“Ozzy?” Early said.
I wiped the bitter smile from my face. “I think I know who’s working our curse.”
He glanced at Rodetk in the back of the car, then set his jaw and turned to me. “Go.”
I hesitated. “Are you sure? What about—”
“Go!” he said. “Both of you. I can get Rodetk to Alcaraz. If I can’t save him, neither can you. You need to shut this curse down before it gets started.”
I turned to Lilian, intending to tell her I could deal with this myself if she wanted to go with Early and Rodetk. But I swallowed my words when I saw the look in her eyes.
“I’m not letting you do this without someone watching your back,” she said.
“I know. I was just going to ask which of us is driving.”
“Me,” she said, leaving no room for discussion.
We were going to die on the road. I knew it.
Without warning, Early reached out his weedy little old man arms and grabbed me by the shoulders.
“Be careful, my boy.”
Before I could reply, he released me and reached into the back seat of his car. He pulled something from beneath the seat and held it out. It was a pump-action shotgun.
I stared. “You’ve been holding out on me, old man.”
“Alternating lead and silver slugs,” he said. “Just in case.”
Lilian grabbed it out of his hands. “Don’t worry,” she said to Early. “I’ll take care of him.”
And with that, Early nodded once more, jumped in the car, and gunned the engine. The wheels spun and he left a cloud of dust behind him as he raced off down the driveway. I turned to Lilian, eyed her and the shotgun.
“You know, that suits you. Really brings out your eyes.”
“You want to flirt, or you want to stop this curse?”
“I can’t do both?” I said.
“Afraid not.”
I shrugged. “Then let me introduce you to someone very close to my heart. His name is Brandon Mills, and he’s the man who killed me.”
32
Brandon Mills had fooled me twice. He wasn’t going to get a chance to do it a third time.
Mills’ story had sent me off on a wild goose chase into the Mines. A chase that’d left Rodetk clinging to life by his fingernails. A chase that we’d only survived ourselves thanks to a roggenwolf that was now almost certainly dead. A chase that had cost me precious hours, and brought me closer and closer to the time when the Dealer would return to claim my body.
And the worst thing was I had truly, honestly believed Mills. I’d been struck deep by his whole damn sob story, his tale of an abducted son.
Had he known about Teddy? About the guilt I harbored? Had he used it to play me?
I’d been sure it was goblins. It fitted everything I knew about the world. I’d gone to the Mines again, just like I’d done all those years ago. I’d been ready to take my revenge on whatever cave-dwelling monster had done this.
But this time there was no scheming goblin. This time it was plain old garden-variety human evil.
I still didn’t know the why, or the what. I didn’t really care. I had the who, and that was enough.
We approached the front door of Brandon Mills’ creepy old house under cover of night.
I held my wax doll in my hand. The bloody clump of Mills’ hair was still stuffed in the doll’s mouth. It had probably lost some potency in the last day and a half, but it would be enough. And if not, I had a truncheon I was eager to introduce to Mills’ kneecaps.
Lilian strode along beside me, shotgun in hand. She had a face like the angel of death. I remembered what she said, about using the anger when the time was right. She was channeling her anger now, that much was plain.
I tried the front door. It was unlocked.
Caution overrode my anger for a moment, and I tested the door for any wards I hadn’t noticed the first two times I’d been here. It was clean. Didn’t surprise me. If it’d been properly warded, the hobgoblin wouldn’t have been able to get in in the first place.
I glanced at Lilian, nodded. With her jaw set, she raised the shotgun. I threw open the door.
The hallway was as black and cold as a tomb. I reached in, found the switch, and flipped it. The light grudgingly came to life, catching the swirls of dust generated by the sudden breeze. Nothing else moved.
With one hand on the wax doll and the other gripping my truncheon, I crept inside. The revolver in my pocket slapped against my side with each step. I was out of silver rounds, but lead would do just fine.
