Summoned (33 page)

Eddy stayed put. She sank the bat into the Servitor’s back, inches deep, and it whipped its head, spraying ropes of drool into Dad’s face. Sean watched his eyes close as the Servitor pressed closer to his throat. The forks of its tongue already lashed his skin, already tasted blood. Sean tasted it, too, God, he did, and the horror was so great that even bodiless, he thrashed.

Then fingers clutched his jaw, fingers with nails long enough to dig in. They levered his mouth open, so he had to take the in-thrust of cool glass, had to choke on bitter sweetness like the sarsaparilla from Geldman’s but a thousand times more intense.…

The Servitor tasting Dad …

Fingers, levering Sean’s mouth shut, making him swallow …

Knees and palms, his own, coming down on a gritty concrete floor. He had slipped into his body again, but he couldn’t stay there. He clamped his eyes shut and shot his mind back into the Servitor’s. He came of his own will this time, no prisoner. That made a difference. It made the thing hear him and stop its gnashing the moment before its needles tore into Dad:
No you can’t. Gave you my blood. You can’t have his.

It would have it. The summoner’s command wasn’t enough to stop it this close to the kill.

No,
the Black Man agreed.
You’re not its master yet.

Sean
knew
the beat of his wings.
You stop it, then!

Golden eyes narrowed. Mild smile remained the same.

Stop it, help them! Want me to come to you? Help them.

The Black Man spoke without haste, in syllables no human tongue could ever twist out of itself. They did the trick. The Servitor vaulted off Dad to land on the slate steps above the arena. Sean saw Eddy’s last swing miss, saw Dad sit.

Then Sean saw nothing as heat scorched the Servitor like a branding iron stamped into its nape. As if uninterested in sharing their agony, the Black Man folded his falcon wings and stooped. In a second he was gone, probably a universe away. In another the Servitor spotted the wielder of the heat: a tall man on the lip of the hollow, casting black light from a thick wand-tube-rod in his hand. A fresh shaft lashed the Servitor’s face. It howled—Sean howled with it—then plunged into a thicket of mountain laurels.

The rake and gouge of branches was nothing to the black light. The Servitor floundered through the bushes until it emerged on the path from the river, nearly plowing into a limping Gus. He jerked up his pistol, but the Servitor had already abandoned the path for the sheer slope of the bluff. It slid out of control. Sean slid with it, scrabbling.…

Scrabbling at the filthy floor of the receiving tomb, because that was where he ended up, that was where he was Sean and no one else, with only his own mind and senses. Between the natural mustiness of the tomb and the lingering reek of Servitor, smell was the sense working hardest for him. Or against him. Desperate for clean air, he crawled toward the only hint of it, a dim square of light.

“Sean.”

It was Helen’s voice this time, not Eddy’s. He made it to the square and crawled through it. Helen crawled out after him and helped him to the marble porch facing the river. He sucked down air that tasted bitter and sweet, like the stuff someone had forced him to swallow. “It was you? You gave me something?”

“A potion,” Helen said. “From Mr. Geldman.”

The potion that would strengthen his will. Helen had told him she was bringing it back from Arkham.

She grabbed his arm. Why? Oh, he was kind of swaying. “Sean, listen. What’s happening? Where’s the Servitor?”

The potion had worked, and so well that his souped-up will had popped him right out of the thing’s mind. That was great. That was bad. “I don’t know,” he whispered. His throat was too dry to manage more volume than that. “We’re not each other anymore. It possessed me, right, like it said in the
Necronomicon
?”

“I’m afraid so.”

Possession
wasn’t that scary a word to him, because wasn’t possession the ultimate excuse for bad behavior?
Hey, I didn’t do anything—it was the monster wearing my skin.
Except in Sean’s case, it was him kind of wearing the monster’s skin while the monster was still inside it and in control. Either way, he couldn’t dodge all the blame for the continuing shitstorm. The Black Man had suggested calling the blood-spawn, but he hadn’t forced Sean to change incantations and squeeze his own blood into the fire, so that the Servitor could spin itself a material form in its new home. He closed his eyes. Though he didn’t get even the faintest overlay of Servitor sight, Geldman’s potion hadn’t severed the soul-thread; after a few seconds, Sean felt it again, like a fish line hooked into his solar plexus, and when he concentrated on that sensation the line snapped taut. “It’s coming,” he said.

