It was harder still to imagine thirteen people willing to off themselves in the name of containing a demon. I’d done more than my fair share of exorcisms and spirit containment over the years, but I’d have never died to make it happen. Getting thirteen willing souls, thirteen people who believed in the cause enough, seemed almost ludicrously difficult. Something clicked in my head. I traced the logic. It held up.
“Will you excuse me,” I said. “I just remembered that there’s someplace I’m supposed to be.”
Mary-Beth blinked at me in confusion, but she nodded. “Of course.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“For what?”
“Breaking the small town code of silence.”
“Why do I get the feeling that you’ve just figured something out?”
I shrugged and stood. “Crossword this morning. Eight-letter word. Clue was ‘striking revelation.’ I just realized the answer. Epiphany.”
I nodded to her and started to leave the room, then stopped. I looked back at Mary-Beth.
“Mr. Hartworth?”
“Did you ever meet a woman named Mary Simmons?”
“Of course I did. Everybody knows everybody in a small town. She was smart as a whip and such a pretty thing. Terrible for that family, her and Randall dying so young. Why do you ask?”
“I met Paul and Abby. They told me a little about themselves.”
“Bless them, their house caught fire a few days ago. Awful, awful business. Word is that some stranger ran into the house to get them,” said Mary-Beth. She gave me a long look. “It was you that pulled them out of that house, wasn’t it?”
I shrugged. “I did what anyone would have.”
“If you say so.”
I tried to get back on topic. “Mary-Beth, was there anything unusual about Mary?”
Mary-Beth looked perplexed and shook her head. “Unusual? No. I don’t think so. Except that she was from here.”
I stared at the librarian, trying to understand her meaning.
She laughed. “Well, not her personally, but her people were from here. They’d all moved away ages ago, you understand, but there were a few folks who remembered her grandparents.”
I kept myself from showing any exterior reaction, but there it was. The definitive link I hadn’t been able to make was laid bare by a simple question. I thanked Mary-Beth and walked as quickly as basic courtesy would allow out of the library. I called Helena from the car and asked her to meet me at my little cabin that evening. First, I needed to check a couple things before I let my bowels turn to water. I called Patty and asked her if it would be possible for me to get a tour of the school. She muttered something about pain-in-the-ass tourists, but agreed to set it up. I thanked her and drove back to my cabin. I spent a few minutes petting Lil, who didn’t purr, but stared up at me with knowing eyes.
“Yeah,” I said. “I think I know what’s happening. I think this is worse than I ever imagined it could be.”
“Mrrrr,” replied Lil.
It was a low, somber sound and struck me as infinitely sad and just a touch fearful. Then again, maybe I was just projecting my own feelings onto her. God, I hoped I was wrong. If I was wrong, at least Abby had a chance. I stroked Lil’s head a few more times and then slid the hard case out from beneath the narrow bed. The burn on my back sent a spike of pain up my spine as I stretched the wound beyond its limits. My breath caught in my throat as the muscles along my spine did their best to contract me into a fetal position on the floor. I made myself take slow, controlled breaths for thirty seconds and the pain eased off.
It had gotten easier and easier to forget about the burn as the constant pain became mental background noise. It was just one more thing to tune out as time went by. The sharp reminder made me feel physically weak. The abrupt adrenaline spike made my legs shaky. The pain also made me feel, in a way that I’d never felt before, old. I tried to push that idea away, but it held tight. I wasn’t a young buck anymore. I was slowing up. I couldn’t shrug things off the way I did when I was twenty. I wasn’t sure how many years I had left before I just wouldn’t be up to the challenges of my own life.
