by Mae Clair
The mere thought of caffeine soured Sherre’s stomach. “I’m glad it’s working out. I’ll see you tomorrow.” She turned to leave but drew up short when Del Desmond plodded into the room. The rookie looked shell-shocked, his skin the color of old cabbage.
“Hey, Desmond.” Concerned, Sherre took a step forward. “You don’t look so good. Are you sick?”
He shook his head, dropping into a vacant chair. “I just found out about Carrie.”
“Carrie?” David crossed to Sherre’s side.
Desmond’s face was slack, his eyes wide. “The news just came through. She was off yesterday. Went zip-lining with some friends. There was an accident…”
Sherre’s gut plummeted.
“The line snapped.” Desmond dropped his head into his hand. “My God, we were going to grab dinner tomorrow, and now she’s dead.” He blinked up at them, the misery in his gaze a plea to change the dreadful reality. “Now she’s dead.”
* * * *
Clive rolled over in bed. He’d been dreaming about Mill Street again. The pretty red-haired woman had managed to twist from his grip, her screams so shrill he’d thought his eardrums would split. She’d flung herself on Kirk, but Clive’s brother was high on drugs, possessed of inhuman strength. He batted her away like a bothersome fly, hefted the dripping red knife above his head, then plunged it into Boyd Hewitt’s mutilated body.
Again. And again.
So much blood. On the floor, the walls. Kirk was drenched in it.
“Stop! Please, stop!” Clive remembered how he’d sobbed unabashedly, begging his brother to stop the butchery. Kirk had laughed, pushed away from Hewitt, and turned on the woman. If Warren hadn’t tracked them down, burst through the back door at that moment—
Make it stop. Make it go away.
Sitting upright, Clive rocked on the bed. All he’d wanted was a puppy. Kirk had promised there were pups at that house, the only reason he’d tagged along. Squeezing his eyes shut, he rubbed the lizard tattoo on his hand. His palms were sticky-wet, and sweat gummed the backs of his thighs to the bedsheets. Maybe if he got up and moved around he could push the memories away.
He plodded to the bathroom in the dark, threw the light switch, then blinked at his reflection in the mirror above the sink. He looked like shit, his pupils contracting to pinpricks. He needed a shower, a shave, and something to take the shakes away. He settled for splashing cold water on his face, pulling on a pair of jeans, then plodding downstairs for a beer. He found Warren sitting at the kitchen table in the dark, his hand wrapped around a can of Bud.
“What are you doing up?” Clive opened the refrigerator and fished for a brew. The light stung his eyes and splashed a yellow rectangle over the cracked linoleum floor. Pressing the cold aluminum can to his face, he slumped against the counter.
Warren still hadn’t answered. Clive wondered if he was thinking about the bell they’d heard in the cemetery. The memory scared the shit out of him. He rubbed the lizard tattoo to hold evil spirits at bay, then popped the tab on the beer. “Hey, Warren, how come you ain’t answered?” He guzzled beer.
Warren grunted, a resigned sound tangled with disgust. Clive knew he didn’t like to be bothered when he was in one of his moods. “Thinking about Yancy.”
“And all that money we got?” Clive pulled out a chair and sat at the table. When he thought about the money, the memory of the bell wasn’t so bad. “You ever wonder how come Yancy has so much to throw around?”
“Not really.”
“You think he’s rich?”
Warren snorted contempt. “I think someone paid him a windfall to keep his mouth shut about something. That life-coaching business is a front.”
“I guess so.” Clive tended to agree with most things his older brother said. Warren was smart. He knew things that made Clive’s head spin, like how to program a TV remote and how to use his cell phone to pay at Starbucks. If Warren said the life-coaching gig was a front, then it was a front. It was funny to think Yancy might have been bought off by someone, just like he’d bought them.
Clive poked a finger into his ear, scratching inside the canal. He dug out a hunk of wax, rolled his thumb over the crust, then wiped it on his jeans. “You know what I’m gonna do? I’m gonna get me a dog with my share of the money.” Warren had yet to do anything to help him find a pup, and Warren had promised. “A brown one with a white patch on its back like Bodine. Remember Bodine?”
