees, casting a faint golden shine upon the weed-choked lawn. A new car sat parked across the street—the Garners’ Subaru. Ellen and Jacob huddled in the backseat, looking terrified. Not hard to see why, considering Nyx—wearing her blonde Russian bombshell disguise—sat behind the wheel.
“So that plan of yours,” Jessie murmured.
I looked down at the street. My chalked circle stood between us and the Subaru, waiting to be finished.
“That incarnate I faced in Vegas,” I said, “took a .454 round to the face. Didn’t kill it, but it hurt. Slowed it down for a minute. Wait until she gets to the middle of the circle. If we all unload on her, that should buy me enough time to close the circle and trap her. Then, once she can’t hurt anybody, I send her ass back to hell where she belongs.”
Nyx got out of the car. The Garners stayed put.
“You brought this one a present,” she said, smiling as she strode across the street.
Edwin stopped in the middle of the lawn. He shook his head.
“Sorry, Nyxy,” he said in Fontaine’s voice. “This one’s already spoken for.”
He threw his head back and bellowed an incantation that set my teeth on edge. The words—words from no human tongue—felt like acid burning my eardrums. I recognized only a single name, the last word he spoke: Adramelech. I glimpsed a shimmer of shadow as Fontaine fled Edwin’s body. Edwin stood there, panting, finally free.
Then the earthquake hit.
The ground shifted, tossing me like a rag doll, and Jessie caught me in her arms. The earth split with a thundering roar and tore a jagged hole in the lawn. Light boiled up from the deep, orange and hungry. Edwin had just enough time to scream before a dozen greedy, grasping hands, their skin charred by flame, grabbed his legs and hauled him into the chasm.
Then, silence.
There was no chasm of flame, no earthquake. The lawn stood pristine, if overgrown. It was all over in less than ten seconds, and suddenly it seemed as if nothing had happened at all. A momentary hallucination.
Edwin Kite was really gone, though. Gone to pay the price for his betrayal. I had a feeling he’d be paying for a long, long time.
Cody stared, speechless, mouth agape. I reached over and touched his arm.
“That’s the part I couldn’t tell you about,” I said softly.
“Did—did that just happen?” Barry asked. “Did any of you see that?”
I didn’t get the chance to answer him. Not with Nyx standing in the middle of the street, pointing an enraged finger at us.
“You!” she hissed, and shed her human disguise.
Armored chitin blossomed across her skin as she grew, her clothes tearing and flames rippling down her back like a mane. She took one step forward, and a cloven hoof slammed onto the asphalt.
Barry stared at her, mouth hanging open. “What the hell?”
Unveiled in her full glory, the demon’s serpentine tail cracked through the air like a bullwhip. Jessie leveled her shotgun. I stood beside her and did the same.
“Funny choice of words. That’s a demon,” I told Barry. “And we just ruined her day.”
“Can we kill it?” Cody asked me.
“We’re about to find out.”
Barry shook his head. Some people break under that kind of revelation. Another man might have cowered or run for his life.
As Jessie, Cody, and I spread out, forming a firing line, Barry stepped up.
“Ma’am,” he called out, “I’m the sheriff in this town, and I’m going to have to ask you to peaceably depart.”
Nyx curled her claws and hissed, “This one looks forward to making you scream.”
He sighed and brought up his shotgun. The four of us held her in our sights.
“Ma’am, it truly pains me to say this, because I’ve always prided myself on overseeing a fair-minded and racially diverse community . . . but your kind isn’t welcome around here.”
We got one shot off as she charged. Just one. Our shotguns boomed like a cannon battery as Nyx barreled across the street, slugs catching her in the chest and thigh and exploding with black ichor. I dropped my gun and pulled a stick of chalk from my breast pocket, lunging for the sidewalk where the tiny, open link in the arcane circle waited to be filled. I landed hard on my knees, ignoring the stabbing lance of pain, reaching out to draw the final line.
Nyx barely slowed down. She tore the weapon from Barry’s grip and slammed the stock across his head, sending him sprawling to the lawn. Then she grabbed Cody by the neck, spinning him around and clutching him in her claws, using him as a human shield.
“You think this one is stupid?” Nyx hissed. “Empty your hand.”
The chalk clattered to the sidewalk, the circle unfinished. I stood back up.
“I don’t have a shot,” Jessie snapped, trying to drop a bead on Nyx’s head.
“Let him go, Nyx,” I said. “He’s got nothing to do with this.”
“This one has been insulted,” she seethed. “This offense will be paid for.”
“Then come at me,” I told her.
