“You’d have to ask my new team member how he caught it,” I said, rising from the table. “But I think he just grabbed it with his hands and hung on.”
“That person ain’t right in the head,” Lou said, shaking his.
I decided there was no time like the present to face the music and walked across the compound to R&D. For once, Elvis was not crooning from the speakers. I opened the door and stepped into the lobby, where Buschgrossmutter was tending a few small pine trees in half barrels.
She looked around to make sure we were alone before making a ‘come with me’ gesture. I followed her into a hidden nook behind another pair of trees. She made a few cabalistic gestures before speaking.
“So,” she said in her heavily-accented English, “have you finally come to speak about what I must tell you?”
“No, I came to speak to Sola about Lou,” I replied, squatting on my haunches.
She turned and stirred a pot that was bubbling over a small fire. I figured there was magic involved, because the fire wasn’t setting off any of the various hard-wired detectors in the building.
“Speak to me you must,” she said.
Dear god Almighty, I was not going to play Luke to her Yoda.
“Tell me,” I said.
“You have angered a great power,” she said, tasting the vile-colored goop on her spoon.
“I know that,” I replied, watching her dump spices into the pot. There was a smell of cardamom and cilantro.
“They seek your soul,” she continued.
“Sold that to the Corps a long time ago,” I replied. Smartass, one each, front and center.
“If you are not careful, not even your God will be able to protect you from what comes,” she replied. I could hear the exasperation in her voice. “Speak to the one who mills about the lance.”
That was about half-cryptic.
“The one who mills? As in the one who wanders in a confused manner? One who builds engines? I need more than vague prophecies to figure out what you mean,” I replied.
She shrieked and slapped me with the spoon in her hand. I had a moment of instant clarity. She was boiling socks, apparently.
“Speak. With. Miller. About. The. Lance!” she said. “Now, go talk to that other idiot.”
I scuttled out of her nook and scrambled into the building, looking for Sola Stellus. I found the elf in his office, of all places, a dejected look on his face.
“So, you’ve come to see me,” Sola said. “Are you here to apologize for your latest ‘gift’?”
“If I must,” I replied, looking for something to wipe the goo off my face.
“What is that stench?” he asked, sniffing the air.
“Buschgrossmutter is making a soup of socks and cilantro, with cardamom,” I replied, grabbing a box of tissues from the desk.
“Cilantro. That explains it,” he said, sighing. “Between the noises that chupacabra makes and the smell of cilantro from Buschgrossmutter, I am in agony.”
I scrubbed the slime from my face and dropped the tissues in the burn chute.
“So I guess now is not a good time to discuss Lou Garrett with you?” I asked.
“Garrett is the least of my problems,” the elf said, sighing again. “Simply put, I cannot remove the implant without help. I have sent to Europe to see if they can spare a master of the great magics to come and examine him, but I have not gotten a response, yet.”
That didn’t sound good for Lou.
“Why haven’t you told Lou this?” I asked.
“It had slipped my mind, amidst the myriad other distractions you have supplied me with,” Sola replied, shrugging. “I will send for him and explain it, if I can.”
“If you can?” I asked.
“Yes. Does he speak Elvish?” Sola asked. “Some of the concepts involved can only be expressed in Elvish.”
“How about just telling him you lack the skill or the power or the testicular fortitude to do what has to be done and had to call in the ‘Ancient Masters’ or whatever to come to this side of the Pond and fix it?” I asked. “He doesn’t need to know what level magics are involved. He needs to know you’re working on it.”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” Sola said, sitting straighter in his chair. “I was so involved with my misery over needing to ask for help that I hadn’t thought of a good way to explain it to Mr. Garrett. I shall find him at once and tell him what’s happening.”
“I saw him in the cafeteria,” I said, rising, thinking about what Buschgrossmutter had told me. “I’ve got to go make a phone call.”
“Yes, don’t let me keep you,” Sola answered, waving a hand to change from the robes he was wearing into…the high collar sequined jumpsuit again.
