Greg nodded, but his gaze kept tripping away to scan the woods.
“Okay, listen good. I need you behind me, I need your hand gripping my belt. You stay close to me; you don’t let go of my belt. Deal?”
“Yes, Grandpa. But I have to tell you something.”
“No time for that now, Greg.” He took his grandson’s hand and put it on his belt over the pocket where he kept his wallet. “You hold on right there, Greg. If something is coming up behind us, give me a tug. Okay?”
Greg nodded, looking miserable.
“Give her a try.”
Moving mechanically, Greg tugged on his grandfather’s belt twice in rapid succession. “Grandpa, the Lady in the Lake, she’s trying to keep us from leaving tomorrow. She’s the one out here—”
“I’ve seen the lady dressed in black, Greg. It’s just a woman playing tricks. Now, no more of this. I’ve got to concentrate on getting us out of here, and you’ve got to concentrate on staying behind me, on keeping up.” Joe treated his grandson to a stern glance. “And from now on, Greg, no more of this running off when I call you. Do you understand me?”
With a sigh, Greg nodded, his gaze straying to the darkness once more.
Joe set off at a brisk pace, moving in the opposite direction from where he’d last heard the dogs braying at the moon—or whatever they were howling at. He hadn’t seen the woman in black for a while, and he hoped he would see no more of her that night.
10
“Elizabet?” Mary ripped her gaze from the now-empty window, staring toward the back of the house, toward the porch door. “Elizabet!”
Her mother-in-law’s shrieking died, and a wet gurgling replaced it.
She took two mincing steps toward the porch, but then threw a glance over her shoulder and out the window. The decaying man had returned, this time baring his tusk-like fangs in an evil grin. “Go away!” Mary shouted. The man threw back his head and shrieked laughter at the moon.
From the hall leading back to the porch came the sounds of feeding time at the zoo. Mary forced her legs through two more steps in that direction and tried to force the image of the man with the decaying skin from her mind. “Elizabet?” she whispered.
A harsh growl answered her—again, something she would have expected at the zoo during feeding time. Could it be an animal? A bear, perhaps? She thought Joe had mentioned bears when he spoke about walking in the woods, but she couldn’t remember.
Her gaze danced toward the pantry, toward the gun safe hidden behind its shelves. She didn’t remember if Stephen had closed it. Almost as if her body were moving on its own, she took a step in that direction.
From the hall that led to the porch, Elizabet gasped and released a long, ragged breath. It sounded as if she were trying to speak, trying to call for help, and Mary forced her feet to move toward the bestial grunting. Fear vibrated through her nerves, and her fingers shook with it. Her throat had gone dry—as dry as it had ever been in her memory—and it hurt to swallow. Summoning even a hint of saliva hurt and burned deep in her throat.
Elizabet grunted as if she were trying to lift something beyond her strength, and a ragged, shrieking variant of laughter followed it.
Mary’s mind painted the picture in her head—Elizabet pinched to the floor by a huge bear, her mother-in-law trying to push the bear away while the bear threw his head from side to side, batting her hands away. Stop standing here doing nothing, you silly bitch! Do something! But still, Mary stood there like a lump of clay, her gaze bouncing back and forth between the hallway and the pantry.
No plans or ideas sprang to mind, as if her mind had gone on vacation and forgotten to notify her. If a bear were mauling Elizabet, there was nothing she could do, though she remembered news stories about people banging pots together to scare them away. Try that!
Her paralysis broke, and Mary dashed around the breakfast bar that separated the living room from the kitchen. Her goal hung over the stove—the pot rack—but as she ran, she threw a glance into the pantry. The lights still blazed inside, and the door which hid the safe stood thrown back, but the gun safe was closed, or nearly so.
Reaching above her head, Mary grabbed a large saucepan and one of Elizabet’s prized cast-iron skillets. She began to beat the skillet with the pot before she even turned back toward the hall. With another short glance at the pantry, Mary dashed toward the porch door, hammering the skillet as she ran.
