Then he heard a frantic scream. He pivoted around, to see a horned, black silhouette come pounding out onto the sidewalk. Saul immediately drew his gun, and was about to fire when Willets rushed across and stopped him.
“Hold it! Wait a minute!”
The figure halted on the spot, inspecting its hands puzzledly. And then its outline wavered. Color started rushing in. Within a few more seconds, a broad-shouldered man was standing there, gawking at the scene around him with open astonishment.
“John?” blurted another woman’s voice.
Its owner burst out into view, a baby in her arms. She came rushing over, and the man embraced her.
Hobart finally found the strength to smile, although it was an effort. There were no remaining traces of the yellow glow, and the demons he’d been looking at had all transformed back into human beings.
But then he noticed that the radio in his car was squawking once again, and so he went across. Only to hear that the same was happening in every one of the affected buildings.
He clamped a hand to the side of his head, like he was trying to stop his brain from leaping out. But the plain truth was that he was now mightily pleased.
He wasn’t sure what Ross had done. But whatever it had been, it looked like it had worked.
Cassie noticed the explosion too. It made the glass of water on her bedside table shudder and its surface ripple.
She got up carefully and crossed to the window, just in time to see a fireball dispersing. And she wasn’t certain what was going on, but got a feeling that it had something to do with her close friends. Were they okay?
She put a hand against the glass, her heart beating double-time. But then she lowered her gaze, catching sight of something else. There was a small apartment block a street away. Nothing especially unusual about it, except its doors and no few of its windows were wide open. Its inhabitants had come outside, and some of them were stumbling about.
What was happening down there? If that blast was down to Ross, then maybe he’d been putting something right.
Man, but she was getting tired of simply lying round all day. She’d seriously have preferred to be there with him.
But that was when she thought she heard a hushed voice murmur, “It’s not over yet.”
She turned quickly around.
But there was no one else here with her in the room. Not even Quinn, whose soft voice it had been.
CHAPTER FIFTY
There was a sound in my head like a swarm of wasps had flown inside my skull and was buzzing around furiously, trying to find the exit.
It took me three attempts just to get my eyes open. And when I finally managed that, a pink angel was staring at me. Only its head and the top part of its shattered torso, you understand. They were upside-down, the tip of one wing embedded deeply in the sodden turf. If the thing had come down another three feet to the left, then I’d have been picking marble feathers out of my chest cavity.
I tried to raise myself onto my elbows, but that made me dizzy. So I let my forehead drop back to the grass. It was perfectly comfortable down there. I ought to stay in this position for a good long while. In point of fact, I might never get back up. That was a notion that would make my life a whole load easier.
But I gradually became aware of another presence. An indistinct shape, off beyond the broken piece of angel. It was a human figure, seated on the plinth of a large gravestone.
And it wasn’t Lauren.
“Thirty years,” a gravelly voice sighed.
Eastlake senior was dressed the same way as the last time, but was so hunched over his expensive suit looked rumpled, shapeless. One hand was raised to his chin, but his face was lowered so I couldn’t see it.
“Thirty years of studying, planning, making deals, all of it gone in a few seconds. Life can be surprising, can’t it?”
There was a movement in the corner of my eye. Lauren had emerged from behind cover and was advancing on Eastlake with her Walther drawn. I was careful not to look for very long in her direction.
Only he seemed to know that she was coming. Didn’t lift his head, but stretched an arm in her direction, with the palm held flat.
“Back off, Boston cop. You’ve got no jurisdiction here.”
Her gun glowed suddenly red-hot. She yelped and dropped it, stumbling to a halt. And then, next second, she stopped moving altogether, like a motion picture that had somehow frozen up. Her eyes were still swiveling round rather alarmedly but, that apart, she looked like she was going nowhere. Eastlake’s deadly magic had to be responsible for that.
I pulled myself up to a seated position, my stupor evaporating quickly. And his features finally rose into view. The same as they had been before, but with the exception that his irises were no longer brown.
They were a pale orange. And that color was on the move, flickering and dancing. It was living flame that I was looking at, captured right there in the bright gloss of his eyes. It made the rest of the man’s face look barely human.
He stared at me evenly for a few seconds. But then, he did something unexpected.
Eastlake took his hand from underneath his chin and held it out in front of him, the index and the middle fingers parted. And another fat cigar popped into existence in between them.
When he put it to his mouth and puffed, an ember appeared at its tip. And then he blew out smoke, still staring at me.
“I knew it from the first moment we met,” he muttered. “You’re a very clever feller.”
All that I could do was gaze back at him, the skin of my face feeling extremely tight. What the hell precisely did he think that he was doing?
“Tell you what, son” he went on, a wry smile lighting up his features. “Why don’t you come and work for me? I’d reward you handsomely, and not only with money.”
“Excuse me,” I broke in across him. “Don’t you understand what’s happened?”
But he acted like he couldn’t even hear me.
“I mean, money’s important, sure. I’d be a liar and a hypocrite if I tried to claim otherwise. But there are other things that supersede it. Family, for instance.”
