He was still in his cottage, but was alone by this hour. Levin had gone home and Martha, he supposed, was resting at her place. He wondered if they could see what was going down as well. But there was no real way of telling.
Willets peered out at the demon fiercely with his inner eye. If he could only blur himself across there, hit the beast with a strong bolt of sorcerous power …
But when he tried, he found he couldn’t even dematerialize. He could watch what was unfolding, but he could not intervene. A furious rage started boiling in him.
The scene up there was terrible. The hillside catching fire as the lava bubbled down it. Trees flaring up like matchsticks, and the smoke of the blaze thickening. And the ordinary people in the houses down below were looking up astonishedly, unsure whether to make a stand or run.
There would be nowhere left to run to, if this demon had its way. And this town had suffered quite enough already. Lehman struggled desperately, trying to think how he could stop this.
There was just one answer that he finally came up with. If he didn’t have the power to defeat this creature, maybe he could bargain with its master.
He went to his shelves and hunted for a book. It was a huge black one, leather bound and very frayed, a silver pentagram embossed upon its cover. He flipped through it quickly, making sure it was the one he wanted. Then he peered around at his surroundings.
This room had palely painted walls, and sash windows that let in a decent amount of daylight. And no, he told himself, this is wrong. For what he was about to do, a veil of darkness would be better.
Martha’s car was parked out on the open ground between their homes. And when he got to it, the key was there in the ignition.
CHAPTER SEVENTY
Lauren and me had found our way down from the second story. It turned out there was another, smaller stairway at the back of the house, that took you out in the direction of the tennis courts.
And not a moment too soon. The place wasn’t just falling apart by now. The lava had set fire to it too. The entire front section of the house was burning.
We backed off a distance as the flames rapidly spread. Eastlake’s few remains were still in there, so what had been his home was going to be his funeral pyre as well. And as for his immortal soul …?
I looked away, forgetting about him. There were more important issues.
Tavanah Kouralis had moved a good distance off before stopping again. She cut an ungainly figure, about a third of the way down the broad hillside. Her hands had dropped to her sides and she had gone silent. She looked relaxed and content.
She looked at home, to be precise. Rifts had opened the whole way across the hillside, lava pushing out from every single one of them. It was the type that rumbled forward at a trundling pace, cutting an unstoppable path through everything it touched.
“What do we …?” Lauren started asking.
Then she breathed in fumes and choked.
It pained me badly, but the only thing that I could do was stand there and watch, hoping against hope that one of our adepts might finally come up with something.
He hadn’t seen this place in months. Lehman Willets hurried down into the basement of the abandoned factory where he used to live. He’d lived that way for years, like a hermit, until Martha had persuaded him out. And he’d studied magic every single day, and not only through textbooks either. He’d examined the trails and the patterns of it, which wove through time and space like the strands of some bizarre cat’s cradle.
Perhaps a little firelight would be appropriate, considering the business that he was about to undertake. And so he tucked the book under one arm, then clicked the fingers of his other hand.
And that worked. So he still had some magic. A small fire sprang up in a corner of the room. There was nothing fuelling it, but it burned anyway. And an abrupt scuttling came to his ears when he did that. Dozens of creatures, from the size of a bug to a largish rat, went running for their holes along the edges of the walls. And then a few small pairs of eyes winked out, staring at him curiously.
The place had gotten grimier in the time he’d been away. Willets sniffed uncomfortably, then opened his book to the most relevant chapter. He began to chant, not in a demonic language but in Latin.
This was a lengthy incantation, and would take a while. And so the whole time that his mouth was on the move, his inner eye was moving too.
It swept across Raine’s Landing, pausing anywhere of interest. He was looking at those people who had been already hurt, who’d lost their homes and livelihoods. Because it reminded him – and very firmly – why precisely he was doing this.
His gaze alighted on a woman called Nadine. She was slim, compact, and had dyed her hair a wide variety of colors. Lehman had even met her once – she was a friend of Cassie’s. He remembered her as being pleasant and polite, and very much hardworking.
And she’d recently lost everything she’d built up down the last few years. She was seated on the couch where she’d been sleeping, at the home of yet another friend who lived near Crealley Street. When the bar she’d owned had been engulfed in flame, her small apartment at the rear had gone up too.
She’d put her heart and soul into that place. She’d loved her little home, and Nadine’s had been a comfortable and welcoming bar, filled with music and bright chatter.
She had no insurance. It was a hard thing to get hold of in a town where chaos was a constant visitor. And she was still as numb as she had been the day before, staring blankly into space and wondering what she was going to do from this point on.
And she was quite oblivious – as well – to what was happening outside, the awful horror that was coming to consume her.
She and people like her … they were decent folks, and they deserved a better fate than this. So Lehman concentrated on the book, his words spilling out in a swift tumble. And the name ‘Ithmoteus’ started cropping up a lot.
