“Where d’you get a drink round here? What kind of place is this, where a decent soul can’t even get a goddamn drink?”
A belch followed. Millicent cringed.
Then a loud caterwauling erupted upstairs. Two of the others had started fighting. A volley of approving yells told her that more of them had gathered around to watch.
This wasn’t what she’d planned. Not how she’d envisioned things. She’d fantasized her revenge a million times since her early years, and never once had it involved this ragged band of maladjusted deadbeats.
And she decided she was sick and tired of it. This was far too high a price to pay. So she raised her free hand. Murmured a spell quickly.
The lumbering woman halted. Grunted and looked down. Something in the middle of her chest had started to revolve. And was spinning—faster, faster—until it resembled a tiny cyclone.
It began to suck her in. She yelled out a frightened protest, tried to get away. But it was part of her, and she could not escape it. She shrank rapidly, and then disappeared from view. Shrieks and wails throughout the mansion told her that the same was happening to the others.
“What did you do that for?” snarled a voice beside her ear.
The momentary sense of triumph went away immediately. There was still this other problem. There was no way she could think of to get rid of Hanlon. He still had hold of the other end of the Wand of Dantiere. And, so long as he kept it in his grasp, they were inseparably conjoined, the most unlikely pair of Siamese twins.
Was she still, to his gaze, “Ma”? She’d given up on that pretense a good while back. But his mind seemed to work very differently than other people’s.
Whatever, he seemed to be enjoying this alliance considerably more than she was. He had even started to complain to her occasionally. And—infuriatingly, to her way of thinking—that was what he was doing now.
“They were our guys,” Hanlon snapped in her ear crossly. “On our side, and ready to do battle on our behalf. Why treat them like that?”
He’d killed and tortured harmless families in the outside world like they were nothing, but had sympathy for these dregs? God, it repelled her even to be near him. But, until the chance presented itself, there was no alternative.
“They were merely for starters, an hors d’oeuvre,” she told him. “I’d no more rely on them than on a piece of mud stuck to my shoe.”
Hanlon squinted at her puzzledly, a strange light shining deep within his eyes.
“Then what?”
“It cost this town, but they defeated everything we threw at them last night. So we change tactics. Now that we know exactly how to go about it, we choose better subjects, and we turn them far more carefully.”
He didn’t know what she was talking about, but tried to look like he did, and nodded.
“Why, exactly?”
“Nobody will know where the next threat is coming from.”
Hanlon turned that over. Then his gaze brightened and delight gleamed in it.
“I get it—we turn the adepts. That uncle of yours? I’d really like to nail his pompous ass.”
But Millicent shook her head.
“No. That’s not what I had in mind. It’s not even them that really bother me.”
This was confusing the big lunatic, and he didn’t look the least bit pleased by that. She was reminded of how potentially dangerous he was.
“Then who?” he spat out.
She stayed calm when she replied.
“That plainclothes fellow or whatever he is. Devries. I know of him. He’s been all over town. He’s been consulting with Raine. And he was even there with my uncle and his friends.”
She paused and stared at the opposite wall.
“I get a feeling about him, and not a good one. He’s stood in the way of trouble before. Managed to stop it when no one else could.”
“He has some special kind of magic?”
“No.” Millicent’s cheekbones turned a few shades darker. “I’m not sure what you’d call it. But he’s a threat to us, and we are going to have to deal with him.”
“He has a dark side, like anyone else,” Hanlon suggested, peering at her mischievously. “Why not simply turn him?”
Millicent’s response was to close her eyes. She reached out with her inner senses, trying to detect what she was really up against. She trusted her own instincts, and they told her to be cautious.
“Again, no. The man has rigid self-control, and that would be a big mistake.”
“Then what?”
And she finally grinned.
“I have a plan.”
CHAPTER 32
Sitting in the darkness, he had watched the events of last night unfold in his mind’s eye, his pupils glowing even more brightly than usual, almost incandescently. Plenty of disaster had been heaped on this town during the years he’d been here. But what he had been watching—the awful, grinding horror of it—shook him to the very core.
Once the sun had risen, Lehman Willets had attempted to lighten his mood the only way that he knew how. The record on his turntable was by Milt Jackson, live at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965. The percussionist was in full swing. The lilting, madcap tones of “Flying Saucer” echoed around the upstairs room. The doctor certainly did not feel happy about returning to his basement yet.
He was sitting on his camp bed, trying to lose himself in the jollity of the tune, when his head came snapping abruptly up. His vermilion pupils burned like tiny twin furnaces.
He snapped his fingertips. The record stopped.
Despite the fact that it was dim in here, he could make out something moving on the air. A faint smokiness. A texture, rather than anything tangible. But he could definitely feel a presence. Someone else’s consciousness was trying to invade his own.
He saw who. And straightened up annoyedly.
“Do you know exactly who I am?” he barked.
The small creatures who were watching him scuttled for cover, when he did that. And the presence immediately vanished.
