by Peter Nealen
There was a knock on the door. “Come in,” I called. Frank eased his head in.
“Sorry, am I interrupting?” he asked.
“No, come on, have a seat,” Eryn said.
Frank eased himself down onto the chair that sat against the log wall. It creaked faintly under his weight, but Ray had built it, so it would hold.
Frank Tall Bear looked down at his big, brown hands for a moment before looking up at me. “You still think that the mysterious sorcerer that Turner was talking about was behind this?” he asked.
I hesitated. “It kind of fits,” I said, after a moment. “After all, one of his disciples tried to summon Abbadon the Destroyer a couple of years ago, and he tried to bind the Walker on the Hills. He’s consistently tried poking some of the worst supernatural nasties that are crawling around the shadows of the world. The only other alternative, that I can see, is that there’s somebody else trying to play the same game. Somebody else who’s been careful enough not to get eaten, yet.”
Frank studied the floor again for a moment. “I don’t even want to think about there being more than one of that psycho,” he said, “but I suppose that it’s entirely possible, isn’t it?”
“Possible, yes,” I replied. “Probable?” I shrugged. “I don’t know. It would take a long time for someone to gather the kind of forbidden knowledge that they would need. Either it’s the same guy, or the Order hasn’t been as good at keeping the sorcerers at bay as we thought.”
“But how could he have coopted a vampire?” Eryn asked. “He didn’t do a very good job of getting the Walker on his side.”
“Again, I don’t know,” I answered.
“I do,” Magnus said gravely. He was standing in the door. None of us had heard him approach, which shouldn’t have been surprising.
He didn’t move, but stood there, his golden eyes gleaming, an otherworldly apparition in and of himself. “I touched the vampire’s mind, when we fought,” he said, his voice distant. “It was very old, and filled with a purposeless malice. It was ancient and cunning, but its mind was truly little more than that of a beast, dominated by its appetites. And its appetites had all been twisted toward destruction, corruption, and death. It was a mirror of its patron. It desired only to see the earth defiled and man corrupted and destroyed.”
He looked at me then. His eyes were unnerving under the best conditions. Haunted as they were now, they were downright eerie. “The sorcerer would not have needed to offer it anything. All he need do was tell it where to find the Thing Under the Mountain. Its own desires would lead it to the rest.”
It made sense. That didn’t make it any more comforting.
“We have to find him and shut him down,” Frank said.
“Yes, we do,” I answered. “But who is he?”
None of us had an answer. But as we sat there in silence, I sensed another presence in the room. I couldn’t see anything when I glanced around, but after a moment, I recognized it, anyway. Sam was still there.
It was heartening, even after everything we had endured, all the horror we had passed through. We weren’t alone. And the war was far from over.