The noise was horrible, akin to an ongoing auto accident, and to it, Mary added her own shouts of “Go away!” and “Get off her!” The horrible sounds from the hall continued, but Elizabet made little—if any—contribution to them. If she dies because I dithered here, unable to figure out what to do, Stephen will never forgive me!
She rounded the corner into the hall and froze in her tracks, holding the saucepan in the air as if ready to hammer the skillet once more. Her jaw dropped open as she saw the thing crouching over Elizabet.
A pool of sickening gore—a mixture of blood and other bodily fluids—spread beneath her mother-in-law. Elizabet’s head was thrown back as if she’d been looking for Mary, looking for help that hadn’t come in time. Her expression was one of terror, shock, and immense pain. Her eyelids had peeled back, showing the sclera all the way around her irises. A single drop of blood rested in the inner corner of her left eye.
Mary’s head tracked upward, and when her gaze met the inhuman all-red eyes of the thing crouching over her mother-in-law, her grip loosened and both the saucepan and the skillet clattered to the floor. The thing opposite her smirked and then winked one scaly eyelid. Some kind of… Is it real? Can it be what it looks like? Or have I gone insane?
The thing was huge—seven feet tall if it was an inch, and his shoulders stretched as wide as two professional football players standing shoulder to shoulder. Immense muscles rippled beneath its mother-of-pearl scaled skin. Razor-sharp talons tipped its thick, horrible fingers, and they made a clicking noise as the thing waggled its fingers at her.
Mary stood frozen, mouth agape, urine running down her left leg as the thing approached her. It walked through the gore, stepping on Elizabet’s excoriated torso. As it came on, it waggled its fingers and drew her attention to its groin—his groin.
Mary averted her gaze, but it was too late. She knew the thing intended to rape her. Run! Don’t just stand here like a stupid cow! She glowered at her own feet, but they seemed glued to the floor.
She raised her head and looked at the thing’s face, and the expressions—a mix of greed, lust, and carnal satisfaction—she saw there turned her fear of the monster into outright terror.
“Run…” gasped Elizabet, her breath rattling in her chest as she tried to speak. Mary turned and sprinted for the kitchen.
Chapter 4
2007
1
Shannon pulled the car up the driveway and parked next to the demon’s body. Benny popped the trunk from the little switch in the glove box, and they both got out.
Benny whistled, his eyes on the demon. “She’s a looker!”
Shannon cleared her throat and gave Benny the stink eye.
“It’s all clear inside,” said Scott from the open front door of the troll’s house.
Sitting in the front lawn with the unconscious body of the demon, Toby grunted, then bobbed his head. “I figured it’d be empty, given what she said.”
“And what was it she said?” asked Benny, stealing a glance at Shannon, a stricken expression on his face.
“Dude, she’s kidding.” Mike came outside to stand on the rickety front porch. “We need to get you subtitles or something.”
Benny grinned and pointed at Mike. “Gotcha!”
“What did she say, Toby?” asked Scott.
“She said she’d ‘stopped,’ and by that, I assume she meant she’d stopped feeding, stopped hunting humans.” With a casual grace, Toby rose to his feet and fired two more chloroform-balls at the demon’s face. “We can’t take her back to the university.”
Toby glanced at the house. “Does this place have a big basement?”
Scott nodded.
“It’s about as big as the footprint of the ground floor,” said Mike. “Why?”
“No university means no industrial digester. That means we need another way of disposing of the flesh.”
“Why would she have stopped?” repeated Scott.
Toby hitched his shoulders skyward and let them drop. “She asked me if I was the…how did she put it? Hunter. She asked if I was the hunter, then she said all the business about how she stopped and asked why I had come for her.”
“Hmmm. You’ve got a reputation with the ladies, Toby.” Shannon threw a wink in Toby’s direction before walking over and kicking one of the demon’s feet. “Should we wake her up and interrogate her? She might be more amenable than Hartman was. She hasn’t seen me—I could pretend to be a Brigitta-clone again.”
