Harmony Black (17 page)

TWENTY-EIGHT

S
udden, jarring darkness. My head rested on a pillow of cold stone. I jerked upright, eyes slowly adjusting to the cellar dark, then doubled over as my muscles clenched and the cramps set in. It felt like a snake made of fire, squirming in my guts.

“What . . . what just happened here?” Jessie murmured, coming to on the floor beside me. “Hey, are you okay?”

I bobbed my head, keeping my eyes squeezed shut and focusing on my breathing.

“We call it the family curse,” I said, my voice tight and breathless. “I use my body as a conduit for the magic. More power I draw, the more I pay for it afterward. Just . . . just pulled a
lot
of power. It’ll pass.”

Her hand closed on my shoulder, rubbing in slow circles. Her eyes glowed faintly in the gloom, darting from side to side, checking every corner of the room. She’d pulled back her jacket, her free hand resting on the grip of her pistol.

“What the hell
was
that? And is there any chance it’s coming back for another shot at us?”

“It’s gone,” I said. “I’d say it’s dead, but it was never really alive in the first place, not in a way we’d understand. Psychic parasite, sort of a brain-eating guard dog. I’ve read about them. Never seen one in the flesh, though. The amount of power it takes to conjure one of those things up . . . we’re not talking bush league here.”

Jessie pushed herself up and clicked on her penlight.

“Well, now we know what Mitchum was keeping watch over.”

I laughed. Just a little. It hurt.

“Joke’s on him. These things stay where they’re put. He could have left the basement door unlocked and wide open. It never would have tried to leave. Real question is, why was it here?”

Jessie turned in a slow circle, strobing the penlight off the stone walls. “You mean, why did someone set an occult guard dog to watch over a totally empty basement?”

“Exactly.”

“I’ve got a theory on that,” she said. “Stand back. I’m about to do some science.”

She walked over to the shelving unit and began clearing the shelves. Carefully at first, picking up the old, rusted junk and setting it off to one side, but then impatience got the better of her and she just started sweeping the clutter to the floor. She leaned in, rapping her knuckles against the backs of the shelves. They sounded solid.

The cramps ebbed away, leaving me with a vague, dull ache in my abdomen. I got up and stumbled over to join her. Jessie ran the beam from her penlight up and down one side of the shelves, then the other, studying where they met the wall.

“Ha,” she said. “Hinges. Give me a hand.”

We took hold of the far end of the shelf and pulled. The old, heavy wood groaned as we dragged it back, scraping along the concrete. I stepped back and dusted my hands off, looking at what we’d uncovered: a door, set flush into the wall. Instead of a doorknob, it sported a flat brass disk with five shallow finger holes to grip and turn.

I reached for the disk, but Jessie held her arm out, blocking me. “Whoa. Hold up a second.”

She crouched down, squinting as she shone her light into the holes, one at a time.

“There’s a needle at the back of the pinkie hole,” she said. “Probably smeared with something nasty. A little fatal poison, you know, just in case somebody got past the invisible nightmare monster.”

“There’s a dividing line between security conscious and full-blown paranoid. Whatever’s hidden behind this door, the owner wanted to
keep
it hidden.”

“Yeah, well,” Jessie said, slipping her fingers into the holes—keeping her little finger clear—and giving it a turn, “let’s just hope it’s not
another
monster.”

The door yawned inward. I tasted stagnant air, the odor of rot curdling in the back of my nose. Nobody had been down here in a long, long time. Jessie whistled as she drew the beam of light across the room, taking it all in.

I knew a sorcerer’s workshop when I saw one. I knew evil when I saw it, too.

The stone altar, the centerpiece of the room, wore its history in rust-red stains. The aftermath of candle wax and blood. Jessie’s light trailed down, hovering over the manacles set into the rock. A wrought-iron cage stood in the corner of the room, sized for humans, next to a wooden rack lined with knives, hammers, and chisels.

“So what do you think?” Jessie murmured. “Wizard, or serial killer?”

“I’m betting on both,” I said.

The beam swept over a writing desk and a smaller set of shelves, stuffed to bulging with leather- and clothbound books. Some of the titles I recognized at first glance: a first-edition printing of Balfour’s
Cultes des Goules
, and the banned
Profane Insights
of Dr. John Dee. Beside them were even older tomes, ones with no name at all, or their broken spines inscribed with alien glyphs that seemed to squirm and writhe in the light.

“You see anything less than a hundred years old on that shelf?” Jessie asked.

“No, and from what I recognize . . . this is the real stuff. The dangerous stuff. We’re going to need a cleanup team in here.”

“That, or a can of gas and a match,” she said, checking out the desk.

