Angel Fire East (6 page)

She fights to regain control of him, desperate to do so, unable to understand why he would appear when she has not summoned him and is not threatened with harm.

Powering down the straightaway, her body wracked by pain and fatigue and by her struggle to rein in the ghost wolf, she catches the Moroccan at fifty meters. The
Moroccan’s intense, frightened eyes momentarily lock on her as she powers past. Nest’s teeth are bared and Wraith surges in and out of her skin in a flurry of small, quick movements, his terrifying visage flickering in the bright sunlight like an iridescent mirage. The Moroccan swerves from both in terror, and Nest is alone in the lead.

She crosses the finish line first, the winner of the gold medal by ten meters. She knows it is the end of her career, even before the questions on how she could have recovered from her fall and gone on to win turn to rumors on the use of performance-enhancing drugs. Her control over Wraith, always tenuous at best, has eroded further, and she does not understand why. His presence is bearable when she can rely on keeping him in check. But if he can appear anytime she loses control of her emotions, it marks the end of her competitive running days as surely as sunset does the coming of night.

“I
’m getting old,” Pick said suddenly, kicking at her shoulder in what she supposed was frustration.

“You’ve always been old,” she reminded him. “You were old when I was born. You’ve already lived twice as long as most humans.”

He glared at her, but said nothing.

She watched clouds fill the edges of the western sky beyond the scraggly tops of the bare hardwoods, rolling out of the plains. The expected storm was on its way. She could feel a drop in the temperature, a bite in the wind that gusted out of the shadows. She pulled the parka tight against her body and zipped it up.

“Hard freeze coming in,” Pick said from his perch on her shoulder. “Let’s give it up for today.”

She turned and began the long walk home. Dead leaves rustled in dry clusters against the bare ground and the trunks of trees. She kicked at pieces of deadwood, her thoughts moody and unsettled, fragments of the race and its aftermath still playing out in her mind.

It had taken months to put an end to the newspaper reports, even after she had taken a voluntary drug test in an effort to end the speculation. Everyone wanted to know why she would quit competitive running when she was at the peak of her career, when she was so young, after she had won so often. She had given interviews freely on the subject for months, and finally she had just given up. She couldn’t explain it to them, of course. She couldn’t begin to make them understand. She couldn’t tell them about the magic or Wraith. She could only say she was tired of running and wanted to do something else. She could only repeat herself, over and over and over again.

Only a month ago, she had received a phone call from an editor at the sports magazine Paul worked for. The editor told her the magazine wanted to do a story on her. She reminded him she didn’t give interviews anymore.

“Change your policy, Nest,” he pressed. “Next summer is the Olympics. People want to know if you’ll come out of retirement and run again. You’re the greatest long-distance runner in your country’s history—you can’t pretend that doesn’t mean something. How about it?”

“No, thanks.”

“Why? Does it have anything to do with your quitting competitive running after your race in the five thousand in the last Olympics? Does it have anything to do with the rumors of drug use? There was a lot of speculation about what happened—”

She’d hung up on him abruptly. He hadn’t called back.

In truth, quitting was the hardest thing she had ever done. She loved the competition. She loved how being the best made her feel. She couldn’t deny giving it up took something away from her, that it hollowed her out. She still trained, because she couldn’t imagine life without the sort of discipline and order that training demanded. She stayed fit and strong, and every so often she would sneak back into the city and have herself timed by her old coach. She did it out of pride and a need to know she was still worth something.

Her life had been a mixed bag since. She lived comfortably enough on money she had saved from endorsements and appearance fees, earning a little extra now and then by writing articles for the running magazines. The writing didn’t pay her much, but it gave her something to do. Something besides helping Pick with the park. Something besides charity and church work. Something besides sitting around remembering her marriage to Paul and how it had fallen apart.

She crossed out of the ravine that divided the bulk of the park from the deep woods and climbed the slope toward the toboggan slide and the pavilion. From out of the distance came the piercing wail of a freight-train whistle followed by the slow, thunderous buildup of engines and wheels. She paused to look south, seeing the long freight drive out of the west toward Chicago, stark and lonely against the empty expanse of the winter landscape.

She waited until it passed, then continued on. Oddly enough, Pick hadn’t said a word in complaint. Perhaps he sensed her sadness. Perhaps he was wrestling with concerns of his own. She let him be, striding across the open ball diamonds toward the service road and the hedgerow that marked the boundary between the park and her backyard. Pick left her somewhere along the way. Lost in thought, she didn’t see him go. She just looked down and he wasn’t there.

