“No,” I say, then stop myself. “Wait a minute. As a matter of fact, there is…”
Lisa interrupts by bouncing out the front door and down the steps, coming to rest next to us. She holds out my phone to me. It’s ringing.
“I tried to answer but whoever it is they didn’t want to talk to me. Hey, Andy.”
Andy? I take the phone from her and answer it. It’s a local fisherman named Chuck Pyle, a bear of a man who lives on his boat and has fished the waters in and around the Bay for almost forty years. He can speak to fish. Not command them, which would make fishing a lot easier if a bit less sporting, just speak to them and understand them. Which, when you take a second to think about it, means he can hear what they’re saying when he brings in his lines, and yet he keeps doing it. I don’t like to think about that too much, but I know for a fact he’s on at least one Aegis watch-list.
He’s barely intelligible when he’s sober and even at this hour of the morning he’s far from it, but after a sputtering moment I’m pretty sure that there were three assholes on the goddamn dock that were fucking with him. He would have cut their dicks off with his boning knife and use them to dickpunch their own assholes if they’d set one shitstained foot on his boat, but the limp-dick cocksuckers didn’t have enough hair on their sacks to jump on board and face him.
Basically, that’s what he said.
When I can get a civil word in edgewise I tell him to stay on his boat tonight and not to leave it, no matter what kind of cocksuckers try to lure him off. He slurs a vague threat that might have been aimed at me but just as easily might have been meant for the cocksuckers. Then he hangs up on me like he’d been doing me the favor by ranting at me.
Lisa and Hollett are staring. Her mouth is actually hanging open a little.
“Guess you heard that,” I say.
“Hard not to,” Hollett answers. “They won’t cross water.”
“Just like how we found out last night that they won’t go into a house uninvited. Just like vampire legends. We really need to dig a little deeper into the myths.”
I must be wearing a pensive expression. Hollett looks at me speculatively.
“You sound like you’ve got an idea.”
“Part of one, at least. Want to take a ride?”
He shrugs. “Well, my boss is dead. Guess that means my morning’s free.”
Lisa holds up her right hand. She’s already holding my key ring. “Where are we going?”
“Oh, hell no. You’re staying right here.”
“Why, because it’s dangerous?”
“Well, yes,” I say in my best no-shit voice.
“This is about those monsters, right? That means I’m going with you.”
“Give me one good reason I should take you out hunting monsters?” I challenge her.
“Because you haven’t got all your strength back, for one, and for another, it’s morning. According to what you do know they won’t be out until nightfall, and that’s not for another nine hours. And don’t forget, I’m a monster, too.” She pulls her short hair back into a tight ponytail and gives me a glare that feels dangerous even with her contacts in.
“You’ve got a lot of power,” I admit, “but that’ll work against you, too. We get caught outside after dark and they’ll be drawn to you.”
She thinks that over, then disappears into the house, taking my keys with her. I trade glances with Hollett, who hasn’t even tried to interject himself into the argument. She comes out a minute later wearing her safety glasses – a wickedly expensive, custom-built pair of polarized sports sunglasses. The frame sits on her face like it was wired there. They’re nearly impossible to shake off by accident, a vital feature when any accidental exposure could turn someone into a statue.
“Okay,” I say, “but you’re back here before sundown.”
“I love it when you’re heroic,” she says with a smile. Since I can’t see her eyes I can’t tell if it’s genuine or sarcastic, but I can guess. “So where are we going?”
“At the risk of sounding cliché, we’re going to the only place left for us,” I tell her. “We’re going back to the beginning.”
Twenty
After exchanging the beefy XVR for the more compact Springfield we pile into my Jeep. When we do I’m hit with a foul sense of déjà vu. Lisa elects to take the back seat, leaving Hollett up front with me to make tactical discussions easier, but at the moment I don’t feel like talking. Last night I sallied blindly forth with Hollett and a powerful woman as partners and she didn’t make it back. Today I’m less blind than I was, but the parallel still haunts me, and telling myself that I had no choice in the matter when it came to Lisa’s decision doesn’t soothe me.
