The Midnight Ground

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by Eric Dontigney


  “I love you, too.”

  The bearded man looked back and forth between us. “Will someone please explain to me what on God’s green earth is going on? This isn’t what I expected at all.”

  Marcy laughed a little. “Things are a bit complex at the moment, but I expect everything will get sorted out in short order. He’ll be heading back soon,” she said, tipping her head at me. “This is probably your last chance to send a message.”

  The bearded man gave me a long look. “Tell her to be braver than me.”

  “Tell who?” I asked.

  The man just said, “You’ll know.”

  The noise of a tolling bell crashed around us. Marcy’s head whipped back and forth, trying to identify where the sound came from or why it happened.

  “What was that?” The bearded man asked.

  “Heh. That was the sound of someone having a bad day,” I answered with a grin. “A really bad day.”

  Marcy quirked an eyebrow at me. “Have you done something wicked, dear?”

  “Of course not. I just set a trap that will do something awful and vengeful to anyone trying to do me harm. I can’t help it if people wander around setting off traps.”

  “The bell?”

  “It’s my internal cue. Time to go, I guess.”

  Lil padded up next me, impossibly silent on her huge feet, and gave my shoulder a light bump. I lurched sideways a few steps and it took an effort not to fall down. Marcy watched me through the cage bars, her face ageless and sad.

  “Don’t worry about me,” she said. “Help the girl.”

  I nodded, but didn’t say anything. She’d have heard the lie in my voice. If it came down to a choice between saving Marcy or damning her through some impotent attempt to save Abby, I was pretty sure I’d save Marcy. Maybe it wasn’t a noble choice, but neither was sacrificing an innocent while you do something knowingly stupid to try to save another innocent. If that meant a lifetime of silence, I’d learn to live with it. I lived with worse.

  “You’ll remember to tell her?” asked the man.

  I looked at him again, trying to see the face behind the beard, but it was too thick. “Yes, I’ll remember.”

  “Appreciate it,” he said.

  I wanted to procrastinate and keep talking to Marcy, but Lil hovered impatiently. There was something, or someone, that needed attention back in the real world. Marcy and I traded a brief smile and then I put my hand on Lil’s side.

  My eyes opened and I experienced the inevitable moment of confusion as the subconscious cedes control to the conscious. There was always a second or two when the handoff was going on where it felt like nothing was behind the wheel. That sensation unnerved me. My conscious mind locked down control and started noting sensory input. The blanket was rough against my hands. It was too warm in the cabin. I forgot to turn the air conditioning on before I dropped off the night before. I felt groggier than I should have. Maybe those odd meetings in the dreamspace didn’t count as REM sleep. Oh, I also heard the soothing sounds of a fire crackling and the screams of someone who tried to take a cheap shot at me. There were worse ways to start the day.

  Chapter 39

  I rolled off the bed and glanced at the runes on the floor. The pure white chalk had turned a tan color that I associated with pancakes. That was enough to give me pause. A color change like that meant the protective magic I set up came under serious strain. No small-time dabbler could have lobbed an attack that serious. Walking out the door could be risky. Then again, most people lost touch with concentration while they were on fire. I decided it was probably a low-risk move and walked outside.

  The smell of burned synthetic material hit me first, harsh and acidic, and then the sulfur stink of burned hair. Beneath all of that, I caught a faintly sweet smell of charred skin. I did my best to ignore the smell as I looked at the figure rolling around on the ground, screaming and trying to extinguish the last of the flames. Parts of his t-shirt were melted and looked to be fused to his chest and back. His left arm was charred black from the back of his hand to where the shirt still bubbled near his shoulder. He’d probably thrown that arm in the way to protect his face. Half the hair on his head was burned off to the scalp, which was blistered in half a dozen places. He was still screaming, batting at the liquefied material of his shirt with his right hand.

  Between the burns and the thrashing, it took me a little while to figure out who I was looking at. I scowled down at the figure when I recognized the man. It didn’t make any sense, though. He didn’t have any power of his own or, if he did, certainly not enough to account for the chalk inside. If he had that much juice, I’d have sensed it. Maybe not during the fight, there was a lot going on, but definitely when he’d confronted me at Connor’s. I’d been calm then, more than calm enough to sense any serious power around the guy.

