Harmony Black (15 page)

Jessie whistled. “Because we needed more complications.”

“It’s geographical,” I said, snapping my fingers. “The math is different because the places they were
put
is different. The balls aren’t made to target the victims—they’re made to target the
houses
. Like a landing beacon for an airplane.”

“My thought exactly,” April said. “It doesn’t bring us any closer to finding their creator, but the knowledge could prove useful.”

I checked my watch. “While we’re out, can you two dig up anything you can find on Mitchum Kite’s background? We need to get going.”

“Got a few hours yet,” Jessie said.

“We have to stop at the grocery store on the way, to pick up a few things. I’ve got an idea.”

TWENTY-FOUR

T
hey’d built the route to the paper mill wide, to accommodate logging trucks, but years of disuse had seen the forest slowly creep back to reclaim its own. We rumbled along the desolate road with nothing but the wind and distant birdsong to keep us company.

Then the birdsong stopped.

As we rounded a bend and hugged the shoreline, barely ten yards from a beach of dirty sand and jagged rock, the old mill rose up before us. The great waterwheel still stood on one side of the cavernous factory, chained fast against the currents and broken down under the powers of time and tide.

Given enough time,
my mother once told me, as we sat cross-legged on the rocky shore behind her house,
a trickle of water can carve the Grand Canyon. Fire burns fast, and dies just as quickly. Given enough time, water always wins.

The parking lot stood cracked and broken, the white lines faded to ghostly blotches of paint. I pulled the car up to the big double doors out front, stopping in front of a battered sign that read,
EMPLYE OF TH MONTH
.

“Don’t you want to hide the car?” Jessie asked.

“Nah. Let ’em know we’re here.”

“All right,” she said, getting out and walking around to the trunk. She came back with a pair of bolt cutters. “Now we’re having
fun
.”

Thick chains wrapped around the door handles, right next to a bright-orange
P
ROPERTY
C
ONDEMNED BY
C
OUNTY
O
RDER
sticker, but the bolt cutters popped the padlock clamp like it was made of plastic. We unfurled the chains and let ourselves in.

Sunlight streamed down, stretching its fingers through broken skylights and spots here and there, where the ceiling had caved in. Pigeons roosted up in tangles of naked rebar, a good fifty feet above our heads, and their droppings spattered the waterlogged concrete floor. The dusty air smelled like dank mildew.

When the plant shut down, the Kites must have sold off everything for salvage and scrap. Empty bays with concrete frames lined the walls, with rusted pipes and disconnected fixtures jutting from the unpainted rock. A supervisor’s office overlooked the factory floor from twenty feet up, but even the staircase to get there was gone; only a few bolt holes remained to show where it once stood.

“Well,” Jessie said, “if we’re ever in need of some creepy-ass waterfront property, I know where we can get a good deal.”

At the far end of the building, a broad staircase next to a smooth loading ramp dipped down into darkness. Storage space, I figured. Someplace to keep the paper pallets dry and cool. All the same, I wasn’t in a hurry to go down there. I walked back out to the car for the groceries I’d picked up. Nothing too extravagant, just a canister of sea salt and a few dried herbs from the cooking aisle, plus a plastic bag to mix it all together. That and four white pillar candles made from beeswax.

Jessie stood guard as I did my work. By the time I was done preparing for Mitchum’s arrival, the sun was sinking fast and those fingers of light pushing though the tattered roof had turned crooked and gray. Night wasn’t far away. We didn’t have long to wait.

We heard Mitchum’s BMW pull up outside. Then a long, long pause before the car door slammed. He was either deciding whether or not to risk coming inside, or calling for backup. Maybe both.

The double doors squealed as he pulled them open, striding into the factory twilight. Jessie and I stood side by side in the heart of the room, waiting for him in a ring of candles. They marked the cardinal points of a five-foot concentric circle, drawn with herbs and salt, anointed by my craft. We stood inside its bounds, the inner ring adorned with carefully laid glyphs drawn from memory.

“You shouldn’t have come here,” was all he had to say. He didn’t look nervous.

“And you shouldn’t have tried to kill us,” Jessie said, pulling her Glock. “Wanna guess which decision was the worse one?”

“Oh,” Mitchum said, “I’m thinking yours was.”

He put his fingers to his lips and whistled. Nyx answered.