As she crossed the yard Hawkeye skittered along the rear of the house, stalking something Nest couldn’t see. A big, orange stray who had adopted her, he was the sort of cat who put up with you if you fed him and expected you to stay out of his way the rest of the time. She liked having a mouser about, but Hawkeye made her nervous. His name came from the way he looked at her, which she caught him doing all the time. It was a sort of sideways stare, full of trickery and cool appraisal. Pick said he was just trying to figure out how to turn her into dinner.

As she came up beside the garage, she saw a young woman and a little girl sitting on her back steps. The little girl was bundled in an old, shabby red parka with the hood drawn up. Her face was bent toward a rag doll she held protectively in her lap. The woman was barely out of her teens, if that, short and slender with long, tangled dark hair spilling down over her shoulders. She wore a leather biker’s jacket over a miniskirt and high boots. No gloves, no hat, no scarf.

Her head came up at Nest’s approach, and she climbed to her feet watchfully. The pale afternoon light glinted dully off the silver rings that pierced her ears, nose, and one eyebrow. The deep blue markings of a tattoo darkened the back of one hand where it folded into the other to ward off the cold.

Nest came up to her slowly, thinking,
I know this girl.

Then, for just a moment, something of the child she remembered from fifteen years ago surfaced in the young woman’s face.

“Ben Ben?” Nest asked in disbelief.

A smile appeared. “Guess what, Nest? I’ve come home.”

Sure enough, it was Bennett Scott.

CHAPTER 5

T
he demon who called himself Findo Gask climbed out of the passenger seat of the car and let Penny Dreadful pull ahead into the narrow garage. He stretched, smoothed down the wrinkles in his frock coat, and glanced around at his new neighborhood. The homes were large, faded mansions that had seen better days. The neighborhood had been one of Hopewell’s finest, once upon a time, when only the well-to-do and wellborn lived there. Most of the homes sat on a minimum of two acres of rolling lawn and enjoyed the benefits of swimming pools, tennis courts, ornamental gardens, and gazebos. Lavish parties were held under the stars as fine brandies and ports were sipped and imported cigars smoked and live music played until dawn.

All that was before Midwest Continental Steel began expanding its plant west out of the city just below the back property lines, forming a wall of corrugated iron, scrap metal shriek, and molten fire between itself and the river. When that happened, the well-to-do and wellborn migrated to less offensive, more secluded sections of the city, and property values began to plummet. For a time, upper-middle-class families raised their children in these old homes, happy to find a neighborhood that exuded a sense of prestige and provided real space. But such families lasted only a short decade or so, when it became clear to all that the cost of upkeep and the proximity of the mill far outweighed any benefits.

After that, most of the homes were converted to apartments and town houses, save for a few where the original owners, now in their late seventies or eighties, had made the decision to hang on till the end. But even the conversions to multifamily dwellings had mixed results. Because the homes were old, they lacked reasonable heating, cooling, plumbing, and wiring, and even with modifications and improvements they were still dated, cavernous, and vaguely spooky. Besides, nothing could be done about the obvious presence of MidCon Steel, sitting right outside the back door at the end of the yard, and most people who might have considered renting at the rates sought wanted someplace with at least a modicum of tranquillity and ambiance.

Soon, rents dropped to a level that attracted transients and what was commonly referred to in the community as trailer trash. Renters came and went with the regularity of midseason TV shows. The banks and mortgage companies sold what they could of their inventory and put off any repairs or improvements that weren’t absolutely necessary. The neighborhood continued its steady decline toward rock bottom, and eventually those renting were pretty much the kind of people who got through life by preying on each other.

Findo Gask had learned all this from the real estate lady at ERA with whom he had inspected his present home two days earlier. It was an old Victorian, four bedrooms, three baths, living room, dining room, study, powder room, basement recreation room, two screened porches, a swimming pool that had been converted to a pathetic Japanese rock garden, and a spacious lawn that ran down to a tall line of spruce trees that effectively screened away the sights, if not the smells and sounds, of MidCon and was the best feature of the property. The house was painted lavender and blueberry, and there were flower boxes set at all the windows on the lower floor.

The real estate lady had insisted it was a real bargain.

He smiled now, thinking of her. She had been quite anxious to sell him the place, poor woman. What she didn’t realize was that he wasn’t even considering renting, let alone buying. It took him a few, ugly moments to convince her of this. When he was done, she was so frightened she could barely manage to draw up the necessary papers, but at least she had given up on the sales pitch. By the time she recovered her wits enough to realize what she had done, he would be long gone.