  “Hello, Tucker,” I said in a casual, conversational tone. “That looks painful.”

  He screamed and rolled some more. As much as I loathed the idea, I was going to have to help him if I wanted to get any kind of information. I went back inside, got out the chalk, and scrawled a much simpler set of runes on the floor. It only took me a minute or two. It probably seemed longer to Tucker, but you just can’t rush magic. There was a snapping sound outside and brief blast of arctic-level cold came through the door for a second. Tucker didn’t stop screaming immediately, but it tapered off. I went back to the door and leaned against the frame. Tucker lay sprawled on the ground. A thin layer of ice coated the man. I noticed it was melting fast in the heat. What a pity. Tucker whimpered and twitched.

  “Tucker,” I said and snapped my fingers a few times. “Tucker!”

  He lifted his head a little and gazed through a haze of pain in my general direction. His eyes came into focus and I understood what had happened. Acidic, alien anger rippled out from him. I shook my head. Tucker wanted his vengeance and apparently didn’t care about the price of getting it. He traded away a lot to give the thing inside him a place to stay. It had probably burned out a big part of his free will, huge chunks of his memories and personality, and certainly a part of his soul. Most human beings were only designed to carry one consciousness, one life essence. To let something in, you had to sacrifice parts of that consciousness and life essence. I’d underestimated Tucker’s hate.

  “You did something stupid, Tucker, but it’s not too late to come back from it.”

  “You have failed,” said something with Tucker’s voice.

  “I’m not talking to you, squatter. I’m talking to the person. Tucker, can you hear me?”

  I gave it a full thirty count before Tucker, or what was left of the real Tucker, finally surfaced. “Kill you. Son of bitch. Burned me.”

  “Yeah, but I haven’t damned you. If you don’t get that thing out of you, though, you will be damned. You won’t go to Heaven or Hell. You won’t be reborn. You’ll just drift on the edge of life, forever.”

  “Lying,” said the real Tucker. “Kill you.”

  “Yes, yes, we’ve covered that. Tucker, I’ll help you get rid of it, but you have to want it.”

  Tucker fell silent and the acidic anger of the demon inside him blanketed the area. I’d sort of expected it to go that way. It almost always did when someone invited a demon inside. Still, Tucker was technically human and I’d had to try. The demon pushed Tucker’s charred body to its feet. Tucker was probably screaming in agony somewhere inside. It snarled at me. It was a grotesque, animal sound that human vocal cords should never have been able to produce.

  “You have failed, conjurer.”

  Then the demon did something I hadn’t expected. It ran straight at me. Well, ran probably isn’t the word. It blurred in my direction, and I felt it slam Tucker’s shoulder into my chest. As I flew back into the cabin, legs just missing the bed, in the half-second before the pain slammed home, I wondered how many ribs had just been cracked. Then I hit the far wall. There was a burst of red and white in my eyes and the burn on my back roared in agony.
I don’t remember crashing to the floor. I must have, gravity being an unrepentant smack-daddy and all, but it was lost in the pain.

  When I came to, after the initial shock of not finding myself dead, I tried to look around. Moving my head sent electric shocks sparking over my nervous system. I froze. What if that damn thing broke my neck? The immediate fear of that passed when pain signals from my extremities reached my battered brain. Whiplash was the more likely culprit. I heard steps and forced myself to look toward the door. The bed obscured most of what was on the other side, but I saw a singed pant leg. I had to find a way to defend myself. There was no time for magic and I was in too much pain to put up more than a token fight. I saw the hard case under the bed. I stretched my hand out for it. Tucker took another step into the cabin. My fingers touched the smooth plastic of the case and slid off. The handle was on the other side.

  “Too late for you, conjurer. Too late by far,” said the thing inside Tucker.

  Lil materialized from one of the shadows beneath the bed and walked over to sniff at the hand I had on the hard case. She looked back at me, her eyes giving off a dim, green luminescence. She looked from my face, to my hand, then to Tucker’s legs.