Seconds later, the Servitor galloped up the riverside path and crouched, a lashing shadow, at the foot of the steps. Helen drew close to Sean. Did she think he could protect her? Right, like he’d protected Eddy and Dad just now. The Servitor had learned that its summoner was weak and ignorant, that when Geldman’s potion wore off it could own Sean again. Tentacles rearing, it probed his mind.

The fold of his left elbow oozed warmth from its new teat. Sick with disgust, Sean dashed a trickle of blood off his forearm. To get rid of the gummy residue of Servitor-saliva would take serious scrubbing, and Jesus, it stank.
He
stank. “Get away!”

Its tentacles reared and swayed like eyeless cobras. It was laughing at him, and when it slouched off into the river it went of its own accord.

Helen let out a ragged sigh. “Did you—”

“No. It wanted to go. It knows it can get me later.”

“I have more potion. And the dismissing spell.”

Someone was running down the bluff path. Helen shut up. After a few seconds, she shouted, “It’s all right. He’s all right!”

Her eyes were working better than his. Sean didn’t see Dad until he heaved himself onto the tomb porch, panting. Drool burns blotched his face, and one leg of his jeans was slashed and black with blood. Man, if Sean could just curl up and croak, only him croaking wasn’t the way to make things right for Dad, who was probably still crazy enough to want him around. What Dad needed was for Sean to be as all right as Helen had yelled he was.

“He’s had some potion,” Helen said. “Looks like it’s working.”

Dad didn’t take his eyes off Sean. “Where’s the thing?”

Again, it was Helen who spoke: “Back in the river. How about Gus and Eddy?”

“They’re up there, with O’Conaghan. Gus sprained his ankle. Otherwise they’re both okay. O’Conaghan showed up with some kind of magical flashlight. It scared the bastard away.”

A flashlight, not a wand, dumb ass. That’s what had cast the burning beam. Sean refound his voice: “He’s that detective, right? Did Uncle Gus call him after all?”

Dad had started coughing. Helen said, “Professor Marvell finally called me back, Sean. He and O’Conaghan are in a group that deals with Mythos, ah, outbreaks. O’Conaghan’s going to take care of us until Marvell flies in tomorrow.”

So there were Mythos police. That explained why O’Conaghan had been interested in the animal killings and why he’d noticed stuff like the pentagram. Mythos cops. Beyond cool, but right now Sean couldn’t think about anything but Dad and what to say after this last close call. The best he could come up with was flat-out lame:
I’m sorry for almost getting you killed, Dad. Again. Oh, and I’m glad I didn’t get Eddy killed, or Uncle Gus, or Helen.
For things to be so majorly fucked up, so that he couldn’t find words strong enough to apologize, he had to have done something terrible, hadn’t he? Not just something stupid. Something evil.

Dad finally stopped coughing. “Sean,” he said.

Sean swallowed the impulse to launch a pre-emptive strike of excuses, however lame.

“I told you not to leave the house,” Dad went on.

That was the worst accusation he could manage? The absurdity of it smacked Sean upside his already-scrambled head, and he couldn’t help grinning. The grin was a gateway expression to laughter. At first he fought it, but what the fuck. He laughed, laughed because Dad was alive to lecture him, and because he was alive to hear it, and for all he cared, Dad could go on lecturing forever.

Dad didn’t go on. His brows knit. Then he bent over, hands on knees, and heaved staccato barks that sounded like they hurt him, but they were laughter, too, definitely laughter.

Helen was the toughest of them, because her voice merely hitched. “There’s a car coming, Jeremy.”

“Must be O’Conaghan’s. Privileges of being a cop. Security let him in.”

A black sedan with the red-haired detective at the wheel crunched into the gravel turnaround at the bottom of the road. Eddy hung out a window, mud caked but unmangled. Gus sat in the backseat.

“I’ll tell them you guys are right behind me,” Helen said. She hoisted her backpack and headed for the sedan.

She must have figured Dad wanted to be alone with Sean so he could get back to chewing him out. Slowly Dad recovered from his barking. He straightened, pawed back his hair, and then closed the gap between them.

Laughter cut and feet planted, Sean braced to say it again, the simple thing that might not help, but which was true. It was so true he ached with it. “Dad, I’m sorry.”

“We’re almost through this. Hang on with me, Sean, okay?”

