Honestly, Will hadn’t quite known what to expect of the place. In the middle of a quiet, upscale neighborhood on the east end of town, gray stone walls loomed out of the darkness, topped with honest-to-God turrets and crenellations. He paused on the steeply sloping street in front of Rubel Castle and stared up in awe. “It really is a castle.”
“Well, yeah. Why else would they call it that?” Rosemary tugged on his hand, pulling him along, and he followed, doing his best not to gape at his surroundings.
Through a tall iron gate, and then into a courtyard crowded with people in all sorts of wild costumes — court jesters and gypsies and fairies and devils. Will recognized the woman who’d come into Sisters We the night before and extended the invitation to Rosemary, mostly because she was wearing a long black dress and a choker made of lace but otherwise hadn’t done much to alter her appearance for the occasion. She sat at a table in the center of the courtyard, a cash box on the table in front of her.
“Hi!” she said brightly as Rosemary and Will approached. “We’re not charging to get in or anything, but the historical society would appreciate a donation.”
“No problem,” he said at once, digging in his pants pocket for his wallet so he could pull out a twenty-dollar bill. While he certainly didn’t mind making a donation to a worthy cause, he thought it was a little shifty that Lena hadn’t mentioned the donation angle when she invited Rosemary and her friends and family.
Apparently, Rosemary was thinking about the same thing, because she frowned slightly as Will handed over the money, although she didn’t comment. “Anything we need to know about the party?” she asked, tone carefully neutral.
“Not really,” Lena replied. “There are refreshments over in the next courtyard and a cash bar. Water and sodas are free. We have access to the upper levels chained off to avoid any mishaps, and also to keep people from wandering into the private spaces where we still have tenants.”
“So, people really do live here?” Will glanced up at the high walls of the castle, at the windows he spied in some of them, where dim lights showed in the darkness.
Lena gave him an indulgent smile. “Yes, there are a few apartments that are still occupied. So, just try to respect their privacy, you know?”
“No worries,” Rosemary said. “I doubt I’m going to do much climbing in these heels.”
“Good idea,” Lena said with a chuckle. “Enjoy yourselves.”
Will took Rosemary’s hand in his, and they left the courtyard where they’d been standing and moved on to the next one. As Lena had said, there were long tables set out with a dizzying assortment of goodies arranged on them. To one side, there was a tiki-style bar with a guy in a pretty decent Beetlejuice costume playing bartender.
“Do you want something to drink?” Will asked. “It’s probably a good idea to hang out here until the rest of our party arrives.”
“Sure,” Rosemary replied at once. “I think I ate enough kettle corn to create a nice cushion.”
Probably, that sugary snack wasn’t the best base to lay down in terms of consuming alcohol, but there was also plenty of food here to ensure they wouldn’t exactly be drinking on an empty stomach. Will asked the bartender for a couple of glasses of red wine — he guessed they only had one kind, so he didn’t bother to specify the varietal — then handed over a ten-dollar bill and got a couple of plastic cups of wine in exchange. He took them over to one side, where Rosemary was looking at her surroundings with a faint abstracted frown pulling at her brows.
“Everything all right?” he asked her as he handed over one of the cups.
She accepted it, took a cautious sip, and nodded approvingly. “That’s actually not bad.”
Will allowed himself a swallow. Yes, for something they were selling for five bucks a glass, it was more than decent. It seemed as though whoever had organized the Halloween party here wasn’t trying to make a profit on the concessions.
“Anyway,” Rosemary went on, “there’s something about this place. It gives me a weird feeling.”
Her comment set off alarm bells in his mind, but he told himself there wasn’t necessarily any reason for worry. “Weird” could mean all sorts of different things. “Weird how?”
She frowned briefly, as if she was having trouble quantifying something that was difficult to pin down. “I don’t know, exactly. The energy here is different from any other place I’ve ever been. It’s strong.”
