Findo Gask had learned all this from the real estate lady at ERA with whom he had inspected his present home two days earlier. It was an old Victorian, four bedrooms, three baths, living room, dining room, study, powder room, basement recreation room, two screened porches, a swimming pool that had been converted to a pathetic Japanese rock garden, and a spacious lawn that ran down to a tall line of spruce trees that effectively screened away the sights, if not the smells and sounds, of MidCon and was the best feature of the property. The house was painted lavender and blueberry, and there were flower boxes set at all the windows on the lower floor.
The real estate lady had insisted it was a real bargain.
He smiled now, thinking of her. She had been quite anxious to sell him the place, poor woman. What she didn't realize was that he wasn't even considering renting, let alone buying. It took him a few, ugly moments to convince her of this. When he was done, she was so frightened she could barely manage to draw up the necessary papers, but at least she had given up on the sales pitch. By the time she recovered her wits enough to realize what she had done, he would be long gone.
Findo Gask left Penny to her own devices and walked up the drive to the front of the house. Leather-bound book held in both hands, he stood surveying the old building, wondering at its endurance. It was sagging and splintering and cracking at every corner and seam. He thought that if he took a deep breath and exhaled sharply enough, it would simply collapse.
He shook his head. It was just another crumbling, pathetic edifice in a crumbling, pathetic world.
He walked up the steps and through the front door. The hallway was dark and cool, and the house silent. It was always like that when Penny was out. The other two never made any noise. He wouldn't have known Twitch was even there if he hadn't listened closely for the television, which Twitch watched incessantly when he wasn't hanging around bars, looking for someone to traumatize.
Findo Gask frowned. At least with Twitch, there was the television to home in on when you wanted to know if he was around. With the other…
Where could it be, anyway?
He glanced into the living and dining rooms out of habit, then started upstairs. He climbed slowly and deliberately, letting each step take his full weight, making certain the creaking of the old boards preceded him. Best not to appear too unexpectedly. Some demons didn't like that, and this one was among them. You could never be certain of its reaction if you caught it by surprise.
Findo Gask searched through all the bedrooms, bathrooms, closets, nooks, and crannies. It would be up here rather than in the basement with Twitch, because it didn't like Twitch and it didn't like lights or television. Mostly, it liked being alone in silent, dark places where it could disappear entirely.
Cask looked around, perplexed. Come out, come out, wherever you are.
Findo Gask didn't like Twitch either. Or lights or television or Penny or anything about this house and the time he spent in it. He endured all of it solely because he was intrigued by the prospect of adding John Ross to his book.
And perhaps, he thought suddenly, of adding Nest Free-mark as well. He nodded to himself. Yes, perhaps.
A small noise caught his attention—a scrape, no more. Gask peered up at the ceiling. The attic, of course. He walked down the hall to the concealed stairway, opened the door, and began to climb. The ceiling light was out, so the only illumination came from sunlight that seeped through a pair of dirt-encrusted dormer windows set at either end of the chamber. Gask reached the top of the stairs and stopped. Everything was wrapped in shadows, inky and forbidding, layer upon layer. The air smelled of dust and old wood, and he could hear the sound of his own breathing in the silence.
"Are you up here?" he asked quietly.
The ur'droch brushed against him before he even realized it was close enough to do so, and then it was gone again, melting back into the shadows. Its touch made him shudder in spite of himself. He wished it would talk once in a while, but it never said a word or uttered a sound. It rarely even showed itself, and that was all to the good as far as Gask was concerned. There weren't many demons like the ur'droch, and the few he knew about were universally shunned. They didn't take the forms of humans like most demons; they didn't take any form at all. Something in their makeup made them feel more comfortable in a substanceless form, a part of the shadows they hid within.
Not that this made them any less capable of killing.
"We're going out tonight," he advised, his eyes flicking left and right in a futile effort to find the other. "I want you along."
