The sun painted pinks and oranges on the surface of Lake Erie, dancing on the small waves produced by the southward wind. He walked to the landing of the steps that snaked their way down the cliff to Toby’s boat landing. His powerboat sat in its berth, as did four jet skis. Benny sat on the top step, elbows on his knees.
Why have power if the fear of using it is so great? Why not just wish it away. The idea was so foreign, so strange to Benny’s manner of thought that he glanced around, expecting to find someone nearby. But he was alone.
He shook his head and gazed out over the water. He’d never give up his power. The very idea was ludicrous. He’d earned his power, and he meant to use it to one day ensure that no one else would ever suffer as he and his friends had at Herlequin and Brigitta’s hands.
Is that what you’re doing? Is that your goal?
Benny shook his head. Of course! Memories began to flash in his mind’s eye. Images of him wearing a smug smile as he explained his abilities to Eddie and Amanda, of preening for Shannon, of his expression as he used his power to bat at Brigitta. That doesn’t mean anything. That isn’t me.
Isn’t it?
Benny squinted down at the water. The voice in his head sounded less and less like his own. Again, he peered around the backyard of Toby’s mansion on the cliff. No dark figures hid in the slowly disappearing shadows. No animals were visible, let alone animals acting contrary to their natures. There was nothing there.
Shannon?
You don’t need her.
That sealed it. Benny would never have entertained such a thought. Who are you? he sent.
No one answered him.
9
Dan Delo relaxed in a majestic ash tree forty feet above the terrace where Benny Cartwright fumed and glared at the lake. As he walked, the bearded psychic gestured as if in the middle of an animated conversation.
She’s got him, he thought. And McBride has Richards, and all because of me. Glee sparkled in his eyes. This is precisely the kind of currency I needed to buy my way back into Oneka Falls. This is proof of my loyalties.
10
Mike stood next to the rolling cart they’d fancied up to be a mobile bar. His right hand rested lightly on the bottle of scotch, his face blank, his gaze distant and unfocused. After Benny left the kitchen, a feeling of grief and sorrow had descended on him. Greg is gone, he thought.
He could smell something burning but had no idea what. Every time he tried to think of anything but Greg’s demise, every time he tried to distract himself, an image beset him. An image of Greg in a cheap coffin, his eyelids and lips sewn shut. Every time that image flashed through his mind, Mike’s grip on the bottle of scotch tightened.
He hadn’t picked it up yet, though, and that was good. He fought the urge to pick up the bottle and carry it into his bedroom, fought the urge to spin the cap off and pour a gallon of the stuff down his throat.
Time enough for that after I get the call, he thought.
What call, Mike?
The mental voice belonged to Benny, and Mike latched onto it like a life ring. The door to the terrace banged open, and Benny dashed through. He glanced at Mike and shook his head. “Don’t do it. It’s not you.”
Mike turned a numb gaze in his direction, but still, his fingers whitened around the neck of the bottle of Swing.
“Well, it is you, but not all of it. Like all that nonsense before wasn’t me.” Benny stepped to his side and put his hand on top of the one Mike held the scotch bottle with. “We’re being manipulated.”
The word jarred through Mike’s psyche, waking him up, and he jerked his hand away from the booze. “Manipulated?”
“Maybe tempted is a better word.” Benny shook his head. “I can’t understand it. I don’t sense anything, and I can’t spot anyone, but I’ve got this voice in my head… At first, I thought it was my own, you know? But it… It told me to take control of your mind, to change you without your consent.” Benny’s eyes widened. “It told me I don’t need Shannon.”
“Demons,” hissed Mike.
Benny nodded. “I think those two new ones we saw yesterday. Or maybe Brigitta and the Snake-lady.”
“How?” Moving as if against a strong tide, Mike turned away from the liquor cart. “And why haven’t they done this before?”
“Maybe it has to do with Brigitta’s cover.”
“Her cover?”
Benny nodded. “She’s an ifrit—a demon of fire—but she’s always pretended to be an undead demon. She was hiding among the demons of Oneka Falls.”