And I didn’t like the way that he was peering at me now. How much did he know about my own personal background?
“Family is so important,” he was saying. “Central to a man’s happiness. And you’ve been having some problems in that direction, so I understand.”
He cocked his head to one side and then dropped his tone a full shade lower.
“I could bring them back to you, son. All I’d be requiring in return is your allegiance.”
He was studying me with those flame-filled eyes, the way a tiger might regard a tethered goat. His smile grew slightly broader, but had not a trace of humor to it. This was not a genuine offer, and I got that. He was trying to taunt me.
“What’s that you’re thinking, son?” he asked. “Too high a price? Oh, but you disappoint me.”
He stood up, waving his cigar around.
“You’re smart, yes, and you’re brave. But deep down, you’re like all the other schmucks. You know what you really want. You know it like a needle in your heart. But you cannot bring yourself to do what’s necessary to get it.”
He grimaced sadly.
“Do you know what’s the most important part of life, son? It’s that final minute, when you’re lying on your deathbed and you’re looking back. And the regrets start flooding in. The failures. The opportunities you missed. The experiences you could have had, but never did. All those things you could have done, but never will in this world.”
He took another draw on his cigar and blew the smoke high into the air above him.
“Let’s try this again, shall we?” he asked. “It’s like a game, with fixed rules. I say ‘I can bring your family back.’ And you say ‘yes, I would like that, so please do it.’ What’s it gonna hurt you, Rossie? Go on, take my offer.”
Then he stopped talking and peered at me again. His face went slightly crumpled and
his temples lifted.
“You’re not even vaguely tempted, are you?”
“It’s not that,” I told him. “Simply that I know a bad deal when I hear one.”
“Really? Do you love your family that little?”
He was really trying to goad me now. And it partway worked. I felt anger quivering through my frame, but managed to hold it back. Got up the whole way to my feet, glowering at him contemptuously.
“You’re headed for that deathbed sooner than you think,” I told him.
“Oh, I think not, somehow.”
This was nonsense. So I gestured at the ruins of his late wife’s mausoleum, the fuel tanker still ablaze in front of it.
“In case you haven’t noticed, you just lost.”
“This round.”
And that took me off balance. Was he bluffing?
“I must admit,” Eastlake was going on, “if it’d been down to me, I might have put all of my eggs in just one basket. But my patron – Ithmoteus – he is very old and infinitely wise. He always has a back-up plan.”
I felt a sharp chill begin oozing through my body when I heard him say that.
“There was always the chance, I guess, that something of this sort might happen. Nothing’s ever simple in Raine’s Landing is it? Not even the finish of it. So on top of the construction of the Portal, he had me perform a few additional ceremonies.”
I started to get the fact that he was serious. And I was getting pretty damned sick of the harsh sound of his voice, but couldn’t stop it coming at me.
“By this time, you’ll have found three corpses in the woods. Three dead bodies, with demonic script carved in them. Truth is, I watched your people dig them out.”
He tapped his forehead.
“And they were important sacrifices. Blondie here was right.”
He gestured to Lauren, who was still frozen in place. I was concerned for her, but didn’t move across to help. Eastlake had me transfixed with that burning gaze of his.
“Ithmoteus, see,” the man said, “is a devil of the third echelon. And do you understand how high up that is, how many echelons there are?”
“Six hundred and sixty six?” I hazarded.
His cigar’s tip jabbed at me.
“There you go – I knew that you were smart! But the plain fact of the matter is, a demon so high up is not allowed to enter this world, except for his voice. The powers above will not allow it. But his lieutenants, now, his underlings …?”
Laughter had sprung up in his pale orange eyes, if it was possible for flames to laugh.
“Why d’you think there were human sacrifices in the first place? They’re extremely strong rites. And each one was performed to bring one of my lord’s lieutenants here into the Landing. The first one got here a while before Christmas.”
And I almost choked on my own breath at that point.
“We’ve not …” Then I stumbled over the words that I’d been trying to get out, seeing what the horrible reality might be. “They’re in human form?”
“So far, yes. But not for too much longer. And when they reveal themselves, son, they’re gonna tear this town apart. They’re gonna render it down to its bare bones, then suck the marrow out. It would’ve been far quicker and less painful if you’d let the Portal do its work. But one way or another, Raine’s Landing is going to become a realm of Hell. And once that’s done, I’ll step right up and rule it.”
I was staring at him frozenly, entirely speechless now.
“And do you know what the real kicker is?” Harker Eastlake asked. “Not even I know what these demons look like. I don’t have the faintest clue. Have fun figuring it out, son. Holy moley, but you’re gonna need those smarts of yours.”
But then the gloating expression melted from his face. He looked down quickly at his fat cigar, then peered up at me anxiously.
“I’m going, now,” he said. “And I can’t take this with. Would you like to have it? It’s a really good cigar.”
I stared deeply into his shifting orange eyes, and I began to understand the true depths of his madness. Except he didn’t seem to get that, his mouth going slack with disappointment.