I bolted from his office and R&D before late ‘70s Elvis could start pounding from the speakers.
I swear the old elf was laughing at my back as I fled.
I called Father Miller as soon as I cleared the front of R&D, and left him a message—knowing Robert, he was armpit deep in musty tomes somewhere and had no signal. I wasn’t dumb enough to mention ‘the Lance,’ whatever the hell that was, however. Who knew who was listening in on his phone, or mine, for that matter?
Diindiisi found me as I entered the main building.
“Where have you been? And why do you smell of old socks and,” she sniffed, “cardamom?”
“I went to see Sola about Lou Garrett,” I replied. “Buschgrossmutter wanted to talk, and she hit me with the spoon she was using to make her lunch, I guess.”
“That might explain the smell,” Diindiisi admitted. “Goodhart sent a message. They got some information from that werewolf we captured the other day.”
Sure enough, my phone bongled, and there was a message from Goodhart. Fucking AT&T.
“I guess we should go talk to him then,” I said.
“Well, you should read the message,” Diindiisi said with a grin.
I did.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” I said. “A Goddamned dog and pony show? Fuck me; I hope the presenter doesn’t read the slides.”
Two hours later, I was sitting next to Diindiisi in the briefing room—a fancy name for a theater—with the other team leads and their seconds. There were also representatives from the logistics side of the house, R&D (Sola and Cathe, naturally). Michelangelo was sitting front and center with Fred and a contingent of dwarves. Rounding things out were five large screens—the center one was blank, while the other four showed Julian of the Council; Henry Kent, one of the Dallas team leads; William Thomas of Piccadilly; and what I assumed was Herself of the Chisos Mine.
Goodhart walked in and immediately started rearranging people.
“Jesse, you and Diindiisi need to move down front. Stewart, you and Williamson move to the back. Ted? Same thing. Jed, seal the room please,” Goodhart said in one rapid breath.
I felt the hair on the back of my neck rise as Padre started applying wards to the room. Once she was done, she and Jed took seats toward the back. Green lights came on above the other screens, indicating the locations there were secure as well.
“I know no one was looking forward to a dog and pony show today,” Goodhart said, laughing. “Unfortunately we’ve come across information that indicates there’s a major push by dark forces to bring back one of the princes of Hell.”
There was a knock at the door.
“Padre?” Goodhart asked.
“Got it,” she replied, gesturing before opening the door.
Miller and an entourage of priests came in. Miller was in Vatican-approved mufti—black slacks, black shirt with priestly collar, grey vest, and black jacket. His entourage was in cassocks and burdened with paperwork.
These things did not bode well for the ‘briefing.’
“Sorry I’m late, I had to grab some documentation from the Diocese here,” Miller said. “Jesse, we need to talk.”
“Later,” I said.
“Right,” he replied as Padre re-warded the r
oom.
Once she was done, Goodhart took over again.
“As you know, we’ve had a series of incidents, beginning in April, involving both Abzu and the diabolic Prince Oeillet,” Goodhart said. “We now have evidence linking all of the incidents and Mother Shipton’s ‘Ye Greate Spelle.’”
One of the priests who’d entered with Father Miller began passing out thick briefing packets.
“I’m going to turn things over to Father Miller of the Knights of St. Quintus,” Goodhart said, sitting down.
Miller took front and center.
“My lords, ladies and other beings,” Miller started formally. “I ask your indulgence for a moment so I can establish the history of what is occurring.”
Nods all around.
“Sometime before Year 30 of the Common Era,” Miller said, “Christ cast a group of ‘daemons’ into a herd of swine.”
“The story is well known,” Ted said.
“Yes, well, it turns out they weren’t daemons,” Miller replied. “Well, not all of them, anyway. In addition, Christ, though this goes against the doctrine of the infallibility of God, missed one.”
“Oeillet,” I said, hand resting on the briefing packet.
“Yes, Oeillet,” Miller replied. “Oeillet, for reasons only known to God, was allowed to stay in mortal form for approximately eleven hundred years.”