No response. Nothing moved. Findo Gask was tempted to have the whole house lighted from top to bottom just to expose this weasel to a clinical examination, but the effort would be pointless. The ur'droch was useful precisely because of what it was, and putting up with its shadowy presence was part of the price paid for its services.
Gask turned and walked back down the stairs and shut the door behind him. His mouth tightened as he stood in the upstairs hallway and ran his fingers over the cover of his book. Penny, Twitch, and the ur'droch. They were a strange and unpredictable bunch, but they were also what was needed.
He had learned that lesson in Salt Lake City.
* * *
The biggest of the five men he had hired bent close to the hotel room door, listening. The dimly lighted hallway was empty and silent at one o'clock in the morning. Findo Gask could hear the sound of his own breathing.
The man with his ear to the door straightened, shaking his head at the other two and Gask. No snores, no heavy breathing, no television, nothing.
Gask motioned impatiently. Go in. Get it over with.
The big man glanced at the two who flanked him, then down the hallway to where the other two were positioned, one each in front of the elevator and the stairway doors. Then he took out the Glock with the screwed-on silencer, stepped back a pace, and carefully inserted the key in the door.
Findo Cask's search for John Ross had begun three weeks earlier with a summoning. He was in Chicago at the time, working the projects on the south side, stirring up dissension and playing on frustrations, an invisible presence in an intellectual and cultural wasteland where hope was a mirage and reality a hammer. The riots of summer had been his work, as had the tenement fires of fall. Winter brought freezing cold and no heat, good building blocks for the instigation of further carnage.
The summoning came to him in the middle of the night as a child's wailing. It was inaudible to human ears, but perfectly clear to his. He knew at once what it was. He had been summoned before, and he recognized the feelings the call invoked. Hunger, blood-lust, fury, and a deep and pervasive emptiness. It was as if the Void were hollowing him out, dredging his insides, his heart and mind and soul, with a tiny metal scoop. The pain was excruciating, and he went quickly from his room in search of relief.
He found it in the basement of the abandoned project in which he had constructed his spider's web of hate, a place where gangs carried out acts so unspeakable there were no names for them. The wail had its source in a dark corner where rats prowled and the detritus of expended human lives was discarded as casually as yesterday's newspapers. There were no windows in the concrete-block walls, but gaps in the ceiling served the purpose. Streetlamps lent just enough illumination to the chamber for Findo Cask to pick his way to where the summoning originated.
The wail died to a rustle as he appeared, a voice speaking to him not from the shadows but from inside his head. The Void's presence was unmistakable, cold, empty, and lifeless, a whisper of the passing of all things and the beginning of none.
Listen carefully, the rustle cautioned. A gypsy morph has been captured by a Knight of the Word at a place called Cannon Beach, Oregon. The Knight's name is John Ross. He is a seasoned, dangerous veteran of our wars. He seeks to unlock the morph's magic. He must be found and destroyed. Findo Cask. Findo Gask.
The words echoed and died into silence. The dark of the basement shifted and tightened about him as he w
aited for the rest.
Bring me the morph . Findo Gask. Findo Gask.
Something like an electric shock jolted him, lifting him clear of the floor, filling his vision with red fire, then retreating in a light as clear as glass. Within the light was a vision of John Ross and the gypsy morph on a day as hard and gray as slate. They emerged onto a beach from a cavern cut into the side of an embankment of stone and brush, the morph caught in a strange netting, all bright lights and speed, the Knight of the Word already beginning to check for the enemies he knew would be coming for him.
The vision faded, and Findo Gask found himself slumped on his knees on the cold concrete basement floor, rats skittering away in the dark, shadows again gone still, silence everywhere.
Not many demons were summoned, Findo Gask knew. Only the oldest and most experienced, the ones the Void depended on most. A gypsy morph was rare and dangerous. Formed of loose, wild magics come together in the ether, a morph had the potential of becoming a weapon of incredible power. How a Knight of the Word had managed to capture one was unimaginable. It must have taken an incredible stroke of luck. Whatever the case, the Knight's luck was about to change.