That thought made me feel even older and exhausted. I wanted to sit on the floor. I wanted to rest. This had never been my fight. I’d stumbled into it by accident. My presence was little more than a quirk of travel. If I’d sucked it up for another fifty miles, I’d never have met Abby or Paul. I wouldn’t have gotten into a nasty bar fight or bought a beat-up old Neon. I’d have long since finished my periodic check-in on my sister and her family in Seattle. I was so tired. I was tired of all of it. I was tired of the constant traveling. I was tired of being an outcast. I was tired of the violence. I was tired of all the terrible memories of the people who’d died and the unspeakable things that had done the killing. It all sat there, in my head, like the anchor of a great sea ship that was too massive to ignore and ready to drag me under.
My head lolled forward. I wanted to close my eyes and sleep. Just sleep and sleep until all of this was over. I didn’t need these problems. Abby and Paul weren’t blood, weren’t even family of choice. They were just unlucky. It wasn’t my problem. I didn’t need to do anything to get out of harm’s way. I only needed to do nothing. Send Helena home and do nothing. My body started to sway as I drifted closer and closer to sleep. Blessed sleep would be a relief. An escape from all the responsibilities I never wanted in the first place.
My equilibrium shifted in a way that my body didn’t like very much. I put my hand against the side of the mattress as weariness threatened to drive me to the floor in earnest.
Red-hot pain flashed as Lil sank her claws into my hand.
“Jesus Christ!” My mind thrashed back to full awareness.
Lil calmly removed her claws.
I stared at the blood that beaded near my knuckles. My heart raced in my chest. Something had happened, was happening, and it was something wrong.
I’d been under attack. Some bastard had tried to put the mental whammy on me. No, I realized, they hadn’t tried. They’d succeeded. If not for Lil, I’d have been unconscious on the floor. If my attacker was motivated enough, I might not have woken up. I tried to shake off the cobwebs. To do that to me, they’d have needed to be close. Really close. I lurched to my feet and stumbled toward the door. I flung it open and stepped outside.
I saw a flash of flannel disappear into the woods that surrounded the cabin. I took a few steps in pursuit before reason kicked into gear. I didn’t know the woods. Whoever tried to put me out of play almost certainly did. Chasing them into their own territory was a good way to get dead. I stopped before I entered the woods proper. A deep anger almost made me reject the objections of reason and hurl myself into the trees. I fought it down. Even at my best, it would have been a stupid idea and the remnant throbs from my back reminded me just how not at my best I was at that moment. I gritted my teeth and went back into the cabin.
Lil sat on the bed and gave me another of her patented opaque expressions. I went over and scratched behind her ears. She purred up at me for a few seconds before she hopped down off the bed and went to her food dish. I watched her eat and wondered about what she was and why she had picked me. I’d probably never get a clear notion of either. I shook my head and crouched, with far greater care, to retrieve the Eye of Horus from the hard case. I checked to make sure Lil had enough food and water, topped both off, and then I set out to make my second drive to Angel’s Rest Cemetery.
Chapter 28
Like all practical plans that should be carried out immediately, the trip to the cemetery was doomed to failure. I hadn’t even gotten into the car when my phone rang. I looked at the screen and saw Helena’s number.
“Hi,” I said, my hand still grasping the handle of the car door.
“I think you should come and pay Abby a visit,” said Helena without preamble.
Fear squeezed my chest. “Did something happen?”
“No, no, nothing like that. She’s just being,�
�� Helena waffled for a moment, “truculent is the word, I think.”
“About?”
“What do you think she’s being truculent about?”
I lifted my hand off the car door’s handle to reach up and massage a spot between my eyes. I’d expected her to be resistant to the process, but not quite so soon. It usually took a few weeks before the mind started to rebel in earnest at having its assumptions deconstructed and reconstructed with an alternate worldview. I’d harbored some vague and obviously incorrect hope that Abby would prove more flexible about her introduction to the world of the supernatural. She wasn’t that old. I’d been several years older than her when I first started. God knew I wasn’t anyone’s definition of tractable, but even I hadn’t gotten stubborn until a week or two into the process.