A thin black folio, about the size of an album cover, sat out on the desktop. Jessie’s fingers brushed against the cracked leather and gently swung it open. A small sheaf of parchment pages, brittle with age and embellished in flowing cursive script, lay within.

“‘Be it hereby attested and known,’” Jessie read aloud, “‘that this contract, signed and sealed under the witness of Asmodeus and Lucifu—’”

She stumbled on the name. I knew it by heart, and by the sinking feeling in my stomach.

“Lucifuge Rofocale,” I said. “According to legend, hell’s treasurer. This is an infernal contract.”

“‘. . . that the human named Edwin Kite doth hereby enter a covenant, of his own volition and free will, with the Marquis Adramelech.’” Jessie looked up at me. “Edwin. The Kite who founded Talbot Cove. This town’s been rotten since day one.”

Jessie passed me the penlight. While I read, she took out her phone. She paced the workshop, holding it up in the air until a single weak reception bar lit up on the screen.

“Auntie April? Need your big brain on research duty. Looks like Edwin Kite was doing business with hell’s finest. Need everything you can find on a demon named Adramelech. One second, I’ll spell it for you—”

While Jessie passed the details on to April, I kept reading. It didn’t get any better from there.

Edwin Kite shall receive power, wealth, and every good thing upon Earth, as well as the grant of a personal demesne in a place Not Here nor There, to enjoy for a span of thirty-three years, three months, three days, and three hours. At the end of this span, his life and soul shall be forfeit, and become the rightful property of the marquis.

Edwin even signed in blood, next to the date: October 17, 1882. His scrawl, dark and brown, sat beside a trio of swirling, ornate glyphs. Demonic seals.

“Sold his soul,” I said when Jessie hung up the phone. I walked her through it, fast.

“So maybe he jumped the contract somehow,” she said. “That’d be a good reason to sic demonic bounty hunters on his ass. Doesn’t explain how he’s still alive over a hundred and thirty years later, though. What’s this personal demesne thing?”

I pursed my lips, thinking hard. It didn’t ring any bells, but the wording caught my eye.

“Not here nor there,” I said. “
Demesne
is another word for ‘real estate.’ Specifically, property attached to a mansion, if I remember right. So this demon was going to give him his own place.”

“I hope it wasn’t this one,” Jessie said, flashing her light across the cobwebs in the corners of the room. “Totally not worth it.”

“Neither here nor there, here nor—” I snapped my fingers. “Think about the capital letters, and who’s signing the contract, where they’re all from. ‘Not Here nor There’ means a place not on Earth, and not in hell.”

“So Auntie’s theory about the spell on the wicker balls, that the Bogeyman’s lair might not be on Earth . . . ”

We both said it at the same time.

“Edwin Kite is the Bogeyman.”

“Okay,” Jessie breathed, “so that makes him how old?”

Doing the math gave my brain something to do—something other than reeling at what we might be up against here.

“Couple of hundred years.”

“So, judging from this room,” Jessie said, “he was a pretty accomplished sorcerer
before
he made his pact with Adramelech.”

“In my professional opinion?” I took another look at the altar. The Pythian coin vibrated in my jacket pocket, responding to the residual magic. Like the radiation from a nuke, clinging to the air and contaminating the soil long after the blast. “‘Accomplished’ might be an understatement. This is . . . this is a lifetime of occult study on display.”

“And he’s had two hundred years to get
better
at it,” Jessie said.

I reached into my pocket and curled my fingers around the coin. It trembled against my palm. Edwin Kite had the powers of hell and two hundred years of experience under his belt. I had a trinket and a gun.

Jessie studied my face. “You nervous?”

I paused, then shook my head.

“Weirdly? No. Now we know exactly who and what we’re up against. And he doesn’t know we’re coming for him. That’s the best weapon we’ve got.
How
to take him down . . . we’ll figure that part out as we go.”

As we pulled into the Talbot Motor Lodge, April sat silhouetted in the doorway of her room. She waved us over.

“I’d say good news,” she told us, ushering us into her and Kevin’s room, “but only for a dubious definition of ‘good.’ I’ve identified Edwin Kite’s patron.”

“Check this out,” Kevin said, pacing the room with one of April’s books in hand. “This guy’s so hard-core he got a personal shout-out in the Old Testament. Second Kings 17:31—‘And the Sepharvites burned their children in the fire, as sacrifices to Adramelech and Anammelech, the gods of Sepharvaim.’”

“We don’t know much about the city of Sepharvaim today,” April said, “but it may have been Phoenician, which would link Adramelech’s followers with the cult of Moloch. Both had an . . . affinity for proving their devotion through the sacrifices of innocent lives.”

