But she didn’t give a damn. She never does. Even pregnant, she was more resilient than most guys you can throw a stick at. I should have been pleased to see her, but these were not the right circumstances.
“You shouldn’t be here.” I said, when I reached her.
“Says who?” she came back.
Her eyes were burning as she took in the surrounding scene of wreckage.
“Why’ve you even come?” I asked.
“Where else was I supposed to go? I’m not deaf or blind. Which means I couldn’t help but notice all the shooting and the fires, not to mention that gigantic bug.”
“It was a devil.”
“Aha! But where’d it come from?”
So I explained it to her. And she took it all in quickly – it’s hardly like she’s totally unused to unpleasant surprises. But her gaze went steely and her upper lip began to curl back.
“I’m checking myself out,” she snapped. “No more lying around for me, not with all this going down.”
And that was when I started to get angry with her.
“No, you can’t!”
“But you’re not coping, Ross. The new girl isn’t making any difference either, from what I can see. You need every bit of help that you can get, and that means me.”
I clutched her gently by her shoulders, trying to reason with her.
“Cass, you can’t put May at risk.”
She opened her mouth to protest, but I stopped her with an urgent look.
“Want to know what I think?” I asked. “I believe that, when May finally arrives, she’s going to be someone really special – right? A kind of adept like we’ve never seen before. Quinn was very powerful, but he was kept down by that Hallows Knot. But May won’t be. My guess is, once that she gets going, there’ll be nothing that can hold her back. And we need that, Cass. We can’t afford to lose it.”
Cass looked absolutely stunned, so she had not really considered that.
“You’re talking about the future,” she said. “And this town’s in trouble now.”
“But if we don’t keep looking forward, what hope do we have? I’ll deal with the present, Cass. You need to keep tomorrow safe.”
The glitter in her eyes had turned into a strange one, rather faraway and damp. She still looked pretty frustrated, sure. But what I had been telling her was starting to sink in, like water through fine sand.
“The doctors are saying I can go home soon. So what am I supposed to do, stare at my four walls with all of this happening?”
“That’s right. Because you’ll be giving us a massive edge a few years later on. Who knows, we might even break the Curse eventually, and May could be the key to that.”
Cassie tapped her tongue against her teeth. Her head was slightly bowed now, and the fire in her irises was fizzling out.
“I’m telling you,” she said under her breath. “If anything like that big bug comes strutting down my street, I’m going at it hard.”
“Fine. I get that. But until that happens, get some rest.”
“Later,” she answered. “I’ve got other things to do first.”
And she walked across to where Nadine was sitting, crouching down beside her friend and wrapping both her arms around the woman. That punkish hairdo bobbed a little, and then Nadine let her forehead rest on Cassie’s shoulder and she started crying.
Renewedly uncomfortable, I stared off into the distance again. And then I headed back the way I’d come, keeping an eye out for Lauren.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
Back at my place, I let Lauren shower first. She emerged, clean and fresh, in a thick white toweling robe. But then there was the problem of what she ought to change into, since she’d left her clothes at Cassie’s place.
There was no option, in the end, but to let her into Alicia’s closet and then shut the bedroom door behind me, going to get cleaned up myself.
By the time that I was done, Lauren was fully dressed. She’d chosen Alicia’s palest pair of jeans, so faded the denim was practically white, and a knitted brown top with a very wide, loose neck. They fitted her like a second skin – she was precisely my wife’s shape and height. And that had been Alicia’s favorite outfit when she had been bumming round the house at weekends – casual, but inviting my attention.
I walk up silently behind her. Wrap my arms around her waist and kiss her on the neck. She wriggles around in my grasp. The kids are over at a friend’s, and so we walk that way, fused together like one single being, into the bedroom …
I almost had to shake my head to clear it.
“I’ve made us some coffee,” Lauren announced. Then she stared a little harder at my face. “Jeez, Ross, are you still beating yourself up? You didn’t want to shoot Olly – I get that. I didn’t want you to shoot him either. He gave a pretty convincing performance.”
There are times when you stay quiet because you have no real idea what you want to say. And I’d been through a number of those times recently. But she was peering at me hard, waiting for some kind of response.
“Coffee sounds good,” I muttered.
At which point, she gave up trying to reason with me and turned away. She looked so much like Alicia it hurt. I went through into the bedroom, changed into some drier clothes myself and then joined her in the kitchen, where we stood sipping our java.
“Wish that you were back in Boston?” I asked.
“Should do, shouldn’t I? But being here … it makes me feel more alive than anything else does these days.”
“Glad you find us entertaining.”
She threw me a slightly aggrieved look.
“That isn’t what I meant. It’s just that everything here is so straightforward, compared with where I come from.”
A tired old man had proved to be a vicious psychopath. And the friendly owner of a diner had turned out to be a fire-breathing devil. And so … straightforward? I found myself wondering how complex exactly life in a more normal city had to be. Perhaps we ought to start thinking of our unnatural isolation as something pretty good.
