“Guards?”
“Not for at least an hour or two. They don’t patrol constantly,” Dmitri said, and that solved the first of our problems.
We had no time to waste.
I got out of the car and stood there a moment, letting my senses adjust. It was dark enough under all the tree cover that I could see fairly well if I kept my sunglasses on. I could feel the place looming up the hill off to my left, like a dark stain against the late afternoon sky. The air had gotten cooler, the sun swiftly headed for the horizon, and I knew with the prescience of the Oracle at Delphi that tonight would be the night I would have my answers.
Tonight I would know what had happened to Elizabeth.
Out here, away from the city, the darkness was nearly complete. The massive structure of the Kirkbride rose ahead of us in the distance, and from here it seemed to me as if it were covered with a dense web of pain and despair, the emotional and spiritual residue of all those who had lost so much of their lives inside its brick walls.
I didn’t spend too much time looking at it; I’d see it soon enough, up close and personal, too. Instead, I turned to see if Dmitri was ready.
He was digging around in the trunk, muttering to himself in Russian, and when he straightened up I saw that he’d come armed for bear. A brace of pistols was strapped to his body in shoulder holsters, and he carried a sawed-off shotgun in one hand. He picked up a highpower flashlight for a moment, similar to the type that police officers carry, and then dropped it back into the trunk. Given that just a few hours before I’d seen him in the form of a massive polar bear, I wasn’t worried too much about him being able to see in the dark.
I did have other concerns, though. Reaching into my pocket, I withdrew a silver necklace identical to the one I was currently wearing, complete with its own pendant of polished lodestone. I called Dmitri’s name and when he glanced my way tossed it in his direction.
He caught it in one hand and gave it a quizzical look. “What’s this?”
“A little extra insurance. Do me a favor and wear it, will ya?”
“Sure.”
He slipped it over his head, and I felt a little better about bearding the dragon in its own den knowing he had it on him.
The generating plant was inside a square concrete blockhouse hidden among the trees. The wooden door was padlocked, but Dmitri, with one sharp swing with the butt of the shotgun, broke it open.
It was damp inside and smelled heavily of mildew. I could see the crumbled ruin of the boiler sitting off to the side of the diesel generator that had replaced it. The entrance to the maintenance tunnels turned out to be on the floor behind them both.
Dmitri hefted the iron manhole cover out of the way and we took a look at what we had. Steel brackets had been set into one side of the shaft to serve as a ladder; we quickly made use of them to reach the floor of the tunnel itself.
The passage was about eight feet in width and tall enough that we could both walk upright easily. The walls had been constructed of brick and then covered with a thin coat of mortar, much of which had crumbled away after so many years.
Without hesitation, we headed off into the darkness, Dmitri in the lead with me following close behind.
46
NOW
The tunnel ran for several hundred yards, turning a time or two before climbing steadily and depositing us into the generator room in the basement of the Kirkbride building.
So far, so good.
We’d managed to get inside the facility. Now all we had to do was find Denise. I’d also be looking for any evidence that might provide further information about the condition and whereabouts of my daughter, Elizabeth, but that went without saying. Once we had what we’d come for, the plan was to hotfoot it out of there and regroup to fight another day.
I should have known better.
The best laid plans never survive contact with the enemy and this one was far from that right from the get-go.
We hadn’t been in the Kirkbride building for more than ten minutes before the psychic weight of it began to drag on me. The place was dripping with dark emotions: anger, hate, pain, envy, sorrow, despair; you name it, it was there. Madness ran beneath it all, corrupting the already corrupted in ways I never would have thought possible.
I wanted to close my eyes and run away, the desire pounding through my veins with all the force of some instinctive survival imperative, but a glimpse of Dmitri stoically pushing onward saved me from embarrassing myself. If he could deal with it, I told myself, then so could I.
That was before the ghosts started gathering, however.
At first there were just a few of them, watching us from the shadows. I would catch just a glimpse of a face or the faint sense of motion from out of the darkness where no motion should be.
While he couldn’t see them the way I could, Dmitri must have felt them, for he grew tenser as our exploration continued and he began casting furtive glances over his shoulder with much greater frequency, searching for what his senses were telling him was there despite his inability to perceive it.
At that point, the ghosts hadn’t done anything to prevent our forward motion, so we ignored them as best we could and continued on toward our goal. We passed a number of rooms set off to either side of the main corridor: a laundry, a kitchen, more than a handful of storage rooms filled with dusty piles of something or other.
When we reached the end of the hall, we found a staircase leading upward and continued that way.
They came for me in the stairwell, halfway between this floor and the next.
A group of ghosts had been waiting on the floor above and now began making their way down the stairs toward us, while at the same time the contingent that had been following us for the last fifteen minutes suddenly pushed up close behind, effectively trapping us between them.