“And then was turned into charcoal briquettes,” Jed said.
“Something like that, yes,” Henry Keith replied. “The incident Father Miller and Jessie are referring to occurred during The Third Crusade. We didn’t know the name of the devil that was captured when the ritual to cast him from his earthly form was begun.”
“Ah, yes,” Miller said.
“That lack of knowledge lead to the ultimate failure of the exorcism,” Henry continued, glancing at Miller through the magic of the internet. “Please, Father, it’s not as if the Church hasn’t known of my, call it condition, since Abbot Peter of London founded the Order of Saint Quintus in 1194.”
“Yes, well, I’ve never seen it stated so…” Miller began.
“Blatantly?” I interrupted.
“If it helps, I believe I still have a copy of the Papal Bull stating that I am not a minion of Satan,” Henry said with a smile. “It’s on my estate in Kent, along with the notes I took at the time about drowning. Do you know the worst part about drowning when you are immortal, Father?”
“Not really, no,” Miller said
“As I remember, drowning isn’t hard. It’s clearing your lungs of water afterward that’s the pain,” Henry said. “Then I died a second time of pneumonia. Fortunately, my people saw it as a miracle of God, with Abbot Peter’s help, when I returned from the dead.”
“Yes, well, we’re a bit far afield,” Miller replied, changing the slide.
The new slide was a photo of a couple in bathrobes—balding male in blue, woman in pink—holding a toaster oven with a lump of something in it. The lump looked like an overcooked beef roast.
“Prior to this year, the last piece of Oeillet was discovered in 1981,” Miller said, shaking his head. “The couple who found it did not survive discovery.”
“Is that a convection oven?” Goodhart asked.
“Yeeessss,” Miller said. “Apparently the couple in question had bought a number of items from an estate sale, including that convection oven. The previous owner was…”
“Eccentric is the Anglicism you’re searching for,” Henry supplied.
“I’d say bark at the moon mad if he kept a hunk of a devil in a convection oven,” Herself said, speaking up for the first time.
“Well, that would work also, Engineer Nesmith,” Henry said, bowing his head toward her image, before turning back to Miller. “If I remember the case at the time, there were issues involving reported time travel as well.”
“Yes,” Miller replied. “At the time, the Church and the church felt that the important part was the piece of Oeillet and destroying it. The Church, in cooperation with our Anglican brethren, recovered and destroyed the artifact. We were then able to backtrack the oven to the original owner—a second son of a second son who had inherited the familial manse, then died without heir, leaving the house to the Historic Trust. His will stipulated that the ‘modern’ appliances be sold to establish a fund to cover the upkeep of the home.”
“And he was a collector of the esoteric?” I asked.
“No, not quite,” Miller said, temporizing. “His father and brother were full initiates into the Cult of Oeillet. Kensington Woods-Smythe was, quite honestly, religiously bland and just an upper middle-class twit who didn’t know what he had, as far as we can tell from the records.”
“So, forty or so years ago, you found a lump of devil,” Herself rumbled. “Which has exactly what to do with what we face today?”
“We now believe,” Miller said, changing slides again, “that incident was the beginning of Oeillet’s followers attempting to discover a working version of Mother Shipton’s spell.”
The slide was a world map, with incidents marked in various colors—red for confirmed, blue for believed, and black for temporal anomalies. There was more black on the map than I’d have thought possible.
I groaned.
“I can show you the data if you’d like,” Miller replied to my groan.
“No, that’s fine,” I said. “I just wasn’t aware that there were that many incidents where people time shifted due to that damned spell.”
“Yes, well, most of the incidents shown require a bit of interpretation,” Miller replied.
“I see you have the ‘damned cow’ incident listed as a time shift,” Thomas said. “The only thing about that cow that was time shifted was the daemon that inhabited its body.”
“Yes, the transformation of a modern cow into a daemon-haunted bos primogen is considered part of the pattern,” one of Miller’s priests snapped.
