The Bone Triangle (2 page)

I saw red, then purple, then black. Could she be stronger than I was? I thought maybe she was, although I’m an athletic man. If this was Meng’s work, I knew it might be a type of maniacal strength. People under her sway often had the strength of raving lunatics.

I realized one of us was going to die soon, and I didn’t want to kill this creature or die by her hand. I heaved upward and regained my feet. She still hung on, sensing victory. She was lighter than I was, so I dragged her several feet toward the cellar door. She didn’t seem to mind until she saw the yawning doorway and the steps that led downward. She fought me then, reaching up with one of those hind legs. I learned in a most painful way that she was equipped with claws. They raked my left hip, cutting right through my
jeans. I felt blood trickle down my leg and pool up in my shoe.

With a final heave, I threw her into the cellar. She rolled only halfway down the stairs before catching herself like an acrobat and springing to her feet. I slammed the door as she charged. She bashed herself against it, snarling like a wild thing. I kept my shoulder there and gasped, twisting the lock. She was trapped.

Wiping away blood and sweat, I found my phone and called Detective McKesson. He answered on the third ring.

“Do you know what time it is?” he asked.

“I’ve got a freak in my basement. Some kind of assassin, I think. Did you detect anything unusual in the area of my house tonight?”

He didn’t answer for a few seconds. “I’m on my way,” he said finally.

I hung up and leaned against the cellar door while the wild woman on the other side tore at it. McKesson and I had a strange relationship. We had grudging admiration for one another and often worked together, but there wasn’t a lot of trust between us. I counted him as the only man in the Las Vegas PD who knew more about these occurrences than I did.

After about five minutes, the snarls and thumping stopped. I wasn’t fooled. The cellar was locked up tight, and there was no way I was going to go down there by myself. My cat-lady was going to have to wait until help arrived. I wondered vaguely how it was going to go if McKesson tried to put cuffs on her. That wasn’t going to be easy.

When McKesson finally arrived, he looked me up and down with raised eyebrows.

“Whatever this thing is, it looks like he did a number on you.”

“It’s a she.”

McKesson chuckled and drew his weapon. I did the same. We crossed the marble foyer and headed to the cellar door next to the kitchen. He put his hand on the door and yanked it open.

We walked down the steps tensely, searching every room down there. It had once been full of expensive wines, but I’d sold off the ones I hadn’t consumed. After about five minutes, we were both sure the creature was gone.

“Everything was locked?” McKesson asked, frowning.

“Yeah.”

“Did you see any rips?”

“No, nothing. If she’d stepped out to another world, wouldn’t the rip still be here?”

“Maybe,” he said.

A rip was a hole between the fabric of our world and some other place. These places were numerous, and some of them were quite alien. Most of my troubles had stepped out of rips. This house had a rich history of visitors from very odd places, which was why I’d been given a bargain price on it.

At last, we gave up. The cat-creature had left no trail other than some splintered wood on the steps leading down into the cellar. After another ten minutes, McKesson left.

“Sweet dreams,” he said, smirking.

I glared after his squad car, locked the place up tight, and after tending to my wounds I popped open a beer. I thought I should really go to the local ER and get some stitches and antibiotics, but I didn’t bother. One of my best powers was an artifact that promoted fast healing. I knew that by morning the wounds would have sealed over and turned into pink ridges of flesh. In less than a week they’d
be gone entirely. It was a power that tended to make a man lazy when it came to infections and scarring.

Despite counting sheep all night, I didn’t sleep until morning, and I was tired and irritable all the next day.

After the assassin’s failed attempt to take me out, I no longer felt comfortable living in my home. Not only was I understandably jumpy, but the weather had become unbearably hot. It was the first week of June, and in Las Vegas, that meant it was
hot
outside. Even at midnight, my air conditioner still thrummed. I couldn’t really afford to keep running the cooler all night, but it was either that or endure more sleepless nights in sweaty sheets.

I kept my gun with me at all times now, and I checked every door and window to make sure they were locked tight. I even went as far as turning on the alarm system, a precaution I’d never bothered with before.

A few days later, it was the deep of the night, and I’d finally managed to drift off. I’d been asleep for less than an hour when I was visited by the last being I ever expected to find in my home. This being was not human either—not even remotely so. But at least she wasn’t a cat-lady.

It was well after midnight, but the night was still strangely hot, even for Vegas. In June, the temperature would usually dip down into the low seventies or even into the sixties before dawn. Tonight, the heat had continued to build and build all evening. I had every window open as it was cooler outside than in. In sun-drenched lands, heat is stored in the roof tiles of your house all day and from there it slowly filters down into the interior during the night. But tonight I was tossing, turning, and sweating more than I should have been.

I finally fell asleep on my couch sometime after three. I’m not certain when I awoke, but I was sure
why
I returned to consciousness. It was the heat—and the glow coming from the wine cellar.

A sprawling home like mine needed a large family to care for it, or at least an army of service people. I had neither. Most of the mansion was empty and echoed as I walked through it. Only the kitchen showed mild use. I lived in the family room. There was a TV embedded in a wall there, in front of which sat a single couch. The bedrooms were all empty—I usually slept on the couch.

I liked the place, but I’d never really been able to furnish it or care for it properly. I might have done a better job if my girlfriend, Jenna, had stuck around. But, after a few months, she’d gone home to visit her family in the Midwest—and never came back. With her gone, I ran out of interest in decorating. Soon after that I ran out of money.

While I slept fitfully, sweating under a single sheet, the strange sequence of events began in the cellar. Something was knocked over and clattered to the ground. My eyes snapped open, and I quietly got to my feet. I threw off the moist white sheet that covered me and struggled to my feet. I willed myself awake. Could I still be dreaming?