“Evil?” he asked, hoping he didn’t sound too concerned.
“No. It’s more…neutral. But zingy at the same time.”
“Do you remember feeling it when you first visited here back in high school?”
At once, she shook her head. “I don’t think so. Or at least, if I felt something, it wasn’t like what I’m feeling now. But that was ten years ago…a lot has changed since then.”
And a lot had changed for Rosemary just in the past couple of weeks. Will wasn’t terribly surprised that she was having a different experience now than she’d had as her younger self.
“I’ll ask Izzie and Celeste when they show up — and Audrey,” Rosemary added. “It might be nothing.”
Or it might be everything, considering the prediction Audrey had made about All Saints Day. Except Rosemary had just said that what she was feeling now wasn’t good or evil, which seemed to indicate it couldn’t involve the Greencastle demons.
“There they are,” Will said, glancing away from her to see the entire contingent enter the courtyard, with Kevin towing Tyler in his wagon at the head of the group. Tyler was looking around in awe, mouth open.
Once they were close enough for conversation, Isabel said, “This place….”
Rosemary’s expression shifted to almost one of eagerness. “You feel it, too?”
“How can you not?”
“I don’t feel anything,” Fred said, in skeptical tones that would have been worthy of Professor Snape himself.
“You’re not psychic, Fred,” Michael remarked. He tilted his head back to look up at the crenelated towers above them. “But to the rest of us, this place is positively buzzing.”
“Why, though?” Audrey said. “I mean, I can sense it — it’s like the static I feel when I forget to put a dryer sheet in with the laundry — but what does it mean?”
Michael paused in his inspection of their surroundings to glance back at her. “I’m not sure yet. But I think we should all probably stay on our toes.”
“It’s a party, Michael,” Rosemary said. “Do you honestly think anything is going to happen with all these people here?”
It was a good question, mostly because the forces of darkness tended to attack when victims were alone and isolated. Although the party was ebbing and flowing around them, and the grounds of the Castle so complicated that Will couldn’t get a very good sense of the general layout of the place, he guessed there had to be several hundred people here. Not exactly an optimal setup for an attack — at least, not if the attackers wanted to escape notice.
Obviously, those same thoughts had been passing through Michael’s mind, because he hesitated before answering. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “But this energy we’re feeling here — it has to mean something.”
“Maybe all you’re feeling is the energy of the hundreds of people who worked on the Castle through the years, who poured their life force into creating this place,” she told him.
He was silent again, looking around. “I suppose that’s possible.”
“Cookie!” Tyler shouted then, breaking the tension in the group. Obviously, he’d gotten tired of the talking and had spotted the goodies on a nearby table.
“Let’s try one of those little sandwiches first, buddy,” Kevin said, unzipping part of the gold lamé “hoard” that covered the wagon so he could extricate his son. He added to Celeste, who was looking a little concerned, “I think they’re just ham and cheese. It’ll be fine.”
“Okay,” she said. “No peanut butter.”
He only shook
his head, as if amused that she thought he’d forget such an important detail. Carrying Tyler, he went over to the table and put together a little plate, then turned back to Celeste. “Why don’t you all take a look around? I’ll stay here with Tyler and make sure he gets some dinner.”
“I don’t know….” Celeste began, clearly not thrilled at the prospect of leaving her son and husband behind.
“I’ll stay with them,” Glynis offered. “I’m sure there’ll be plenty of time for me to poke around later. Go on — have some fun.”
“It would be easier to do some exploring without having to haul that wagon everywhere,” Rosemary said.
That argument seemed to clinch things, because Celeste gave a lift of her shoulders, as if deciding it wasn’t worth arguing about. “Okay. But only for ten minutes or so.”
“Sure,” Rosemary responded. “We can still see a lot in that amount of time.”
