Harmony Black (21 page)

THIRTY-FIVE

J
essie paced across the parking lot, head down, kicking at stones. April rolled alongside her, speaking in soft tones. No cars around but ours and a couple of police cruisers—looked like Fontaine had already cleared out, and Nyx had no reason to stick around, either.

“Hey,” I said, walking up behind them.

“Our best chance at closing this case,” Jessie said, “and he shoots himself. Well, I’ve got good news and bad news. Good news is, the Bogeyman abductions are over. Bad news is, thirty goddamn years from now we’ll be right back where we started.”

“Maybe not. We’ve got one last lead to chase. Let’s head back to the motor lodge. We’ll need Kevin’s help.”

Kevin was a step ahead of me. He sat huddled over the mayor’s laptop in the motel room, muttering under his breath as his fingers flew over the keys.

“Trying to track down this CTide06 guy, but it’s no good. He’s using a free e-mail provider and routing everything through a proxy VPN. Makes it look like he’s sending all his mail from Hong Kong. Which, I can confidently say, he isn’t.”

Jessie leaned over his shoulder to read his screen. “Can’t you, I don’t know, run a back trace on the proxy?”

“Did you just make that up? Words mean things. And no. I’m a hacker, not a wizard. I know, it’s an easy mistake to make. No, this guy knows how to hide his tracks—which, to be fair, isn’t all that hard. Our best bet, though I cringe to say it, is the legal route. Get a subpoena for his e-mail service provider so we can scope out their internal logs.”

“Which will take weeks,” I said. “I’ve got a better idea. We know that the child who comes back is always a blood descendant of Edwin Kite, right?”

April, sitting at the table by the window, glanced up from her notes. “Yes. Which, at this point, enumerates several
hundred
people in Talbot Cove alone. Over the course of two hundred years, any family tree tends to sprout vast, long, and leafy branches.”

“But we can narrow it down. We’re looking for a family with a young child—”

“Doesn’t narrow it down as much as you might think,” Kevin said. “I’ve already tried that. I’ve spent the last four hours searching through
years
of birth announcements and cross-referencing them with everyone who has a passing connection to—wait. Wait, wait, wait. I’ve been going at this wrong. There’s an easier way.”

“What is it?” I asked him.

“When people put numbers in an e-mail handle, it’s always a historically significant date. Birthdays, weddings, graduation. CTide. Crimson Tide. That’s the University of Alabama’s football team.”

His fingers flew across his keyboard. I watched his screen turn into a wash of white on scarlet, and words scrolled on a pop-up window.

University Bursar’s Office

Employee Access

“If you only want employees to access your employee-only site,” he muttered under his breath as he worked, “maybe update your firmware more than once every five years.”

“So we’re looking for an alumnus who graduated in 2006,” April said, “with a relation to the Kite family. Hmm. Bigger needle, smaller haystack. I’ll help with the search.”

Kevin cracked his knuckles and glanced my way. “We’ve got this. Give us three or four hours, tops.”

It took them only two. Which, coincidentally, was the number of Kites they found.

“Jacob and Ellen Garner,” Kevin said, pulling up old photographs from a campus newspaper on his screen and lining them up side by side. “College sweethearts. Our buddy Jacob was a running back for the Crimson Tide and a short pick to go pro until he blew his knee out. Ellen, meanwhile, is a Kite cousin twice removed. It’s a stretch, but she’s got the family blood in her veins.”

“They married the summer after graduation,” April added. “Traveled a bit, and came home to Talbot Cove to start a family. Jacob is the branch manager at a local bank—”

Kevin produced a sheet of motel stationery with a flourish, handing it to me. “—and as of one year ago, Ellen became a stay-at-home mom. Can’t say it’s them for sure, but they fit every single one of the criteria.”

He’d scribbled an address on the sheet along with turn-by-turn directions. If I remembered the spot, it was a nice little chunk of town just off Main Street. Affluent, quiet, nice place to raise a kid.

Or lose one.

J
essie and I sat in the SUV, parked curbside on a tranquil little side street. Big houses, white picket fences, and the last light of the setting sun filtering through orange and dying leaves. A beefy blue Subaru sat out in the Garners’ driveway, and the shifting lights of a television screen glowed against their living room window.

“We need to agree on something,” Jessie said, staring at the house, “before we go in.”

“Name it.”

“Unless we get something to go on here, a real lead, none of this goes in our final report. Not the Garners, not the third abduction, none of it. It ends with Willie.”

“What? Why?”

Jessie pointed a finger at the front door.

“Edwin Kite is stuck in his . . . demesne, right? And the Bogeyman can’t do squat without someone Earth-side to build and set out a beacon for him.”

“Right.”