Findo Gask left Penny to her own devices and walked up the drive to the front of the house. Leather-bound book held in both hands, he stood surveying the old building, wondering at its endurance. It was sagging and splintering and cracking at every corner and seam. He thought that if he took a deep breath and exhaled sharply enough, it would simply collapse.

He shook his head. It was just another crumbling, pathetic edifice in a crumbling, pathetic world.

He walked up the steps and through the front door. The hallway was dark and cool, and the house silent. It was always like that when Penny was out. The other two never made any noise. He wouldn’t have known Twitch was even there if he hadn’t listened closely for the television, which Twitch watched incessantly when he wasn’t hanging around bars, looking for someone to traumatize.

Findo Gask frowned. At least with Twitch, there was the television to home in on when you wanted to know if he was around. With the other . . .

Where could it be, anyway?

He glanced into the living and dining rooms out of habit, then started upstairs. He climbed slowly and deliberately, letting each step take his full weight, making certain the creaking of the old boards preceeded him. Best not to appear too unexpectedly. Some demons didn’t like that, and this one was among them. You could never be certain of its reaction if you caught it by surprise.

Findo Gask searched through all the bedrooms, bathrooms, closets, nooks, and crannies. It would be up here rather than in the basement with Twitch, because it didn’t like Twitch and it didn’t like lights or television. Mostly, it liked being alone in silent, dark places where it could disappear entirely.

Gask looked around, perplexed.
Come out, come out, wherever you are.

Findo Gask didn’t like Twitch either. Or lights or television or Penny or anything about this house and the time he spent in it. He endured all of it solely because he was intrigued by the prospect of adding John Ross to his book.

And perhaps,
he thought suddenly,
of adding Nest Freemark as well.
He nodded to himself.
Yes, perhaps.

A small noise caught his attention—a scrape, no more. Gask peered up at the ceiling. The attic, of course. He walked down the hall to the concealed stairway, opened the door, and began to climb. The ceiling light was out, so the only illumination came from sunlight that seeped through a pair of dirt-encrusted dormer windows set at either end of the chamber. Gask reached the top of the stairs and stopped. Everything was wrapped in shadows, inky and forbidding, layer upon layer. The air smelled of dust and old wood, and he could hear the sound of his own breathing in the silence.

“Are you up here?” he asked quietly.

The ur’droch brushed against him before he even realized it was close enough to do so, and then it was gone again, melting back into the shadows. Its touch made him shudder in spite of himself. He wished it would talk once in a while, but it never said a word or uttered a sound. It rarely even showed itself, and that was all to the good as far as Gask was concerned. There weren’t many demons like the ur’droch, and the few he knew about were universally shunned. They didn’t take the forms of humans like most demons; they didn’t take any form at all. Something in their makeup made them feel more comfortable in a substanceless form, a part of the shadows they hid within.

Not that this made them any less capable of killing.

“We’re going out tonight,” he advised, his eyes flicking left and right in a futile effort to find the other. “I want you along.”

No response. Nothing moved. Findo Gask was tempted to have the whole house lighted from top to bottom just to expose this weasel to a clinical examination, but the effort would be pointless. The ur’droch was useful precisely because of what it was, and putting up with its shadowy presence was part of the price paid for its services.

Gask turned and walked back down the stairs and shut the door behind him. His mouth tightened as he stood in the upstairs hallway and ran his fingers over the cover of his book. Penny, Twitch, and the ur’droch. They were a strange and unpredictable bunch, but they were also what was needed.

He had learned that lesson in Salt Lake City.

T
he biggest of the five men he had hired bent close to the hotel room door, listening. The dimly lighted hallway was empty and silent at one o’clock in the morning. Findo Gask could hear the sound of his own breathing.

The man with his ear to the door straightened, shaking his head at the other two and Gask. No snores, no heavy breathing, no television, nothing.

Gask motioned impatiently.
Go in. Get it over with.

The big man glanced at the two who flanked him, then down the hallway to where the other two were positioned, one each in front of the elevator and the stairway doors. Then he took out the Glock with the screwed-on silencer, stepped back a pace, and carefully inserted the key in the door.

Findo Gask’s search for John Ross had begun three weeks earlier with a summoning. He was in Chicago at the time, working the projects on the south side, stirring up dissension and playing on frustrations, an invisible presence in an intellectual and cultural wasteland where hope was a mirage and reality a hammer. The riots of summer had been his work, as had the tenement fires of fall. Winter brought freezing cold and no heat, good building blocks for the instigation of further carnage.