He suddenly became aware that someone was behind him. And he got the distinct notion that it wasn’t any devil.
“Lehman?”
Martha Howard-Brett stepped into view, her expression appalled. So she had obviously seen him leaving and then followed him here. By blurring?
“What do you think you’re doing?” she gasped. “You’re … conjuring something up?”
Willets stared back at her the way a boulder might stare.
“I’m summoning the devil who’s in charge of all this. It’s the only thing that I can think to do.”
Martha had to struggle to see what his plan was, but she finally got it. He could tell that by the way she blanched.
“You’re offering yourself up? Have you gone insane?”
“I’m a very powerful magician, Martha. And my complex, rather unique soul, given over willingly? I think this Ithmoteus might be tempted by a deal like that.”
Which sounded rather lofty, but he couldn’t think of any other way to put it.
Martha’s mood was phasing through to open anger, though.
“You can’t do this! It won’t even work!”
“I have to at least try,” the doctor told her firmly.
He was far more strongly skilled at witchcraft than she was. So he thrust a palm toward her, with his pupils flaring. And that actually worked too. She vanished, going back to where she’d come from. So it seemed his powers could still be used, so long as he did not try to attack the creature on the hillside. Willets returned his attention to the book.
Translated, the next passage read, “Ithmoteus, come to me. I beckon and invite you. I make of myself a lamb upon your altar, and expose my throat to your knife’s blade without so much as flinching. I stare at your form without blinking. I bend my knee and bow my head, and I await your judgment.”
The fire in the corner suddenly died down to a few glinting embers, blackness filling up most of the room. Sounds began vibrating through the dimness, peculiar whispers. Some of them were human voices. Others were completely different, sibilant and deep
. The darkened air in front of him began to coalesce, taking on vague shapes that were almost like distorted faces.
But then, he sensed that Martha had returned. And she’d brought someone with her this time.
Another female voice started bellowing out. And goddamit, this was Emaline Pendramere. He was stronger than her too, so what the hell did the High Witch think that she was doing?
Her incantation finished with the shrieked word, “Lux!”
Willets swung around, but not in time. A searing white glow shot out through the entire basement. It was emanating from her body, Emaline’s frame reduced to a wispy silhouette deep at the heart of it.
And the voices all immediately stopped. The shapes all disappeared. She’d chased away the devil he’d been seeking.
Willets hurled his book down, then went stomping over.
“What did you do that for?” He was so angry he was nearly screaming. “That was our final and our only chance! So why throw it away like that?”
Emaline stared back at him coolly, not bothered by his shouting in the least.
“Even if you managed to succeed, we’d not allow it.”
“We?” Willets thundered. “Who are ‘we,’ exactly?”
“Myself. And Martha here. The other friends who care about you deeply. And most importantly of all, the Goddess. You are one of Her creatures, Lehman Willets. Your life and soul, they are Her gifts to you, and so cannot be given away or bartered.”
Martha was nodding in agreement.
“We’ll find another way,” she put in, trying to reassure him.
At which, every trace of anger left the doctor. His body deflated and his shoulders slumped.
“What other way?” he asked. “We’ve nothing left.”
And the silence closing in around them appeared to confirm that.
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
Cassie was back home by now. The doctors had advised her to try and ignore everything that was happening and simply get some rest. Which proved that they could look inside her body with their ultrasounds and scans, but they had not the faintest idea how her mind worked.
Originally, she’d kept on crossing over to the window of her living room and staring out. But it faced east, and there was not an awful lot to see in that direction. So finally, she went to a door that had been bolted for a good long while, unlocked it and pulled it back.
The empty diner that she used to run stared back at her. A sudden tide of memory washed over Cass, the regulars she’d enjoyed seeing, and the brand-new customers she’d smiled at in the hope that they’d come back. Life had been far simpler then. Busier too, since she’d had three kids to look after. She had barely had a moment to herself, if truth be told. And hadn’t cared. She’d been content.
Cass walked over to the plate glass frontage. It faced south. She could make out the top of Sycamore Hill from here. And she’d seen smoke before, from her hospital room. But not this much. There were gigantic billows of it.
Cassie felt her insides stiffen. If there was trouble up there, then Ross would almost certainly be around, and Lauren too. And trying to tell herself her friends were not in danger … that was nonsense, and she knew it.
But there was no way of knowing what they were up against, not stuck down here. Cassie pressed both hands against the glass, staring up mournfully. Every fiber in her frame was urging her to go up there and help them. But she knew she couldn’t do that without risking May.
The very next moment, however, something very weird and totally unprecedented happened. A shining ball of blue light suddenly appeared in her mind’s eye, inside the darkness of her head. She quivered with shock and then blinked firmly several times, only it wouldn’t go away.
What was this, and where was it coming from? It was electric blue light she was seeing, a perfect orb that color. But then it started spreading open at its center, parting to reveal a moving picture.