Lauren pulled her Walther from the waistband of her jeans and began stripping it down.
“Got a clean rag and some gun oil?” she asked. “That ash got in everywhere.”
I fetched her what she needed, and she had the job done in a bare couple of minutes. And I liked that about her, the fact that she was so precise. We tried to make some small talk, but that didn’t really work.
And – not for the first time in my life – I found myself wishing something bad would happen, just to occupy my mind and stop me feeling awkward.
“Would you like …?” Lauren began to ask.
But then the phone out in the hallway started ringing, and I let my shoulders drop. I went out through to answer.
It was Saul.
“Thought you’d like to know,” he told me hoarsely. “There’s a riot going on in Greenwood.”
There was a what now? Riots came to us by means of the external TV news. You read about them in books. The closest we had ever gotten to one here in Raine’s Landing was when a mob had gathered in front of the Town Hall, all riled up by Saruak. And even then, it had amounted to little more than a bunch of angry people shouting. Was Saul serious?
“Do I sound like I’m joking? That whole neighborhood’s going up like the Fourth of July. Demons again?”
“See you there,” I told him.
Lauren had poked her head out from the kitchen and was peering at me anxiously.
“We’re needed?”
“Yuh. And by the sounds of it, we could both use body armor.”
She blinked at me.
“And a water cannon would be helpful too,” I added. “Got any ideas where we can rent one?”
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
That cranky, skew-eyed French guy, Jean-Paul Sartre, once remarked that, “Hell is other people.”
That wasn’t a particularly friendly thing to say, but by the time that we’d arrived in Greenwood, I could partl
y see his point. Other folks are fine most of the time. But when they announce themselves by throwing a half brick against your windshield and then staggering across the road, locked in combat with each other, they begin to lose their basic charm.
I peered out through the cracked glass, wondering what in heaven’s name was causing this.
A riot usually means a mob against a line of officers. But this wasn’t that thing. So far as I could make out, it was everybody against everybody else.
People had simply come out of their homes and started attacking each other. There were women with their hands locked in each other’s hair. Elderly folks lashing out with canes, which wasn’t wise. I watched a few of them getting knocked to the ground on account of that.
Kids of all ages were darting between the fistfights, screaming their heads off and throwing in swift kicks and punches wherever they could. And the further into the neighborhood we progressed, then the fiercer and more manic the commotion got.
Lauren’s jaw was nearly dropping off its hinges.
“What do they think they’re doing?”
“I doubt they’re thinking anything,” was my opinion. “This has to be the influence of another devil.”
Which was partway confirmed when I stopped my Caddy and got out. A guy in his mid-thirties – sandy-haired and fairly tall – came running at me. His face was bloody, but he didn’t even seem to notice that. He gawked at me with vacant eyes, then threw a punch.
It wasn’t his fault, and I understood that. He was under the thrall of some demonic power, not responsible for the things he was doing. But that didn’t mean I had to stand round getting hurt. And so I blocked his swing, then drove my other fist into his gut.
I muttered “sorry” as he doubled over. But then I moved on.
We were now on Almer Square, the central hub of Greenwood. It was normally so calm a place that you could label it as dull, the hangout of retired types mostly and the pigeons that they liked to feed. The most exciting thing that generally happened here was when some Yorkshire terrier got off its leash and started running round and yapping.
But now, hundreds of fully-grown adults were running amock. Everyone around them was their enemy, and if you happened to be too weak to defend yourself, then that was your tough luck.
Those people who weren’t actually scrapping were discovering other ways to vent their fury. That mostly involved glass – windows, storefronts, and the windshields of parked cars. And they kept on smashing those up until someone tried to stop them, at which point another fight broke out.
The uniformed cops who’d already turned up were scuffling too. At first glance, it looked like they were trying to stop the violence. But the reality was, they were only making things a good deal worse.
And then the same dark magic began seeping through my frame as well. I felt an angry impulse running through me, the senseless urge to strike somebody, but I fought it off.
Another guy rushed up at Lauren. And she felled him with a fast, deft sidekick. But her fists stayed balled up. Her cheeks had turned red. She looked like she was going to follow up that move with further violence. So I grabbed her round her upper arms, pinning them to her sides.
“Hold on there,” I breathed into her ear. “You don’t want to be joining in with this.”
“Sorry, Ross. I know you’re right.” But then I felt her start to shake. “It’s like there’s this … jangling vibration on the air around me, though. And it’s setting my nerves on edge, and badly.”
Oh yeah. I could feel it too. An urgent stirring, like a fast drill against metal. It got under your skin and worked down through your flesh. The roots of my teeth had started to ache, and every time I blinked I heard my eyelids thud together.
It was influencing this entire district. As I watched, the whole riot notched up another gear, tight clusters gathering around those people who’d already fallen, kicks being rained in. Which was an awful thing to have to watch. Folks had only gotten hurt, up until this point. Now, there was a real risk of them dying.