Saul Hobart was driving into Garnerstown again. He was not in the easiest of moods. The town had managed to survive last night, but, to his mind, it was more by luck than judgment. The whole thing was sure to start again as soon as darkness fell. So, if the ordinary civilians wanted to help—and let’s face it, he didn’t have enough men to cope on his own—then there were better ways that they could do it.
He had used up a good part of this morning going around the neighborhoods, organizing their inhabitants into proper militias rather than the unformed mob that had rushed in to help a few hours back. Most people had warmed to that idea. Last night had been chaos. And who wanted that?
He spent so much time in his car these days, it was almost like a second office. There was a small heap of files on the passenger seat. A pine-shaped air freshener and a string of worry beads hung from the rearview mirror. He’d never used the latter—he just liked the way it looked. And there was a half-used-up pack of gum in the well beside his seat. He never chewed in front of his men, but liked to when he was alone. There was a wad in his cheek right now.
The other thing down there, of course, was a snapshot of his wife and daughters. Saul never went anywhere without that. Like a talisman, it gave him extra strength.
He had one hand on the steering wheel, and the other clasped around his cell phone. Time was short. He wanted to discuss a few things in advance of his arrival. Nick McLeish sounded worried on the other end.
“The way you’re describing it, this could happen to pretty much anyone.”
“It looks that way.”
“My friends? Even my family?”
“Which is what we have to be prepared for,” Saul said, trying to reassure him. “The better informed about the danger everybody is, then the readier they’ll be for it. I’m pulling onto Greenwood Terrace, Nick. I’ll be there in about two minutes.”
This route was familiar to him, and he negotiated it almost automatically. But as he
was hanging up, he noted a faint mistiness on the air ahead of him. It didn’t surprise him too much. It was not unusual, even this late in the morning, for patches of fog to come drifting in from the surrounding forest.
He continued onward, thinking that he’d pass right through. But it was inside the car in the next moment—despite the fact his windows were shut—and hovering about him. Voices started chanting in his head. And one of them he recognized as Ms. Tollburn’s.
“Why are you bothering? You know that you can’t win.”
He pulled over to the curb before he lost control of his Pontiac. And then tucked his head down against the steering wheel. Fear was coursing through him like a second bloodstream. Could he even fight against this thing?
“You work all the hours God gives, protecting this town. And to what end? Nothing ever changes. No one really cares.”
“That’s not true! I know what you are!” he yelled back.
The voices kept on battering at him. And he started to feel another cloud—a black one of despair—begin to settle over him. But he ground his teeth and struggled against it.
He thought of the job he had to do. About the people who were relying on him. Most of all, he thought about his home, his wife and his daughters.
He kept on clinging to the image of his family until the voices went away.
The fighting had not come near here, and so he had not gotten caught up in it. Which was just as well, since he was not a violent man. He was a pacifist, if anything. Studying Chinese philosophy had made him so.
But Lawrence L. DuMarr was aware of everything that had been going on—he owned a TV and a radio. And wished that he could have helped in some way. If only he were more robust in his approach to life. If only he was a little bit more like Cassandra Mallory. He was friends with Cassie, and Ross Devries, and had come to admire her.
He was sitting in the office at the back of his apothecary shop on Exeter Close, where Marshall Drive sloped up to meet Sycamore Hill. As was his custom, he had lit an oil lamp, preferring its glow to the electrical variety. It had more depth, and gave things proper texture.
Its ochre flame illuminated the charts on his walls. They were of pressure points, meridians, running in lines across a human body. Lawrence was a practitioner of acupuncture, oriental medicine, and a whole lot more. His main business was healing people, by channeling their life-force in beneficial ways.
Like anybody else born here, he had never left this town. But objects from the outside world arrived, and they included books and magazines. Pretty early on in life, he had become fascinated with Eastern culture. He had become an expert on the Tao, the I-Ching, Confucius, and Buddha. And had chosen a profession which made use of that compendium of knowledge.
Except that…no one who’d been injured, even slightly scratched, had come to him this morning. Now that the chips were really down, no one had thought to make use of his services. They’d all gone to a regular doctor or a hospital.
Did no one trust him anymore? He felt rather abandoned and betrayed.
Lawrence sighed, and brushed his prematurely white hair away from his temples. Then his goateed face tilted up a few inches, his eyes narrowing behind his gold pince-nez.
Was the oil in the lamp burning inefficiently? There seemed to be a hint of smoke on the room’s still air. The furniture around him—cabinets and shelving, all constructed of dark wood—seemed to be casting extra shadows. He suddenly took in the fact that he was not alone.
“Here you sit, discarded and forgotten,” murmured a voice in his head. “No one really wants what you have to offer. No one understands the wisdom you possess. When they come to you at all, it’s out of curiosity. They think that you’re an absurd crank.”