Resistance was normal. In fact, a lack of resistance was generally considered a serious warning sign that someone was not temperamentally suited to operate in the shadowy world I occupied. Too much willingness to surrender one’s own worldview in favor of another, especially one that flew in the face of the facts of everyday existence, almost always meant an unacceptable weakness of mind or will. Strength of mind, strength of will, were not mere necessities for controlling the often unpredictable ebbs and flows of magic, but were the bedrock of raw survival in the face of things that could construct illusions, warp perception, and offer all manner of temptations.
Too little willingness to entertain and eventually accept an alternate point of view was just as bad. In the case of someone with Abby’s exceptional native talent, it could make an already difficult job impossible. It also left her without any protection from things she had no framework to understand. That could be lethal. In an equitable world, that might be an acceptable choice. Allowing someone the free will to choose who they wanted to be wasn’t something to be taken lightly. If she wanted to reject mine and Helena’s world, she ought to be allowed to do so.
We didn’t live in an equitable world. Leaving her talents unrestrained didn’t just threaten her. They posed a threat to anyone she might meet. Psychics as powerful as Abby could do unspeakable things to another person’s mind. She could literally force someone to think they were in love with her. She could make someone step into traffic. Given the right impetus, she could probably create enough fear to stop someone’s heart. She couldn’t be allowed to wander the world without some internal checks and balances on that power. And she was fighting the process.
“Damn,” I muttered. “I’ll be right down.”
I drove to the hospital, but, once I got there, I just stood in the parking lot and glowered up at the building. I’d been there so often in recent days that they should have reserved a space for me. As I stood there, I did my best to ignore the nagging sensation that I had not performed a perfectly reasonable action. I supposed it was the parking lot itself that triggered that feeling. Helena had told me to call the Twins and I’d said I’d think about it. I hadn’t called them. In fact, I had not thought about calling them for one second. If my intuition about what was happening was right, though, I needed to make that call. I’d just have to hope they’d take the call and, even less likely, tell me what I wanted to know.
I sat down on my hood and stared at my phone, not moving, and certainly not dialing. In the shadowy world of the supernatural, there were a lot of gray people. Semyon and Dmitri Osinov, who everyone simply called The Twins, were the grayest of those gray people. That grayness extended well beyond their moral orientation. They lived and worked in a small, gray building they owned in Manhattan. They wore identical gray suits, gray shirts, and gray ties. The only way to tell them apart was by the color of the handkerchiefs the men kept tucked into their suit coat pockets. Semyon favored a cool blue handkerchief, while Dmitri favored pale green.
Their offices were carpeted in dark gray, painted in light gray, and even their business cards were custom-printed on gray paper. Officially speaking, for tax purposes, they were businessmen engaged in dozens of extremely boring but perfectly legitimate enterprises that ranged from commercial real estate to boutique stores and investing in a range of startups. Among the supernatural set, they were widely considered to be information brokers of the most valuable sort. They didn’t judge. They simply quoted a price.
If you wanted to know how one might go about resurrecting a dead loved one, they could provide or acquire the information on how to perform such a ritual. If you were a little suicidal and wanted to spend the night in bed with a demon or demoness, they could provide you with the appropriate contact information. Have a burning need to set off a minor apocalypse, they knew which discarded deity had an axe to grind with humanity. They could get it all for you, if you had deep-enough pockets or could offer a sufficient favor in exchange.
Of course, nothing is ever as simple as it sounds on the surface. Members of the supernatural community are tribal both by nature and as a defense mechanism. You stick with the groups you know and trust because you can anticipate their behaviors. It also gives you a support system if something comes looking to start a fight with you. The tribe closes ranks around you. Information rarely crossed tribal walls, which was how I came into contact with The Twins.
For a variety of reasons, my wandering ways not least among them, I had contacts all over the place. I wasn’t beholden to any particular tribe. Not that any of them would have accepted me anyways. I came with capital-b Baggage. Yet, there were always times when one tribe or another needed a go-between to arrange meetings or serve as a neutral arbiter. I was the perfect choice for such tasks. No one wanted me hanging around with their people too long, but that meant that I didn’t have a lot of vested interest in helping or screwing anyone over.