The summoning came to him in the middle of the night as a child’s wailing. It was inaudible to human ears, but perfectly clear to his. He knew at once what it was. He had been summoned before, and he recognized the feelings the call invoked. Hunger, blood-lust, fury, and a deep and pervasive emptiness. It was as if the Void were hollowing him out, dredging his insides, his heart and mind and soul, with a tiny metal scoop. The pain was excruciating, and he went quickly from his room in search of relief.

He found it in the basement of the abandoned project in which he had constructed his spider’s web of hate, a place where gangs carried out acts so unspeakable there were no names for them. The wail had its source in a dark corner where rats prowled and the detritus of expended human lives was discarded as casually as yesterday’s newspapers. There were no windows in the concrete-block walls, but gaps in the ceiling served the purpose. Streetlamps lent just enough illumination to the chamber for Findo Gask to pick his way to where the summoning originated.

The wail died to a rustle as he appeared, a voice speaking to him not from the shadows but from inside his head. The Void’s presence was unmistakable, cold, empty, and lifeless, a whisper of the passing of all things and the beginning of none.

Listen carefully,
the rustle cautioned.
A gypsy morph has been captured by a Knight of the Word at a place called Cannon Beach, Oregon. The Knight’s name is John Ross. He is a seasoned, dangerous veteran of our wars. He seeks to unlock the morph’s magic. He must be found and destroyed. Findo Gask. Findo Gask.

The words echoed and died into silence. The dark of the basement shifted and tightened about him as he waited for the rest.

Bring me the morph. Findo Gask. Findo Gask.

Something like an electric shock jolted him, lifting him clear of the floor, filling his vision with red fire, then retreating in a light as clear as glass. Within the light was a vision of John Ross and the gypsy morph on a day as hard and gray as slate. They emerged onto a beach from a cavern cut into the side of an embankment of stone and brush, the morph caught in a strange netting, all bright lights and speed, the Knight of the Word already beginning to check for the enemies he knew would be coming for him.

The vision faded, and Findo Gask found himself slumped on his knees on the cold concrete basement floor, rats skittering away in the dark, shadows again gone still, silence everywhere.

Not many demons were summoned, Findo Gask knew. Only the oldest and most experienced, the ones the Void depended on most. A gypsy morph was rare and dangerous. Formed of loose, wild magics come together in the ether, a morph had the potential of becoming a weapon of incredible power. How a Knight of the Word had managed to capture one was unimaginable. It must have taken an incredible stroke of luck. Whatever the case, the Knight’s luck was about to change.

Findo Gask left the basement and the projects and Chicago that night. One or two other demons would be dispatched by the Void as well. But Findo Gask knew he was the one who would have the best chance of succeeding.

In the beginning, tracking John Ross was not difficult. Every time the gypsy morph underwent a new transformation, which was sometimes hourly, it emitted a pulse of expended magic. Like a beacon, the pulses could be homed in on, leading a hunter to his target. But human behavior was complex, and John Ross would know he was being hunted and that the gypsy morph was giving them away. He would be evasive. He would not stand around waiting to be caught.

Findo Gask tracked John Ross for eighteen days before he found him. He read the pulse of the gypsy morph at each change and relied on his instincts to tell him what Ross would do. He found the Knight of the Word in Salt Lake City ten days before Christmas in a seedy hotel at the north edge of the downtown area. With five very tough, well-paid thugs in tow, he entered the empty lobby of the hotel on the night shift, walked up to the clerk, produced his fake U.S. marshal’s identification, and asked for the key to Ross’s room. The clerk, young and stupid and scared, handed it over without a word.

“There’s not gonna be no trouble, is there?” he asked.

Gask smiled reassuringly. “Tell me what Mr. Ross brought with him to his room,” he ordered.

The clerk stared at him dumbly, trying to figure out what was being asked of him. “I dunno. A duffel bag and a knapsack’s all. Came in off a bus.” He paused, thinking. “Oh, yeah, he’s got a ferret, too. Must be some sort of pet.”

Gask took the men up to the third floor where Ross was staying. One man would position himself at the elevator, one by the stairs, and the other three would go in after Ross. They had been told Ross was a dangerous man, a traitor and a spy. They were not to try to subdue him; they were to kill him. He would be armed, and he would kill them if they did not kill him first. They had been issued Glocks with silencers and sworn in as deputy U.S. marshals. They would face no adverse consequences for their actions. All were under the protection of the United States government. Everything they did was fully sanctioned.