How to stop this?
There was a parked patrol car not ten yards from me, both its front doors hanging open. So I poked my arm inside and turned on the siren. That got a few people’s attention. The keys were still in the ignition, so I took them out, went to the trunk and opened it. A pair of riot guns was lying there.
I yanked one out and started firing in the air. Then, when the pin clicked on an empty chamber, I restarted with the second gun.
People were forgetting about pummeling each other and were staring angrily in my direction. Lauren peered back at them awkwardly.
“Are you sure that this is wise?” she asked.
“I’m pretty sure it isn’t.”
But I had to do something to slow this down. And making them concentrate on me instead had been the only thing that I could think of.
The gazes that were fixed on me had not a scrap of humanity left in them. Teeth were bared. Eyes were very wide, the marbled veins around the edges showing. Most of these people had been hurt themselves, but didn’t seem to care. They were caught firmly in the grip of bloodlust.
A section of the mob detached itself and began moving toward me. But that was not what I was looking for. I kept on peering at the outer edges of the crowd.
A dark blue Pontiac rolled into my field of vision. Saul had finally shown up. And he was followed by around twenty more cruisers, with their beacons all ablaze. But if the cops fell under this spell too, this whole huge mess was going to start getting even crazier.
A group of about a dozen rioters broke loose of the rest and charged at me. Saul came thundering across and grabbed two of them by their necks, his massive bulk forcing them down. Several more were dealt with by the newly arrived cops. And me and Lauren took care of the rest.
But … I was starting to enjoy this way too much. The vibration was affecting me again. I was feeling the strong impulse to just swipe out mindlessly at anything that moved. But the closest moving thing to me was Lauren and so – once again – I fought it.
Then I caught a glimpse.
It was only a brief one, before the crowd moved back across it. But a woman was standing, perfectly still, over by the edge of the square where it gave out onto Ellby Street. An upright figure, her arms folded neatly across her chest.
Silver-rimmed spectacles and silver hair. That was the impression that I got. But then a mass of rioters moved in between us. She was lost into the mayhem once again.
I went a few steps to my left, catching sight of her a second time. A woman in her sixties, in a long skirt and a cashmere sweater, her hair tied up in a bun. She could have been an aging schoolmarm, but was standing very calmly at the edge of this wild, churning sea of violence and confusion.
No one was so much as approaching her, I couldn’t help but notice.
Another woman – in her twenties this time – suddenly attacked me from behind, throwing herself on my back and trying to bite my scalp. That only lasted for about a second before she was dragged off and I heard a thump.
I turned to Lauren, who was breathing hard.
“Thanks,” I said
“You should have been paying more attention,” she came back at me. “What the hell were you looking at?”
But when I pointed, the schoolmarm was gone.
I spotted her again some half a minute later, strolling casually away down Ellby, hundreds of rioters still tussling between us.
“Back into the car,” I said.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
Driving through the mob itself would have been to invite disaster. These crazed people would as soon attack a moving car as step out of its way. So I spun us round in a tight circle, heading back onto the tail end of Greenwood. Took a left onto Jefferson, then another left, so that we came out lower down on Ellby.
No one was berserking here, and no silver-haired ladies were in sight.
“Damn it!”
She had either vanished magically, or else had
gone into one of the low, plain houses that fill up this neighborhood. But seeing as how she had been keeping up her human disguise this entire while, I reckoned it might be the latter. So I slowed my Caddy to a crawl and began staring, very hard, at every home we passed.
No doors were open. And no drapes were moving. There were no lights on anywhere I looked. These places were dead. And pretty well identical as well. There’s not a great deal of variety in Greenwood, since the place had mostly gone up in one huge construction in the Forties.
Everything was pristine, neat. We could still make out the warring, bustling mob off at the far end of the street, but it didn’t look like it was getting any closer. Things were pretty calm and quiet round here, so that the mayhem in the distance seemed a touch unreal. I pulled my Caddy over to the curb and switched the engine off, then wound my window down.
And flies were buzzing. I could hear that clearly. It might be warmer than it ought to be, but this was still February. Flies?
So I got out, and Lauren did the same. I paused a moment and then headed the direction that the sound was coming from.
The place we finally stopped in front of was no different than the rest, except that there was something rather odd about its windows. The drapes weren’t covering them. You ought to have been able to see inside a little. But you couldn’t. There was only blankness.
There was nothing much in the front yard, just turf. But when you stared at it more closely, it was on the move, quivering and twitching.
There were thousands of winged bugs scurrying through the grass. They were as fat as bluebottles, but they had matt black hides. Every ten seconds or so, a group of them would rise into the morning air. They’d hum furiously, describing tight circles, before settling back down and resuming their frantic scuttling.
And flies had something to do with the Devil, I recalled. He was the Lord of them.
I peered at the frontage of the house again. The door looked like it was slightly off its latch. And so I took out my gun, and Lauren did likewise.
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