Findo Gask left the basement and the projects and Chicago that night. One or two other demons would be dispatched by the Void as well. But Findo Gask knew he was the one who would have the best chance of succeeding.
In the beginning, tracking John Ross was not difficult. Every time the gypsy morph underwent a new transformation, which was sometimes hourly, it emitted a pulse of expended magic. Like a beacon, the pulses could be homed in on, leading a hunter to his target. But human behavior was complex, and John Ross would know he was being hunted and that the gypsy morph was giving them away. He would be evasive. He would not stand around waiting to be caught.
Findo Gask tracked John Ross for eighteen days before he found him. He read the pulse of the gypsy morph at each change and relied on his instincts to tell him what Ross would do. He found the Knight of the Word in Salt Lake City ten days before Christmas in a seedy hotel at the north edge of the downtown area. With five very tough, well-paid thugs in tow, he entered the empty lobby of the hotel on the night shift, walked up to the clerk, produced his fake U.S. marshal's identification, and asked for the key to Ross's room. The clerk, young and stupid and scared, handed it over without a word.
"There's not gonna be no trouble, is there?" he asked.
Gask smiled reassuringly. "Tell me what Mr. Ross brought with him to his room," he ordered.
The clerk stared at him dumbly, trying to figure out what was being asked of him. "I dunno. A duffel bag and a knapsack's all. Came in off a bus." He paused, thinking. "Oh, yeah, he's got a ferret, too. Must be some sort of pet."
Gask took the men up to the third floor where Ross was staying. One man would position himself at the elevator, one by the stairs, and the other three would go in after Ross. They had been told Ross was a dangerous man, a traitor and a spy. They were not to try to subdue him; they were to kill him. He would be armed, and he would kill them if they did not kill him first. They had been issued Clocks with silencers and sworn in as deputy U.S. marshals. They would face no adverse consequences for their actions. All were under the protection of the United States government. Everything they did was fully sanctioned.
A demon could persuade violent men of anything, and Findo Gask had no trouble with these. Kill John Ross, he emphasized, but under no circumstances harm the ferret. Leave the ferret to him.
Standing at the far end of the hall in the shadows, Findo Gask watched it all. The room key went into the lock smoothly, the door cracked open, the big man kicked out the chain, and the three primary assailants burst through the opening, their weapons firing—phfft, phfft, phfft. One heartbeat later, there was a brilliant flash of light, as if a thousand cameras had all gone off at once. The wall separating the room from the hallway shattered as the broken bodies of two of the assailants hurtled through it. The third assailant, he discovered later, was thrown through the window to the street.
Then John Ross came through the door in a crouch, his staff ablaze with magic, his knapsack slung over his shoulder, his duffel abandoned. For just an instant he looked in Findo Cask's direction, but the demon remained in the shadows, holding himself perfectly still.
The man by the elevator began firing his weapon. Ross knocked him twenty feet through the air with a single surge of power from the staff, and when his head struck the metal-bound edge of the wall where it angled around the main heating vent, Gask heard the vertebrae crack. By now, the last man was firing as well, but Ross knocked him down with a sweep of his staff and was past him so quickly he might as well have been armed with a flyswatter.
In less than two minutes, the Knight of the Word had disposed of all five assailants and disappeared through the fire door. Four of the five were dead, and Findo Gask finished off the last on his way out, pausing as he passed through the lobby to silence the night clerk as well.
It was a messy business, and it netted him nothing. What he learned, however, was that if he was to have any chance at all with John Ross, he would need help of a special sort.
Help of a kind only other demons could supply.
* * *
But three days earlier, while he was continuing his search for Ross, something unexpected happened.
That the morph continued to change shape on a regular basis not only provided a way to trace it, but showed that it hadn't settled on a form or been revealed. John Ross had not found the key to unlock its magic. His time was running out. A morph, on average, survived for only thirty days before it began to break up. If Ross was to solve its riddle, he must do so quickly. The odds against his succeeding were enormous. Only on a handful of occasions in the course of history had the servants of either the Word or the Void found a way to unlock the magic.