“How are you so damn sure?” Thomas asked, an edge coming to his voice.
“The Church used a relic,” Miller began.
“The Holy Middle Finger of Saint Mitrophan,” I said, grinning broadly.
“Yes, the Relic of Saint Mitrophan,” Miller replied, ignoring the rest, “and it shows that the spell used to summon the daemon that inhabited the cow there in Piccadilly was Mother Shipton’s spell. Were you able to interrogate any of the summoners?”
“Hell no,” Thomas replied with a laugh. “Kinda hard to interrogate someone whose head has been stomped into a bloody mud hole, or whose internals are now external and spread across thirty odd feet of Central Texas scrub brush.”
“True,” Father Miller replied. “We also noticed a pattern to the incidents, especially in Texas.”
“Fuck me with a chain saw, running,” Jed said when Miller flipped to the new slide.
The new slide showed the Texas incidents, along with the major ley line conjunctions. It formed a major summoning circle centered on San Marcos, Texas.
“Well, that explains a lot, doesn’t it?” I said in a chirpy voice.
“You could say that,” Diindiisi agreed. “Want to bet it’s specifically centered on Bever’s Cave?”
“Sucker bet, wife,” I replied.
“Yes,” Miller said. “It’s centered on that cave. We don’t know why.”
Goodhart and Fred both coughed, then laughed. Fred stood and walked to the lectern.
“There’s another cavern below the room referred to as the Crystal Palace,” Fred said, handing Miller some documents. “That room ties to the wishing well through a series of lateral passages.”
“Have you, sorry, has anyone investigated those passages?” Miller asked, interest showing clearly on his face.
“No, and no dwarf will until we work out what lives there,” Herself barked.
“Why not?” Miller asked.
“Because the initial survey team, hired by QMG when they purchased the property,” Herself replied, holding up a hand to forestall Miller’s next question, “f
ound well-carved lateral passages from the ‘Deepest Wishing Well in Texas’ to the chamber under the Crystal Palace. When that happened, we sent in a team of mining accountants. They found signs of…Erebus.”
“Erebus?” Jed asked.
“Erebus was a son of primordial chaos,” Diindiisi said simply.
“When did we piss off entropy?” Jed asked. “Damn. It’s almost enough to make a guy consider reenlisting in the fucking Corps for a nice, safe job running convoys in Afghanistan. Hell, I’m thinking about going to church for the first time in years.”
“Yeah, remember what happened last time you said that,” I said.
“Wasn’t my fault Hajji managed to drop a rocket in the chapel,” Jed mumbled in reply.
“No, but as your spiritual advisor,” Padre said, “I’d say it was a sign from God.”
“So,” I said. “Not to change the subject…”
“But to get back on topic,” Miller replied. “We have an unknown agent of Chaos operating in San Marcos. What are the odds it’s not related to Abzu?”
“And we know what you did to piss him off,” Jed said with a grin.
“Yeah, well, killing his wife was preferable to the other option,” I replied.
“You could have done it for science,” Jed said.
“I am not being slowly digested by an agent of Chaos for anyone,” I countered. “Science or no.”
“Good point,” Jed replied.
Miller threw up his hands. He’d lost control of his Canine/Equine Extravaganza and he knew it. Even Herself was grinning, which was frightening in and of itself.
“None of this is getting us to the point,” Julian said, taking control of the meeting.
“True,” Miller replied, changing slides again. This time it showed a rash of incidents across the US. “These are werewolf incidents reported to the Catholic Church over the period 1981 to 2015.”
“That’s about a third of the overall incidents we’ve dealt with,” Julian said, pulling out paperwork of his own.
“Yes. However, these incidents all involve werewolves or other therianthropes of ‘unusual strength or speed,’” Miller said.
“Unusual strength or speed is one of those phrases which could mean bupkis,” Jed scoffed. “How many people survive their first encounter with a therianthrope as a point of comparison?”
Blood Moon Eclipse (The Shadow Lands Book 2) Page 20