The ride there is spent in tense silence. The town’s Christmas decorations have been up since the day after Thanksgiving, but they give off no sense of joy or festivity. We pass one crime scene after another – broken windows with cheerfully crude holiday tableaux painted across them are hastily plastered with crime scene tape, spent road flares marking where car accidents had happened, smoke-blackened buildings with scorched strands of golden tinsel hanging like dejected stalactites. At the bank on the corner of Tremaine and Crown Streets a man in green coveralls is trying to clean a mist of blood off the sidewalk cash machine with a spray bottle and a rag that’s already turning pink.
Someone died at every one of those scenes, for no reason other than the fact that they were born with something most people weren’t. Every one of them was my fault. I’d rushed headlong into a situation I didn’t understand, stupidly relying on my own immunity to protect me and forgetting utterly that I’m not the only one around here who needs protection from magic.
Normally I watch out for the regular, everyday humans who have no idea who or what is sitting at the table next to them at the restaurant, on in the next car over at the stop light. Today I have to remind myself that there are other types of people in this town, and if I forget, well, there are plenty of reminders waiting for me all around. Last night I failed everyone in this town, normal and Grey, thanks to my own damn giddy carelessness.
Never again.
Guilt is a heavy weight. It sinks its hooks into your heart and settles back, dragging at you and tearing a little bit with every step you take. I try to shunt it to the back of my mind, put it away in a cabinet until I can deal with it directly, but guilt is disobedient, only letting you have your way with the promise that it’ll be back again, with even more barbs than before. Sometimes the only way to get rid of it is to go along with it and deal with the consequences down the road. That’s what I have to do, for the good of everyone else in this town. I close that mental door with a strong kick and lock it down good and tight and concentrate on the road. Fortunately, traffic is light and brooding eats up time. We’re there in what feels like a blink.
I’d been expecting the street around Parkman Gems to be still under police presence, but the area’s deserted except for two uniformed cops stationed in front of the storefront’s shattered front window. Crime scene tape is wound around the area like a demented spiderweb, but the street’s clear and most of the debris on the sidewalk has been cleaned up. The sanitation crew must have been at it all night. I pull to a stop so close to the building the grill of my Jeep presses against the crime scene tape.
Immediately the two SBPD cops appear at my car door. One’s a tall, lean fence post of a man with crewcut red hair, the other’s a weighty Hispanic with a thin mustache. I know them by sight, but not by name. Neither of them are Grey. They both have hard cop faces on until they see me.
“Mr. DeLong,” the ginger says with cautious respect. His partner nods at me.
When I landed in Superstition Bay I was furnished with a tight background by the Aegis. As far as the locals know I’m a retired federal agent who dabbles in private investigation. A cover like that allows me a limited degree of freedom in the law enforcement circle, giving me a little leeway to stick my nose into some citizen’s business w
hile retaining the right to carry a gun. It’s been helpful over the years in circumstances like this one.
“Morning, gentlemen,” I say to them. “Detective Farelli leave word about me?”
“Yes,” Thin Mustache says, “but not about them.” He’s eyeballing Hollett, but Ginger can’t take his eyes off Lisa. I’ll have to have a word with him about that later.
“They’re helping me out,” I say, putting an edge on my voice. “Just a quick look around.”
They look at each other. I don’t know which of them is asking the opinion of the other, but they both nod. “We’ll be across the street,” Ginger says.
“We’ll wave when we’re done,” I tell him. The two cops cross the street to a small deli and accept Styrofoam cups from the owner. I step out and open Lisa’s door for her.
The first thing she sees is the spot on the sidewalk where Celeste Reese fed on her first victim, the man in the leather jacket. Most of the mess has been cleaned up, but there’s a piece of yellow plastic with the number 16 on it on the pavement near the door. An evidence marker. Around the small yellow wedge, a small spray of dried blood is spattered. It’s lonely evidence, but compelling.