Lilian closed the door behind us and we paused, listening. The house made all the usual old house noises: creaks and groans and the whistle of the wind coming in through some crack in the wall. But there was nothing else.
I gestured silently to Lilian. We went room-by-room, Lilian covering me with the shotgun while I threw open doors. The guest bedroom was empty aside from the moving boxes that still hadn’t been unpacked. I checked the main bathroom next. It had been scrubbed clean.
I nudged open the door to Mills’ mother’s bedroom. It still had her smell. The curtains were pulled, and the sheets had been stripped. There was no sign of either the woman or her wheelchair.
No one in the nursery or the living room. Piles of dirty dishes and empty take-out boxes littered the kitchen, producing a hell of a stink. Flies buzzed around in circles, making little black tornadoes above the sink.
Only the two plates sitting at either end of the dining table looked recently used. By the look of things, Brandon Mills and his mother had had themselves a fine meal not more than a couple of hours ago. But they weren’t here anymore.
“Shit,” I whispered, lowering my truncheon and looking around the empty living room. “No one’s home.”
“I don’t know about that,” Lilian said. “That mold patch looks developed enough to start wearing a suit.”
I rubbed my beard in frustration. I had all kinds of pent-up emotion I wanted to work out on Brandon Mills’ face. And the bastard didn’t even have the decency to be here.
So where the hell was he? Where were they both?
Hell. It was just after nine. Only three hours until midnight. Three hours until the Dealer returned to claim his due. I had to find Mills while I still had time.
“Let’s look around,” I said. “See if he left some clue about where he went.”
“There’s nothing here, Ozzy.”
“Look anyway.”
“We already have,” she said. “There’s nothing.”
I shook my head. I couldn’t accept it.
“Can’t you do your cunning man thing?” she said. “Track him that way?”
“I could,” I said. “If I had time and the right ingredients. I’ve got neither.”
She frowned. “Then maybe we should hide in wait. If Mills comes back, we can ambush him.”
“What if he doesn’t come back? What if he’s out there right now, working the curse?”
She chewed her lip. “Then we’re already too late.”
Real ray of sunshine, this one. But she was right. Goddamn it, she was right.
“I need to call my sister,” I said suddenly.
“What for?”
“You heard what Early said. Whatever this curse is, it’s bad fucking news. We don’t know what will happen if Mills succeeds. And I don’t want my family sticking around to find out. Is there anyone you need to call?”
Lilian hesitated, then shook her head. “No. I’ll…I’ll switch off the lights. We don’t want Mills knowing we’re here if he comes back.”
I nodded and stepped into the hallway, bringing my phone to my ear. It went straight to voicemail.
“This is Alice. You know what to do.”
Shit. She’d switched her phone off, which meant she was probably at work. The beep came, and I hesitated for a second, unsure what to say.
“It’s me,” I said. “I’ll try to call you at the station in a second, but in case I can’t get through�
�” I trailed off and sighed. “Listen, some things might be going down. I can’t go into detail. I told you I had a job go bad, right? Well, it’s getting worse by the second.” I shook my head. “I’m rambling. The point is you need to get out of town. You and Val and the boys. For a few days, at least. Leave tonight. Just put some distance between you and Lost Falls.”
I heard a switch flip, and the living room went dark. Lilian moved about quietly, and even though I knew she wouldn’t be trying to eavesdrop, she wouldn’t be able to help overhearing.
“I’m sorry I can’t explain,” I said into the phone. “Just know that this isn’t me being crazy. Get out of town. Seriously. I love you all.” I sighed. “Okay, I’ll try to call you at the station.”
I hung up just as Lilian switched off the hallway light. Darkness descended, until the only light came from my phone’s screen. I scrolled through my contacts, trying to find the number for the radio station’s reception. I knew I had it somewhere.
But just then I noticed a sliver of light out of the corner of my eye. I lowered my phone.
“What the hell?” I whispered. “Lilian, come look at this.”