Much to my shock, I recognized some of the faces, having glimpsed them in the crowds that sometimes gathered outside my gate. An even bigger surprise was the sight of Scream standing among them as if he was their leader.
It was as if I had suddenly been betrayed by my best friend.
I was still standing there in shocked amazement when Whisper appeared beside me, reached up, and yanked my lodestone necklace off my neck, then tossed it into the darkness behind us.
As if that was some kind of a signal, the ghosts moved in.
Scream went straight for Dmitri, trying to use his ability to generate fear to incapacitate my partner, while the group that contained most of those I’d recognized rushed me in the wake of Whisper’s betrayal.
I backpedaled as quickly as I could, still too stunned to do much else, trying to wrap my head around the idea that Whisper and Scream had quite effectively ambushed me. Had they been working for the fetch or its still-unseen master all along?
With my attention on the ghosts, I didn’t see the bit of rubble in my path until it was too late to do anything about it. My legs got tangled and down I went.
I could hear Dmitri bellowing in anger and fighting back as hard as he could, but it’s hard to defend yourself against a pack of marauding poltergeists, particularly without the right equipment. I couldn’t see him, but I could imagine what was happening, how he would be swinging his massive fists only to have them pass right through his assailants.
I pushed myself into a sitting position just as the first of the ghosts surrounding me made its move. It rushed forward, passing physically through my body just as the ghost of Marshall had in his loft. And just as before, I saw snatches of the ghost’s earthly memories, of the time before it had left its body on the other side of death. I was able to see the events that had led the ghost to this particular place and time, to experience them as if they were memories of my own, to feel all the pain and grief and despair that went along with them. I watched through the eyes of my mind as a stranger first approached and then killed him. I felt it in the depths of my being as a piece of the poor man’s soul was torn from his dying corpse by the actions of the fe
tch. My body shook and shuddered, flailed against the cold cement on which it lay, while I could do nothing to stem the tide that engulfed me.
When it was over the next one stepped forward and repeated the process.
One after another, I watched them die. Their killers often wore a different face, but there was no question as to what I was seeing.
The ghosts had given me a front-row seat to their own murders at the hand of the fetch.
I lay there stunned, emotionally drained. To know that there had been multiple murders at the hands of the same individual was one thing; to watch them die, to feel their pain, that was something else entirely. I could feel tears running down my face, and I was unashamed. Suddenly I wanted to help them, not because it would help me discover what had happened to Elizabeth, but because it was the right thing to do. They hadn’t deserved their fate and someone had to fight back on their behalf.
No sooner had I come to that conclusion than a final phantom entity approached from out of the darkness.
Whisper herself.
She stared at me without expression and then ran forward.
My mind recoiled from the onslaught of memories that weren’t my own, but there was nothing I could do. In the midst of it, I learned why Abigail Matthews had been missing for so long.
In addition, I understood what connected these people together and what they had done to deserve such a fate.
Their selection as victims hadn’t been random at all.
They’d been intentionally chosen by the fetch, chosen not for who they were but for who their ancestors had been.
And in the heart of that information was the answer to the puzzle we’d been trying to solve.
47
NOW
Denise regained consciousness for the second time in as many hours. She lay on the cold cement floor, still facing the wall she’d slammed into when the fetch had thrown her across the room after her escape attempt earlier.
For the life of her, she couldn’t figure out how she could still be alive.
She rolled over and pushed herself into a seated position, her back against the wall. One quick look was all it took for her to recognize that, yes, she was still captive in the same room she’d been held in before. This time, however, the space around her was considerably messier, with discarded file boxes, folders, and mounds of paper scattered throughout the room.
There was also a light.
The electric lantern the fetch had been carrying earlier stood on the floor in the center of the room, pushing back the darkness with its soft glow.
A slender journal bound in what looked to her like genuine leather rested on the floor next to it.
She stared at it, dumbfounded.
The thing was bringing her reading material? What the hell?
Something was going on here, something she didn’t completely understand. The fetch had had the opportunity to kill her not once, but twice now, and each time it had chosen not to do so. The bloodthirsty killer that had already slaughtered forty-seven other Gifted individuals had made a conscious decision to let her live.
Why? What does it want?
Obviously, it had something in mind for her. All she could think was that it needed to use her talents; otherwise, she figured, she’d already be as dead as the rest of them.
Maybe the book would hold some answers. The damned thing must have brought it for a reason.
Leery of hidden dangers, she used a minor cantrip to flip the book over a few times and then levitate it into the air. When that didn’t trigger any defensive measures or cause it to vanish into thin air like the illusion she half expected it to be, she made a “come here” gesture with her right hand.
The journal shot through the air and came to rest in the palm of her outstretched hand.
It was old; that much was immediately obvious before she even opened it. It was hand-stitched, something they didn’t do anymore, and the paper was of a quality and heft that would never be used in a commercial product in this day and age. Never mind the fact that it was yellowed with age.