“Well,” she said, “with Willie out of the picture, that means the only link to Edwin Kite—and the only thing that can help him snatch more victims—is the infant in that house. Vigilant Lock doesn’t leave loose ends.”

“I assumed we’d, you know, keep the kid under surveillance. Maybe run some tests, when she got older, to try and suss out how the link works. It’d be good intel.”

Jessie snorted and gave me a humorless smile.

“Our mandate is investigation and extermination. Emphasis on the latter. Vigilant isn’t in the business of taking chances when it comes to occult threats. Remember, I was a kid when I landed on their radar, too—and Linder had to be talked out of sanctioning my ass because I
might
be dangerous.”

“Jessie . . . are you saying Linder would give a kill order on an
infant
?”

“I’m saying he’s a cold-blooded son of a bitch, and I’d rather not find out if he would or not. So I’m asking you: Are you down with lying to the boss?”

It sounded like an easy question at first. Sanction an infant? And the victim of a crime? Never.

But Willie had been an infant, and a victim once, too, and now two children were gone—maybe gone forever—because he helped Edwin Kite take them. In twenty, thirty years, if the Garner kid made the same choices Willie did, the cycle would start all over again. By covering it up, we’d be leaving a time bomb in the heart of Talbot Cove.

Take the kid out of the equation and Edwin Kite lost his meal ticket for good. A quick fix. A snip of the chain. It was attractive.

Quick fixes always are,
I thought,
and they usually blow up in your face later on down the line. It’s the wrong way.

“One condition,” I said.

Jessie turned in her seat and gave me an expectant look.

“If that’s what it comes to,” I said, “if the investigation just dead-ends here, the case stays open. Unofficially, I mean. I’m not waiting another thirty years for a crack at Edwin Kite. We come back as often as we can, we keep an eye on this kid, and most of all we make damn sure she doesn’t turn into another Willie.”

“Shit,” Jessie grunted, shoving open her door, “that was
assumed
.”

We stood on the Garners’ doorstep. Their doorbell played the opening notes of “Ave Maria,” ringing out on metal chimes.

“So,” I said, “you lie to Linder often?”

“I like to think of our case files as a carefully constructed media narrative, where specific facts and incidents may be reedited or reframed in order to convey a deeper understanding and context. Sort of like reality television.”

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

Jessie shrugged. “I’ve got two priorities: my team, and our mission. Everything else takes a backseat, and that includes Linder and all his shady backroom buddies in Washington. All I need from them is funding and intel so we can keep doing what we do. All
they
need is to stay the hell out of our way.”

A dead bolt rattled, and the door swung wide. The man on the other side looked like an all-American gone to seed, broad-shouldered and square-jawed but hiding his potbelly under a cable-knit sweater.

“Jacob Garner?” We flashed our IDs. “FBI. Could we have a word with you, please?”

He got a deer-in-the-headlights look and stepped back, gesturing us inside with a shaky hand. “Uh, sure. Sure, c’mon in. What’s this about?”

The Garners kept a clean house. More than clean, meticulous, from the plush white carpet to a molded wood entertainment system with a stereo and racks of vintage vinyl. A place for everything and everything in its place—except for the rolling suitcases stacked in a line by the front door.

“Going on a trip?” I asked, nodding to the luggage as Jacob shut the door behind us.

A woman swept in from the dining room, thin, long-necked, and shrouded in a gray tunic dress. She put on her earrings as she walked.

“Honey? I thought I heard the doorbell. Is it—oh, hello.”

“Ellen Garner,” I said. “Good. You’re both here. Special Agents Temple and Black, FBI. We’re here to investigate your daughter’s kidnapping.”

Bull’s-eye. The color drained from Ellen’s face like someone pulled a plug, and the look that shot between her and Jacob turned the room to ice.

“I . . . I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “Mallory? Mallory is just . . . just fine. We didn’t call about any kidnapping.”

“That’s right,” Jessie said. “You didn’t call about it.”

Jacob forced a nervous laugh. “You two are way, way off base. I mean, you must be looking for another house or something. There hasn’t been a kidnapping! Mallory’s fine.”

“Then you won’t mind letting us see her,” I told him, “so we can verify that for ourselves.”

“Do you have a warrant?” Ellen asked.

Jessie smiled. “Are you really going to make us get one? C’mon, if it’s a mistake, no harm done. Just let us see her and we’ll leave.”

“It’s okay,” Jacob said. “It’s fine. I’ll show you.”

Mallory’s crib was in the master bedroom, next to a California king bed and a whole bunch of cardboard boxes with duct-taped lids. A dresser drawer hung open and empty. The Garners weren’t going on vacation—they were just
going
, period.