Apparently, she’d decided to act as tour guide, since she’d been to the place before, and no one else had, not even Isabel. Half-drunk cup of wine in one hand, Rosemary led the group around the ground level of the place — there was actually a huge underground apartment that had once been a water storage tank — and showed them the blacksmith’s shop, the cement walls embedded with glass bottles, the various other odds and ends that had been incorporated in the construction of the place. Looking at everything, Will got the impression that there had probably been a lot of weed involved in the building process, which made sense, since the majority of it had taken place during the 1960s and ’70s.
When they returned to the courtyard a little more than ten minutes later, Kevin was sitting there, looking up at the moon as it began to rise over the eastern walls of the Castle. However, neither Glynis nor Tyler were in sight.
“Kevin, where’s Tyler?” Celeste asked, moving past Rosemary and Will so she could approach her husband.
Before he could answer, Glynis appeared, coming in from the other direction. Celeste whirled to face her, looking worried.
“Mom, do you know where Tyler is?”
At once, Glynis looked over at Kevin, who hadn’t moved from the folding chair where he sat. “He was with Kevin just a minute ago. I had to go to the ladies’ room, but I was only gone for a couple of minutes at the most.”
Kevin blinked, then said, “Tyler’s fine. He went with Lena.”
“What?” Celeste demanded. “Why would you let him do that? We don’t even know the woman!”
“Rosemary knows her,” he said.
Next to Will, Rosemary shook her head. “We’re acquainted, but not that well. Where did they go?”
He heard the tension in her voice, but it seemed she was doing her best to remain calm. While he guessed this was all a misunderstanding, he couldn’t ignore the strange, blank expression on Kevin’s face, which seemed very unlike him. Will didn’t pretend to know the other man very well, but even his brief acquaintance with Rosemary’s brother-in-law had been enough to show he tended to be a cheerful sort of person, the kind of guy who smiled more often than not.
“Something’s wrong,” Isabel said. She stepped forward, away from the group, and went to stand next to Celeste. “Kevin, where did Lena take Tyler?”
“He’s right here,” came a woman’s voice.
There was Lena, striding into the courtyard, Tyler’s hand gripped firmly in hers as his little legs tried to keep up with her brisk pace.
“He’s fine,” she continued. “Or at least…he will be…if you do what I ask.”
And as Will stared at the woman, her face rippled and shifted, just as her form altered, growing taller and broader. In a few seconds, it wasn’t the friendly member of the local historical society staring back at them.
It was Daniel Lockwood.
Chapter 17
The plastic cup of wine fell from Rosemary’s hand and clattered against the flagstone-paved ground. There had been very little wine left in it, so it didn’t splash much. However, she wasn’t thinking about the wine.
How could Daniel Lockwood be here?
But even as she stared in horror, she realized he wasn’t alone. Costumed figures moved to stand next to him, their faces shifting as well, no longer half-familiar neighbors from her hometown, but the rest of the Greencastle contingent, including Gerald, who stood behind Daniel, his expression stony, unreadable.
As well as the Beetlejuice who’d been serving drinks. He came out from behind the bar, and suddenly the crazy makeup and striped suit and wild hair were gone, and it was Caleb standing next to his father, arms crossed, that hateful smirk back on his face.
“Let him go!” Celeste burst out, then ran toward her son.
At once, Daniel Lockwood raised a hand, and she fell to the ground, apparently stunned.
Rosemary cried, “No!” and began to move forward, but Caleb spoke then.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Rosemary. She’s fine — just knocked out. Whether she — or the rest of you — remains fine is entirely up to you.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Michael step out from the rest of the group. Off to the side, Glynis made an abortive movement, as if she intended to go to her unconscious daughter. Michael gave the slightest shake of his head, apparently telling her to remain where she was, and so she stopped in place, hands clenched at her side.
“What do you want?” Michael asked, his voice clear and cold.
“Oh, we want lots of things,” Daniel replied. He glanced down at Tyler before returning his attention to the man who stood a few yards away. “And we intend to have them. We’ve been denied long enough.”