“This one is doing so. You like this man, yes?” Nyx’s claws dug into Cody’s neck. He bit back a grunt of pain as trickles of blood stained his uniform shirt. “This one saw, from the vents, when Willie died. Saw him try to protect you. Can you protect him now? No. Want to see the look on your face as you watch this one—”
“Oh, Nyxy-poo,” Fontaine called. He sauntered up the sidewalk, back in his corpse body. “Job’s done, sugar. That bounty’s mine.”
“This one knows that,” she snapped. “But—”
“Ain’t no buts about it. Job’s done. Now, it seems to me that you’re hanging about in a place where you’ve got no business, about to do a nasty number on some humans you’ve got no business doing a number on.”
She showed him her teeth. “No rules against it.”
Fontaine shook his head, gi
ving us a “What can you do?” look. His gaze went to Cody, clutched in Nyx’s iron grip. Cody fought to stay stoic, eyes hard and teeth gritted, fighting his fear.
“It’s just unprofessional, is what it is,” Fontaine said. “We’re only supposed to interact with humans as part of a hunt. Hunt’s over. You’re makin’ us look bad. And frankly, if you insist on besmirching the Chainmen’s good name with your general unruliness and suchlike, I’m gonna have no choice but to break out the biggest, meanest weapon I’ve got.”
Nyx stared at him in expectant silence.
“I will tell your momma,” Fontaine said. “She’s already gonna be ten kinds of pissed that you got skunked out of a bounty today. You really wanna make it harder on yourself?”
With a frustrated grunt, Nyx shoved Cody to the grass. She turned her baleful glare upon me and Jessie.
“Black. Temple. This one knows your names. This one will not forget.”
With a whip crack of her tail, she turned and stomped away. Her image seemed to boil as she walked, a heat mirage striding toward the sunrise, until it finally dissolved in the open air. She left nothing behind but the stench of sulfur.
“She does know how to make an exit,” Fontaine said. “Just a tiny bit lacking in the social graces. And on that note, it’s time for this rambler to get rambling. It’s been a pleasure doing business.”
He strolled up the sidewalk, whistling a happy tune. Across the street, the Garners slowly clambered out of their car.
“Is it over?” Ellen asked.
“It’s over,” I said. “Go home.”
Barry radioed for a couple of ambulances, one for me and one for the recovered infants, and called around to break the good news to their parents. I ended up lying on my stomach on a stretcher, getting fifteen stitches and enough bandage pads and antiseptic cream to stock a small clinic. It could have been worse, I told myself. Getting patched up stung more than getting the cuts in the first place.
The sunrise brought a new day to Talbot Cove, washing the streets in gold. A day with no Edwin Kite, no Bogeyman, no missing children. We’d ended the cycle for good.
And my baby sister was alive. She’d been through a hell I couldn’t imagine, but she was alive.
I dug my nails into my leg, hard enough to leave cherry-red welts, to drive back the sudden torrent of emotion. Lock it down, I told myself. My eternal mantra. Lock it down until you get home.
Once I got the thumbs-up from the paramedics—and changed into a fresh blouse, tossing the tattered ruin of my jacket into my suitcase—it was time to have a couple of talks. Jessie and I pulled Barry aside.
“You’ve been involved in this from the start,” I said, “so you deserve some answers. I can’t tell you everything. I won’t tell you everything. But here’s what I can share.”
So we walked him through it, leaving out half the story and a few key details he didn’t need to know. Like what happened to Angie.
“So the thing that killed your dad—”
“Dead,” I told him. “The Bogeyman is dead.”
He chewed that over.
“You all right?” I asked.
“Just saw a man get swallowed into hell, then a demon clocked me with my own shotgun.” He rubbed his temple, an ugly bruise rising up. “You might say I’m adjusting at my own pace. Figure I’ll freak out later, in the privacy of my own home, once the adrenaline wears off.”
“Please remember that everything we’ve just told you is highly classified,” Jessie told him.
He chuckled. “And if I blabbed about it, I’d get locked up in the nuthouse anyway.”
“Exactly,” she said.
“Well, you got those kids back,” he mused, “and put a stop to the whole damn mess. Guess that’s some kinda win.”
As we walked to the car, leaving him to deal with the grateful parents, I saw Jessie smiling at me from the corner of my eye.
“What?”
“It absolutely was,” she said, “some kinda win. Nice job, Agent.”
I looked up the sidewalk. Cody stood alone, gazing into the distance with a thousand-yard stare.
“Let me handle this one myself,” I told Jessie. She gave me a nod and kept her distance as I walked over to stand at Cody’s side.
“I get it,” he said, his voice distant. “Why you couldn’t tell me. I mean, I wouldn’t have believed you. I wouldn’t have believed in . . . any of this.”
I thought of Douglas Bredford, drunk and hopeless in his booth at the bar. And the talk I had with Jessie on the drive to Detroit, about why we keep our secrets secret. Imagine a nation of Douglas Bredfords, she’d told me. Some people could handle the truth, and some people couldn’t.