It was what she had been hoping for, a vision of the things she couldn’t see before. She found herself staring at the gradient of Sycamore Hill, with lava pouring down it. Cassie jerked.
The front edge of the flow was within several dozen yards of starting to engulf the Clayton district. Most people had fled, but a few hardy souls were trying to build a rampart in the dirt, an effort that was far too little and too late. She could already see it would have no effect.
Then the focus of the picture shifted. Cassie shuddered, stumbling back. She hit a chair behind her, sitting down on it like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
But she could now see what was causing this. There was a massive devil higher up the slope. A truly enormous monster, with its fangs bared and its purplish eyes gleaming. Further up behind it were both Ross and Lauren, but they were not even trying to attack it. All that they could manage was to stare down as the creature went about its deadly work. So Cassie figured ordinary force was no real use against it.
She clasped her damp hands to her temples, struggling to get a grip on what was going on. What kind of magic was allowing her to see this? And what was she supposed to do about it anyway?
“Who’s doing this to me?” she yelled.
There was an unexpected wavering on the air in front of her, and Quinn’s outline came into view, very faint against the daylit glass. But she could see the concern etched across his face. He stepped up to her, going down on one translucent knee.
“Are you showing me this stuff?” she asked him urgently.
“Nuh-uh.”
“Then who?”
Quinn considered that, then shook his shoulder-length blond locks.
“Hold still a moment, ‘kay?”
He lifted his right hand. And Cassie watched him with a growing sense of unease as he put his fingertips against her swollen belly. But she remained still and silent, even when the top joints of his spectral fingers went in past her clothes. She could feel a gentle tingling, but nothing worse than that.
Quinn’s eyelids slipped quietly shut. He bowed his head, and looked like he was listening to something only he could hear.
And when his gaze snapped open and his face came up, astonishingly, he was smiling. There was a sheer sense of amazement to the way he did that, his features twisted up with raw emotion and his eyes brimming with tears.
“It’s her, Cassie,” he whispered, struggling mightily with the words.
“Her?”
“It’s May. It’s her who’s showing you this stuff.”
Cassie tried to yank herself away from him, as though he were a madman.
“That can’t be!”
But Quinn’s head gave a slow, firm shake.
“I told you she’d be powerful, didn’t I? May’s already conscious, Cassie. She can sense, and even see, the way the adepts can.”
“But –“
Cassie felt like she was going to pass out. Even in a town chock full of strangeness, she had never heard of anything like this. And could it really be?
Quinn could see how thrown she was, and seemed to understand. He stood and put a hand to her cheek, trying to soothe her.
“There’s no need to be scared,” he murmured. “May’s not scared. She’s only trying to help.”
“But how? What … what good does it do showing me this?”
Quinn ducked his chin again and concentrated.
“She already has some powers.”
May was barely five months in the womb, so Cassie’s eyes came open very wide.
“She’s strong enough that she can hold out for an hour or so,” Quinn told her.
May could … keep herself safe while her Mom joined in the fight? Another jolt went right through Cassie, so hard that it drove her to her feet.
“This is nuts!” she screamed. “You’re imagining this! It can’t be real!”
“But it is. She’ll be just fine, believe me.”
He settled both his palms against the shaking edges of her face.
“There’s serious trouble up there, Cassie. You want to go face it,
right? I want you to do that too. And even May agrees.”
And Quinn showed her his bravest smile.
“So go.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO
Every other matter was forgotten in that moment. Cassie spun around and headed back into the house. Her boots were by the front door, and she pulled them on. Then she yanked open the cupboard where she stored her weapons.
She pulled on the belt on which her pair of Glocks was holstered, although she had no choice but to buckle it up at the last notch. And then she grabbed her Mossberg pump-action. She knew it had a hefty kick, and wondered if she ought to risk it. But an instinct seemed to come to her. There were no actual words. No, there was merely the strong feeling that May could cope with the impact of this gun.
She got the reverse of that, however, when she flung open her front door and started marching over to her bright red Harley. Her emotions changed abruptly. This – she was immediately aware – was not okay. Riding that big, powerful hog sent vibrations through her frame that jangled her bones till they almost hummed. And that was out. She’d have to find some other means of transport.
Was this still May guiding her? Cassie didn’t have the time for any speculation though, and so she drove such thoughts out of her head, looking around quickly.
The only other vehicle that she could see nearby was her next-door neighbor – Mrs. Plack’s – very ancient, badly rusted pickup. It had barely any paint left, but she knew the thing still ran okay.
She raced around and began banging on her neighbor’s door.
“Mrs. Plack? It’s Cassie!” She pressed her head against the woodwork and could make out TV noises. “Mrs. Plack, it’s urgent!”
They weren’t exactly friendly. But even somebody as dour as Mrs. P. had to see that that wasn’t the point right now. Cassie tried the doorbell, but it wasn’t working.
Speak of the Devil - 05 Page 27