If Tyler had looked at all afraid — if he’d been struggling or crying the way a little boy gripped by a strange man should have been — then Rosemary would have taken the chance and run forward, relying on her strange powers to shield herself from Daniel’s attack. But her nephew only stood there calmly, gazing off into the middle distance as if he didn’t have a care in the world. Clearly, whatever spell or magic or whatever you wanted to call it that Lockwood had employed to keep Kevin quiescent had also been used on Tyler.
Because her nephew wasn’t in obvious distress, Rosemary forced herself to hold her ground. “‘Denied’?” she repeated, hoping she sounded incredulous enough. “I’ve been to Greencastle, remember? You all seem to be living pretty comfortably for a bunch of people who claim to have been ‘denied’ anything.”
Daniel lifted a scornful eyebrow. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Do you think a few creature comforts can compare to what we should have had, considering our birthright as the sons of demons? No, it’s time to bring our master back, to give him the dominion that is his right. And this is the night when it can come to pass.”
Master? Rosemary thought frantically. Does he mean Satan? But Michael and Audrey never even mentioned the Devil being involved in any of this….
Her thoughts were whirling around in her head, flying this way and that like falling leaves in an autumn gale. If she could just concentrate, figure out how to get Tyler away from that monster —
Michael surprised her by uttering a derisive laugh. “Your ‘master’?” he said. “Audrey and I sent him to Hell six months ago, and we’d be more than happy to do it all over again if you even try to summon him here.”
“And this time, they’ll have help,” Will added, hand hovering by the pocket of his frock coat, where Rosemary guessed he had stashed some of those plastic vials of holy water.
Unfortunately, Daniel didn’t seem too worried by the not-so-subtle threat. His lips lifted in a thin smile, and he said, “I’m afraid you don’t have the upper hand here.” His glacier-pale eyes shifted back to Rosemary, seeming to bore into her. “It’s very simple, my dear. You have the power of our blood. Help us now, and I’ll return your sister’s son to you.”
“‘Help you’?” she repeated. “Help you do what?”
Caleb sent her a pitying glance, as if he couldn’t believe her stupidity. “If you real
ly need it spelled out, Rosemary, we need you to help us open the gate to let Belial out. He wants to come back to this world, wants to reward all his faithful servants.”
“And that will include you,” Daniel said in coaxing tones. “Anything you want — it will be yours. Just join your strength to ours on this holy night, in this holy place.”
“What’s so holy about it?” Audrey asked, speaking for the first time.
Daniel’s glance raked down her, from the glittery devil’s horns half-hidden by her lustrous brown hair to the red knee-high boots she was wearing. If Rosemary had been on the receiving end of that gaze, she knew she would have wanted to take a bath, since it was all too clear what the half-demon thought of her friend’s skimpy costume…and the woman wearing it.
A few feet away, Michael bristled, but he didn’t take the bait. Voice cold, he said, “Yes, tell us what a demon-blood like you would know about ‘holy.’”
Rosemary wanted to flinch at the insult, although she knew it hadn’t been directed at her personally. Yes, that same blood flowed through her veins, but that didn’t mean she intended to act like it did.
“At the center of this property, two ley lines intersect,” Daniel said, gaze still fixed on Audrey, as if he hadn’t even heard what Michael had said. “You know what a ley line is, don’t you, my dear?”
Her lips thinned under their coating of red lipstick, but she said calmly enough, ignoring the condescension, “They’re invisible lines of electromagnetic energy that supposedly connect places of cultural or mystical significance.”
Another of those thin smiles, and Daniel said, “Oh, there’s nothing ‘supposed’ about what they do. As you said, they carry the Earth’s energy within them, and they’re a source of unimaginable power…if you know how to tap into it. One passes below DePauw University in Greencastle, which is part of the reason why we settled there. In fact, that same line travels all the way here and passes under this structure, and continues to a spot a little less than a mile to the west of us.”
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