Night of Demons - 02 (4 page)

“What do you do, huh?” he asked the rod.

He shook it a little harder, letting out a few more sparks. And nothing more than that.

“I represent the Old Ones, you know. So you’d better reveal your secrets, or they’ll be mad at you.”

He lashed it back and forth, but that got no reaction whatsoever.

“Whatever that old fool used you for, I own you now! So do the same for me!”

He swung it around in a broad circle. What little weight there’d been between his fingers disappeared completely. Cornelius could still see the thing. Except its shape and color were changing.

As he watched, it ceased to be so very dark. The wand became pale gray. Then its edges started breaking up.

It turned to smoke before his startled gaze. Cornelius lurched back, trying to let go of the thing. But it would not drop from his grasp.

Looking down, he could see why. He let out a shriek. It was not simply the wand that was dissolving into vapor. The same was happening to his fingers. They had turned a similar pale gray.

It spread out right across his hand. There was no pain, but terror overwhelmed him. He shook his wrist furiously, turning around in circles, making small, horrified gibbering noises. Nothing that he did made any difference. His wrist turned to gray smoke—then his upper arm.

And that was when a new idea occurred to him. Maybe this was supposed to happen. Maybe this was what the wand actually did. Cornelius stopped moving, trying to calm down. It wasn’t easy, but he forced himself. Because…perhaps this was part of his destiny. What the Old Ones had wanted for him all along.

He watched as his whole arm dissolved. His body broke up the same way.

He felt his head begin to fade, and peered at his reflection in the dark, surrounding glass. There were only his eyes left. They let out a glint, then vanished too. His entire frame was lost from view, just pale mist by now. He tried to move around, and found that it was easy. He just had to will himself in a direction and he drifted there.

High in the conservatory, a single panel was propped open. Presumably for ventilation, since it was still warm, despite the rain. Cornelius wafted up toward the opening, spilling out through it into the night air. He swept across the grounds in the direction of the rusted gate. Went by the abandoned Chrysler.

Floated back to Plymouth Drive, then headed back the way he’d come.

Lord, so many lights below him. So many dwellings filled with people, drowsy, unaware. And there would be no stopping him in this new form he had assumed.

Those newspapermen, back in Boston, had been right about him without even knowing it.

He really was the Shadow Man.

“Ross, are you up?”

I pressed the receiver against my cheek. A thin, pale shaft of moonlight was streaming in between the drapes, casting the bedroom’s furniture into shadowy relief. The full-length mirror. The dim outlines of the dresser. The bowlegged stool in front of it. I seemed to inhabit a world of shadows a lot of the time, these days. More than any sane man would reasonably want. And I could see Alicia sitting there a moment, applying brief touches of makeup. It’s the first thing I remember, every time I wake.

And then I blink, and she is gone again. The flat, empty normality of my bedroom returns. Her perfume, the smell, faded a long time ago, and I missed that.

“Well?” Cass asked.

“I am now.”

“Then you haven’t heard?”

I sat up sharply. Hadn’t the Little Girl just warned me something bad was going down?

“Heard what?”

“Lucas Tollburn’s been murdered.”

And Lucas Tollburn was the oldest, most respected adept in the Landing. So I pulled myself together pretty quickly after that.

One of the rarest sights on Sycamore Hill is flashing lights up there. The pulsing red of police beacons cutting through the expensive gloom. As I’ve said, it’s where the very richest live. And rich—exactly like in any other town, I’d suppose—means cosseted, aloof. Means powerful. Except that word has some very different connotations, in the Landing.

When the genuine witches of Salem arrived here—fleeing the trials back in 1692—they were single to the last. Men and women both, they’d lived that way their entire lives. But, having only narrowly escaped an ugly death, they saw they needed to change their ways and blend in better. Some of them had married into the few well-heeled families of that era. Others had chosen bloodlines that were not rich yet, but would be one day. Gaspar Vernon and Judge Levin were both good cases in point.

Whatever, people here are careful not to mess with them. So there is little in the way of robbery or violence on the Hill. But I was still thinking of what the Little Girl had told me. This was someone from outside, who didn’t know the usual rules.

“A very bad man indeed, for the moment.”

And now I was in my aged Cadillac. It had started drizzling gently again, damp smearing my windshield. The lights up ahead looked unreal, like a glow from a television screen viewed through a blurry pane of glass. I fished out my cell phone, speed-dialed Cass, and started talking to her again.

“How did you get in on this?”

“I was out for a ride, just cruising around. And then I spotted some patrol cars heading up here, so I followed.”