Mentioning the stray mutt that had showed up in their backyard when they were kids might spur Warren into action. Back then, it had taken Clive three days to convince his dad to let him keep it. Kirk said the dog smelled bad, so when Clive wasn’t home, he plugged Bodine full of BBs, then dumped his body in a field behind the house. Clive had balled his eyes out when he’d found the pup still feebly clinging to life. Dad said there was nothing to be done for the animal. He’d used his pistol to put Bodine out of his misery. Afterward, he’d used his belt on Kirk. It had taken three weeks for the welts to heal.
Warren pitched him a tired glance. In the dark, his eyes looked like two cavernous holes. “You got more money than a dog’s gonna cost.”
“Don’t care.” Clive took another swig of beer so he wouldn’t have to look at the empty sockets where Warren’s eyes should be. “Alls I want is a brown dog with a white patch and enough money to buy dog food. Maybe a few toys for it to play with. You promised.”
“Yeah, I know. We’ll look next week, okay?”
“Where?”
“The pound. Bodine was a stray. They got plenty of them there.”
Clive felt a spark of hope. “You sure this time?”
“I said so, didn’t I?”
Clive had never known his brother to back out on a promise. Satisfied, he grinned. “You can have the rest of what Yancy gave us.”
“Funny thing about that.” Warren drummed his fingers on the table top. Cheap plastic, it was nothing more than a folding square they’d bought at the local flea market, but it made a decent place to have a bowl of Froot Loops or a cheeseburger and fries. “Yancy ponied up a lot of paper, but he didn’t want the bones. He wanted the emerald, remember?”
“Yeah. He said it was some kind of family heirloom.” Clive spun his beer can between his palms, studying the small condensation rings it left on the table. Stupid shit. You couldn’t get loyalty from a bauble. “I guess it meant a lot to him to part with all that dough.”
“That’s what I’m thinking, too.” Warren tilted his head back and drained his beer. “I think the bastard lied about it being an heirloom. I bet it’s worth a fortune.”
Clive stared blankly, uncertain where he was headed.
“Remember that kid who fell in the grave? I think he could have found it.”
“Makes sense.” Clive’s gut tightened. He rubbed a thumb over his lizard tattoo. Too bad his totem animal wasn’t a dog.
Warren was silent several seconds. Shoving the empty can aside, he leaned forward, planting a muscular forearm on the table. “Probably wouldn’t take much to find out who the kid is. Where he lives.”
“Huh-uh.” Backpedaling in his chair, Clive shook his head, thoughts of Bodine and stray dogs swiftly forgotten. “Don’t even think about it.” He’d let Kirk drag him into the house on Mill Street under the ruse of getting a pup and was still suffering nightmares because of what happened. “I don’t mess with kids, women, or pets.”
“Okay. Forget I said anything.” Warren held up a hand, his voice dropping to a pacifying tone. “I don’t want to mess with a kid, either. It just bugs me, you know? Thinking we missed out on something big. If I knew what Yancy was up to—after I told him to take a hike, he called back trying to weasel out how he could sniff up Kirk.”
Clive was sure he blanched. Yancy had called him, too. Probably after striking out with Warren. “What’d you tell him?”
“To
take a hike. The less I have to do with Kirk, the better. That crazy-assed bastard will do anything. Yancy must have heard of his rep.”
Fear bubbled up from Clive’s gut. He hadn’t thought twice about telling Yancy how to reach Kirk but hadn’t stopped to consider why Yancy wanted the information. Dumb, dumb, dumb! Like Warren was always telling him—he didn’t have a filter. He spoke without thinking, acted without thinking, took everything at face value.
Shit. All he’d wanted from the whole messed-up deal with Yancy was a dog like Bodine, and now he might have set bad karma in motion. Best not to tell Warren.
Squirming on his chair, he rubbed his lizard tattoo. “I gotta bad feeling about things.”
“Like what?”
Clive rolled his shoulders. “Don’t know. Just bad. Didn’t you hear that bell in the cemetery?”
Warren smirked. “Not that shit again.”