Jessie snorted. “Huh. Life must have been easy a few thousand years ago. Show up in some backwoods town, throw around a little hellfire, and declare yourself a god. Probably had the rubes falling all over themselves to worship him.”

“And these days,” April said, “earnest devotees are a bit harder to come by. The pattern is clear, though: in ancient times, Adramelech thrived through the ritual murder of children. Edwin Kite served him as well, which brings us to the Bogeyman abductions . . . ”

Her voice went quiet. She looked my way. Everybody did.

“I know,” I said. “My sister is dead.”

Up until that moment, until it was torn out of me, I had no idea how much hope I’d been hiding in my heart.

Intellectual Harmony knew better. Intellectual Harmony had already come to terms with losing Angie years ago, and knew that it was better to assume the worst. Intellectual Harmony was too smart to let herself hope.

Now Emotional Harmony just came along and kicked me square in the teeth, to remind me that she was in my head, too.

Facts were facts. If Adramelech got his mojo by hurting kids—or just
liked
it—then his servants weren’t keeping a stolen child alive. Not for thirty years, not for thirty days.

“I need—” I started to say, then paused. I wasn’t sure what I needed.

“Sleep,” Jessie said. “It’s late, and we’ve had a hell of a long day. Everybody get some shut-eye, and we’ll reconvene first thing in the morning.”

I stood outside for a moment, between the two motel room doors, looking up at the canopy of stars. The lights inside the motor lodge’s big cartoon owl sign flickered, on the edge of burnout.

“You coming in?” Jessie asked, her voice soft.

“Yeah,” I told her. “In a second.”

I listened for a while. I listened to the wind, and I listened to the stars, hoping they had something to tell me.

TWENTY-NINE

What I heard instead of the wind and stars, coming up behind me, was the slow crunch of wheels on gravel. Cody’s squad car. He killed the ignition and got out.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

“Just . . . just thought I’d come over and check on you. I mean—I was in the neighborhood, anyway.”

I spread my hand, taking in the night.

“It’s Talbot Cove, Cody. It’s all one neighborhood.”

He chuckled and rubbed the back of his neck. “Guess you got me there. You okay?”

“Don’t I look okay?”

“Depends. You want me to lie?” He sat on the hood of his cruiser, putting one boot up on the front fender. His palm lightly patted the steel. “C’mere. Sit down a second.”

I swallowed. Glanced toward the curtained motel windows.

“I should probably get going—”

“You gonna tell me you’ve got somewhere better to go?” He had an easy smile. “It’s after dark. This town is
closed
.”

I shrugged and walked his way. The cruiser gently rocked as I climbed up on the hood and sat next to him.

“Talbot Cove has to have something going for it,” I told him. “It kept you around, didn’t it?”

He shook his head and looked up at the canopy of stars, taking a deep breath of night air.

“I almost made it,” he said. “Escape velocity. Every small-town boy’s dream: to get the hell out and never look back. I had a full-ride scholarship to MIT, studying aerospace engineering.”

“So you’re a rocket scientist,” I said. I wasn’t sure if he was joking or not. “You’re
literally
a rocket scientist.”

“That was the plan. Plans change.”

“What happened?”

“Dad took off about a decade back, and Mom got sick.” He bounced his heel against the fender. “Somebody had to come home and take care of her, and both my older brothers had careers and families of their own. So. That’s what I did. Dropped everything, left midsemester, and came back to good old Talbot Cove.”

I touched his arm. My fingertips brushed against the stiff polyester of his uniform shirt.

“I’m sorry. Is she—?”

“Lingered for eight long years. Passed last winter. And in the meantime, every opportunity I ever had outside the Cove dried up and blew away.” He leaned back on his palms and gazed upward. “One nice thing, we’re far enough from civilization that you can get a damn fine look at the stars. Can’t
reach
’em from here, but you can look all you want.”

The night sky was so big. It made my stomach flutter, just for a heartbeat, thinking I might lose my grip on the earth and fall straight up. Tumbling into space.

“Imagine this is all hitting you pretty hard,” Cody said. “Your sister and all. Swear to God, if Barry hadn’t been around, I would have knocked that wannabe reporter Tucker flat on his ass.”

“I can fight my own battles,” I said, a little quicker and a little harder than I wanted to. “But . . . thanks. I’m all right.”

Cody let out a little snorting sound and shook his head.

“I’m not sure what’s worse. You thinking nobody can tell you’re wound tighter than a steel spring, just by looking at you, or you trying to convince yourself everything’s fine.”

“Maybe I’m always like this.”

