by Stacia Kane
But he couldn’t help wishing for one second, just one lonely, horribly sad second, that he was nine years old again watching his mother make the crowd love her, safe in the knowledge that she was the most beautiful woman in the world and full of pride that he was her son. He hadn’t felt that in a long time.
She wasn’t there at the moment, though, and this was not the time to get maudlin or sentimental. Someone else was there—more than a few someone elses—and those someone elses weren’t there to dance in feathered headdresses or give him a party like the one his mother had given him there when he turned ten during her run. They were there to try to cut off his head and unleash an evil worse than anything the world had ever seen. And they were going to fail, but he kind of needed to at least try to talk them out of it before the beast killed them all. Not because he especially wanted them to live but because he’d feel guilty if he didn’t make the attempt.
He mumbled and stirred as they laid him down on some sort of platform or hard bed. The beast gave a horrible little shiver of pleasure. That bed was the one they’d committed their other murders on; the smell of blood, of death, clung thickly to it. Power clung to it, as well, the power of murder and darkness. All of it combined to make the beast wiggle with excitement, even beyond what it already felt about getting the mirror. That was in the building, too, and it knew it, and it wanted it back. Speare wouldn’t have agreed to take Val Ingram’s place at that moment for anything, not even for his freedom.
“Is he still out?” That was Ingram’s voice.
It was also a cue he couldn’t resist. He opened his eyes and glared in the general direction the voice had come from. Don’t ask about Ardeth, he told himself. Letting them know she was important to him was just giving them more ammunition—against her and against him—and that was a bad idea. “You’re making a mistake.”
“I think we have different definitions of the word ‘mistake,’ ” Ingram said.
It wasn’t very bright in the cavernous space—he’d been right, it was the theater of the Silver Bell—and he didn’t see Ardeth when he scanned the room. All he saw was the tattered relic of the grand place he remembered; of course, he’d been a child, but he was sure the padded velvet covering the walls hadn’t been threadbare then, faded by dust and grime from its vibrant crimson to a dull, bruised-looking rose color. He was sure the enormous chandelier hadn’t cast so many shadows from dirt and missing crystals then, and that several of the chairs hadn’t been broken and leaking stained yellowish stuffing like fungus.
The ravages of age and neglect could be very harsh, although being used as a ritual-murder party chamber by a gang of psychopaths probably had even more of an effect. Twenty years wasn’t long enough to cause some of that damage. “Is your version of ‘mistake’ one where you end up dead? Because that’s my version, and believe me, it’s going to happen if you do what you’re planning to do here.”
“You seem awfully confident,” Ingram said, “for a man lying on a mortuary table.”
“You seem awfully confident,” Speare replied, “for a man who’s about to die. Along with all of his associates.”
Ingram sighed and turned away, heading for the center of the room where he lit two candles on either side of the mirror. The beast started whirling with excitement in Speare’s head, excitement turning into frustration when the Molyous Rope kept it from bursting through. That wasn’t a problem either, though, he realized. In order for their ritual to work they’d have to remove it and tie him down with something else, and any other rope or cable or chain in the world would break when the beast came out. Easily.
This time he didn’t bother to hide his smile. Partly because it was fun not to, and partly because he hoped Ingram would see that he really wasn’t nervous, and decide this whole thing was maybe a mistake after all.
“So tell me,” he said, in as conversational a tone as he could muster, “how do you plan to control that thing you’re making?”
“That’s not your problem.” Ingram shifted the mirror a little to the left, then to the right, apparently trying to find the perfect spot. Like Satanic Homes and Gardens was coming to do a pictorial or something. “You won’t be alive to care, although, of course, certain of your memories—your qualities—will remain locked in there. Part of the spell.”
The beast snarled again in Speare’s head. Not because of Ingram’s sadism or his plans for Speare—and, Speare figured, Doretti—both to die, but because Ingram kept touching the mirror.