“No again, huh?” he said quietly. “Well, that’s a pity. Did anybody ever tell you you’re a very awkward man, Devries?”
I was about to answer, but another flame-edged doorway opened in the air behind him, and he stepped back through it.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Lauren went back to normal as soon as the man had gone. She wobbled about a bit, then rubbed at her limbs like she had a charley-horse. I finally went over to her, relieved she wasn’t damaged worse.
“You okay?” I asked her.
“I think so. But it was weird. I could see and hear everything, but couldn’t move a muscle.”
“You heard about our three visitors, then?”
“Yuh-huh.” She righted herself and then retrieved her sidearm, pulling a face as she did so. “I can’t believe we haven’t stopped him, after all of that. Are we really right back to square one?”
“Looks that way.”
It was a long, slow journey to retrieve my Caddy. And a noticeably glum one. We walked a while, then found a cab, which took us back up to the gas station on Colver. Few words passed between us, since there weren’t too many left that made an awful lot of sense.
There turned out to be nobody but uniformed officers and civilian staff back at the station house. And the judge’s house was empty, the lights off. But we finally found the people that we needed over at Willets’s cottage, behind Martha’s house. He, Samuel Levin and Martha Howard-Brett were seated round the kitchen table, poring over massive, ancient books, a Chet Baker album playing softly in the background.
Their heads lifted as we came in, and I could see it in the way they looked at us. Perhaps they’d caught a psychic glimpse of what was happening at Salem Lawns, or maybe it was instinct. But they knew this wasn’t over. And it hung around their necks like some enormous millstone.
“Where’s Emaline?” I asked them.
“Back in Tyburn,” Martha said. “She wants to prepare her people for whatever might be coming next. Which is …?”
So I outlined what I’d been told.
“No need to feel badly – you did pretty well, the pair of you,” the judge said. And his gaze flickered to Lauren. “Especially you, dear. Most resourceful. Think of it this way – if you hadn’t broken up the Portal and bought us some extra time, then we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.”
He took in the depressed looks on our faces and managed to force a smile.
I stared across his shoulder at the book that he was reading. It was from Willets’s vast collection, and he’d opened it – by the illustrations – to the section on the dark arts. And the same went for the others. It wasn’t anything that they were used to, certainly, but they were trying to bring themselves up to speed on this entire demonic business.
“Black Magic 101?” I asked.
Levin nodded pensively. “We thought that we’d familiarize ourselves with the rules and general practices of that side of the art. And from what you’ve told us, we were right to do so.”
“Have you learned anything that might help?”
“Such as?”
“A locator spell, for instance? Something that might tell us where these three lieutenants are. And, more importantly, how to kill them.”
“No, you can’t do that,” Willets objected. “They exist outside the normal bounds of time and space, so death is not an option. The best thing you can hope to do, Ross, is to send them back where they originally came from.”
“I can’t even hurt them?”
“You can do some of that while they are still in human form, I would imagine. Damage them while they still look like people, yes. That alone might be enough to send them packing. Here’s an interesting rule I came across.”
He flipped back several pages of the volume he was leafing through, then traced a sentence with h
is finger.
“They have to maintain their human form while you’re still looking at them. But if you glance away, for so much as a microsecond, they are able to transform, revealing their true selves. And once they’ve done that, they’re about as easy to handle as a nuclear bomb.”
Oh, that was simply great. I wandered over to the kitchen window and stared out.
Willets’s home – alongside Martha’s – sits on the lower reaches of Sycamore Hill, where most of the adepts and the rich folks in this town live. There was open ground behind the cottage, then a steeply falling gradient. Streetlamps were visible beyond its edge, distant masses of them in a slightly tangled checker pattern. And there were myriad lit windows.
Thousands of them. Tens of thousands. Raine’s Landing might have the feeling of a small town but, because nobody can leave, it’s grown quite sizeable down three whole centuries. My gaze swept across West Meadow and then headed up to Northridge, where my own house stood. And there were far too many lights to count. But behind three of them were devils, each disguised as human beings.
How in God’s name were we going to find them? I blinked exhaustedly, a clogged-up feeling settling in my stomach.
“How long do you think it might be till you come up with something?” I asked the others, without turning round.
“These types of devil,“ and it was Willets again, “they are complex, awkward, hard to second-guess. Shrewd, intelligent, and tricky. Practiced masters of concealment and deceit. We’re trying our very best, Ross, that I promise you. But it’s as though we’ve been playing trumpet all our lives until this point, and now we’re having to learn piano. It’s not in the least bit easy.”
Chet Baker was still twisting his tongue around a bossa nova number, but his dulcet chords entirely failed to soothe me.
“Nothing ever is,” I murmured.
I wasn’t going to get any rest. I definitely wasn’t going to be able to sleep. But at least I could eat, which I hadn’t done all day. And Lauren was happy to go along with that plan. She was used to pulling lengthy shifts, and understood the importance of keeping your strength up.
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