He was considering what to do next, when something shifted in the corner of his vision. At least, he thought that was the case. By the time he’d turned to face it, it was gone.
But Reece had reacted as well. And so it hadn’t just been his imagination.
“What was that?” the man gasped.
Ritchie started walking over to investigate.
The wall to his right-hand side abruptly … rippled.
It had been perfectly smooth a moment before, indistinct in the strange lighting. But then, without any warning, it bulged. And the bulge moved, rushing upward like a bow-wave on a flat expanse of water.
The sergeant lurched away from it.
“What’s happening?” he could hear Reece yelling.
How the hell was he supposed to know? His hand went to the pistol underneath his coat, but Ritchie did not draw it.
Wait and see, he was telling himself. Figure out what you’re dealing with before responding.
He’d found that was the best way to approach phenomena like this.
When the wall moved again, it didn’t simply bulge. It seemed to part, right at the center. Something like a massive darkened worm came snaking through. It had no features he could see, not so much as the tiniest dots for eyes. But it stretched directly at him.
This time, Ritchie drew his Browning.
Maybe the creature sensed the danger it was in. It halted when he did that, then drew back and vanished. The hole slid shut. Vallencourt let out the violent breath that he’d been holding down.
“We’re getting out of here!” he barked.
And when Reece didn’t move, he grabbed him by the shoulder, hustling the man out and slamming the door shut again behind them.
“Get your coat, Mr. Reece,” he ordered. “Think about spending the night elsewhere. Because from this point on, your house is out of bounds.”
Jay Reece was stumbling, and practically in tears again.
“My wife? My boy? What’s going on?”
And Ritchie felt genuinely sorry for the guy. But until they could establish what was happening …
“We’ll do everything we can to get them back,” he said, in a quieter tone. “But that’s the best that I can promise for the moment.”
It was a lousy thing to tell anyone, and he knew that. But it was the honest truth.
Ritchie usually enjoyed his job. But not the whole time. And not the slightest bit on this particular night. Hell, that much was for sure.
Several patrol cars turned up in the next ten minutes. One of them was used to spirit Mr. Reece away. The poor guy was in such a state, a trip to the ER was required.
The rest of the uniformed officers were busy cordoning the house off, throwing wary glances at it as they did so.
It had begun to snow again.
Ritchie stood out on the frozen sidewalk by his old orange Camaro. He’d already woken his superior up and told him what was going down, and Saul Hobart was on his way here. But he knew that there was someone else he really ought to call.
The ring tone sounded six times before anyone picked up.
“Yeah?”
It was no more than a muffled grumble, really. But he recognized the voice.
“Remember how I told you you’re not needed?” Ritchie said into the mouthpiece. “Well, it looks like I was wrong. You’ve got your wish after all. So, Merry Christmas, Ross.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Another guy losing his family, in a similar fashion to the way I’d done? That was what we were looking at here. And it ground at me like sandpaper, lending an urgency to all my actions.
Me and Saul and Ritchie searched the house from top to bottom. We left out nothing, going into every nook and cranny. And we found precisely zip. There were no more purple lights. No walls moving. Nothing coming out of them. So whatever had been here was most likely gone.
My eyeballs felt raw and my head was throbbing. I’d had two hours sleep tonight, and it was worse than having none. Dawn’s light found me sitting on the Reece’s porch, watching the town come into sharp relief around me.
It looked so pristine under snow, you’d never guess that we’d had to rebuild whole sections of it twice in a single year. Once after the Shadow Man, and a second time after those goddamned ‘hominids’ had trashed the place. But the townsfolk of Raine’s Landing are nothing if not resilient. And – let’s face it – cut off from the rest of the world the way we are, there’s not much else to do.
The adepts had helped, to give them credit. You’d expect no less from the town’s most powerful magicians. Lehman Willets, Martha Howard-Brett, Kurt van Friesling, and even the McGinley sisters had visited each neighborhood and used their powers where they could. And as for the Central Library – the contents of which had been completely shredded – Judge Levin and Gaspar Vernon had found the catalogues, which were locked up in a drawer and had miraculously been spared. And gone to the lengths of conjuring up a new copy of every single destroyed book. They’d had to do that one book at a time, and it had taken them until the end of November.
But that was then, and this was now. Saul Hobart came out and sat down next to me, his bulk making the porch boards creak.
“So, where do we go from here?” he asked.
“We need to get some people with real power involved.”
And I threw a glance along the street. We were not very far from the Little Girl’s house. She was the strangest apparition in this whole bizarre community. A creature who looked like a normal little, blond-haired five or six-year old. Except she floated in the air, and she was mostly made up out of energy, as I had found out painfully a while ago.
She saw a lot of things even the adepts couldn’t, so she might turn out to be of help. But my gut told me otherwise. This looked far more like a case of tracing magic to its roots. And that meant Lehman Willets.