  “Go,” I whispered. “Get out of here.”

  Lil seemed to find that advice as unimpressive as most of my behaviors. She walked out from beneath the bed and sat down in front of Tucker’s boots. I could smell the char, the chemical stink of the burned shirt, and the uniquely awful scent of burned hair. It was harder to hold down the vomit with my body screaming and my head ringing. I stared at the cat, horrified at her behavior. She might be powerful and dangerous in the world of spirit and dreams, but in the material world she was just a cat. I expected that a boot or a gun or a car would kill her as easily as any other cat.

  “Lil, no,” I croaked.

  “A pet, conjurer,” said the demon inside Tucker, its voice gleeful. “I’ll kill the tiny beast first, so you can watch.”

  I watched the demon draw back one of Tucker’s booted feet and it blurred toward the cat.

  “No!” I screamed.

  Lil didn’t move. She didn’t flinch. She just let out a tiny little hiss. Invisible force crashed into Tucker and flung him bodily from the cabin. There was a sound like a wet canvas bag hitting something outside and then there was silence. Lil stood, stretched, yawned, and then meandered back toward me.

  She patted at my cheek with a paw. “Mrew.”

  “Yeah, I’m okay. Remind me not to piss you off too much.”

  Lil sat and watched me with her always inscrutable kitty-cat expression until I started acting like I meant to stand up. At that point, she jumped up onto the bed and watched in apparent interest. It hurt a lot and took a couple tries, but I managed to get to my feet. I stumbled over to the door and looked out. I saw where Tucker had hit a huge old tree. There was a wet smear on it, but no body to be seen.

  “Damn,” I muttered.

  I didn’t necessarily wish Tucker dead, but it would have uncomplicated things. I had the feeling that, as long as blood was flowing in Tucker’s body, the demon could make that body do just about anything it wanted. That definitely wasn’t good for me. It probably wasn’t good for Paul or Abby either. In fact, dread danced inside me as the implications of the demon’s words hit me. It told me I had failed. I lurched to the nightstand and grabbed my phone. It was almost noon. Abby was supposed to get released in the morning. If she’d gotten turned loose first thing, she was clear of the protection the room provided. She was in the open.

  I fumbled at the phone, trying to dial Helena. My hands shook so much from the pain and the fear that it took me four tries. It was only later that I remembered I could have simply dialed her from my recent calls list. Pain and fear were always the enemies of rational thought. I listened in agonized impatience as the ringing went unanswered on the other end. There was a telltale click and I got transferred to voicemail. I hung up and redialed, manually, and waited again as the phone rang. I was shunted to voicemail, again. The case of the phone creaked and made a little pop as my hand tightened around it.

  I glared down at the phone and tried Paul’s number. I tried that number three times. Same results. The dread inside me evolved into full-blown fear that aimed for stratospheric heights. What if they were hurt? What if they were dead? My mind shrank back from anything even remotely connected to that idea. Whatever was going on, I needed to get to them. Where were they? Not the hospital, I reasoned. If something happened there, they’d have called the sheriff. Barnes might not love me very much, but Patty would have given me a call out of courtesy. Odds were good that Helena would have shown up in the morning to be helpful while they checked Abby out. She’d have engaged Abby and Paul in chit-chat to make the process less aggravating.

  Paul would have invited her to come get a look at the new place. I knew that’s what he would have done because it’s what I would have done. Helena had been kind to Abby and he’d have wanted to repay that kindness in some way. Extending her hospitality wasn’t much, but it was something he could do. They would have gone back to the cottage and then, I blanked. What had happened? Almost noon, I thought. More than enough time for Tucker to do something there and come back for me when I didn’t show up.

  I grabbed my keys off the nightstand. I needed to get there. I got all of two steps before I realized that might have been the plan. Provoke me into action before I was ready. Think it through, I demanded of myself. My brain was still trying to get its bearings. My body was reporting pain from everywhere. Don’t rush headlong into anything, said the voice of cold reason. I forced myself to put the keys in my pocket and put a hand on the wall.