The baby lay in her crib, dressed in a tiny pink-flannel onesie and sleeping with her little fists pressed to her scrunched-up face. Safe and sound.

“See?” Ellen said. “She’s fine. Now . . . please leave.”

I unbuttoned her onesie.

“Hey!” Jacob snapped, striding toward me. Jessie got between us. She was half Jacob’s size, but she gave him a glare that stopped him dead in his tracks.

The pink flannel tugged aside, baring the sleeping baby’s shoulder. Revealing the glyph burned into her skin.

THIRTY-SIX

“
I’m going to save you two a lot of time and trouble,” I said, buttoning the onesie back up and turning away from the crib. “We know about Edwin Kite and the Bogeyman. Jacob, we read your e-mails to Mitchum Kite. And we know you hired Nyx.”

“Where . . . ” Jacob said. “Where is Mitchum? We haven’t been able to reach him since yesterday—”

“Dead. Nyx killed him.”

“Oh God,” Ellen moaned. She pressed her face against Jacob’s shoulder. He curled his beefy arm around her, pulling her close.

“Who are you people?” Jacob said. “Who are you, really?”

“We’re the folks you really, really want to cooperate with right now,” Jessie said.

Ellen pulled away from her husband and dabbed at one eye with her sleeve.

“I’ll talk to them. Just keep packing.”

“Ellen—”

She squeezed his hand, then let go.

“I’ll talk to them.” She glanced our way. “Follow me.”

The tiny room in the attic, up a flight of creaking steps and behind a locked door, might have been someone’s office once. A quiet little retreat to get away from it all, with a porthole window overlooking the street outside. Most offices didn’t have the faint residue of pale-blue chalk on the floorboards, though, marking the curves of half-erased pentacles, or a candle-laden altar draped in purple silk.

“Our family talks,” Ellen told us, slowly pacing the room. “Not all the Kites, and not all of them believe, but we’ve all at least heard the stories. About Edwin Kite, and the Bogeyman.”

Jessie’s gaze slowly took in the room, from wall to wall. “I’m guessing you’re one of the believers.”

“When I moved back to Talbot Cove after college, I got in touch with Mitchum. We were kindred spirits. He knew all about monsters, growing up in his father’s house. Jeremiah Kite saw Edwin as an . . . aspirational figure. He idolized him. When he wasn’t busy torturing his own children, he was trying to re-create Edwin’s work. Then the ‘great sorcerer’ died of a ruptured appendix, of all things, and left Mitchum with the family inheritance.”

“And the monster in the basement,” I said, thinking back to the psychic parasite we’d fought there.

“And that, too,” Ellen said. “We spent years looking for a way to get past it, thinking it must have been guarding Edwin’s old workshop. Best we could do is keep it contained. I’m afraid I’m not a very good witch.”

She paused beside the window, the golden sunset light washing over her.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen. The timing was wrong.”

“What wasn’t?” Jessie asked.

“We knew how it worked. Edwin is . . . feeding off the children somehow—they’re keeping him alive, but he can’t leave the House of Closets. So he has two tools: the Bogeyman and the returned child. They work together and send him what he needs. Then I made my mistake. The timing. I thought the timing would always be the same. The last time he hunted, it was the ’80s. Before that, the ’40s. I thought we’d have another ten years before the Bogeyman came back.”

Ellen clenched her hands into frustrated fists, her voice cracking.

“I thought,” she said, forcing the words out, “it would be safe to have a baby.”

“But once the abductions started,” I said, “you knew.”

“Oh, we knew. Our first plan didn’t work. Find the last returned child and stop him. Just . . . I don’t know. Stop him, any way we could. But that bastard Jeremiah shredded the original police report before he died. He covered up every mention of the abduction, and we couldn’t figure out who it was.”

“His name was Willie Grandeen,” Jessie said.

Ellen tilted her head. “You said ‘was.’”

“He killed himself today.”

“He killed himself.” Ellen sighed, leaning back against the attic wall. Her head thumped against the grainy wood. “He marked my baby girl. He gave her to that monster.
Then
he killed himself.
Bastard.
”

“So that was your first plan,” I said. “What was the second?”

“Nyx,”
she said with a bitter curl of her lip. “That was Mitchum’s idea. He read about the Chainmen in one of his father’s grimoires. You see, Edwin Kite is a fugitive in hell’s eyes: he broke his deal with Adramelech, and even stole some of the demon’s power. We thought if we could get the Chainmen’s attention, they’d kill Edwin for us and end this nightmare for good. I found the summoning ritual. Didn’t know what to expect, but Nyx answered the call. Once we found out her price, it was too late.”

“What’s her price?”

“When Nyx goes back to hell, she has to bring
two
souls with her: the one she’s hunting, and the one who called her name.” Ellen folded her arms. “Jacob volunteered. Said it’s what any father would do for his little girl.
I
said there’s no way she’s growing up without her daddy.”