“This is where it came from?” Lisa asks in a suddenly shaky voice. Now that she’s seeing the kiovore’s work firsthand she seems to be showing some nerves, but she’s tough. She’s fought and even killed before.
Hollett gets out, looks the building up and down. “We’re wasting our time here,” he grunts. “If anything, we should be out at the barn. That’s where they imprisoned it, whoever they were. If we could learn how they did it, we could do it.”
“I took pictures of the site and gave them to Jamie last night. He can’t even identify all the languages they used, let alone translate them. No, our answer is down here.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“It’s dry down there,” I point out.
“What’s that mean?” Lisa asks.
“The cave under the barn was wet because the water table in this area is so high you can’t dig down more than a couple of feet before you start hitting mud, but this one here was warm and dry. That’s some deep running magic that went into that room’s construction, and I don’t think it was done by whoever it was that capped off the ley spring.”
“You think the kiovore did it?” Hollett makes it sound like I think the Tooth Fairy was responsible.
“Let’s just go see what’s in there,” I say. “Without preconceptions. Let’s see what the room tells us.”
They’ve got nothing left to say, so we go through the dislocated entrance door and into the mangled display floor. In here the wreckage hasn’t yet been touched. I’m guessing Mayor and Mrs. Parkman have already been here, surveying the damage, and will start dispatching clean-up crews as soon as Captain Bayle decrees it safe. Given what the hole in the floor must have done to the building’s structural integrity, though, that could take weeks.
In the daylight the steps going down don’t look as foreboding. The light only carries about twenty feet down, but that’s still enough to get a finer appreciation of the craftwork that went into their construction. The stone is so flat it looks shaved, and in the light of day we can see the perfect seams where two or sometimes three different rocks were fitted together to complete a step. Masterful work by today’s craftsmen. By centuries-old standards? Beyond genius. I shove the appreciation aside and take that first step down.
Last time I went down these stairs it felt like it took a week to reach the bottom. This time it’s at least a month.
Night starts early underground. What ambient light remained up above is only a pleasant memory by the time we’ve taken three steps. As the darkness swallows our feet Hollett raises his thorn wand and, holding it like a beacon, starts down the stairs with noticeably more confidence. A magical flashlight, though I’ll wait until later to make a Harry Potter joke. The joke’s on me, though. I can’t see the merest glimmer of light. I hesitate, unable to see the next step, so Lisa edges around me, following Hollett down through the darkness with easy sureness. I swear, nobody can appreciate magic unless they’re completely denied it.
I click on my flashlight and use the narrow beam to quickstep down the stairs, overtaking Lisa and shouldering my way past her. Chivalry doesn’t extend to giving a monster the chance to get the drop on your girlfriend by letting her walk ahead of you.
As we near the bottom of the steps I can see there’s already a light down there. It’s bright but distant, and it flickers every now and then. We never went back down for the lantern the lovebirds brought with them last time. Surprised to see it’s still giving light, but then the Gamagori almost certainly enhanced it magically and it’s likely still running on whatever power it absorbed when Celeste used my sweat to crack the seal. Still a sturdy lantern. Maybe I’ll take it home with me.
I’m freshly surprised when we enter the cavern. Calvin Reese’s body has been removed, along with physical evidence like the women’s discarded teeth, but all of their paraphernalia remains. Adam probably gave the order to leave the scene as-is for the moment, and I’d have to imagine that the Grey members of the force were only too happy to obey.
“You were right,” Lisa says, dragging a finger along a wall. “Dry as a bone. Don’t touch the walls.”
“I get what you mean, but I was all over these walls last night. If there were any spells in them keeping out the moisture, they’re already shot.” We circle deeper into the room, Hollett gravitating towards the seal. He knees down next to it, face all but resting on the stone disk. Lisa follows him. I stand well back.
“Granite and quartz. No rocks like that anywhere around here.”