There was the familiar growl of a twin-cam motor from the main street to our left. Cassie’s bright red Harley came around the corner. She was dressed in leathers head-to-toe against the cold. But I wasn’t sure what she was doing here. I hadn’t gotten in touch with her and, so far as I knew, neither had anybody else.
I stood up and walked over as she clambered off her bike.
“Hey,” I asked, “what brings you here? How did you even find out about this?”
She looked more relaxed and happy than she ought to have been, and I thought I could detect a warm gleam in her large, dark eyes.
“You know me,” she smiled. “I have my sources.”
“And I also know you’re pregnant. Do you really think it’s wise, getting involved in anything of this nature?”
Cassie’s broad smile melted, and she threw me a faintly scornful look.
“Jesus, Ross, I’m expecting a child. It’s not like both my legs are broken.”
Then she stared over at the house in question, and her manner became far more somber.
“Vanished family, huh?”
“That’s right. Only the father left behind.”
Her kids had gone in a similar way. It was an injury that we both shared. Her gaze went slightly damper, and she made a curious, low-pitched noise.
“It sounds like we need someone who can tell if magic happened here. You getting Willets in on this?” she asked me.
“I was already thinking of doing that.”
Lehman Willets had been very useful to us in the past, but the man had issues, and he lived a hermit’s life. Sometimes, you could summon him up merely by thinking hard about him or calling his name. But that felt to me like taking him for granted. So I figured a personal visit would be more respectful.
He’d set up home in the basement of an abandoned factory, out on the edge of the commercial district. And I’d visited him there several times before. So I started fishing out my Caddy’s keys.
Then stopped doing that.
Because entirely out of nowhere, Saul Hobart was letting out some genuinely unexpected sounds.
He was still sitti
ng on the porch where I had left him, when I swiveled round. But the huge, bald detective lieutenant had now doubled over. Both his massive hands were folded round his brow, and he was rocking back and forth. His teeth were bared and tightly clenched. And peculiar, keening noises were being squeezed out from between them.
Alarm took hold of me. I’d known Saul my whole adult life, and never seen him act this way. He didn’t suffer from migraines, so far as I knew. And so, was this down to the injuries he’d taken when the Shadow Man had been around, or was it something else?
We went over to him quickly, but he shook us off.
“What’s going on, Saul?” I demanded
“See something,” he muttered back.
And that wasn’t a response that made an awful lot of sense. His eyes were shut, so what on earth did that mean?
“Trying to see it clearer,” was the next thing that he mumbled.
“Saul?”
He tucked his head down further, trying to evade me.
Ritchie Vallencourt came out. I knew how highly he regarded his commanding officer. And when he saw the man hunched over and apparently in pain, he hunkered down beside him, genuinely anxious.
Saul still wouldn’t open his eyes, but he managed to catch hold of the young sergeant’s wrist, gripping it so tightly that discomfort showed on Ritchie’s face.
“Are there any kids in your house?” Saul asked him abruptly.
Ritchie looked bewildered, which we all were at the moment.
“Are there any children in your house?” the lieutenant repeated.
And I knew that Ritchie and his wife had put off such things for a while, for the sake of his career. And so this wasn’t really making any sense.
Except it turned out I was wrong about that. Ritchie’s forehead crumpled up.
“Yeah, Heidi’s little cousins,” he responded. “They’re like baby sisters to her, and they always do an overnight this close to Christmas.”
Saul’s eyes sprang wide open when he heard those words.
“We’ve got to get there, right away!”
And this was as bewildering as anything I’d ever come across. But no one gave a damn about that.
There would be plenty of time for questions later. Right now, we were on the move, all headed in the same direction.
“It happened once before,” Saul explained to me, huffing breathlessly and mopping moisture from his face as we headed off to Clayton, the next district down from Marshall Drive.
We were both in my car, since the man was in no state to drive. Vallencourt and Cass had taken their own vehicles. Cass was going to get there first, because she always did, riding that monster of a Harley. Vallencourt would not be far behind her – I was pretty sure of that. And we were bringing up the rear.
And as it turned out, Saul had no idea what specifically was wrong at Ritchie’s house. He’d simply gotten an extremely nasty premonition.
My old Caddy’s engine roared. The whitened streets sped by us. And the sun was high enough for me to not be overly bothered by the prospect of black ice. The main ways through were pretty free of traffic, so I put the pedal to the metal with impunity.
“Back when I was in Raine General,” the lieutenant continued, “not long after I had woken out of that damned coma, I felt a pain in my head. And then, I could see it when the hominids took over Tyburn.”
“You mean it showed up in your mind?”
He nodded. “No one could have been more surprised than I was.”
I turned that over, being careful to keep my attention on the thoroughfare ahead. What he was describing … it was the way that characters like Willets saw stuff. The kind of second sight that you associated with a truly mighty adept. And Saul wasn’t that.
“You’re no magician.” I said, trying to untense my jaw. “So what’s that about?”
“I’ve been wondering ever since it happened,” he replied. “Looked at it from every angle. And the best that I can come up with is – Lehman Willets saved me, right? Put me back together when the surgeons couldn’t. And how long did he spend poking around inside me with those healing powers of his?”