He should have gotten up and walked out of there. Didn’t even understand what this voice was. But it seemed to have a grip on him. The words that he was listening to fixated him. And he waited for them to continue, his lower lip dropping nervelessly.
The smoke moved around him, filtering through his white mane of hair. It hung around for a good while.
Then it lifted from him, left the shop, and moved away.
It was heading northeast this time. To the district of East Meadow.
CHAPTER 33
Cassie was physically as shattered as she’d ever been, her brain teetering on the edge of sleep. But adrenaline and anger wouldn’t let her go there.
She was in her living room again, on the couch, her boots on the cheap upholstery and her head pressed to her knees. A shudder ran through her occasionally. That was just her nervous system, trying to quiet down. She never liked to show it, but she was sore and aching after the fights last night. The fact that she’d won them didn’t mean she wasn’t hurt. She felt like she’d been tenderized.
Cleveland kept on moving up to her and dabbing at her elbow with his nose. But she ignored him. There was more than just the damage to her body, since her thoughts were painful too.
When the fighting had finally stopped, what had Ross gone and done? It still bugged her. He’d barely said a word to her. Simply wandered off with that new woman again.
She could scarcely lay claim to him. Not in any romantic sense. Their relationship wasn’t in the least bit like that, never really had been. And she wasn’t under any illusions, when it came to that side of his character. She knew what the score was with Ross. He’d never try to come on to Lauren, or give in to her advances. He was—unlike the men she generally chose—one of the straightest arrows that had ever flown, still devoted to his wife. It was one of the reasons that she genuinely liked him.
But…they’d been through so much together, side by side. Become so close. Good friends, but something more than that. They worked together as a perfect team. Matched each other like two pieces of a jigsaw.
Now she felt this Brennan chick was pushing them apart.
Memories came rushing back into her mind, the walls between the present and the past dissolving. She felt almost like she’d been abandoned, and she’d known that feeling once before. It had been when she was seventeen, and her folks had died in a road accident. She knew they had not left her alone deliberately. But back then, it sometimes felt like that. And she had wandered on her own for months, until she’d met up with the motorcycle gang.
Even they hadn’t accepted her unanimously.
It had been in the washroom of the dingy basement bar they hung out in, The Hole on O’Connell Street. She was standing in front of the smeared mirror, admiring her tattoos. She’d got them very recently, since she had only been in the gang a week.
The door suddenly swung open behind her. Another girl member—Sheba—walked in, followed by her two inseparable buddies, Ursula and Vixen. They saw how she was admiring herself, and smirked sarcastically.
“Well, look at you looking at you. You really think you’re some kinda big deal, don’t you, bitch?”
She tried to pull back from the memory, but it wouldn’t let her go. Her first real fight. The savagery and heat of it. She had been scared, but had come out the right end of it.
Her first taste of blood, then. It had been one-on-one, which was the rule. Sheba’s friends had stood back and watched. And Cass had wound up with bruises and scratches, even a bite mark, sure. But it had ended with her slamming Sheba’s forehead into a washbasin until the blood began to flow.
“Look what you’ve done to my face, you crazy bitch!”
“Well, look at you looking at you.”
The others had stepped out of her way quickly when she’d headed out of there. And none of the girls in the gang had picked on her much after that.
She tried to pull back from the images again. She didn’t act that way these days—at least, not to human beings. Hell, she wasn’t that scared, angry teenager anymore. She’d behaved like that because she had been cut adrift, was terrified the world would notice just how vulnerable she was.
Since those days, she had turned herself around completely. Become self-reliant. Got hersel
f a family.
Except that…where was it all now? She’d worked so hard to keep herself on the straight and narrow. And everything had simply dissolved like bubbles in her grasp.
The memories kept flooding through her.
She’d cornered a drunk in an alley behind O’Connell once. He seemed to have got lost down there. Tall and strong even at that age, she’d pushed him up against a wall and held a small knife to his throat.
“Watch! Wallet!”
“Yes, miss,” he had blurted.
And she’d liked the sound of that, being called miss for once, instead of kid or junior. It sounded like…respect.
Another evening, she stole a postal truck, and drove it in through a storefront window, just to make the rest of the gang laugh. Had felt slightly bad for the owner of the store. But she’d do anything for their approval.
No! Cut it out! That wasn’t her! She was…
She was…?
Her eyes came open and her head lifted. She gazed blearily around her living room. The ancient TV and the crummy furniture stared back at her. The pink walls that had needed repainting years back, and the tacky nylon drapes. A pile of motorcycle magazines sat on the low table in front of her. The acoustic guitar that she occasionally strummed was propped beside the couch. She couldn’t even play it properly. None of this was worth an awful lot. The only things that genuinely mattered were the snapshots of her vanished kids.
It had happened two weeks before Christmas, practically two years ago. Cassie peered bleakly at the tinsel tree still standing in the corner. She ought to have gotten used to her circumstances by this time. But how could you honestly, really? Moisture started filling up her eyes.
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