“Hiding from what?”
“Don’t know.” Benny peered at him, his gaze boring into Mike’s. “Are you okay now? I need to get my phone.”
Mike turned his back on the booze cart and walked toward the kitchen. “Go. I’ll throw the burnt food away.”
11
Kristy rolled out of bed and yawned. Sean’s side of the bed was empty—nothing new there, he often sat up all night, filling calls for research on the SPECTRe app. She pulled on a pair of blue scrubs and walked down the hall, rubbing her eyes.
She knocked on the door to Sean’s office, then pushed it open. He sat hunched in front of his machine, chin on his chest, sound asleep. On the screen, the app flashed and blinked with activity from the group of researchers he spent the most time with. Don’t you people ever sleep? she wondered. She lay a hand on Sean’s shoulder. “Hon? You fell asleep at the computer again.”
As usual, Sean came awake instantly. He glanced at her and blushed.
“What was it this time? Tracking down demon sightings?”
He shook his head. “In a way. A request came in last night to track down sightings of this redheaded woman. She’s a demon, of course.” He clicked over to his browser and played a video recorded on someone’s cell phone. In it, the redhead stood in the middle of an intersection that was as familiar to Kristy as her own bedroom, an intersection in Oneka Falls. The redhead said something to a person on the sidewalk and stared at him for a moment, and as the light went out of his eyes, Sean paused the video. “She turns him into a drooling idiot and then turns into some kind of creature made of black smoke.”
“They should be paying you to watch stuff like this,” Kristy whispered.
“Who? SPECTRe?” He shook his head. “No, no. I do what I can because I want to do it.”
“That’s all well and good, Sean, but you have to take care of yourself. You have to—”
“Let me show you what I found!” he cried like an excited child. “There have been sightings of the entity going back decades, mostly in New York.” He flipped to the research tab and scanned the new updates. “It looks like someone found older reports while I snoozed.” He bent toward the monitor. “Wow… Look at all this.”
Hiding her smile, Kristy grunted and turned back to the hallway. “Breakfast in fifteen, Sean. Don’t let it get cold this time.”
“Yeah. Fifteen. Fine.”
12
Shoulder to shoulder, Toby and Lily walked east. A companionable silence had fallen over them. Lily seemed lost to reminiscence, while Toby spent the time thrashing his mind for a plan, a strategy, a tactic, anything that might get him out of the jam that held him as tight as a jealous lover.
The sun climbed higher, and the temperature rose with it, though because of the dry, baking heat Lily emitted, Toby didn’t notice the ambient temperature. Not until it was too late.
His vision doubled, and a chill ran down his spine. His head pounded, and with each beat of his heart came sharp pain as if someone drove a spike through the top of his skull. His skin felt hot and dry, and his stomach twisted and turned in his guts. Pulsing nausea assaulted him along with the nastiest taste he could imagine flooding his mouth.
He staggered and would have fallen thirty feet down the face of a dune if Lily hadn’t grabbed his arm and held him upright. She squinted and scoured his face and neck with her gaze.
“Thanks,” he said.
“You’ve got heat stroke, Tobes.” L
ily sucked at her teeth. “Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I hadn’t planned to let you go this far so soon. I was distracted.”
Toby closed his eyes, wincing at the pain in his head.
“It’s not too late, habibi. Even this, I can fix. I can create a cool palace for you to rest in, a pool of water to cool you, a feast to sate you, the choicest wines to soothe your throat.”
A lopsided grin formed on Toby’s lips. “Let me guess. All I have to do is ask.”
“Yes,” she said in a fervent hiss. “Ask me, papi. Ask me.”
Toby chuckled and let his head hang forward.
“Do it, Toby. Let me help you. Even if it’s only the once, just do it. This isn’t how your time on Earth should end—lost in the Syrian Desert, alone, baked to death by the sun.” She stepped in front of him and lifted his chin with a hand that felt cool to the touch. “Let me help.”
He wanted to ask her for help. He wanted it so bad he could taste it, but the problem was, it tasted of something nasty, of betrayal, of evil deeds done in the dark.