I tried to think back, which was hard under the circumstances.
“At least twenty minutes. Maybe more.”
“That’s a good long time to be subjected to a magic spell,” Saul told me. “And maybe a little of it stuck, or simply got left behind.”
I could feel my head swim gently.
“He left some of his magic in you? Like a surgeon leaves a swab?”
“Like I said, I’ve examined it maybe a couple thousand times. And that’s the only explanation that makes any sense.”
We went around a corner, and I shot him a swift sideways glance.
“So you’re a psychic cop, these days?”
The man shrugged. “A little bit psychic, or so it would appear.”
“Still impressive,” I pointed out.
Hobart made a faint rumbling.
“Would you just shut up and watch the road?”
CHAPTER FIVE
Cassie drew up in front of the Vallencourt house a good couple of minutes before anybody else. She’d ridden across people’s lawns to get here, instead of bothering with stuff like intersections. And had headed down a couple of footpaths too.
She killed her engine and scanned her surroundings. The house looked normal, at a first glance. The drapes were mostly drawn, but there was nothing unusual about that, at this time of the morning. And in the windows that weren’t covered up, there were no lights.
There was an eight year-old Cherokee parked out front that had to be Heidi’s. The woman was already practicing to be a soccer mom, no doubt. But there was no commotion that she could detect. Not the slightest noise, in fact.
The homes to either side were silent too. One of them had recent tracks in the driveway where its owner had gone off early to work. But the other household was still dormant. Everything was as it ought to be.
Maybe Saul had brought them here on a wild goose chase. What had all that head-clutching business been, anyway? But she thought it best to check things out to her full satisfaction.
Cass dismounted, going carefully across the snow, her gaze still darting to the few uncovered windows. She was wearing both her Glocks, and normally would have drawn one. But she kept reminding herself there were small kids present. Shoot at a movement, and it might turn out to be a child. She had other weapons on her too – knives, and a straight razor. But she’d only pull them if she had to.
She snuck around the side extension, where the kitchen had to be. There was a big sash window with a blind pulled down behind it it, the pane slightly open. Still no noises from inside. So Cassie paused, then pushed it up and wriggled in.
As soon as she was through, she could see that a light had been switched on, further back.
It was purple.
Sonofabitch, what was making it that color? She couldn’t figure this thing out, but felt pretty sure she didn’t like it.
She was in a kitchen-diner. Cass had never been in Vallencourt’s place before, and didn’t know the layout. Her right hand went to one of her pistols, but she still refused to draw it. She just listened very carefully.
There was only silence, at first. But then she thought she heard a very distant voice.
But it did not sound in the tiniest bit human. Was dead flat, and had the weirdest kind of echo to it. Certainly not Heidi or the kids. It was coming from deeper within the house, and sounded as if it was murmuring something along the lines of “Mollendop.”
There was no such word, in any language she had ever heard of. What with that and the purple lighting, this was one hell of a way to start things off. Cassie hated being faced with stuff she didn’t understand. She finally drew a Glock, holding it up by her shoulder. And moved as quietly as she could toward the kitchen door.
But the floor was some kind of vinyl tile. And, in spite of her best efforts, her boots made little clicking noises as they w
ent across it.
Something seemed to notice that.
“Toogootoh!” the same voice muttered urgently, a little louder than before.
She was still wondering what kind of gibberish that was, when the wall ahead of her … shifted.
Directly above the door, a snake-shaped bulge appeared under the wallpaper. It writhed for an instant, going nowhere. But then vanished before she could bring her gun to bear.
Her pulse was banging wildly and her breath was hissing. What had that been?
But to hell with this. Where was the point in staying quiet when she’d already been discovered?
“Heidi?” she yelled. “Kids?”
And when she got no answer, Cassie grit her teeth and burst into the hallway. There was no one there. She checked the living room, then went round to the back. This was a single-story residence.
She turned a sharp, right-angled corner in the hallway, swinging her Glock out in front of her, but keeping her aim above a kid’s head height. She was still surrounded by mauve light. And it had gotten deeper back here, the bulbs glowing a rich, dense purple. It made everything look one dimensional, and she could barely see straight.
Cassie stopped and wobbled slightly. Then she took a deep lungful of air and got her balance back.
The room up ahead of her looked like it might be the main bedchamber. Its door was partway open. There was a large, rectangular mirror on the wall back there. And at first, she thought that she was only looking at her own reflection, curiously distorted.
Then she saw the shapes in it were moving in a way that she was not.
Cass peered harder, trying to figure out what she was staring at.
Someone with their back to her. No, three people, one of them tall and fair-haired and the other two considerably smaller. A statuesque blond woman with two little girls, still in their nightclothes. The woman had a child by each hand, and was stepping languidly away from Cass.
This had to be Heidi and her two visiting cousins. But it was no reflection of them Cass was looking at.
They were inside the mirror.
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