The demoness plunged through a hole in the roof, streaking down like a comet of blue fire. The factory floor shuddered when she slammed down, landing in a crouch, her cloven hooves driving half an inch into the concrete and scorching it black. She slowly rose to her full height—at least seven feet—and her tail whipped the air as she turned her molten-copper gaze upon us. Her chitin gleamed, covering her body like the armor of some hell-bound knight.

“There they are,” Mitchum said, pointing at us. “Kill them! What are you waiting for?”

“Khlegota aham-ahaz t’nala,”
she hissed. The words sounded like they came from two tongues at once, squirming wetly against each other, and a wave of nausea washed over me.

“I don’t understand,” Mitchum said. “Speak English, damn it.”

Nyx spun and grabbed the collar of Mitchum’s shirt, hauling him close. When she spoke next, her words came out in sonorous, perfect English, dripping with ice and hatred.

“Watch your mouth.”

She shoved him, sending him sprawling to the floor. While he sputtered and grabbed at his shirt—the fabric singed and torn by her claws—Nyx strode toward us.

Jessie shot a nervous glance at the circle of salt. “You’re good at this, right? Because now is not the time to find out you flunked out of witch school. And if the plan was for me to wrestle that thing, I’d have appreciated a heads-up.”

“Relax,” I murmured. I stood at the circle’s edge. Nyx walked around the outer ring, sniffing the air, probing, testing, then came face-to-face with me.

I stood my ground.

She lashed out her fist, fast as a rattlesnake’s bite, straight for my face. The air rippled with a sound like thunder, and her claws bounced off the invisible barrier between us.

I didn’t flinch. She let out what might have been a faint, raspy chuckle.

“Trapped yourself,” she said. “Can’t come in. You can’t come out.”

“Nope,” I said. “He’s the one who’s trapped.”

Behind Nyx, Mitchum pushed himself to his feet and straightened his shirt, trying to regain his lost dignity.

“How am
I
trapped?” he asked, wearing an ugly smirk.

Jessie leveled her pistol at him. “Because my partner here? She can banish Tall, Dark, and Spooky from
inside
this little circle.”

“That’s right,” I said to Nyx. “You can leave the factory, or I can blast you straight back to hell. Your call, but you
are
leaving.”

“Which leaves you alone with us,” Jessie said, keeping Mitchum in her sights, “and unless you can outrun a bullet, you’ll never reach the door before I take you down. Better start talking.”

“You—you can’t shoot me in the back,” Mitchum said, “and I’m unarmed!”

“You can’t imagine how little I care,” Jessie said.

I shrugged. “She really doesn’t. And I’m not inclined to stop her tonight.”

“Do you know who this one is?” Nyx asked me. It took me a second to realize what she was asking. She seemed to have a weird aversion to the word
I
.

“Sure. We had a chat with Fontaine. I understand you’re both after the same thing. So are we.”

Nyx held up a single claw. She reached out and dragged it along the barrier between us, slow and sinuous, as if tracing the flesh of my cheek. Tiny sparks of errant magic erupted in her talon’s wake and screeched like nails on a blackboard, turning amber and black as they drifted to the floor and faded.

“Why do you refuse your gift?” she asked.

“What gift?”

Nyx nodded toward Jessie. “She understands the blessing of wrath. Embraces it. She spread her legs for the King of Wolves and drank his filth.”

In the corner of my eye, I saw Jessie’s mouth twitch. The gun wavered in her hand.

“Go fuck yourself,” she snapped. “You don’t know anything about me.”

Nyx laughed. It sounded like barbed wire rasping across a sheet of sandpaper.

“Was complimenting you, pup. You have been blessed by the power of this one’s choir.” She turned her copper eyes back toward me. “But you? This one can taste your pain. A trail of sorrow and regret at your back like an oil slick. Could be your greatest weapon, but you fear losing control.”

“Seriously,” Jessie said. “Enough with the fortune-cookie bullshit. Harmony, you wanna get this banishment under way already?”

“You could forge your pain into a sword,” Nyx said, “and persecute your enemies. Triumph. Survive. But fear imprisons you. Fear of breaking
rules
. Fear of what people will
think
of you. Petty little fears.”

Nyx inched closer to the circle’s edge. The air blurred as she pressed her face to the magic barrier, inches from mine. When she spoke again, it was in a pitch-perfect parody of my own voice.

“This one feels . . . so sorry for you,” she said.

I thought back to what Fontaine had told us. “I’m not the only one who believes in rules. That’s the whole point of the Chainmen, right? You enforce hell’s laws.”