The Twins had used me on a number of occasions to make arrangements for them to meet with third parties, collect objects of interest, or deliver payments that couldn’t be handled through more traditional channels, like banks. They once had me oversee the delivery of a cow to something that was, I was pretty sure, some kind of mountain troll. Another time, they had me handle what they called “the third most important exchange of their career.”
I flew to Denver and met with a tiny Japanese woman who did not speak English. She insisted, through a translator, that we spend the day experiencing the curiosity of life. It was a strange sort of day. She undertook a rather complex tea ceremony that, the translator informed me, was a great honor for me. I did my best to look appropriately humbled by the gesture. The next stop was a koi pond. The translator hovered behind us and related some kind of parable or legend about carp becoming dragons. The lesson, I was informed, was about the value of perseverance. I nodded as though the story made sense to me. It, of course, did not make sense to me, but I wasn’t there to offend The Twins’ business associate.
Then we went to a mall, sat at a food court, and people-watched for hours. Several times, wide-eyed men and women came over and spoke to her in hushed whispers I didn’t understand. I asked the translator about it, but he shook his head and said it was unrelated to my business with her. Late in the afternoon, for two very memorable hours, she dismissed the translator. At the end of the day, I provided her with a single gold coin of a make I did not recognize. She offered me a box that contained a lone cherry blossom. Everyone acted as though they were getting the better end of the exchange. I never could figure out the exact nature of that deal.
It was a good gig for me while it lasted. My arrangement with The Twins came to an end when they asked me to arrange an exchange between them and a man named Ambrus. I advised them against it. Ambrus was a murky figure even in our murky community. His reputation was uneven. Sometimes he acted exactly as promised. Sometimes he murdered people for miniscule offences or no discernible reason at all. The guy made me look downright polite and housebroken. In the end, my job was to handle the arrangements. I did my job.
The Twins went to meet with him in person, so I only heard about what happened after the fact. Ambrus showed up and took whatever The Twins had of
fered in exchange at the point of several sub-machine guns. They blamed me. I thought blaming me was a bit ridiculous, since I had advised them against any kind of deal with Ambrus. I had suggested they take security, advice they ignored. I had even offered to go with them, or in their stead, which they had waved off as unnecessary. There was a shaky second when I thought Dmitri might shoot me, but Semyon muttered a few words in Russian, I think, and Dmitri backed off. I always liked Semyon better.
I hadn’t spoken with either since, though I did see them once in San Francisco a few years later. I’d been in an antique shop, during my personal shopper days, and they came strolling into the place. Dmitri gave me a narrow-eyed glare for a moment. Then he sighed, waved his hand as if to dismiss an annoyance, and went to look at old clocks. Semyon just stared at me for a long moment. I think he was surprised, more than anything. Then he offered me a little smile, dipped his head in acknowledgement, and joined his brother. I think it was the nod of acknowledgement that convinced me that calling them wasn’t a totally lost cause.
I dug through my wallet—I’d kept their card, just in case—and dialed their office. I knew their personal cell phone numbers, but that seemed like pushing things a bit more than necessary. Calling their office was a meager way to show respect for their privacy and add a patina of professionalism to the first moments of the call. I listened as the phone rang on the other end. There was a click, then a second click, and I heard a weird double voice, like two radios playing the same station a fraction of a second apart.
“Osinov’s,” said the double voice.
“It’s Hartworth,” I said. Then I added, trying to keep the resignation out of my voice, “Don’t hang up.”
There was a long pause before a voice wafted over the phone. “Hartworth? Hartworth? Oh yes, I recall. We employed a Hartworth years ago. Unreliable, as I remember.”
Dmitri, I thought and bit back the sharp reply. I needed them. Decades in the States had mellowed his accent, rounded out the harshness. He still sounded foreign, but not recognizably Russian anymore. There was another, shorter pause before a second, nearly identical voice wafted over the line in a chiding tone.
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