“Look at me, neshama.”
“More Spanish?” The slur in his voice frightened him more than a little.
“No, the language is far older than Spanish. It’s a language suitable for the setting.”
Toby shrugged and gritted his teeth against the surge of nausea that followed.
“It’s Hebrew. It means ‘soul’ or ‘spirit.’”
“Interesting,” he murmured.
“It’s used as a term of endearment between lovers, Tobias. That’s what I…” Her voice trailed off until the wind blew it away. She began to hum the melody and countermelody she’d hummed before, all spectral lament and eternal dirge.
“The desert song,” he mumbled. His knees went watery, and he staggered into her, but his added weight didn’t faze Lily. It was like stumbling into a wall of granite.
The song continued, and something inside Toby’s head loosened, opened. He closed his eyes, and colors danced on the inside of his eyelids. Bright colors: cherry reds, oranges, silver; they all intertwined in an elaborate movement that seemed too complex not to be random, but at the same time, they looked …designed.
“Yes,” she crooned. “The desert song. I like that title.” The insane discordant battle between the melody and countermelody continued unabated despite Lily using her vocal cords for speech.
“How do you do that?”
“Do what, kisa?”
“Hebrew?”
“Russian for pussycat.” She smoothed the hair away from his forehead while stroking the back of his neck with another hand. Another set of arms held him in a tight embrace.
“How do you talk and hum two different songs at the same time?”
“That’s easy, Tobes. Even humans can do something like it with practice. Though, in fairness, the cultures that developed this ability did so in imitation of me.” She peeled one of his eyelids open and squinted at him. “Ask me, ese. Ask me before it’s too late.”
Toby tilted his head back, eyes closed, and exhaled. The desert song continued to play, seeming more a product of wind and weather on stone than a human throat.
“You must ask me, Tobias!”
“You demons… Always in my life… Ruined it. Ruined everything.”
“Ask me!”
He fought against her multi-armed embrace, shoving at her hands when he could, settling for shoulders and forearms when he couldn’t. More arms wrapped around him, more hands grabbed him, and still, she stroked his hair and the back of his neck.
“Ask me, Toby, and I’m yours. I’ll be yours, and you’ll be mine, forever and ever, amen.”
Fingers tugged at his clothing, palms rubbed against his skin, legs wrapped around him, breasts pressed against his chest, skin on skin, her nipples as hard as diamonds. “Do it, Tobes. Do it, do it, do it.” She ground her hips against him and groaned. “Oh, ask me, motek. Ask me, ask me, ask me!”
The world tilted, and Toby thought he was falling, though he landed on something soft and welcoming instead of hot sand. He came to rest with the lightest touch he could imagine, as though some giant had laid him down carefully.
Lily sat atop him, legs astride his hips, and her multitude of hands continued to stroke him, to caress him. “Ask me,” she begged.
He could feel her hovering above him, ready to stab herself down on him, to envelop him. To allow it would invalidate everything he’d ever done in his life: escaping from Herlequin, fighting his first demon, tracking them, hunting them, killing Herlequin, fighting Brigitta—all that would be rendered like fat in a frying pan.
But he wanted her anyway, wanted to give in, wanted her to cocoon him, to succor him, to make him feel something again.
13
“Sean!”
He straightened and looked over his shoulder. “Yeah?”
“I’ve been calling and calling. Didn’t you hear me?”
“Sorry. But you’ve got to see—”
“Come eat, Sean. Right now.”
“But you said I have fifteen minutes.”
“Yes,” she said, squinting at him. “And that was twenty-five minutes ago, knucklehead.”
“Oh…” He pushed himself away from the computer desk. “I didn’t realize.”
“No duh. Get your butt in here and eat your breakfast.” She shook her head. “I’d say, ‘before it gets cold,’ but it’s already too late for that.”
“Mmm, cold eggs,” said Sean.
“Eggs? No. Cold pancakes and bacon.”
“You’ve got to read this stuff, though, Kristy.”
“After breakfast.”
“Yeah. You know how I said there were reports of the redhead going back a couple of decades?”