She walked back down the dark of the hallway to me. A couple of near-empty moving boxes had been stacked up against the wall where the hallway turned a corner. But there was a crack of light coming through a gap in the wall behind them.
Lilian saw it too. Without a word, I pushed the boxes aside.
I’d be exaggerating if I called it a hidden door. Now that I’d moved the boxes, the handle and door frame were pretty obvious. But it had been designed to fit in smoothly with the wall, right down to the wallpaper. A thin strip of light came through the crack in the door.
Lilian and I moved into position without exchanging a word. She readied her shotgun, and I pulled open the door.
It was a staircase leading down to the basement.
Hell. Why was it always a basement?
There was a light on downstairs, illuminating the stairway. By the looks of it, Brandon Mills had made only one renovation in the entire house, and it was here. A stair lift had been installed in the stairway, giving Mills’ mother a way of getting downstairs. The bucket seat was sitting at the end of the track, at the top of the stairs.
A smell floated up from the basement. It wasn’t so different from the smell of blood in Likho’s chamber, only this time the smell was old, stale, the smell of meat beginning to turn.
I glanced at Lilian, gesturing with my eyes. She nodded. Taking a deep breath, I started down the stairs.
Whatever was down there, I knew it wouldn’t be good.
33
There was a horror show waiting for us at the bottom of the stairs.
For a second I just stared at it all, letting it soak in. I couldn’t speak.
Lilian reached the bottom of the stairs and gasped. She kept the shotgun raised, even though there was nothing to aim at.
Nothing alive, at least.
The basement was part rec room, part satanic ritual chamber. A couple of battered, cigarette-burned couches were being used as shelves, holding an unordered collection of vials and powders and small boxes of unknown content. A huge trunk, wrought with tarnished silver, was pressed up against the far wall, with a grimoire open on top.
There was even a little bar at the far end of the basement, but unfortunately for me all the booze had been ransacked long ago. In its place was a tray of dirty knives and a lumpy mess covered with a bloodstained cloth. The cloth crawled with flies. There was also a blowtorch and what looked like a thick clay bowl. A simple manual wheelchair was sitting at the bottom of the stairs.
Pride of place was given to a pool table, no doubt abandoned by the house’s previous owners when they decided they couldn’t be bothered hauling the damn thing back up the stairs. And upon said pool table was the star of the show.
Brandon Mills lay face up on the pool table, buck-naked, staring blankly at the ceiling. Lit candles were planted around the rim of the table, next to the pockets. They were all burnt half down, sitting in puddles of wax. Arcane symbols had been painted in a neat, tidy hand all across Mills’ naked flesh—at least the parts that weren’t covered in blood.
Mills, the son of a bitch, was dead. Dead before I could make him pay for what he’d done to me.
Just my luck.
“Maybe we should check for a pulse,” Lilian suggested.
Her idea of a joke. Brandon Mills’ chest was a bloody mess. His ribcage had been cracked open by one of those surgical spreaders. Mills was dead. No doubt about it.
I felt tired all of a sudden, like all the furious energy that’d been keeping me going was sucked out all at once. I wanted to lie down on one of those flea-ridden couches and sleep for a week.
If only I had a week.
“What’s that?” Lilian whispered.
“What’s what?” I tore my eyes from Mills’ corpse to see what she was looking at.
She was looking up, in the same direction Brandon Mills’ dead eyes were staring. There was something pinned to the ceiling.
Apparently feeling neither my disgust nor my fatigue, Lilian leapt nimbly up onto the pool table, placing one foot on either side of Mills’ head. She reached up and plucked the thing stuck to the ceiling.
She dropped back down beside me. She was holding a Polaroid photograph. It was no professional picture. The focus was off, and the whites were blown all to hell. But it had a special quality to it all the same. It was a picture of a baby, not more than a couple of months old, with a mop of dark hair. A pretty damn cute baby. An easy baby to love.