  “Take a minute,” I said out loud. “Just take a minute.”

  Chapter 40

  I beat down the impulse to race to Paul and Abby’s new cottage. I lashed mercilessly at my psyche to process information and not just react to it. They didn’t answer their phones. That meant, if Tucker didn’t just murder them because he could, they’d been incapacitated. Maybe they were only restrained, but maybe they were hurt. If they were hurt, they’d need more help than I could give. Based on the pain in my chest, it was possible that I needed medical attention. I didn’t think any of my ribs were outright broken, but I’d have bet at least a few were cracked. It hurt to breathe. That was a problem I didn’t need on top of my already diminished lung capacity. Fear threatened to overwhelm reason. Images of Helena, Paul and Abby with broken necks, or bleeding out, kept crawling out of the darkest reaches of my imagination.

  “Think, damn it. You’ve got time to think.”

  The word time set off an intuition. I did have time. Abby wasn’t dead, yet, because I was still breathing. The inhabitant of the Midnight Ground wouldn’t have sent its errand boy if it were free. That walking nightmare would have shown up personally to subject me to every excruciating thing it ever dreamed up. It might have Abby, and that thought was enough to make my stomach do ugly things, but she was alive. It probably wasn’t keeping her around for any kind of sociopathic torture or mind games. From the very beginning, the demon of the Midnight Ground had acted with cold, systematic ruthlessness. It spent better than a century murdering its way through the ranks of Cavanaugh’s mystery school and their descendants. In all likelihood, it had her. Yet, it hadn’t finished the job. Why hadn’t it finished the job?

  Maybe, I thought, it hadn’t because it couldn’t. At least, it couldn’t finish the job immediately. It wouldn’t take her if it didn’t plan to kill her. What prevented it from just offing Abby at its leisure? After all, it had managed to kill people a hell of a lot farther away than down the street. It had to be something about her, specifically, that kept it at bay. She was the last one. Cavanaugh said as much himself.

  “The last one,” I muttered out loud.

  My intuition screamed at me that I was on the right track. Okay, self, I asked, what makes Abby special? She’s an immensely powerful psychic. She’s spent her life in a house that shiel
ded her. No, I thought, and scratched that from the list. That had to have been true of other people the demon had gotten to before now. I came up blank. That was it. She was an immensely powerful psychic. Powerful enough, in fact, to have managed to fend off at least some of what was coming at her, but that wasn’t enough. The last one, I thought again.

  “Holy shit! She’s the last one.”

  My battered brain finally coughed up the answer. It all went back to the basic principles of magic. Things have to be in balance or it doesn’t work right. The power of the bloodline binding had been spread over thirteen families. At first, that power would have been negligible in any given person. Start offing everyone who carries it, though, and that power doesn’t just go away. It redistributes itself to the rest of the people. At that moment, wherever she was, Abby was holding the full power of that binding inside of her. That was why the messenger-boy demon had set the house on fire. I’d have bet that its boss couldn’t come at Abby directly. In fact, almost everything it had sent at her over the years had probably missed the mark. Either the binding just slapped it down or diverted it somewhere.

  If that were true, though, then why was she sick? I flashed back to the feeling that Abby both was and wasn’t under attack. I thought back to the graveyard. I hadn’t been paying much attention to it at the time, but there was no smoke binding over Abby’s father’s grave. His family wasn’t part of the binding. They were just people and…

  “And people get cancer,” I told the wall.

  It had gotten smart. It had stopped trying to get at Abby through direct action. It took its shot at the part of her that was her father. That was the part that all her psychic power was protecting. The part not automatically defended by the binding. Try to hit her with a bolt of lightning, the binding diverted it. Get some cells coded with her father’s genetic material to misbehave, the binding probably didn’t react. It wasn’t overt enough. Cells reproduce and why worry if some are reproducing faster. I shook my head. It still didn’t all add up. Once Tucker turned to the dark side, he should have been able to slit Abby’s throat without a problem. Unless the binding read the house guest in Tucker’s body as a mere extension of what lived in the Midnight Ground. That had to be it.

 

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