I could see the despair on Cody’s face, and it terrified me. He was slipping under the waves, the weight of what he’d seen like a lead anchor chained to his ankle.
“Who are you?” he asked me.
I shrugged. “I’m just the girl next door.”
“When we were kids, yeah,” he said, “but that was a long time ago. Who are you now?”
I had to think about that.
“I’m the woman who makes the monsters go away. Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose.” I looked back toward the empty house. “This time . . . we did all right. Talbot Cove is safe now, Cody. It’s over.”
He let out a bitter chuckle and touched the fresh bandages on his neck, covering the cuts Nyx had left him. “It’s over for them, you mean. All the people who don’t know the truth. The people who don’t have scars on their neck from a goddamn demon.”
“I’ve got a few of those, too.”
“So you know,” he said, “it’s not over for me.”
“No. I won’t lie to you. You’ll remember this day for the rest of your life. What matters is what you take away from it. The point isn’t that demons are real, Cody, and the point isn’t that you saw a man get dragged down into hell.”
He shook his head. “What’s the point, then?”
“The point is,” I told him, “today? The good guys won. And you were one of them.”
I let him think about that for a while. He strolled up the street, hands in his pockets, mulling it over, and I walked silently at his side.
He stopped, and turned to me.
“You remember what I said, about living in Talbot Cove? That night we talked outside the motel?”
“That you’re moving on,” I said. “Saving up a nest egg, and figuring out what you want to do with your life when spring comes.”
There was something new in Cody’s eyes. The despair faded, replaced by calm confidence. The cowboy was back. Maybe a little older, a little wiser—the kind of wisdom that comes only from getting kicked in the teeth a few times—but he was back.
“I put on this badge because I wanted to help people. I think, knowing what I know, seeing what I’ve seen . . . ” He looked all around, taking in the sleepy suburban street. “I think my calling’s definitely elsewhere.”
“What are you thinking about?”
“Don’t know yet. I need to process this. Think it over. But now I know that monsters are real. And I know I wouldn’t be any kind of a man if I didn’t do something about it.”
I gave him my business card.
“When you decide,” I told him, “give me a call. Day or night.”
He took the card, read it over, and slipped it into his pocket. I looked back toward the cars. Jessie waited for me, making an effort to pretend she wasn’t watching us.
“One last thing,” Cody said, “before you go?”
“Sure, what—”
He put his hand on my shoulder and pulled me into a kiss. I lifted my chin, rising up on my toes to meet him, my body responding before my brain could catch up.
“Sorry,” he murmured as he pulled away slowly, not sounding sorry at all. “But if I hadn’t done that, I’d have kicked myself from one side of town to the other the second you left.”
“You don’t hear me complaining,” I told him, swallowing
down the butterflies in my stomach. “Talk to you, Cody. Stay safe.”
I tried to ignore Jessie’s smirk as I walked back to join her. To her credit, she didn’t say a word.
“So how much of this is going in the final report?” I asked her.
She pretended to think about it as we got into the SUV.
“Oh, at least twenty percent,” she said. “Maybe even twenty-five. We can leave out everything about your sister, for starters. Better drop Barry and Cody out of the picture, too. Don’t want Linder sending anyone around to hassle them once we leave.”
“Thanks for that.”
“Hey,” she said, “we take care of our own.”
I looked over at her.
“Yeah? That mean I passed the audition?”
“Well, there’s still a few formalities, like your membership dues and the mandatory hazing, but I’d say you made the cut. Welcome to the Circus.”
I’d spent three years flying solo, working a case with nobody to talk to but the mirror. I’d thought I was fine with that. It wasn’t until now, with people I could trust at my side, that I understood how much I’d been missing.
A team? Sure. That suited me just fine.
We watched Main Street wake up as we cruised on by. People flipping CLOSED signs to OPEN, setting out window displays. Just another ordinary, average day.
A day without monsters.
“So,” Jessie said, “ready to say good-bye to Talbot Cove?”
“Yeah.” I leaned back and stared out the window. Taking one last look. “Yeah. I really am.”
FORTY-FOUR
We met up with April and Kevin back at the motel. April packed up, slipping her books into a battered suitcase, while Kevin huddled over his laptop.
“We just took down a two-hundred-year-old sorcerer,” Jessie said, shaking her head at the swooping dragon on his screen, “and this is how you celebrate. You really are hopeless, you know that, right?”
“Working, thank you very much,” he said. “One of my contacts is online, the one I had check out that Cold Spectrum thing for you.”
“That phrase Douglas Bredford mentioned?” April asked.
“He’s got nothing,” Jessie said, “because it means nothing. The ramblings of a very sad and self-loathing drunk.”
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