“It is so. We hold the line against chaos.”

“Well,” I said, “so do we. There are two missing children out there, somewhere, and we’re going to bring them home to their families. That’s
our
job. Nobody is going to stop us. Not Fontaine, not Mitchum, and not you.”

“Why are you even
talking
to them?” Mitchum demanded. “
Do
something.”

I glanced between Nyx and Mitchum. “Now, we intend to interrogate this man, because he has information we need. You can leave willingly, or I can cast you out. I think one choice is a lot less painful than the other, but I’ll let you decide. Call it professional courtesy.”

Mitchum fumed, pacing. “This is ridiculous. I don’t know what we even hired you for. Just kill these two bitches, and let’s
go
already.”

Nyx held up one claw, giving me an oddly apologetic look. “Moment, please.”

She turned, took two quick strides toward Mitchum, and ripped his throat out.

It all happened in a blur: just a whip-fast flash of her claws and then the mayor fell, clutching his throat, rivulets of blood flowing between his fingers like a river gushing through a broken dam. He looked as shocked as I felt. He twitched on the floor, flopping like a fish on dry land while he painted the concrete crimson.

Nyx turned without missing a beat, casually strolling back to the circle’s edge. “You were saying?”

I wasn’t saying anything. I just watched as the mayor gave one last wheezing rattle and died, his wide eyes fixed on the broken skylights.

“You didn’t . . . ” Jessie said haltingly. “You didn’t have to
do
that.”

Nyx shrugged. “You were right. It was a good trap. You could make this one leave, and he would have broken under questioning. Only solution: remove him. Also, he was insolent. Was already thinking about killing him anyway.”

“You’re that desperate to keep us from finding the Bogeyman’s master?” I said.

“To keep you from getting there
first
. This one was trained well, in the House of Dead Roses: the prize for first place is a bounty. The prize for second place is suffering and shame. Besides, it is in your best interests to step aside.”

“Yeah?” I said. “Why’s that?”

“Because you cannot punish him like this one can.”

“I can’t argue that, but it isn’t the point. This isn’t about punishment. It’s about justice, and saving those kids.”

Nyx studied her bloody nails, like they were more interesting than anything I had to say.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Am I boring you?”

“Just thinking, almost want you to find him. Want to see the look on your face when you realize . . . hmm. Funny. Maybe you’d let the anger out, then. A chance for enlightenment. Ready to answer your question now.”

“My question?”

Nyx turned her back on us, her tail snapping at my face.

“This one leaves under her own power,” she said as she walked away. “No banishment necessary.”

TWENTY-FIVE

“
So,” Jessie breathed, “that just happened.”

Nyx was long gone. So was the sun, plunging the gloomy mill into darkness. We stood in the light of the four pillar candles, still protected by the circle of herbs and salt. In the shadows, Mitchum Kite’s corpse was a mangled lump on the concrete floor, slowly cooling.

“She killed him,” I said. “She actually killed the man who hired her just to keep us from talking to him. You’d think there’d be a rule against that.”

Jessie holstered her pistol. She touched my sleeve.

“Wait a second.
Did
she? Remember what he said before she took him out: I don’t know what
we
hired you for. Mitchum might have been in on the deal, but she made it pretty clear she didn’t answer to him.”

“Somebody else hired her,” I said. “Somebody knows the answers we’re looking for. Somebody connected to Mitchum Kite. And unless Nyx feels like volunteering the information, they
don’t
know that Mitchum is dead.”

“Unless we call it in,” Jessie said, eyeing the corpse.

It wasn’t even a debate. It should have been, but I ran the numbers in my head, and the math wasn’t hard. Mitchum’s next of kin, whoever they were, would wait to get the bad news. Keeping his murder under wraps could give us an edge, and we needed every edge we could get.

I hated this. All my training, all my experience, screamed that leaving a murder victim to rot in an abandoned factory was as far from good police work as I could get.
Still,
I thought,
it’s not like anybody in this world can bring his killer to justice. Anybody besides us.

“We’re not calling it in,” I said.

Special circumstances.

“So,” Jessie said, “what now?”

“Now’s the hard part.” I looked down at the circle of salt. “How bad do you think Nyx wanted to kill us?”

“Not sure. Felt like she was laughing at us more than anything. Why?”

I pointed at the barrier.

“Because,” I said, “to leave, we have to step outside the circle. Which means, if she doubled back and she’s hiding somewhere in the dark . . . ”

“Hmm. Yeah. May have been a tiny flaw in your brilliant plan.”