Shirtless and barefoot, I squinted at the line of light and padded over the tiles toward it. I walked to the cellar door and examined it closely from a safe distance. The door generally stayed locked, and I hadn’t been down there since the visit from my feline friend. I didn’t want to open it now, so I eyed it critically. There was a significant gap between the bottom edge of the door and the tile floor.

As I studied the crack beneath the door, I saw a lurid red glow begin to pulse there. I retrieved my .32, which I’d left on the coffee table.

The glow under the cellar door brightened then ebbed again. I checked my pistol with practiced movements. The magazine was firmly rammed into place. I thumbed off the safety with a tiny click.

Many odd events had occurred in that basement. Most of them had never been fully explained to my satisfaction by the cultists who had occupied the house before I took possession. It was their involvement with bizarre places and peoples, in fact, that had resulted in my ownership. My patron, a Ukrainian crime lord named Rostok, was among the most powerful citizens of the city. He’d sold the house to me cheaply to station me here. I knew he wanted to set me up as a guardian at this possible invasion point. I’d understood this unspoken detail of the arrangement when I’d taken the keys, but I had hoped my duties would be only perfunctory.

For months, nothing had occurred that I could classify as otherworldly. I’d relaxed over time. Like a villager settling nervously on the slopes of Mt. Vesuvius, I’d quickly grown complacent. I’d thought the doorway that seemed to exist in the cellar had been closed for good.

Tonight my luck had run out. There was something in the cellar, something
hot
, and it wanted to come out and play.

For the first time, I smelled smoke. I realized there couldn’t be any doubt of it. There was an acrid scent filling the house. I recognized it as the sharp stink of wood smoke. I was surprised the smoke detectors hadn’t gone off. As I became more fully awake, I recalled having removed the batteries from most of the detectors and disconnecting them. A small mansion has an amazing number of smoke detectors these days, and they wouldn’t stop beeping and complaining about their dying batteries. Looking back on my decision to disconnect them all, I thought perhaps that had been a shortsighted policy.

I reached the cellar door and stretched out a hand to gently touch the handle. The house had interesting doors. They were made of
real
wood—not pressed hollow fiberboard fabricated to look like wood. These doors were heavy and made of planks of cedar. Darkly stained and varnished, each door had an arching top, like a dungeon door in an old castle. Even the handles were interesting. They were a dark, oil-rubbed bronze.

I learned in an instant that these metal door handles conducted heat very well. I recoiled, jerking back my burned hand with a hiss and a curse. It was not a loud utterance, but apparently it was enough to alert my visitor.

“Quentin?” asked a sibilant voice from behind the door.

I forgot about my throbbing hand and lifted the .32. I stepped back two paces and aimed the muzzle at the door. Rethinking my stance, I shuffled to the right. If my visitor was aiming a weapon of its own at the far side, there was no sense in making the task any easier for it.

“Who’s there?” I asked in a harsh whisper.

The light under the door brightened, then dimmed again. I thought I saw the movement of a rippling shadow.
Whatever it was, I had the feeling that it had shifted and turned away.

“I think I’ve damaged your stairs. I’m sorry.”

I frowned in recognition.
Could that be…?

“Ezzie?” I asked. “Are you down there wrecking the place?”

“I’m sorry.”

I rubbed my burned hand on my chin and kept the pistol aimed at the door with my other hand. If it really was Ezzie, and not some other trick from another place, shooting her would have no effect. She was essentially a silicon creature—a living mass of heated stone.

“What the hell are you doing here? Are you alone?”

“I’m not cold now. I feel good.”

Whoever it was, it certainly
sounded
like Ezzie. She was a creature that seemed to function like a pet for Rostok, my benefactor. Since he was the very man who’d set me here to guard this juncture between worlds, my mind was racing to conclusions. Had he changed his mind about my ownership and sent Ezzie to eliminate a possible impediment to his plans?

“Did Rostok send you, Ezzie?” I asked.

“Let me in, Quentin.”

I took a deep breath. I’d spoken with Ezzie only a few times before, and she’d always been somewhat childlike in her responses. My immediate concern was for the wooden portions of my house. If I could get her out onto the tile floor in the main room, at least she couldn’t burn away flammable portions of the house that came too near her radiant body. Now that I knew where she was, I was fairly confident I could outrun her if it came to that.

“All right,” I said. “Let me get something. Just a second.”

I walked to the kitchen, flipped on the lights, found a hand towel, then flipped the lights off again. Ezzie and her kind didn’t like bright light.

Using the hand towel, I opened the door and quickly stepped backward. A glaring, hot mass undulated forward. Ezzie moved at about the speed of an elderly man who had to lean heavily on a cane. Sliding through the doorway, her rounded, crusty sides brushed the doorjamb. Fine wood blackened and sent up twin curls of smoke. I winced at that. This visit was going to end in a repair bill I couldn’t afford.

Ezzie herself resembled a giant slug made of cooling lava. She had no eyes but seemed to sense her environment somehow. I figured the source of her odd voice was the opening in her head, which swiveled fluidly on a thick stalk.

“This room is cold,” she said.

“I’m sorry about that, Ezzie,” I replied, keeping my distance. I wiped sweat from my forehead. It seemed a hopeless task, as droplets continually beaded up and ran down from my hair to sting my eyes. Her presence was like that of a mobile, open furnace. “Can you tell me why you are here? What do you want, Ezzie?”

Her head section rotated, as if taking in her environment. It was a slow process requiring several seconds. At last she fixated upon me again. I felt a chill then, despite the sweltering heat. Had she come to kill me? Was she able to squirt lava at an intended target? I’d met up with several of her kind before—although she was the only one I’d had words with. A small one had burned down my previous home, and another had burned to death a person I’d known. Yet another had tried to get me when I’d visited their hot, hellish homeworld.