The suitcases, the cardboard boxes—now it all made sense.

“You’re running,” I said.

“What else can we do?”

Jessie rubbed the back of her neck, thinking. “If Nyx doesn’t get Kite, do you still have to pay up?”

“No, but Nyx doesn’t fail,” Ellen said. “Ever. At least, that’s the story. I guess she’ll be hunting us next. At least my baby will be all right.”

I scuffed the toe of my shoe against a faint line of chalk residue.

“You mentioned the House of Closets. What do you know about it?”

“Only what’s been passed down through the family. Hints and whispers. They say it was the key to Edwin’s betrayal. When he sold his soul to Adramelech, he crafted these elaborate designs for a mansion in . . . well, I don’t know where it is or how it works, only that it isn’t
here
. He tricked the demon into infusing his own power into the building.”

“So why doesn’t Adramelech just take it back?” Jessie asked her.

“Edwin designed the house as a trap. It’s a siphon. Power flows only one way: inward, straight to him. He barred Adramelech from coming in after him, then took his precautions a step even farther. According to Jeremiah’s journals, he merged with it. He became part of the house itself. He can’t be removed.
Can’t
be. The only way Edwin Kite can leave the House of Closets is under his own power and by his own free will.”

“But you think Nyx has a way to get at him anyway,” I said.

Ellen shrugged. “She thinks she does. You’ve met her, I assume. Do
you
doubt she can do it, if she says she can?”

“Excuse us a moment,” I said and tugged Jessie’s sleeve. We walked over to the far corner of the attic, conferring in low voices.

“What do you think?” I asked her.

“Nyx wouldn’t take a job if she wasn’t certain she could pull it off. You heard her at the paper mill: she’s a little obsessed with coming in first place.”

“And if she nails Kite,” I said, jerking my head toward Ellen, “how much of a chance do you think these people have of getting away without paying her?”

“Somewhere south of zero and none. About the same as our chances of getting Kite first, considering we can’t
reach
him.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not.”

Finding a demon-crafted house that doesn’t exist anywhere on Earth—let alone getting inside—is a little outside my wheelhouse. I’m good at what I do, but there’s magic and then there’s
magic
. Still, the inklings of an idea came to me as I looked over at Ellen’s shrine.

I can’t say it was a
good
idea, or even a sane one, but you work with what you have.

“Ellen.” She looked away from the darkening window, toward me. “What do you know about the beacons?”

She shrugged. “The Returned uses them to tell the Bogeyman where to strike. That’s all I know. They were a passion project of Jeremiah Kite’s—there’s reams of pages about them in his journals—but the symbolism and the math . . . it’s like trying to unravel higher calculus when all you know is how to add and subtract.”

“Those journals—may we have them, please?”

“If you think it’ll help,” she said. “Jeremiah thought he could reverse-engineer the spell. Turn it into a two-way gate so he could go meet Edwin and ‘learn at the feet of the master.’ As far as I can tell, he never pulled it off.”

Jessie gave me a side-eyed glance. “Are you that good?”

“Not even close,” I murmured, “but maybe I don’t have to be. We just need to get a little creative.”

Ellen dug out the books: four of them in all, thumb thick, with cracked black-leather covers. I opened one, the old binding glue splitting and flaking, and gazed upon a dense sea of cramped handwriting. My eyes glazed as I tried to follow Jeremiah’s stream-of-consciousness ramblings. Maybe that was for the best. What little I did read made my skin crawl.

She bundled the books into my arms and asked, “Now what?”

“Now you stay put,” I said.

“We
can’t
,” she said. “Are you crazy? Once Nyx gets Edwin Kite, she’s coming back for Jacob. We can’t be here when she does.”

“Ellen,” I said, “if Nyx can capture a two-hundred-year-old sorcerer who’s hiding out in another dimension, how much of a chance do you think you and your husband have? Edwin has an otherworldly stronghold. You have a Subaru.”

Her shoulders sank. I could feel her hope sinking with them.

“That doesn’t mean we can just stay here and wait for her,” she protested, but her voice had lost its strength.

“That’s exactly what it means, and I’ll tell you why. First, she’s not coming back, because we’re going to catch Edwin before she does. Second, if all of this has taught you anything, it should be that once you make a bargain with a demon, you
don’t
screw with the terms. If you run, Nyx will know. It’s not just your husband’s life at stake: it’s yours and your child’s, too.”

“Do you really think you can beat her?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I really do.”

Sometimes you have to try and sound more confident than you feel. What we really had was a chance. Just a chance, bordering on a long shot, but it was the only chance we—and the Garner family—had left.