“Don’t mock it.” Clive pushed away from the table and paced the length of the narrow kitchen. Cold sweat rolled from his hair onto his neck and dribbled down his back. “What if it was meant for one of us? Maybe one of us is gonna die. Maybe it’s ’cuz of Mill Street.”
“Now I’ve had it.” Warren shoved back his chair and stood. “Mill Street was three years ago. I told you to forget it. Pretend it never happened.” He lobbed his beer can at an overflowing bin in the corner. “I’m going to bed.”
“I can’t forget it!” Clive crowded close, peering down into Warren’s face. He might be younger, but he towered four and a half inches over his brother. “All you did was come in at the end and haul us out. You didn’t stand there and watch Kirk butcher Boyd Hewitt in front of his wife. I heard she ended up a vegetable in some kind of asylum.”
“Her loss.” Warren stiff-armed him out of the way.
Worry built in Clive’s head. He felt like a pressure cooker, ready to explode. “You ain’t listening to me.”
“Tell you what.” Warren paused in the doorway leading to the hall. “I’ll make a deal with you. I’ll forget about that kid, and you forget about Mill Street. That way we’ll both stay out of trouble.” Before Clive could answer, he stalked from the room, swallowed by darkness.
In the sudden stillness, Clive listened to the blood-thump of his heart—
And the distant toll of an imaginary bell.
* * * *
The bad thing about living in a huge house was trying to find something, especially when that “something” was packed away in a dusty attic. Friday morning, Dante carried a mug of coffee up to the attic and studied the mess of oddities tucked under the rafters. Jillian was picking him up at noon to take him to the care facility where her sister lived, but he had several hours to kill in the meantime. Talking to Jillian about ancestors and family had gotten him thinking about his own, particularly his grandmother.
Sonia DeLuca had practically raised him, once living in the big house along with him and his father. Dante had never known his mother, a beautiful but frail woman who’d died of a rare bone disease a few months after he was born. Once or twice he’d thought about trying to contact her spirit but always ditched the idea in the end. He’d never tried to communicate with his father, either. The dead deserved their rest, the crossing of realms exacting a harder toll on them than the person doing the summoning. He just wished he’d known his mother. Wished he understood the truth behind the accident that took his father’s life. The details of Salvador’s death had always been murky, but given the settlement his employer paid, there had to be negligence involved. At fifteen, Dante hadn’t been savvy enough to push for information. If his grandmother did, she’d never relayed the specifics.
Five years ago, Sonia moved to Pin Oaks Senior Center and gave Dante’s aunt, Imelda, the bulk of her possessions to sell. Imelda owned an antique store that specialized in vintage items, but some keepsakes didn’t translate well. Sonia had been a hoarder with a special fondness for old photos, letters, newspapers, and documents. Dante never understood the reasoning behind half of what his grandmother tucked away but knew she’d spent years researching the history of Hode’s Hill. He could always visit and chat with her to learn what he needed but preferred not to involve her in supernatural theories about guardians, monsters, and church grims.
As a kid, he’d often seen her bent over a large book, jotting notes, adding diagrams and tiny boxes with names. Looking back now, Dante was sure she’d been constructing a genealogy of the founding families of Hode’s Hill. Sonia had lost interest in the project after Dante’s father died. He’d rarely seen her with the book after that, but odds were it had to be stored in one of the trunks or cartons she hadn’t wanted to part with.
Blowing out a breath, he surveyed the hodgepodge of items strewn over the floorboards.
Even so close to Halloween, it was stuffy in the attic, the air musty with a combined reek of rough-hewn wood, crumbling newspapers, and mothballs. Wherever he looked, some forgotten memory was wedged beneath the rafters—trunks, cartons, boxes. A tall bureau that had once belonged to his father, a pitcher and bowl set made of milk-glass his grandmother had cherished, stacks of folding chairs used for lawn parties, old toys and board games—some he recognized—a broken patio fountain, curtain rods, discarded tools. Sorting through the mess could take hours. One of these days he was going to have to clean out the clutter and think seriously about selling the house. It was too freaking big for one person.