“Well, I
thought
I was going to end up banishing her.”

No point wasting time. Either she was lurking or she wasn’t. I took a deep breath, pushed my shoulders back, and stepped over the line of salt.

Nothing. Nothing but a cool night breeze whistling through the broken skylights.

“I’m not going to say it,” Jessie told me.

I stepped all the way outside the circle. Jessie joined me, hesitant.

“Say what?”

“I’ve seen enough horror movies to know how this goes down,” she said. “If I say, ‘I think she’s gone,’ that’s gonna be her cue to jump out of nowhere and eat our faces. So don’t say that.”

“You . . . just did.”

“Oh.” Jessie shrugged. “I think she’s gone, then.”

I’ll admit it, I flinched.

We didn’t discover Nyx’s parting gift until we stepped outside. She’d shredded all four of the Crown Vic’s tires, nothing left but scraps of torn rubber clinging to bent rims. The mayor’s BMW got the same treatment.

“Technically,” Jessie said, “she did us a favor.”

I couldn’t argue that. We called April and Kevin, told them to rent a car and meet us at the mill. First they had to call a taxi, then they had to take the cab to the only rental place that was still open, at a small airport fifteen miles away.

We waited, in the middle of nowhere.

Jessie walked the lot, doing stretching exercises, kicking the occasional stray rock. Some people are good at sitting still and doing nothing. Jessie wasn’t one of them.

“You all right?” I asked as she walked by me on her fifth lap of the lot.

“Huh? Yeah, sure, why?”

“What Nyx said back there, about your ‘gift.’” I jerked my thumb toward the mill’s front doors. “Sounded like she hit a sore spot.”

Jessie’s lip curled. “Nobody talks shit like demons. All that creepy woo-woo ‘I glimpse the shadows of your soul and call to your darkness’ garbage. Seriously, you ever read the lyrics to a Dio album? Exact same stuff, but at least Dio put some good guitar licks behind it.”

She stopped a few feet away, her back turned to me. She picked up a rock, weighed it in her hand, and gave it a throw. It skipped across the parking lot and out of sight.

“What my dad did, that’s got nothing to do with who I am inside.” Her voice went a little lower, a little harder. “And I don’t spread my legs for the king of anything. Best
believe
that.”

Headlights flashed in the distance, glowing against a copse of trees.

“Either the mobile cavalry is here,” Jessie said, suddenly flippant again, “or Nyx stole a car and she’s coming back to eat our faces.”

Fortunately, it was the first option. Kevin and April drove up in a chocolate-colored Hyundai SUV with an Avis bumper sticker. Kevin rolled down the driver’s-side window.

“Need a lift?”

We climbed into the backseat. Jessie reached up and rubbed Kevin’s shoulder.

“My hero. I could kiss you, if I was desperate and blind drunk.”

“Love you, too, boss,” he said. “Get anything out of the mayor?”

“Unfortunately,” Jessie said, “he caught a terminal case of death. Nyx wanted to shut him up.”

“What do we know about Mitchum Kite?” I asked. “Spouse? Kids? He wasn’t the only person who hired Nyx. Her other backer, or backers, has to be somebody close to him.”

“Practically a hermit,” April said. “No children, never been married. Four brothers, two sisters, most of whom have moved away from Talbot Cove.”

“No relationships and no real friends outside his coworkers,” Kevin added. “And I get the impression even they don’t—I mean, didn’t—like the guy very much.”

I buckled my seat belt as Kevin swung the SUV around in the parking lot.

“Good,” Jessie said. “Then since nobody knows he’s dead, nobody’s going to be watching his house.”

S
pecial circumstances,
I thought, standing in the driveway of Mitchum Kite’s house.
These lines just keep getting easier to cross.

“Tell me you’re not going to ask for a warrant,” Jessie said, standing beside me. We’d left Kevin and April back at the motel and taken the SUV.

“There is nothing in the world we could say to a judge to justify a search warrant,” I said, “besides the truth, and that’s the one thing we can’t reveal.”

“Now you’re getting it.”

“Doesn’t mean I have to like it,” I said.

Jessie handed me a pair of disposable latex gloves, then slipped on a pair of her own.

“Nope, sure doesn’t,” she said. “Now let’s break into a dead guy’s house.”

