I take a good look at him. He doesn’t appear to be poised to attack me again. It also doesn’t escape my attention that he looks fully healed from the beating he took from Marsh. He might be little, but clearly, there’s more to him than meets the eye. “Well, you did take a good chunk out of my hand.”
He closes his eyes and looks absolutely guilt-ridden. “I apologize most profusely. I was not prepared to meet a living person. I like to pride myself on my iron will and self-control, which obviously are not words you would apply to my actions. I hope you understand that my actions are wholly my own and should not reflect poorly on the integrity of the building where I work.”
I shift uncomfortably from one foot to the other. I can tell without a doubt that he is very sincere in his apology. I’d be able to tell if he were not.
“Look, come back with me to my office where we can talk in a bit more privacy.”
He nods, relieved, and steps up to my side, keeping his eyes focused in front of him. We weave our way through the press of officers and go back to the office. Burchard follows a few steps behind us. I glance at Smith out of the corner of my eye, just to make sure he doesn’t try to sucker punch me or take another bite, but he keeps his attention focused forward and never even peeks over at me. Interesting. The other detectives look up as we enter.
“The hell are you doing back here?” Marsh demands loudly of my guest, standing up quickly.
Archibald flinches and attempts a bow. “Detective Marsh, I believe? As I informed your partner, Detective Green, I am here to turn myself in for my actions the other night. You have my deepest and most profound apology, and I intend to pay to the fullest extent for my crime.”
Marsh looks frozen in place. He eventually relaxes, slightly confused. “Uh, OK then.”
The other four detectives are looking on curiously. Archibald again explains his surprise at seeing a living person in front of him and his little lapse in willpower that caused him to try and eat me.
“I assure you, Detectives, that it will not happen again.”
“Well, I might still be a little skittish around you, Mr. Smith. But I’m willing to let this go.”
“Not going to happen,” Marsh says firmly. He points at the doorman. “You’re just lucky he’s a little fella. We can’t let folks around here think there’s no harm in taking a little nibble off you whenever it tickles their fancy.”
“Your partner is quite right, Detective Green. I must insist that I be punished for my crime. And I sincerely hope that there were not too many people in the crowd who witnessed my shameful actions. At least none of the building’s residents were witness to it.”
I nod, embarrassed. “OK.”
“When my sentence is complete, I will go search out the residents of the building and their guests that day and extend my apologies. I will have to beg Miss Everin to allow me to contact all six of her guests from that day. I need to assure them they will not see me lapse in that manner again.”
I look at Marsh, my brain trying to process what I just heard. Burchard beats me to saying it.
“Wait a minute. Back up. Six guests?”
“Well, yes. I keep track of everyone I let into the building, the times they leave and return. It’s part of the expectations of my job.”
Marsh walks up and towers over Mr. Smith. “Burchard’s right. We only counted four people, not six: Calhoun, Dean, and the Mayweathers.”
“Well, yes,” Archibald says, leaning back from Marsh nervously. “They were the four guests who were with Miss Everin at the time of my incident. But surely their two friends who arrived with them would have heard about it by now. Even though they left shortly beforehand.”
Archibald looks around and realizes we’re all staring at him.
“Which. Two. Friends?” Marsh asks firmly.
“Mr. Daniel Cortez and Mr. Francis Goldman. They had been arriving with the Mayweathers regularly over the past few months.”
“They wouldn’t happen to be any of these guys would they?” I ask, pointing at the photos we recovered from Clark’s apartment. We’ve tacked them up on a corkboard in our office.
Smith glances and the photos and nods. He points at two of them. “Yes. This one is Mr. Cortez, and this one is Mr. Goldman.”
And just like that, we have a new lead. Sometimes you earn them. Sometimes they just fall in your lap. Sometimes they come when someone snacks on you.
I take Mr. Smith up to one of the officers outside to book him on his charge for assaulting an officer, but I make a point to put in a good word for him and stress his help in an ongoing investigation. Smith bows to me and, his chin up, resolves himself to accept his judgment.
I get back to our office to hear Meints arguing with Marsh.
“What good is it going to do to just charge out and grab these guys?” Meints asks.
“What, we just ignore them? Is that what we do now?”
“No! Of course not. Marsh, hold it a second. Think this through. We can’t just toss them in a cell. If one of them is this demon, then that will be useless. We can’t just kill their bodies.”
Everyone mulls this over. Meints is right; we can’t just grab them and hope our problems are over. We need to have more of a plan.
“The Pit,” Marsh says, simply.
“Maybe. Who knows? I’m just saying we need a plan!”
I clear my throat. I already have a plan; it’s just not one I can share. “I need to go to Warner’s.”
The group looks at me curiously. “Uh, now’s not a good time to hit the bottle, buddy,” Marsh advises.
“There’s someone I need to talk to. I need to do it now. Can I go by myself, or does someone need to come with me?”
Both Burchard and Meints shake their heads. “No way, we had our turn,” Burchard says. “Someone else gets to take this bullet.”