Suddenly Speare noticed something. He could see Ingram’s reflection in the mirror; Ingram’s smug face showed clearly as he turned it this way and that. But that’s all it was: just a reflection in a mirror. No hell, no nothing. Interesting. He didn’t know if it mattered, but it was interesting just the same.
Ingram either didn’t know or didn’t care what he was thinking. Probably the latter. “How fun it will be, to watch Doretti die at the hands of a creature with your head, and to watch his face as he does.”
“I guess it would be, for you,” Speare said. “It’ll never happen, though. Really, I think you should do yourself a favor and stop this. Let me go. We’ll just pretend this never happened.”
Apparently Ingram was satisfied with the arrangements, because he stepped back and turned to someone out of Speare’s line of vision. “We’re ready. Bring it in.”
“I hope you made a will,” Speare said.
Ingram rolled his eyes in reply and headed stage left. A low trunk or case of some kind—Speare couldn’t see it well from his position on the table—sat there, just in front of the curtain, and Ingram lifted a few items from it. Items that interested the beast quite a bit; it started moving around again, pacing, eager to get started.
Eager to see hell again. It was almost sad how desperate it was, how excited.
He probably would have been more sad if it weren’t for the things it was so eager about. It longed for torture, for agonizing screams, for the ability to do things so depraved that Speare didn’t even want to think about what they might be called.
It longed to play with the things Ingram laid out on the floor at the base of the mirror’s stand, too, the bones and pieces of flesh and hair. Not just because they were parts of dead things, but because they’d obviously been collected in a way that made them powerful. Their owners had been murdered, tortured. The beast loved that. It loved the incense Ingram lit, the heavy scents of patchouli and clove, lobelia and devil’s shoestring, making it feel warm and comfortable. That incense was the smell he’d noticed on Frank Mercer’s body, Paulie’s head. Probably the smell that clung to Theodore’s clothes, too, the incense of powerful demon ritual and danger.
And all the while Speare wondered where Ardeth was, and if she was even there. Had they stowed her in the lighting booth or one of the dressing rooms? Was she in some separate location? He didn’t want her in the room when the beast came out, but if they’d set up some plan where she’d be killed if Ingram didn’t call at a certain time or something, he needed to know it now. The beast might—might—be willing to leave Ingram alive before it escaped through the mirror, and Speare could then force him to make the call.
He had to ask, because Ingram looked ready. He could try to mask the question as much as possible, though. “Where’s Majowski? And the woman?”
“The woman you’ve been sleeping with, you mean?” He hadn’t thought it was possible for Ingram to look even grosser than he had before, but the man still managed to do it. The lasciviousness of his smile seemed especially perverse, like he was trying to hold back his drool as he pictured it all in his head.
He was not going to feed that leer, not if he could help it. “The woman from the graveyard.”
“The one you’ve been sleeping with,” Ingram said again. “She’s coming, don’t worry. And the cop. We couldn’t have them alerting anyone, could we? They’ll be excellent test subjects for our new toy.”
It took him a second to realize he’d tried to leap off the table,
that the rope and his muscles were straining with the effort. God, he really hoped the beast might let him take over for a second while it killed Ingram. Just so he could have some little part in the process. The thought of Ardeth being at the mercy of some demon-thing made of corpse parts…of Ingram and Fallerstein standing there watching it attack her, offering it praise or something like they were training a dog…it was hard to focus on anything with those images in his head.
Ingram’s cool smile didn’t hide the flash of fear in his eyes. Nor did the condescending pat he gave Speare’s stomach. “Now, now. You won’t be here to see it. At least, not really.”
“Neither will you,” Speare managed to say. “It won’t happen. But I’m surprised you want to bring witnesses into this.”
Ingram shrugged. “Dead people don’t testify.”
“You don’t think she has people who’ll come after you?” Keeping the tension out of his voice was harder than he’d expected. Shit shit, he could not take the chance of Ardeth being there. For the first time a trickle of genuine fear made its way down his spine, fear that was not soothed at all by the beast’s chuckle. If they brought Ardeth in there…“You don’t think the LVMPD is going to have a problem with one of their own being slaughtered? You really ought to just get them out of here. Use a memory spell or something on them—if you can build a creature like you’re doing, that should be easy for you, right?”