The owner’s name was written inside the front cover, along with the date.
JOHN HATHORNE
1696
Her interest went up considerably. She recognized the name; any practitioner of the Arts living in New England would, as Hathorne had been one of the judges presiding over the Salem Witch Trials in 1692. Never mind the first Magister named to that position in the New World.
If it was authentic, the journal in her hands was worth an incredible sum to the right parties.
Turning the pages, Denise discovered that Hathorne had written in a cramped spidery hand that time had made, for all practical purposes, illegible.
That wasn’t going to stop a hedge witch of Denise’s caliber, however.
She waved a hand over the open page, said a few words beneath her breath in a language that hadn’t been spoken in over a thousand years, and channeled her will into the book before her.
The voice of the long dead Magister spoke from out of the darkness around her, reciting the words he had written on the page so long ago.
She hadn’t even gotten through the first two pages before her heart began to beat faster and she realized that what she held in her hands might hold the answers to many of their questions.
From what she could gather, Hathorne and several other practitioners of the Art had faced off against a rogue mage in the fall of 1696. This was not in itself unusual in that day and age, she knew. The Americas had been considered a kind of Wild West for those early mages and more than a few had tangled with one another for various reasons, just as they did now in other parts of the world.
But what caught her attention was Hathorne’s description of what happened when he and several of his cohorts cornered the rogue with the intention of permanently ending his rebellious activities.
But the sorcerer had made of himself a twin, a double of the most heinous kind, and set within its black heart a small portion of his own villainous soul in blasphemous parody of the Holy Creation. This twin, this terrible demon, was swift and fleet of foot and thereby escaped capture.
Because the doppelganger contained a portion of Eldredge’s most unholy soul, we, the righteous judges appointed by God, could not carry out our intent to cleanse him of his darkness and set his soul free.
We therefore devised a new plan, this one being twofold. We would secure Eldredge’s body inside a suitable container and then bury said container, hiding it away for generations to come and leaving the final resolution regarding the sorcerous witch to the hands of Almighty God and his most excellent Judgment Divine.
When the time came to carry out the deed, we surrounded Eldredge and his followers, and, after a fierce exchange of mystical energies, were able to subdue him appropriately. Winston secured an iron maiden and the sorcerer was bound and sealed inside the vessel. The lady was then wrapped tight with chains and the whole contraption buried deep beneath the surface of the earth where it could be guarded and watched as necessary.
Hathorne continued speaking but it soon became obvious that he’d said all he intended to say about the Eldredge incident. Eventually Denise waved her hands in a complicated pattern and released the spell’s energy back into the air around her.
There was no need to hear the rest; she had what they were looking for.
Eldredge had created the fetch to carry out his evil plans.
And it was looking more and more likely that he was still controlling it now, though how that was possible after all this time she didn’t know.
One thing was certain: she intended to find out. Gaia willing, she’d put an end to it once and for all.
That line of thought brought her right back to the fetch and its reasons for giving her the information it had. She considered recent events for a few minutes and then drew some hasty conclusions, noting primarily that the fetch was up to something more than just what its master wanted.
It had to be; its behavior jus
t couldn’t be explained any other way. It had left the street artist’s paintings to be discovered, the one clue that had led them directly to the Kirkbride. The fetch had passed up a chance to kill Hunt when the opportunity had presented itself and then had done the same with her on not one, but two separate occasions now. It had even locked her up in this room, which she had first taken as a sign that she was bait to draw in her friends, but which she now suspected might have simply been a means of keeping her out of harm’s way.
Finally, the fetch had begun to feed them intelligence, revealing just who and what it was they were facing.
Which meant the fetch must want … Sweet Gaia!
She had to get out of here. She had to warn Hunt. She snatched up the journal and the light, then rushed over to the door of her makeshift cell.
As she expected, the door was unlocked.
That was all the invitation she needed. Moments later she was free of the storeroom and moving as quietly as she could through the deserted halls, searching for a way out.
48
NOW
Stanton brought his car slowly to a halt several yards behind the parked Charger. He had no idea if the vehicle was still occupied, and he wanted to give himself time to react if it was.
He knew he couldn’t be more than ten, maybe fifteen, minutes behind the fugitives.
Spotting them climbing into that Charger a few blocks from headquarters in the aftermath of their escape had been pure luck. The decision to follow them on his own rather than haul them in then and there had been based on years of investigative experience. There was something strange going on, and Stanton was determined to understand just what it was before he collared Hunt and made him stand trial for as many of the Reaper cases as he could make stick.
Every passing second gave Hunt a bigger lead, but Stanton wasn’t going to throw away his chance at redemption by being stupid now. He unsnapped his holster and drew his gun, his eyes never leaving the vehicle in front of him.
Eyes to See Page 24