“Fine,” Armstrong decides, standing up. Kim stands up with him. “We’ll take you. Let’s just make it quick.”
Kim shoots Marsh a serious look. “Wait for us to return.”
With my protection on either side, we make our way over to Warner’s. I have a few questions I need to run past Frank.
The crowd at Warner’s is quiet tonight, withdrawn. We allowed it to open up again, but the vibe hasn’t been the same since. The mood’s been grim ever since Annabelle’s body was found. It’s a little depressing, but right now, I have bigger problems. I still haven’t figured out a good way to ditch the two detectives so that I can speak to Frank in confidence.
“Yeah, I suppose so,” Armstrong says. He and Kim are looking at something next to them. But I can’t for the life of me figure out what it is. We’re barely inside the door, looking at the crowd. “Let’s do that.”
The two of them start walking towards a booth near the back. I hear Kim chuckle at something. “You said it, Green.” That’s weird. Kim never laughs at anything.
“What the hell?” I mutter. They are supposed to be guarding me, but they just ditched me at the door.
A voice whispers in my ear, “They think they are still with you.”
I jump and barely stifle a scream from erupting from my throat. Frank is standing right beside me. I glance over to the room at the back, and Frank is staring at me from the doorway. The Frank beside me gestures for me to follow him to the back. “This way, Jacob.”
I look over at Armstrong and Kim, carrying on a conversation with a third person that isn’t there. “This isn’t hurting them, is it?”
“What? Of course not, Jacob, of course not. They think they are conversing with you, although a slightly funnier and more pleasant version of you, to be sure.”
“Well, that’s just great,” I grumble. Frank’s glamours are evidently superior to the original.
Frank’s room is unchanged—same books, the same piles of paper. The double of Frank in the room walks
over and merges with the Frank standing next to me. Whole again, he gestures for me to close the door behind me.
“To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit?” Frank asks grandiosely.
“We found the demon,” I explain.
“Excellent!” Frank smiles. He really is very good at his semblance of mortality.
“But we don’t know how to stop him.”
“Well, you cannot kill a demon,” Frank explains in a patronizing tone. “We are eternal. We may not be The First or The Last, but we are very close. You can kill the body we inhabit, but we will merely try to inhabit another.”
“Even pigs? Like that Bible story? How did it go, exactly?” I ask. “Didn’t Jesus cast out some devils, and let them go into the bodies of pigs, and the pigs went and killed themselves or something?”
Frank grimaces. “Oh, yes, that. Your summary is decidedly ignorant of the facts. But you are essentially correct. Some of my siblings will stoop to taking possession of swine or other animals. But even if you manage to destroy that body, the demon will merely wait until it finds a new host body. Or it will simply pursue you without a tangible body and hound you every second of every day for the rest of your life.”
I sit down on a chair, keeping an eye on Frank. “I was hoping that wasn’t the case.”
His voice sounds in my ear again. “What exactly do you want from me?” I spin in my chair and see him standing behind me. My head snaps back to where he was standing a moment before; he is no longer there. I put a smile on my face as I turn back to him. OK, lesson learned. I can’t keep my eye on him.
“We can’t kill him. There has to be some way to . . . I don’t know, banish him?”
Frank nods, sagely. “Sure. Of course. That is an excellent idea, Jacob. You could banish him. And then if a mortal knows his name he can be summoned right back. Have you found all his followers, the cult of the undead that he is working with?”
“No,” I reply sourly. Clark and Abayomi were working for the demon, but Frank is right. They may not have been the only ones working with it.
Frank’s smile widens. “Then I fear banishment may not be the correct path here. If you can ensure that you have eliminated every mortal who knows his name, every book that contains it, and all knowledge of his name has been erased from humanity’s memory, then perhaps banishment would work.”
I think about this, try to discern if he’s telling me the truth. I have to be careful about taking anything he says at face value. But I think he’s right here. We don’t know everyone that is working with the demon.
“So we can’t kill him. Banishing him would just be a stutter and less than effective. Can we keep him out somehow?”
Frank shakes his head sadly. “Not if someone simply invites him back in.”
I stew some more, thinking other angles. “Do you have any ideas?”
He shrugs, evasive. “Perhaps. Perhaps not.”
I wait. Frank just smiles at me. I sigh in exasperation. He clearly wants me to think this one out myself. “We can’t kill him. We can’t banish him. We can’t keep him out, because someone can just invite him back. What if we can, I dunno . . . We need to make it so that he can’t come back. So even if he’s invited, he can’t come.”
Frank nods, urging me on. “Perhaps. Continue with that thought.”
“If he can’t come in . . . Not because he can’t get in, but because, he can’t get out . . . of somewhere?”
Frank claps his hands in delight. “I think you might be on to something, Jacob.”
“The Pit?” I guess.
A sad frown splits Frank’s face. “Sadly, no. The Pit will not work on those like my siblings and me. It is purely a force that has power over mortality—mortality as we see it, which includes both the living and the once living.”
I slap my knees in frustration. “Well if we can’t trap the demon in the Pit, I don’t know what we can do.”