On a night like this? Hardly the time for joyrides. Cass lived over in East Meadow. She’d been a good long way from home then, to spot anything on Plymouth Drive. But Cassandra Elspeth Mallory ranks among the walking wounded, the same way I do. She’d lost her family to magic too, in equally grim circumstances. And so when she’s not busy helping out, she kills time any way she can.

But there’s something else as well. She has the keenest nose for trouble that I’ve ever come across. Almost like she’s born to face it. That is something that I always try to keep in mind. It stops me from acting like her boss, which I am not. She backs me up of her own choosing.

“Tollburn lived alone, didn’t he?”

“Ever since his wife died, yeah.”

“Then how—?”

“Your friend Levin simply got this feeling. Spirited himself over here. And that was when he found the corpse.”

And the judge was one of the few adepts who I really trusted. He had a code of honor, at least, which made us similarly inclined.

“He still there?”

“No, he was too upset. Tollburn and his father were close friends, apparently. There’s only Hobart and his men, a medical examiner. And me of course. How long are you going to be?”

“I’m almost there,” I told her.

Then I hung up and turned onto the darkened lane at the end of which the Tollburn house stood. Three patrol cars and Saul’s dark blue Pontiac were parked by the front gate. And there was a fifth car in among them—an aged, grimy Chrysler—that I didn’t recognize.

At first, I thought that everyone had gone inside. But I was wrong. Matt Chalker’s face appeared out of the tree-filled darkness, seeming to float weightlessly above his navy uniform. I knew him well, from my own time on the force. He’d always been a decent guy. But Matt rarely looked at ease these days. His best friend, Davy Quinn, had been killed not long ago by Saruak, another interloper to this town.

When he saw me climbing out, he scowled. Maybe, when he looked at me, he simply saw more disaster coming. Which wasn’t my intention in the least. But you cannot help the way that other folk perceive you sometimes.

“Hey, Devries,” he mumbled. “I kind of guessed that you were on your way—that weird broad’s already here.”

Which meant Cassie again. She’s not exactly on the department’s list of favorite people. Rather too contemptuous of the rules for that. I spotted her bright red Harley.

“I’m not supposed to let you in,” Matt told me when I started heading for the grounds. “You’re not on the payroll anymore.”

Which was nitpicking, since he’d just admitted that Cassie—who had never been on the payroll—was already in there. Besides, every cop knew what I did these days. I seemed to have developed a real talent for facing down problems of the supernatural kind. And it wasn’t just a knack. I’d found out recently that there was something more than that involved. Higher powers watching over me. I didn’t understand that fully, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to. So I tried to forget about it, simply get on with the job in hand.

Matt was making no real move to stop me.

“Saul inside?” I asked.

“Where else would he be?”

“See you later, then.”

I reached across when I went past him, giving his shoulder a firm squeeze. I was trying to show him that I understood. So many of us have lost people that we care about to magic.

He simply looked away, then reached up and yanked at the peak of his cap, and that was all I got from him.

Once through the gates and past the conifers, surprise struck at me. I’d only been here a couple of times. But I didn’t remember the Tollburn place being quite as small as this. He had been very old. His wife had passed away. He didn’t need a larger dwelling. Perhaps, it occurred to me, the house had once been bigger, and he’d used his powers to hive it off into a space where he felt comfortable. I’d known adepts do stranger things to their homes, Woodard Raine for instance. But then…no, don’t get me started.

The lawn was dense with moisture. A couple more uniformed cops were out there, playing their flashlight beams across the wet turf, looking for signs of anything that shouldn’t be there. This entire area was surrounded by trees, I noticed, giving it a closed-in look.

“I can see footprints going in,” I heard one of the guys say. “But none coming out. What the hell is that about?”

I had to admit, it didn’t sound exactly promising.

With most of the lights in the house on, the leaded windows made it look partway like a cage. But the door was wide open. There was another patrolman, Hugh Williams, stationed by it. He stepped back and let me in. I wiped my shoes on the mat and then, finding no one in the living room, went through to the back.

When I saw the corpse, I felt my frame twitch. Lucas Tollburn was the last person that you’d expect to see this way. Such a massively respected figure in the town, an adept of almost legendary power.

He was lying faceup in a pool of blood. But there was more than that. He had apparently been mutilated. I’d met the man several times. He had seemed amiable and charming. So…who’d do such a thing, and for what reason? Why?

The examiner was crouched over the body. He was new to the team, a small, yellow-haired guy called Troughton, and I didn’t know him very well.

