Chills (24 page)

He looked disoriented for a minute, and then, taking in the cleaners and the Blue People, he bowed his head in awed reverence, and turned to Kathy and Teagan.

Kathy realized what the Blue People had done. Neither they nor the cleaners could access Kathy or Teagan as long as they were in the circle. The monsters had tried to lure them out, to make them angry or scared, to play on their senses of loyalty, guilt, and sympathy, and none of that had worked. If they couldn't draw Kathy or Teagan out, then they would have to send someone in.

The cultist strode purposefully over to them and reached into the circle. Teagan pointed his gun at the man's head. The man regarded the gun with a patient look before suddenly yanking Kathy over the border. She cried out as her toes skidded over the circle, smearing the chalk and oil. Her heart sank. Nothing would protect them now.

“Stop right fucking there,” Teagan said. “I swear to God, I will shoot you dead where you stand. Get your hands off her.”

The man let Kathy go, holding up his hands palms up in a gesture of acquiescence. But he was smiling. The damage had already been done.

Teagan hadn't fully understood what the man had done until he looked down at Kathy's feet. Then the light dawned in his eyes. With a kind of resignation, he took a step voluntarily out of the circle.

“No, don't!” She cried out, but it was too late.

“I'm not leaving you out here alone,” he told her.

Then the cultist punched him. Teagan shook it off, touching the corner of his mouth. His fingers came away with blood on them. He chuckled sardonically and said to the man, “Bring it, arsehole.”

The man swung again, and this time Teagan dodged out of the way. His return swing hit the cultist squarely on the jaw and sent him stumbling backward. The cleaners caught him in their tendrils. He looked triumphant for a moment, and then scared, and then in pain as the tendrils yanked off first one arm, then the other, then his head and legs. The tendrils didn't stop there, though. They tossed the body parts in the air, and the ice sheaths covering them grew stiff and sharp. The tendrils lashed wildly, slicing the icy body parts to shreds before they hit the floor with a messy, pulpy
plop
. Kathy felt her gorge rise and fought to keep down the bile.

Having served his purpose to them, the creatures no longer needed the cultist.

One of the tendrils snaked its way over to Teagan. She cried out to warn him, but it was around his ankle, yanking him off his feet. He fell with a thud, and the tendril lashed him across the face, drawing blood on his cheek.

Kathy lit the kitchen lighter and rushed the thing, thrusting the fire under the nearest tendril. It jerked back in pain, forming first a face twisted in anger and then a hand that it clamped down on her bad wrist. A liquid cold formed a band of pain over her injury so intense that she dropped the lighter. The tendril let go and immediately smacked her in the face, knocking her off her feet.

The cleaner surged forward over her, forming a montage of angry faces in bas-relief. She reached blindly for the lighter; she thought it was somewhere nearby. Another tendril dropped like a sewing needle, spearing her in the side, filling her with that crippling, acid-etching cold, and Kathy groaned, feeling more frantically for the lighter. Her fingers closed around it and she gratefully pulled it toward her as another tendril injected its frozen agony into her shoulder. She could feel the cold slowly spreading outward from each of the wounds, and felt sure that it would begin killing tissue and then organs if she couldn't banish these creatures quickly.

Nearby, Teagan was struggling with tentacles looking to spear him in the chest. He was holding his own, but his grip on the whips of darkness was awkward and weakening.

She had to stop this. With effort, she crab-crawled backward toward the circle, and the amorphous shadow above her kept pace, readying for another attack. Kathy felt around the circle again, and gave a little victory cry when she found what she was looking for.

With the lighter, she set fire to the little door.

From the corners of the room where the Blue People had been directing the cleaners, their mouths opened as one and the light in those cavernous throats became so bright it hurt her head and chest as well as her eyes. A thunderous roar issued forth like a storm wind through a cave, and as the light got brighter, the sound rose in pitch until it was a wail, then a scream, then a shriek as bright and painful as the light.