Frank smiles wickedly. “There are other methods one can use to catch a demon.”
“Don’t hold back! What else is there?”
“Well,” Frank says, guardedly. “There are ways to build a demon trap. Such a trap can hold one of us for all eternity, or until we are let out.”
“Let out?” I ask.
He nods. “You would have to take care that one of the demon’s followers do not learn of its location and release the demon once again.”
I breathe out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. “So, we’re back to where we were. If we don’t know all of the demon’s conspirators, one of them could simply release the demon after we’ve trapped it.”
Frank shrugs casually, in too-poised a manner to be truly casual. “Unless the trap was located somewhere that a mortal could never reach.”
I think about this for a moment, realizing what Frank is getting at. “Build a demon trap to hold the demon for all eternity, and then throw the trap in the Pit, where no mortal can ever get at it.”
Frank smiles at me like a proud parent. “Yes, exactly. I do believe that would work. Well-reasoned, Jacob.”
We are arriving at the conclusion he guided me to, but it seems pretty sound to me. I look at this solution from as many different angles as I can manage, and I can’t see any loopholes to this plan.
“OK. Let’s do that, then,” I say. Frank winces like I’ve wounded him, and I realize what we’ve been building to. The hook is set. Now, he’s going to try and jerk me on the line.
“Jacob Green, take a step back and think about what you are asking of me.”
I glare at him suspiciously. “I’m asking you to help me stop an immortal killer.”
He shakes his head sadly. “No, Jacob Green. That is not what you are asking me. You are asking me to give you instructions on how to create the one thing that could forever imprison me throughout the ages. I think that is asking a little much. Do you not agree?”
“What would entice you to tell me?” I ask, guardedly.
“Look at you, so suspicious of me. Surely, you can agree that this information would be worth nearly any price.”
“What kind of price are we talking about?”
“If I give you the means to build a cage to keep a demon forever bound, then you need to build me a key to escape it.”
“Key?”
Frank nods, seriously now. “Correct. You first build me a key to escape such a prison, and I will tell you how to build the cage.”
It can’t be that simple, I think. “How do you build one of these keys?”
Frank smiles, and that’s when I know I’m right; it’s not nearly so simple.
Chapter 41
You want to run that by me again?”
Frank smiles apologetically, but not sincerely. “Come now, Jacob Green. It is not so much to be concerned about.”
“You need blood. A Seer’s blood. My blood. To make this key. And it does what again?”
Frank spreads his arms wide in a gesture that attempts to put me at ease somehow. “As I told you, it will provide me with the means to escape this prison intended to hold me.”
I think as quickly as I can, trying to poke holes in this plan. “Can’t we just get a key that’s already made? There have to be some around somewhere, right? I mean, you told me you have a recipe for one.”
“Ah, Jacob. There are records of some that have been made in past millennia, but their locations are lost to me. And they are incredibly rare. It is not often a Seer willingly agrees to build a key to release those of my kind.”
“There’s probably a good reason for that.”
“I will admit that there is ample reason for the majority of my kind. But surely, I am not as evil as all the rest. I am helping you after all.”
A frown is fixed to my face, I have the nagging suspicion this was his goal all along. He meets a Seer and, hey, look at that—he just ha
ppens to know about an item I desperately need that coincidentally requires some of my blood. I don’t see an alternative, but I’m suddenly very aware that I don’t know enough about how things work here to recognize the pitfalls I’m about to walk into.
“How do I make this key of yours?”
He does a complicated flourish with his hands and points to a small tome covered in leather, sitting under a pile of papers.
“Open it to the bookmarked page,” he encourages.
The book is old, the pages brittle. The leather is cracked, and many of the pages are water stained. Flipping the pages carefully, I reach the bookmark and look at the handwritten script. It takes a few minutes to decipher the words on the page.
“Mercury. Silver. Sulfur. Blood. Carved symbols. I don’t recognize some of this other stuff. Frank, I’m not going to be able to do this. Not on my own.”
Frank considers this. He mulls over his options. But I’m guessing getting this key is going to outweigh his desire for complete secrecy.
And I’m right.
“Very well. I am risking a great deal with this, Jacob Green. But you may tell one person to help you.”
“It’s going to have to be two.”
“One! The risk is too great.”
“Frank, it has to be two. If I involve anyone else, I’m going to have to explain to Ms. Greystone. And she can’t be the only one I tell because she can’t physically help me. It has to be her and one other.”
He paces a bit, but I’m sure that is to give me the impression he’s weighing the decision.
“Agreed,” he says. He leans in close to me, our noses almost touching, and I can feel heat rolling off him. “You may tell this Greystone and one other. But be warned, they must not tell anyone else. If I find they have told, hinted, or even caused suspicion about me to anyone else, I will destroy the three of you and anyone else involved.”
I swallow, my mouth is suddenly dry. I know Frank doesn’t have a tangible form; he shouldn’t be able to physically harm me. But he’s not lying. I have no doubt that he is fully capable of carrying out his threat. If I agree to this, I am automatically committing my friends.
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