“It would be, yes,” Ingram said. “But I think my plan is more fun.”
“The police—”
“Won’t prosecute someone who can have them torn limb from limb,” Ingram finished. “Besides, I thought I was about to die? You’re very inconsistent, Speare.”
Goddamn it. Goddamn it. There was nothing he could do, nothing. He couldn’t protect her, from Fallerstein and Ingram or from the beast. Worse than that, he’d probably endangered her even more, because despite the fact that Majowski was apparently there, too, he couldn’t help but blame himself. If he hadn’t gotten involved with her, if he hadn’t slept with her, Ingram might be willing to cast a memory spell and let her go. Probably not, but maybe. At least there might have been something to bargain with.
But as it was…no. The sadistic gleam in Ingram’s eyes made it very clear: It wasn’t just the idea of Speare’s death, Laz’s death, that pleased him so much. It was the idea of wounding Speare before he died, and Ingram knew—Speare knew he knew, and the beast could see he knew—that the blade of the demon-sword itself wasn’t as sharp or as painful as the idea of some ramshackle demon-thing from the depths of a hellish nightmare getting its hands on Ardeth.
Whatever last argument he might have made was interrupted by the sound of approaching footsteps, crisp and strong. Not Ardeth’s, though, and not Majowski’s. One man who smelled like evil and aftershave, and something else, another being that reeked of death and whose energy jangled in the air, so wrong Speare wanted to cringe away from it. Their monster was in the room, the patchwork creature they wanted his head to complete.
He didn’t want to look at it. The beast did want to look at it—a thing that still held life energy but smelled dead sounded pretty cool to it—and it started churning in Speare’s head so violently that he realized he’d be sick if he didn’t let it. His head turned.
God. It was grotesque. It lay on a wheeled table like his, its naked form invading his line of sight more and more with every foot that the table advanced. The different skin tones of its various limbs made it appear artificial, like an old doll with brand-new legs and arms to replace the ones broken by a careless child.
Arms and legs that didn’t match. Both legs were the same, but the arms, the whole of its body…One large, muscular right arm reached almost to the knees of those too-short legs, while the left arm was smaller, slimmer, with gray hair. That arm looked shriveled and unhappy next to the powerful barrel chest with its pale abdomen just beginning to slack. Thick black stitches held all the various parts together.
Worst of all, of course, was the empty space above the blood-edged stump of the neck. Speare didn’t want to look at it but couldn’t help it; even when the beast’s eyes were focused elsewhere he couldn’t help but see it peripherally, the way the throat just ended, the way the shoulders looked wrong with nothing above them.
The beast, of course, was enchanted. It wanted to get close to the thing, to touch it, maybe give it a lick and see if it tasted as unique as it looked. The thought made Speare want to be sick. Not quite as sick as the thought of that thing touching Ardeth, but almost as sick.
The other figure was Fallerstein. A very different Fallerstein from the one Speare knew, though. That man had been weaselly, mean. Small, in the way of men who were more ambitious than smart and who commanded loyalty not because they deserved it but because they bought it.
This was not that Fallerstein. Whatever he’d been doing—whatever he’d done to gain the kinds of powers he now had—it had changed him completely. The man Speare saw looked like Fallerstein but didn’t carry himself like him and sure as hell didn’t feel like him. This Fallerstein felt even darker and more twisted than the creature made of people scraps did. Which seemed impossible, but it was true. The creature was an empty shell; Fallerstein was full of the sorts of things that scuttled up walls in the dark.
In his hand he carried a demon-sword. Speare saw the sword as a blade made of glass, glimmering translucent like black light. A real demon-sword, created from pure evil solidified through magic. It could poison water if dipped in it, destroy crops if allowed to touch them, and it could consume or trap the soul inside a body, depending on the spells used.