“Sure,” Cody said, “maybe you are. Life’ll do that to you, if you let it. Hey. I want you to try something.”

“What?”

He patted his shoulder. “Lean against me.”

I arched an eyebrow. “You’re joking.”

“Not even a little. You’re so tense
I’m
getting tense just looking at you. When’s the last time you let your guard down, just for a minute?”

“I’m a federal agent, Cody. I let my guard down, people die.”

He patted the chrome-barreled revolver on his hip.

“Well, then,” he said, “good thing a duly deputized officer of the law is here to pick up the slack. C’mon. Please? For me?”

I grumbled, but I scooted a little closer on the car hood and leaned my shoulder into his.

It was all right.

“C’mon,” Cody said, “you’re holding yourself stiffer than an ironing board. Take a deep breath.”

Then he put his arm around me.

That was all right, too.

We just sat like that for a while, sitting on his hood in the dark, listening to the crickets sing, looking at nothing in particular.

“It’s okay, you know,” he said. “You can let somebody else be strong sometimes. World won’t end. I promise.”

I felt my back and my neck unclench. I didn’t know they’d been clenched in the first place. His hand was soft but firm on my shoulder, and his arm warm across my back. Stable.

“So why the badge?” I asked him.

I felt him shrug a little. “Wanted to be useful. If I couldn’t have my dreams, at least I could help other people. This . . . this isn’t my forever, though. Mom’s gone, nothing’s really keeping me tied down here. Nothing but not knowing where to go. I’m saving up a little nest egg. Figure I’ll work through the winter and sort things out come springtime.”

“How do you stay sane, in the meantime?”

Cody shook his head. “You’ll laugh.”

“No, I won’t. I promise.”

He squeezed my shoulder, gentle, and pulled his arm away. For just a second, I wished he hadn’t. He fumbled in his pocket and pulled out his phone. He tilted the screen toward me as he tapped his way through a gallery of photographs.

A falcon soared, spread-winged and free, through a pale sky streaked with wispy clouds. A cardinal perched in a tree, a spot of vibrant scarlet in a sea of bristling green. Another picture captured the forest at dawn, dew-drenched and blanketed by a low sea of roiling mist.

“You’re a photographer,” I said.

“Don’t know if I can rightly call myself a photographer,” he replied with a chuckle. “But I do take pictures.”

“You take
good
pictures,” I murmured, lingering over a long shot of Talbot Cove’s main street. Caught at dusk, lonely and empty and loveless and old. “These are beautiful.”

“Can’t paint, can’t draw. I just try to shoot what I feel.”

“I can tell,” I said.

“Yeah? How?”

My finger slid over the phone’s screen, changing a nighttime shot of the old paper mill—its girders bending like the bars of a rusted iron cage—to a bluebird taking flight under the summer sun.

“You want to fly,” I told him.

He turned off his phone. He stared down at the blank screen, his bottom lip caught between his teeth, and nodded.

“Suppose that’s right.” He shrugged. “You don’t always get what you want.”

“Sometimes you do, though.”

He met my gaze.

“Sometimes,” he said, his voice sounding as uncertain as I felt.

He leaned in, just a little. I tilted my chin, just a little. My heart pounded, and I felt like a first-time parachutist, about to jump out of a plane at fifty thousand feet. All it would take was one little push, one little step forward—

Our lips brushed. I fell out of the plane. I yanked the parachute cord.

He jolted back at the same time I did, both of us wide-eyed and tripping over our apologies as we talked over each other. “I’m sorry,” he said. “That was completely out of line—”

“No, it’s me, I shouldn’t have—”

“—I mean we barely know—”

“Cody,” I said. I grabbed his hand.

He fell silent. Unsure.

“It’s okay,” I said. I squeezed his fingers. “It’s okay.”

He chuckled. “It . . . it was pretty okay.”

“It was
very
okay.” I shook my head, smiling. “Look, it’s . . . it’s late, and we’ve both got to be on the job tomorrow. I’m going to go get some sleep. But I’m glad we talked.”

I let go of his hand and slid down from the car hood.

“Hey, Harmony?”

I turned.

“If you have time, I mean, after we catch this guy,” he said, “would you maybe want to, um, get dinner with me? Or something?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’d like that a lot. Good night, Cody.”

I let myself into the motel room. Jessie was already asleep, out like a light. I undressed in the dark and slipped into my own bed, head swimming, stomach fuzzy. I could handle mobsters, monsters, and demons from hell. Handling a cute guy who wanted to take me out to dinner? Outside my skill set. It felt dangerously normal. I didn’t know how to deal with normal.

It felt nice, though.