The cleaners flickered and roared, their tendrils waving wildly, snapping at the air above and around them with tiny blue electric sparks.

She heard Teagan's voice. He had left behind the cleaner that had been attacking him, its own tendrils speared through a solid part of its otherwise amorphous mass. Teagan had made it over to the papers while she had been fighting off her own cleaner, and he had begun reading the incantation again, his voice steady and clear, all his sanity and sense of self control hanging from that single thread of focus.

They were close. The hold the winter had over Colby was finally weakening.

The Blue People advanced on her as one, and she lit another part of the door to make it burn faster. From the reaction of the creatures, it was as if she had set fire to them . . . which, she decided, wasn't a bad idea.

She touched the lighter to the hem of the robe closest to her and was delighted to see it blaze up. The creatures screamed as if she had set fire to the lot of them, and the light from their throats was blinding. She shielded her eyes but it did little good, so she started swiping blindly in wide arcs with the lighter. The light surrounded her, swallowed her whole. For several long seconds, the light and their screams were all that existed. They filled her body and soul, inside and out.

There was a flash of light so bright she could practically see it through her eyelids.

Then it was gone. The screams, the light, the cold—all of it was gone.

She opened her eyes. The cold in her wounds was receding slowly, and although she was bleeding, she saw the wounds weren't too deep. She looked up. Teagan was in the same place on the floor, breathing heavily and clutching the papers, looking visibly relieved. He smiled broadly at her when he caught her eye. She smiled back, then slowly surveyed the room. The ice and snow were mostly gone, and the temperature, though still cold, was rising. The creature they had killed was gone, the cleaners were gone . . . and the Blue People were gone, too. The little door she had burned had been reduced to a tiny splinter and a pile of ash.

“Did we get them, love? Is it over?”

“I think it is,” she told him, still amazed. “I think we did it.”

She stood on shaky legs, helped Teagan up, then made her way over to the window. It was still the blue of early morning, but she could see well enough to notice that, outside, the snow was already melting. She could see the icicles dripping from the eaves of the roofs across the street, and the snow drifts looked, at least to her, significantly smaller than they had the night before. Teagan's car tires were visible now, as were the tops of some of the mailboxes.

The snow was melting. Winter was finally leaving Colby.

* * *

While Kathy and Teagan were fighting cleaners outside the circle of protection, Jack was watching the pit at the center of the cultist's ice altar and hoping to his own God that wherever Kathy and Teagan were, they could stop anything from coming up through it.

It was no longer completely dark down there; there was a faint greenish light now, and although it didn't even begin to illuminate the bottom, Jack could see gray tentacles climbing upward. They were hideous things that made Jack's stomach turn—hell, they made his
soul
turn. He could see black orbs full of intelligence and malicious intent swimming in the substance of what passed for flesh. Mouths with rows of shark-like teeth moved freely, too, gaping to reveal impossibly deep throats, deep as the pit from which they were rising.

Within minutes, they were close enough for the tips of the tentacles to snap at the stones within feet of him, and he could finally see with some clarity what those tentacles were attached to.

“Oh my God,” he breathed.

The Old Gods were coming.

He didn't have to look up to know that Morris had seen them, too; he was firm in directing Katie to shield the children's eyes, and his efforts at breaking the lock were renewed with vigor.

Cordwell continued to laugh, the frenzy of a madman's soul. The children were frantic. Katie was crying. Jack turned to Morris.

“Get out of the way,” he said, and Morris did. Jack aimed, focusing all of himself into making this one shot count, and fired at the lock. It broke, and the door fell open, throwing off their balance, and the cage swung. Katie cried out and the children clung to the sides, but Morris threw himself into the momentum of it.

“Okay, when I tell you, jump, okay?”

“We can't!” Carly said.

“You have to!” Morris told them. “You'll be fine. Your daddy'll be there when you land, okay? I need you to be brave.”

“Come one, baby, do this for me,” Katie sniffled through her tears.

“I'm right here,” Jack called up to them. “You can do this. I'm right here.”