Grabbing a folding chair, he flipped down the seat, then pulled over the closest box. Several photo albums were wedged inside, and he spent a few minutes paging through faded memories before moving on to the next carton. He rummaged through stacks of magazines and newspapers, medical science articles his father had saved, old receipts and tax documents that should have been shredded years ago. Standing, he wedged a hand in the small of his back and stretched. He’d barely made a dent in the mess, but it felt like hours had passed. A glance at his watch told him the assumption wasn’t far off the mark. Jillian would be arriving in another forty-five minutes.
It had grown brighter in the attic, late morning light streaming through a trio of half windows set high under the eaves. Dust motes did a lazy dance in the broken beams and added to the thick coating on top of the bureau. He could have written his name in the powder, sketched an image. His lips quirked at the thought of outlining a monster in the dust. Out of curiosity he yanked open the top drawer.
The book he remembered his grandmother holding lay inside.
“Shit.” The book was the only item in the drawer, a thin volume longer than it was tall. The shape and size reminded him of a hotel guest register or an accounting ledger, but the pages were unlined when he flipped through them. His grandmother’s spidery handwriting detailed names and dates, arrows drawn between neat container boxes to indicate relationships and parentage. He shuffled back to the first page and eyed the title: A rough genealogy detailing the founding families of Hode’s Hill.
Bingo.
Grinning, Dante shoved the drawer shut. It stuck halfway, the old wood swollen by the stuffiness of the attic, refusing to budge. He set the book aside and tried to force it closed. It moved a few inches, screeching under the pressure, then held fast as if something blocked it from inside. Dante yanked the drawer from its slot and bent to peer in the opening. Even with sunlight angling through the windows it was too dark to see much of anything in the deep cavity. He felt along the sides and back of the hole but came up empty. Shrugging, he hefted the drawer to align with the slot.
“What the—” The angle exposed a small book taped to the underside.
Dante pulled it free. The initials S.D. were stamped in gold leaf in the bottom right corner. S.D. for Salvador DeLuca. His father had often had personal items monogrammed.
Swallowing hard, he opened the book and examined the first page.
I feel it when I least expect it, lingering like a disease. The color blue has haunted me
since I was a child, a whisper of my life to come. Now, it hovers near, wrapped in the guise of the monster I treat. From the start I fear this has been my destiny, a madness light will not breach. How else can I justify my role of Dr. Frankenstein to L’s monster? I have no doubt Blue will turn on me one day, driven by the experiments I subject him to. Blue may well be L’s son, but he has become my personal demon, one who grows to abnormal size and strength. If I die, it will surely not be an accident, but by Blue’s hand. It will be because I allowed myself to be corrupted by this wretched place. I fear it is blighted and has been for centuries.
No good will ever come of Wickham.
Chapter 10
October 18, 1799
Gabriel blinked, consciousness returning slowly as he struggled from a deep slumber. His surroundings were vaguely familiar, the bedroom outfitted with a tall standing wardrobe, rocker, and washstand with pitcher and bowl. He rested in a four-poster bed, far finer than the small cot he slept on at home. Curtains were drawn over the windows to blot the light, but from the hint of red beyond the heavy fabric, he guessed the time near sunset. A fire burned in a hearth in the corner.
Bits of memory floated through his mind—Dinah tending him as he labored with fever, Jasper pacing in the distance. He remembered his friend coaxing liquid through his lips, Dinah pressing a cold cloth to his forehead. He’d twisted with nightmares of the Endling. Ugly dreams in which the beast had mauled his throat instead of his shoulder. Remembering the wound, he fingered the fresh bandage wrapped over his chest. The area was tender, but the ragged starburst of pain had faded.
The sound of footsteps drew his attention to the door. Dinah appeared on the threshold carrying a wooden tray laden with a soup bowl.
“Thank heavens you’re awake.” Quickly, she deposited the tray on a small table by the bed. When she gripped his hands, her touch was papery and warm. “It has been four days, Gabriel.” She eased onto the edge of the mattress, her face drawn by lines he’d never noticed before. Deep shadows bruised the flesh beneath her eyes, and a thin sheen of perspiration clung to her cheeks.