A woman was holding the baby to her chest. The woman’s face fell outside the frame, but from the way she held him, I was almost certain it was the boy’s mother.
I took the picture from Lilian and flipped it over. On the back, someone had scrawled: Michael, 6 weeks.
Michael. Michael Mills.
“This was what he was looking at when he died,” I said. “A picture of his son.”
“Nice of his killer to give him that.”
I grunted and pocketed the picture.
Lilian bent over Mills’ body, examining him. “His heart is gone.”
I nodded. I’d already guessed that much.
“Can’t see any other wounds. No bruising.” She looked at me. “I think his chest was opened when he was still alive.”
I nodded again. Mills’ face was frozen in a scream of pain. But his eyes were wide open, staring up at the ceiling with all the intensity a corpse could muster.
“Were we wrong?” she said. “Was he just a victim after all?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “His arms and legs aren’t tied. No bruising there either. So either he was held in place by some kind of magic, or…”
“Or what?”
“He went to his death voluntarily.”
Lilian’s eyes widened and she turned back to the massive, gaping wound in his chest. “How could anyone suffer that willingly?”
I didn’t have an answer for her.
I went over to the bar, careful not to step on a spray of Mills’ blood that’d soaked into the carpet. Most of the flies in the room were buzzing around the lumpy cloth-covered pile on the bar, rather than Mills’ body. His death had been recent. Maybe no more than an hour ago, given the look of him.
But whatever was under the cloth on the bar had been dead a while longer.
I couldn’t bring myself to lift the cloth right away. Instead, I started looking through the other items scattered about. The blowtorch looked newly purchased. There were a set of tongs as well, and a clay crucible. I picked up the crucible. There was something inside. A thin, curved piece of ivory.
I’d seen it once before. In that roadside diner where I’d captured the hobgoblin. Where Mills killed me. Except back then, the ivory had formed the handle of a silver baby rattle.
I lifted a pair of heavy leather gloves. Beneath them lay two halves of a clay mold. A mold for forming the blade of a sm
all dagger.
I cast a look at the tray of knives sitting further along the bar. But none of the knives there matched the shape of the mold. And besides, they were all stainless steel. None of them had been made from the silver of a treasured family heirloom.
I filed that knowledge away with the rest and turned at last to the cloth-covered pile. I waved my hand at the flies swarming around it, but they just parted and went right back to their buzzing as soon as my hand was clear. Taking a deep breath, I pinched the cloth by the corner and pulled it away.
“Oh, Christ,” I said, planting my palms flat against the bar.
“What?” Lilian said from behind me, where she was still examining Mills.
I rubbed my face and sighed. “I found my hobgoblin. Some of her.”
Brandon Mills’ corpse wasn’t a pretty sight, but he was still intact, for the most part. The same couldn’t be said of the hobgoblin.
In some ways, that actually made it easier. It was just like looking at a slightly rotten cut of meat. By the look of it, most of her bones and internal organs had been stripped out of her. Her skin was nowhere to be seen.
The only part of her that was intact was the head. It had been severed neatly. Her eyes were closed, thank God.
I had plenty to feel guilty for, but for some reason, this right here hit me the hardest.
I’d been trying to do good. Just like Early taught me. All I’d wanted to do was recover a stolen heirloom for a grieving father.
I’d never wanted the hobgoblin dead. I didn’t want her carved up like a Christmas roast. No sentient creature deserved to die like this.
Lilian laid a soft hand on my shoulder. For a moment, my knees went weak. I wanted to collapse into her arms. I wanted to cry.
I didn’t, though. I couldn’t. Not yet. I turned to face her.
“What is all this, Ozzy?” she asked. She looked as drained as me. “Some kind of ritual? Witchcraft?”
I looked at the symbols painted on Brandon Mills’ flesh. “Hag’s magic. The final preparations for the curse.”
“So where’s the hag?” she said.
Good question. I glanced once more around the basement, and my eyes fell on the silver-wrought trunk in the corner.
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