“The redhead?”
“Yeah, you know. The new entity, the one in the video. Anyway, she goes back a lot farther than that. One researcher even found ties to Hitler and Stalin!”
“She must be old.”
“Well, she’s a demon. The research around the Nazi party even points to the idea that Hitler was possessed by her. Now, we know possession is largely mythological, but evidently, this chick has ways of getting men to do what she wants.”
“Oh, I’ll bet,” said Kristy as she swatted his rear-end. “I bet she can get her man to the breakfast table on time.”
“Yeah. Sorry. Anyway, this entity spent a lot of time with Hitler. She even ran Bad Tölz for a time. There’s even this quote…” He stopped and turned, but Kristy pushed him toward the kitchen. “Yeah, okay. Sorry. There’s this quote attributed to a close friend of Hitler’s that basically says, ‘Hitler will dance, but the music is my own,’ or something like that.” Again, Sean paused walking, and again, Kristy gently shoved him toward the kitchen. “Yeah, sorry. Sorry. Breakfast, first.” He headed back down the hall. “Did I tell you about Stalin?”
“After breakfast,” said Kristy.
“Yeah. Sorry.”
14
Benny ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time. As he passed the door to the guest room, Eddie Mitchell came out and nodded a greeting. “Can’t stop,” said Benny. Something’s come up. Meet us in the kitchen.
Behind him, Eddie gasped at the mind to mind contact. Then came the sound of a door opening. “Amanda, get up and get dressed. Something’s going on.”
He slid through the door to the suite he and Shannon shared, his gaze sliding across her things arrayed on her dresser, and he felt a pang of loss, of impending grief. But I don’t know anything yet.
Yes, you do. You know that if she isn’t already dead, I will send soldiers to search the hospitals until I find her. Then she will die, I can promise you. The mental voice hit him like a tsunami of acid, burning everything it touched and leaving an oily, slick residue behind.
Get the fuck out of my head.
Temper, temper, Benny-boy. Your brother was never half as much of a pain in my ass as you were. Are.
Brigitta! Though no conscious answer invaded h
is mind, he did hear something like an echo. Naamah? Is that your actual name? Again, no answer came, but Benny didn’t need a confirmation. He’d seen the change in her form, seen LaBouche literally beat the skin off her, but he could imagine her no other way than as she’d appeared before them as Herlequin burned back in Thousand Acre Wood, a zombie wrapped in black, rotting skin.
His phone lay on the nightstand on his side of the bed. He’d forgotten to plug it in, and the battery display read eleven percent. He snarled at himself and his innate ability to forget the most important things. If I miss my proxy’s call because of a dead battery, I’ll throw myself off the cliff. He snatched the charger and the cord and ran back to the kitchen.
He plugged the phone in and lay it on the granite countertop for a moment. Eddie and Amanda stood side by side at the sink, washing a few pans by hand. “Something has happened this morning,” he said.
“Already told them.” Mike sat at the table with his head in his hands.
“It was Brigitta, Mike. Her real name is Naamah.”
Mike lifted his head and met his gaze for a moment, then ducked his head again.
Benny glanced at the Mitchells. “Gotta warn you, cooking breakfast seems impossible this morning.”
“We’ve got it,” said Amanda. “And we are professional breakfast burners, so don’t you worry.” She smiled and tossed him a wink.
A pang raced through Benny’s guts. “Shannon would have loved you,” he murmured.
“She will love me,” said Amanda. “Don’t borrow trouble.” She turned back to the sink and began scrubbing one of the frying pans.
“I don’t think the demon in my head is Brigitta or Naamah or any other name you want to call her. It almost reminds me of… But that’s crazy. Anyway, the voice tempting me is more self-assured than she ever was.”
“Who?” asked Benny.
“I don’t know, but if I had to guess, I’d say the voice belongs to Sally McBride.”
Benny stared at him blankly for a moment before shaking his head. “No matter who it is, there’s a question we need an immediate answer to.”
“What’s that?” asked Eddie without turning.
“How do they know where we are?”
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