But then, sometime in the middle of the night three days ago, the gypsy morph had found the shape it wanted. It had not changed since, not once, not even for the briefest moment. Findo Gask had searched the power lines that embraced the earth carefully for any disturbance, and there had been none.
Even more unexpected than the morph's settling into a permanent shape was that it had spoken. A morph lacked a voice. It was energy, pure and simple. But somehow it had communicated, one word only, spoken three times. Undoubtedly, the word had been meant for the ears of John Ross alone, yet it was delivered with such intensity of purpose and need that it snagged on the lines of power that conveyed all the magics of the world and filtered through the ether in a whisper that Findo Gask overheard.
The word was Nest.
Findo Gask walked down the hallway of the old Victorian toward the stairs, musing over his good fortune. No other demon had heard, he was certain; no other had his talent and instincts. The find was his alone, and he would be the one to make use of it. John Ross would come to Hopewell because he would draw the same conclusion as Findo Gask. He would come in the hope that Nest Freemark could provide the clue that would unlock the secret of the gypsy morph's magic. He would come to seek help from someone he trusted and respected. He would come because he had nowhere else to go.
When he did, Findo Gask would be waiting.
Chapter 6
I've come home.
The words didn't register for a moment, Nest struggling with the idea that it was really Bennett Scott standing in front of her, no longer a little girl, but someone so far removed from the child she remembered she could barely bring herself to accept that such a transition was possible.
"Home?" she echoed in confusion.
Bennett looked embarrassed. "Yeah, well, I know it's been a long time since I lived here. I should have written or called or something. But you know me. I was never much good at keeping in touch."
Nest stared at her, still trying to make sense of the fact that she was here at all. "It's been almost ten years," she said finally.
Bennett's smile faltered slightly. "I know. I'm sorry." She brushed at her lank
hair. "I was hoping it would be all right if I just showed up."
Her words had taken on a defensive tone, and there was an unmistakable hint of desperation in her voice. She looked used and worn, and she did not look well. Nest suddenly felt the cold and grayness of the day more acutely. The sun had slipped all the way west, and darkness hung in the bare-limbed trees like a shroud.
"Of course, it's all right," she told Bennett softly.
The smile returned. "I knew it would be. You were always my big sister, Nest. Even when I was back with Big Momma and the other kids, moved to that southern Indiana redneck farming town…"
Her voice tightened, and she shivered with more than the cold.
"Mommy?" the little girl at her side said, tugging on her sleeve.
Bennett reached down and touched her round cheek. "Hey, pumpkin, it's okay. This is your Aunt Nest. Nest, this is my baby girl, Harper."
Nest came forward and dropped to one knee in front of the little girl. "Hello, Harper."
"Say hello to Aunt Nest, baby," Bennett encouraged.
The little girl lifted her eyes doubtfully. "Lo, Neth."
Bennett picked her up and hugged her close. "She's kind of shy at first, but once she gets to know you, she's real friendly. Talks all the time. She can say a lot of words, can't you, baby?"
Harper dug her face into her mother's shoulder, entwining her tiny fists in Bennett's dark hair. "Appo juss."
Nest straightened. "I might have some apple juice in the fridge. Come on inside."
Bennett picked up a small satchel sitting to one side and, still carrying Harper, followed Nest through the back porch door and into the house. Nest took them into the kitchen and sat them down at the table. She accepted a baby cup from Bennett and filled it with apple juice. The baby began to suck the liquid down with steady, hungry gulps.
Nest busied herself with emptying the dishwasher while Bennett bounced Harper gently on one knee. Every so often Nest would glance over, still trying to convince herself that it was really Bennett Scott. Piercings and tattoos aside, the young woman sitting at her kitchen table didn't look anything like the girl she remembered. All of the softness and round-ness was gone; everything was sharp and angular. Bennett had been full of life and bright-eyed; she had been a repository of fresh possibilities. Now she looked hollowed out, as if her life had been reduced to harsh truths that boxed her in.
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