“They're going to die,” Cordwell said. He had pulled himself up to a standing position using cracks in the altar, and now he peered over the side. “It's too late for them, and for you. They're here. They're here!” He raised his arms in triumph, and in that moment, all the fatigue and anger Jack felt overwhelmed him. He lunged at Cordwell and pushed him over the side.

Seeming unsurprised, the coroner laughed madly as he fell. That is, until the tentacles found him. They greedily grabbed at his body, simultaneously tearing it apart and sucking out the warmth and life of each part. He stopped laughing then and started screeching, until there was nothing left of him to make noise. The creatures, though, had raised an incredible din. It sounded to Jack like wind and thunder, and it was growing louder.

Morris, meanwhile, distracted the children by swinging the cage and counting.

“One!” he shouted, and the cage swung back. Then it swung over and past the pit again.

“Two!” The cage returned like a pendulum, then swung out again. Beneath them, the storm sounds raged on.

“Three!” Morris shouted, and as it swung back, he instructed them to jump on the next outswing.

“Jump!”

Jack Jr. jumped. Jack's heart clenched in his chest while his boy was in the air and didn't relax until Jack Jr. had safely cleared the pit and landed on the stone floor on the other side.

On the next swing, Morris yelled for Carly to jump, and she did. Jack's heart leaped with her, and he breathed a sigh of relief when she landed safely next to her brother.

When Katie jumped, a tentacle reached up and grabbed her ankle. It snatched her from the air and yanked her down. He could hear her screaming over the cacophony from the pit. It cut right through Jack, and the terrified cries of the children broke his heart. They knew, even without having seen, that those things were killing their mother. Jack ran to them and held them, burying their faces in his chest, hoping to shield them from as much of the scene as possible.

When her screams died down, Jack looked up at Morris, who was still swinging, somewhat uncertainly, over the pit. A spatter of Katie's blood dripped off the underside of the cage. Beneath Morris, the pit roared. His gaze was fixed on the waving tips of tendrils that were just starting to grasp the rim of the altar. He increased the momentum of the swinging cage again, took a deep breath, and when the cage had cleared the pit, he jumped, too.

Jack held his breath and prayed.

Morris landed in a less-than-graceful, jumbled heap by Jack and the kids, rolled over with a groan, and sat up. Jack beamed at him, and he grinned back. He looked touched by Jack's relief.

The relief was short-lived, though. The tentacles were reaching wide now, and one of them was hauling something over the edge of the altar. The sounds the creatures made were deafening.

Jack told his kids to run, but they remained frozen in shock and fear. He reloaded and aimed at the thing coming out of the pit, both he and Morris firing all the bullets in their guns. Some passed through the flesh of the thing, and others simply bounced off. The children screamed, and Jack pulled them close in a quick hug before commanding them to run. This time, they moved, spurred by the authority of his voice, but paused in the doorway.

“This is it,” Morris told Jack. His voice was calm, his face serene. Morris knew none of them would get far. They probably wouldn't even make it out of that subterranean cavern. But Jack was determined to get his kids as far from there as he could before the inevitable caught up to them. Those things would have to work at killing them.

“Don't look,” he shouted to the children, clutching his empty gun tighter as he and Morris backed toward the door. “Don't look! Just run, for God's sake! Run now!”

He watched the terrible bulk of the first of the Old Gods in this world emerge from the center of the altar. Then he turned away. He had spent so much of his professional life facing the ugly things, staring them down. He thought he'd earned the right to turn away. He looked at his kids instead. He and Morris, they could stay and fight, slow it down, maybe give the kids a head start....

There was a single breath of cold on his cheek and a lingering reek of dead fishy things, and then . . . silence. From the doorway, the kids' eyes were wide as they stared beyond him.

Jack turned back to the altar.

The tentacles, and the hideous bulks from which they sprouted, were gone. Jack looked around. There was no sign of them—no sound, no smell, no evidence whatsoever that they had even been there.