Toby shook his head. “No, it’s not worth the risk. If we learned anything from Hartman, it’s that these demons are more likely to lie to us than give us any useful information, and at any moment, everything can go south.” Toby shook his head once more. “No, if you ask me, our days of trying to interrogate these things are finished. Besides, we’ve got Benny.”
“But, Toby, it wasn’t Hartman that brought all those demons down on us,” said Scott. He jumped down from the porch, eschewing the stairs. “That was LaBouche, and you know it.”
“Yes, but what did we really learn from Bill Hartman?”
“We learned about the Passage. We learned about the first one to cross to…well, to come here.” Shannon crossed her arms over her breasts.
“Yeah, but is any of that true?” said Mike.
“It’s obvious by his escape that Hartman could’ve gotten out of those chains at any time, and yet he pretended otherwise. Why? Was it to sow disinformation? Did he see through your disguise? Or, as this one did, did he smell that you were human? We don’t know the answers to those questions. But he might have known. And if he knew, that means everything that he told you was also part of his act.”
Shannon pressed her lips into a thin line and shook her head. “No, he believed me.”
“Maybe it only appeared he believed you.” Scott walked toward the car. “Come on, Shannon, we’ve got to go shopping.” He turned his gaze to Toby. “What is it you need to get rid of this hunk of rotten meat?”
“The industrial digester works by pressurizing sodium hydroxide, then heating it. We won’t be able to pressurize anything, not without making a huge vessel like the industrial digester and then rigging up a compressor or something.” Toby tilted his head to the side. “No, let’s go old school. We’ll need a big cast-iron tub, lye, and a big heat source. Or we could use fifty-gallon drums, but we need to boil the lye, or it will take forever.”
Scott looked down the length of the Lincoln. “I don’t see how we’ll get a cast-iron tub in this thing. We could get a fifty-gallon drum in the back seat.”
Toby’s expression soured. “If we use a drum, it’ll mean dismembering her.”
“No, I’ve got an idea,” said Mike. “Get two barrels, then go to one of the box stores for the lye, and while you’re there pick up an angle grinder with cutting wheels and a cheap welder with the accessories that go with it.”
Toby turned to face him and arched his eyebrows.
“Have you ever seen one of those big mobile barbecues? The kind made from barrels? They cut off the ends and weld the couple of them together.”
Toby cracked a smile, and his eyes twinkled. “That’s thinking with your dipstick, Jimmy.”
“Jimmy? Why did you call Mike—”
“It’s from a commercial, Benny. Don’t worry about it.”
Benny drew a deep breath and blew it out in exasperation. “Maybe I do need subtitles.”
“Come on, Benny-bear,” said Shannon. “Go shopping with Scott and me.”
“Benny-bear?” said Toby before laughing.
Benny winced but said, “Don’t be jealous, Toby.”
Mike shook his head, looking down to hide his grin. “Don’t worry, Benny-bear, we are not jealous of that nickname.”
With a sigh, Benny turned and got in the car.
“Come on, Toby. I’ll help you get this big thing down into the basement.”
“Okay.” Toby bent to grab the troll-demon’s arms but then straightened. “Get something to catch all the blood.” He looked down at the demon. “Something big.”
“Roger,” said Scott, sliding behind the wheel of the Lincoln.
“Are we going to go back to the hotel?” asked Shannon.
Toby shrugged. “Any reason not to?”
“We could use this,” said Shannon with a glance at the demon’s house. “Would they ever expect it? Us, living in the demon's house?”
“It would be cheaper, Toby,” said Mike. He swept his arm toward the vista. “Plus, it’s defensible as hell.”
“Not a bad idea,” said Toby. “We’ll just have to be careful.” He held up an index finger as would a father lecturing a group of children. “We’ll have to make sure no one follows us. That no one sees us come here. Otherwise, it will be for nothing.”
2
Dan Delo grumbled as he ascended into the overcast sky. LaBouche had given him errands to run. Errands!
He’s gone soft in the head! The old bastard has lost his mind if he thinks I will sit still for this.