The beast knew all of that, and which spells to use. In its view the sword was beautiful; it glowed with darkness and devastation that made what passed for the beast’s heart ache with love.
But which spells to use wasn’t the only thing it knew about the sword, he realized. It had information about it, how it was made and what it required. What it could do. Maybe how to destroy it, even. As gently as possible, he tried to probe those memories, tried to glean what he could from them before the beast realized what he was doing and shut him down.
Or before the ritual reached the point where his active participation was required, which was not that far away, judging by the expectant way Fallerstein’s goons started arranging themselves in a loose semicircle. Speare smiled at them. “Since you’re lining up anyway, you should go ahead and get in the order you want to die in.”
For the first time, Ingram looked irritated. “You really ought to stop it. You just look delusional, you know.”
“Maybe you should rethink the whole taking-my-head thing, then.”
“I’m tired of hearing you speak,” Ingram said. He tapped something into his phone—okay, there, at least, was one phone Speare could grab when it was all over—and put it back into his pocket. “You know, we can have our creature kill the woman quickly, or slowly. We can harm her first, if we want to. Perhaps we’ll let your mouth make the decision.”
Damn it, that threat was even more effective than it had been a few minutes before. Mostly because the words had barely faded into the air when Ardeth entered the room, followed by a couple of Fallerstein’s men. Majowski and a similar guard came immediately after. Those guys looked like vipers, and Speare had no doubt that they’d use the long, sharp knives they carried if Ingram told them to.
Ingram’s look of satisfaction was matched only by Speare’s desire to kill him. “Nothing to say? No smug little taunts for me? You sure? Because Erik over there really enjoys using his knife.”
Speare said nothing. He looked at Ardeth, trying to catch her eye to reassure her or something, but she didn’t look worried at all. In fact, her smile at him was almost cheerful, and when she turned slightly and lifted her elbows, he realized why. She was handcuffed. Of course. Did they think they could keep her cuffed, really?
Apparently they did. Ingram glanced at her, nodded, and turned back to Speare. “That’s better. Let’s get started,
then.”
Fallerstein started marking a circle on the floor, chanting as he went. The words weren’t familiar to Speare but they were to the beast; its glee rose to such a level that Speare couldn’t help feeling it, too. It was hard not to laugh. Even thinking of Erik the knife guy practicing his fileting skills on Ardeth didn’t help, because that idea didn’t dull the beast’s delight one bit.
In fact, the beast was quite pleased that she was in the room, and it wanted him to know how pleased it was. The images it sent him were explicit. Very explicit. Shutting it out had been the right thing to do and he didn’t regret it, but he hadn’t anticipated just how pissed off it would be, or that it would be willing to delay its journey back through the mirror in order to spend a few minutes with her. Which it definitely planned to do. Fuck.
It was so full of cheer that it hardly noticed when two of Fallerstein’s goons approached him, each holding a set of handcuffs, with which they attached his wrists to the table on either side of him. Not what he’d expected, but still not a big deal. The beast would be able to break out of those.
Or not. Pain erupted in his wrists the second the metal touched his skin, a deep, burning pain—the beast’s pain. Those weren’t just any handcuffs. They’d been bespelled, or blessed, or something; probably not blessed, because using a religious item to bind a person while performing a dark rite on them might not work out too well, but something had certainly been done to them. It was agonizing.
And it was something to worry about. If those cuffs hurt the beast that much, it might not be able to break out of them. And God or the devil only knew what Fallerstein and Ingram might do if they realized they had a human-embodied demon right there already, no ritual required.
Fallerstein’s circle snapped into place. Speare felt it. The beast felt it. Its fury rose higher. The power in the room, the power in the circle now being fed by that low chant, felt like an insult to it; the images in its head, pictures of blood and body parts, weren’t as reassuring as they might have been if they hadn’t been accompanied by that torturous pain. The beast felt trapped, more trapped than it ever had, and the tiny sense of hopelessness starting to build inside it was terrifying.