The way Dad held out his hand made words gush from Sean, like spoiled food he couldn’t, shouldn’t, keep down: “While we were in the tomb, while it was drinking, the Servitor showed me this weird place, another planet, and I was getting all into it. The Black Man was there—he wanted to talk to me. I started running right to him, instead of staying here with Eddy, and that could’ve got her killed. Why’d I want to talk to the Black Man so bad?”

Dad’s hand made it to Sean’s shoulder. “Geldman told Helen some things. I don’t understand it all yet. Hell, I don’t understand any of it. But we’ll worry about that after we’ve dismissed the Servitor. One job at a time, all right?”

One job at a time. That was what Sean had watched Dad learn to do in the bad times after Mom had died. At first Dad hadn’t been able to do anything at all. Cel and Gus and Grandpa Stewie and Uncle Joe had seen to the funeral and the visitors. They had cleaned the house and kept food in the kitchen and looked after Sean. Dad had let them, while he’d paced his studio or sat in Mom’s among the drawings and canvases and paint tubes and brushes that lay exactly where she’d left them after she’d gotten too sick to work. But when they’d tried to pack up Mom’s stuff and close her studio, Dad had freaked. Those jobs were too important. He was going to do them by himself. And he had done them, a closet one day, a dresser the next, then a bookcase. The night he’d started on Mom’s studio, Sean had followed him and said he couldn’t lock Mom’s unfinished paintings away while they were still humming. Not that Dad could feel the hum—he’d never been able to. That night, though, he’d let Sean touch all the paintings, all the drawings, one at a time, and then he’d made it Sean’s job to take care of them while they hummed and to put them away when they’d stopped.

The humming. Jesus. Oh Jesus. Sean hadn’t thought about that for years, except as one of those nutcase things little kids make up and talk themselves into believing. Had it actually happened, then, a sign he had magical potential? In a way, it didn’t matter if the humming had been real. Not believing, not understanding, Dad had let him treat Mom’s paintings as if they were alive. He’d let that be Sean’s duty, for as long as Sean had needed for it to be.

Helen had gotten into the backseat with Gus, and both of them had squeezed over to leave room for Sean and Dad. Eddy was waving at them from the passenger seat. What with his throat gone tight, Sean just cocked his head toward the car.

“Right,” Dad said. His throat didn’t sound all that loose, either. “We’d better go.”

They walked toward the turnaround. Dad limped a little, and it was good, the way he leaned on Sean, that and the way Sean found he could carry the weight.

27

En
route from the cemetery, Helen listened to Eddy spin the cover story she’d tell her parents. See, she’d suspected Sean was goofing around in Swan Point, so she’d gone after him, but he was all the way down by the river and she’d slipped in this gross puddle of sewer runoff. That would explain the mud and the Servitor-stink, wouldn’t it? O’Conaghan approved Eddy’s alibi, and Helen would have goggled at her sangfroid if Eddy’s words hadn’t tumbled out a little too fast, a little too shrill. The girl was holding up damn well, considering how close she’d just come to dying. The full horror of it would probably hit her later. Helen had better ask Marvell what they should do to help Eddy and, yes, what they should do to help Helen. Eighteen reasonably smooth years as a kid and adolescent, then seven years more or less cradled in academia, had left her mental armor of personal invulnerability little dinged. Since Monday, however, the Servitor-situation had corroded that armor to brittle lace.

Before Eddy dashed into her house, she bequeathed her bat to Helen. Charred and pitted at the business end, it remained a sturdy weapon. Helen shook her head.

Celeste, older than Helen, seemed as relatively resilient as Eddy and the bat. Maybe the hustle of triage kept her too busy to overthink. She parked Gus on the living room couch and packed his sprained ankle with ice. She bandaged Jeremy’s leg and determined that his drool burns were superficial. She even checked Helen’s eyes, which had returned to near normal. It was Sean, unhurt, who baffled Celeste.

Helen looked over Celeste’s shoulder at the bizarre growth in the fold of his elbow: an inch-long conical nipple, rosy with blood flow. The Servitor had drunk from it, Sean explained, meeting no one’s eyes.

“Witch’s teat,” O’Conaghan confirmed. “I’ve seen them before. Familiars create them.”

“Can somebody take it off me?”

“Nobody will have to. It’ll shrink away after the dismissing.”

Thank God and thank Marvell, they had a real Mythos expert now. “Are you a magician, Detective?” Helen said.