The Kite family home was a two-story colonial with a gabled rooftop and a pristine, manicured lawn. It lorded over a cul-de-sac in the nice part of town, where the sidewalks were lit with modern “old-timey” street lamps and everybody was tucked in bed by ten.

“Yep, it’s the original family home,” Kevin said over the phone. I could hear his fingers rattling like a hailstorm against his keyboard. “I cracked into the municipality database, gonna see if they’ve got the original blueprints on file. Their password, for the record, was ‘password.’ I can’t even feel proud of myself.”

We circled the house, keeping low, our footsteps muffled by the drone of crickets.

“Okay,” Kevin said, “want some weird? Here’s some weird. We’ve got only partial blueprints, scanned in from the originals. I’m showing first-floor access to a pretty good-size cellar. The cellar itself? Not shown. Probably wanna check that out.”

“The cellar,” I said. “Great. Because nothing bad ever happens in the cellars of creepy old houses.”

A brick patio with a barbecue grill stood in the backyard. Given how spotless the grill was, I figured it had never been used. Jessie crept up to a window and clicked on a penlight, casting a narrow, shimmering beam through the empty house. She carefully checked along the windowsill, then the back door a few feet away.

“Caught a break,” she said. “No alarm system. Gotta love small towns.”

“Doesn’t get us inside.”

“Oh, ye of little faith.” She handed me the penlight. “Here, hold this steady and watch as I make my own kind of magic.”

She crouched at the door and pulled a small black plastic case from her jacket pocket. The clamshell opened to reveal a row of stainless-steel picks.

“It beats using a battering ram,” she said, picking out a thin, bent rake and a stout probe, going to work on the lock. “More importantly, we do this right, nobody will know we were ever here. Don’t need to leave
more
unsolvable crimes to clutter up Sheriff Barry’s case files.”

At that moment, I didn’t much care about Barry or his files, but she had a point. The more silently we operated, the less of a mess we’d leave for the civilians to clean up after we finally left town. As it was, the mayor’s death would go down as a permanently unsolved mystery.

The tumblers clicked and rolled over for Jessie like a well-trained dog. We let ourselves in.

Jessie cupped her hands to her mouth and called out, “Hello? Sheriff’s office. Identify yourself.”

The house sat silent and still. Jessie looked back at me and shrugged. “Better safe than sorry.”

We turned on a few lights, just enough to work by; it wasn’t like anyone was going to come home and catch us. The late Mayor Kite had a flair for the spartan, furnishing his rooms with the bare minimum to get by and doing most of his shopping at antique stores: a Victorian end table here, an art deco lamp with a stained-glass hood there. Old, expensive-looking dinnerware stocked his kitchen cupboards, but the trash was heavy with fast-food takeout bags and paper plates and cups, like Mitchum had been afraid to use any of it.

I felt a lingering unease, growing as we poked around in the dead man’s house. I wanted to chalk it up to the fact that we were committing a burglary, but that wasn’t the reason. There was something unhealthy about the Kite home.

No,
I thought,
that’s just it. It’s a house, but it isn’t a home. It feels like a museum, a set piece, a stage for a play.

We drifted through a living room with a spotless plush sofa and a single end table with a lamp, positioned to face an empty, blank wall.

“Nobody
lives
here,” Jessie murmured, echoing my thoughts. “It’s like a Charles Dickens orphanage collided with a furniture-store showroom.”

Homes mold themselves around the rhythm of their owners’ lives. Sloppiness and clutter happens, dust settles in hard-to-reach places. People leave things out on tables, intending to put them away later and never quite getting around to it. Not here. The Kite house could have passed a white-glove test from top to bottom, spotless and cold as a mortician’s slab.

Un-lived in,
I thought.

Unloved.

“Okay,” Jessie said, standing in the threshold of Mitchum Kite’s bedroom. “Now,
that
is creepy.”

Stark white sheets and a single thin pillow lay upon the mayor’s antique four-poster bed. On the opposite wall, centered perfectly, hung the first piece of artwork we’d seen in the entire house: an oil painting of a tall, balding man, staring down in furious condemnation.

J
EREMIAH
K
ITE
, read the brass nameplate at the bottom of the frame.
O
UR
P
ATRIARCH
.

“This guy didn’t just have issues,” Jessie murmured. “He had multiple
subscriptions
.”

What drew my eye was the closet door. Well, not the door itself, but the little addition, bolted onto the frame with newer hardware than anything else in the house.

“Jessie,” I said, “why is there a dead bolt on his closet door?”