Saul Hobart and Cass were standing at opposite sides of the conservatory, their backs propped against the glass, watching the man do his work. I could make out silhouettes beyond them, the trees I’d noticed and a higher section of the hill, a few other lights shining in the distance. Their heads came around when I walked in, and both Hobart and Cassie nodded to me. Cassie looked like she wanted to favor me with a brief smile, but then thought better of it. She is used to death and tough that way, but understood she ought to be respectful.

The detective lieutenant, Hobart, was smartly dressed as usual, in a plain navy suit, a blue shirt, and a knitted woolen tie. He was, above everything else, a family man. He had a wife and three young daughters up in the northern suburbs. And they defined most things about him.

Massive, sometimes lumbering, he was no soft touch—don’t get me wrong about that. But he was generally slow and thoughtful, sizing up the consequences of his actions. The sort of cop—in other words—who thinks first, hard, and only shoots if he has to.

Cassie, my de facto assistant, was the precise opposite of that. Her black hair cropped closely to her skull, she stood nearly six foot tall. She had on a sleeveless beige T-shirt, and the same ripped jeans and biker’s boots she always wore. The faded tattoos on her arms stood out in the room’s stark light. There was a 9mm Glock strapped to each of her hips, as usual. I sometimes imagine she sleeps with them on.

As I’ve mentioned, she used to have children too. So, when she peered at me, there was a spark of pain in her dark eyes that never really went away.

She looked pretty sickened. Both of them did. I took a closer look at the corpse. Cause of death had been, without any doubt, a stabbing to the abdomen. An exceptionally savage one, it looked like. The blade had been dragged about with expert cruelty. Lucas here had either bled out, or had simply died of shock. But his shirt had been ripped open. And some kind of symbol had been carved into his chest. An oval, with a horizontal line running across it.

I didn’t recognize it.

“It’s postmortem,” the examiner told me, seeing where my eyes had gone.

There were no ligature marks, so I’d already figured that one out. No one simply lay there and let someone else do this to them.

“He went quick,” Troughton added softly. “Barely felt a thing.”

“Anyone know what this is?”

I looked across at Saul. The big guy nodded, his bald head glinting faintly as it caught the light.

“I spoke with Levin, then got on the phone to a few other adepts. This is not a symbol any of them use.” He worked his heavy jaw uneasily. “Gaspar Vernon knew what it was, though.”

Vernon was, among other things, a classical scholar. I didn’t get on with the man particularly well, but I respected him for that.

“It’s a theta,” the lieutenant continued. “Eighth letter of the Greek alphabet. A ‘tee-aitch’ sound, as in ‘them,’ ‘those,’ ‘that.’ But it can signify something else as well.”

I waited, the night’s silence closing in around me.

“It can sometimes stand for
thanatos.
Which means ‘death’ in Greek.”

At which, Cass let out a snort.

“Someone kills this guy, and then writes ‘death’ on him? So…we’re looking for someone with a knack for stating the obvious?”

Saul peered at her annoyed.

“More like, whoever did this has a weird mind-set, and maybe an agenda.”

I could see what he was driving at. The more I thought about it, then the more it dawned on me we might be heading down a path we’d never gone before. You see, Raine’s Landing might be a pretty weird place. But folks here are generally peaceable. They’ve learned, down the centuries, to get along with their neighbors and make the most of their tenuous lives, largely because there’s no option. We’re all stuck here. No one born inside the Landing can ever get out.

We call it Regan’s Curse. And because of it, nobody from our town can wander off into the outside world. No one visits here for very long either, save for the occasional lunatic. And now, Hobart was suggesting…?

That someone might have killed old Lucas merely for the sake of killing. For the pleasure and the thrill of it. In which case, he might strike again. Serial, I knew they called it in the outside world. And we’d not had one of those before…not human anyway. The thought of it made my blood run cold. This was something none of us was used to.

“Found a pair of sneakers next door, definitely not the old man’s,” Saul went on. “Whoever was here left them behind.”

And what exactly did that indicate? The only thing it did was leave me puzzled.

Troughton finished up and left. A couple of forensics guys moved in. One began dusting for fingerprints. The other went across the flooring with a pale blue light. I was still trying to sort this through my buzzing head when a commotion out front brought my attention swinging back around.

Someone else had turned up. A woman, apparently. Her voice was raised in anger, and it wasn’t anyone I knew. She was trying to get past Hugh Williams. He was trying to reason with her, but wasting his breath.

“I have to get in there, you idiot!” Her tone was supercilious, shrill. “Do you have any idea who I am?”

She must have simply shoved past him, next instant.

Her heels made a staccato clattering as they came down the hall.