“I’m not even sure that’s a naturally occurring combination. I know I’ve never seen it before.”
“Amazing work,” Lisa says. “Not even a chisel mark.”
“I doubt a chisel ever touched it,” Hollett says, standing up and looking around. “We can start by reading the walls.”
Given the room’s mostly bare state there seems to be no other obvious choice. We separate, each taking a different section of room to examine. I pick the spot furthest away from the seal. We run our lights over the ancient writing. After a moment Lisa speaks up.
“Well, it’s not in German,” she says. She took German in high school and college, so I’ll trust her opinion. We keep looking. I go over two sections of stone before I spot something.
One of my bullets struck this section of wall, knocking a plate sized chunk out of it. I kneel down an arm’s length away from the wall and shine my light at the hole. It’s bare, dry soil, the opposite of the natural dirt of Superstition Bay, riddled with dry earthworm tunnels, but they aren’t what caught my eye. An object is barely visible at the point where the wall cracked. I call the others over.
Hollett gets closer than I can, almost sticking his face in the hole. “Can’t make it out,” he says.
“Take the wall down,” Lisa suggests. Hollett shrugs, gets a hold of the inside edge of the break and hauls in an act that would give an archaeologist a massive stroke. The sheet of rock pulls easily free of the wall, and we have to jump back to avoid it landing on us. Not that it would have hurt us; it’s barely half an inch thick. We gather closer, the broken rock crunching under our feet, and look at what’s been embedded in the revealed earth.
It’s a body.
Or at least it had been, once. Male, by the look of it, maybe five and a half feet tall. Judging by the skeletal frame he’d probably been on the stout side. His hair, where it hasn’t been digested by the soil, is thin as a strand in a moth’s cocoon, but still black the way only youth’s hair is. Untold years in the dry, magically protected soil have dried the skin to the texture of spoiled jerky. It still wears clothing of a sort, what looks like a tunic made from some kind of unrefined animal hide.
“Whatever magic went into the room must have preserved it,” Hollett says, his voice solemn.
“Wonder who it was?” Lisa�
��s voice is the same as his.
“No way to tell right now,” I say, leaning closer. I let the light play over the body. I don’t feel any revulsion, not because I’m hardened to the sight of dead bodies but because this fellow looks less like a body than a movie prop and as long as I can think of him that way I’ll be okay.
The tunic covers him from shoulders to thighs, two long flaps of hide meant to be belted by some kind of woven fabric around his middle. There’s no sign of the belt. The rest of him is so well preserved you’d think there’d be some kind of remnant, but there’s nothing. He was buried with his clothing, but the belt was forgotten.
“Open up his tunic,” I tell Hollett. He looks sideways at me but does as I ask, finding the edge of the tunic’s front and gently lifting it aside. I shine my light underneath.
The mark on his chest is all but invisible in the desiccated flesh, but it’s there, right between and slightly south of his pectoral muscles. I ask Lisa to hold the tunic open so Hollett can see. He links his hands together, index finger to index finger and thumb to thumb, and holds the resultant finger circle over the wound like a magnifying glass.
“What does that look like to you?” I ask him.
“Teeth,” he says, his voice odd. “A victim of the kiovore?”
“Look closer,” I say. He does. When he sees it his head snaps up.
“The wound isn’t round. Those are human teeth marks.”
“Exactly.” I look around the room again. The panel of rock covering the body was only a little bit wider than the body itself. Most of the other panels in the room are six feet wide at least, but there are six others that are only half that. I point out the closest one.
“Take that one down,” I say.
I expect him to use his thorn wand to do the job and he does, but instead of sending destructive energy through it he uses the thorn’s hardened edge to work into a seam between panels. Once he has enough space for a hand grip he slowly pulls. Miraculously he manages to remove the panel in one piece. He and Lisa gently lower it to the floor, preserving its integrity.
No More Devils: A Visit to Superstition Bay Page 19