As he spiraled toward the bruise-colored clouds, he happened to glance down. Below him, a child stood in the center of Neibolt Street, pointing up at him. Cursing himself for his stupidity, Dan Delo created a mask of invisibility.
I’ve got to calm down. Dan Delo wagged his head back and forth, grimacing at his mistake. LaBouche has me so pissed I’ll get myself sent back.
He dropped his left wingtip and swept through the sky, racing the wind and the rain toward Lake Ontario and the five demons living there that LaBouche had commanded he speak to.
3
“One problem with being way out here in the boonies is that there’s no way to get good Internet access,” said Toby over dinner.
“Eww. Porn,” said Shannon with a grin.
Toby rolled his eyes and shooed her away.
“Why do you need Internet access?” asked Mike.
“There’s a lot of information out there. There’re a lot of things I can do, can check on, with Internet access. Plus, there’s the whole issue of money.”
“Money?” asked Scott.
“Yeah, money. I have plenty—enough to support all of us—but it’s not liquid. I’ll need to free it up.”
“But can’t your Internet activity be traced?” asked Mike.
“And why do we need you to support us?” asked Scott. “I’ve got a job, remember? One I want to get back to.”
“I remember, and I’ll bet LaBouche remembers, too. You can’t go back, Scott. Not until—”
“I can’t go back? No, that’s not part of the bargain. I love my job. I enjoy putting assholes like Abaddon in jail.”
“And I’ve got an interview with them coming up,” said Mike.
Toby folded his arms across his chest. “How do you think my apartment got blown? Why were all those demons at the university? Why is it I went for ten years with no one finding me, and now demons are all over my shit? Isn’t it possible that LaBouche followed one of you? He is a bird, for Christ’s sake.”
Scott nodded, his expression resting in agreeable lines. “And a little one. Even if he is bright yellow.”
“Exactly. So how do you expect to go back to work? How do any of you expect to go back to your normal lives, when there’s a chance that LaBouche knows all about them?”
Shannon frowned at him.
“And don’t pretend I’m the bad guy.”
“So, you blame us for losing your safe spots?” Shannon arched her eyebrow and tilted her head to the side. “You hold that again
st us?”
“No, of course I don’t.”
Shannon inclined her head toward him and stared him in the eye.
“Okay, okay. I admit to being irked, but I’m not holding it against any of you.” Toby spread his arms wide and then put his hands face down on the table on either side of his plate. “Herlequin ruled the demons here. He was their monarch, their king. When we killed him, we declared war—at least that’s how they will see it.”
“Why? You’ve been killing them for years, right?”
“True, and they’ve never come after me. But now they are. They’re coming after each of us. If you think nothing will change, I’m sorry to tell you you’re wrong. Everything has changed.”
“I can take more bereavement leave, but leaves are finite, Toby. I’ll have to go back sooner or later.” Scott leaned forward and rested his chin in the palm of his hand.
“The key phrase is sooner or later, Scott. How long that period lasts depends on how well we can take this war to the demons.”
“Couldn’t I just go with Scott and keep him disguised?” asked Shannon.
“All day? How would he explain your presence? Plus, how can he walk around as a trooper while disguised as someone else?”
“Toby, stop being dense,” said Benny. “That’s my role.”
“I wouldn’t need to go with him all day. All we need to do is disguise him until he’s inside the building and when we pick him up at night.”
Toby tapped the edge of his index finger against his front teeth. “Risky. I’d need to go along—to make sure LaBouche, or some other demon, wasn’t there watching, just waiting for Scott to arrive. We’d have to—”
“Why would it matter?” asked Benny.
“Good job picking up your role again.” Toby grinned to take out the sting. “Look at it this way: Scott’s walking through the hall at the barracks, heading for the parking lot to leave, and poof! He no longer looks like Scott, but the demon twenty feet behind him saw the change and knows it’s Scott. All he has to do is follow the man who no longer looks as Scott should.” Toby frowned. “But none of that matters, anyway. Scott’s job isn’t to sit in an office. He works outside the barracks most of the time, and we’re right back to Shannon tagging along all day.”
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