Midnight's Angels - 03 (24 page)

“Do something!” I yelled at Willets and Martha.

But they both looked stymied, their gazes swinging around helplessly. More power lines were crackling and falling. And apart from the sparks that they sent churning out, we had been plunged into near total shadow. The scene around me looked like a broken up black-and-white movie.

Then that clattering and rumbling started up again. Now that those with magic powers had done their work, the main body of hominids was taking over. Advancing. Slowly at first, but then speeding up.

“Do something!” I yelled at Quinn.

The hell with his wish to remain normal. We were in far too deep for that.

“Fix the power lines!” I hollered.

“They’ll just tear them down again!”

There was the clack of a shotgun being pumped beside me. Cassie’s face was really grim. She swung around and marched across to the outside edge of the crowd. And took aim. A load of people who were holding weapons followed her lead on that. They didn’t seem to care anymore that the shapes approaching them had once been human. So push had genuinely come to shove, and then some.

“One way or another, a lot of folk are going to die or be transformed in the next few minutes,” I told Maycott furiously. “There has to be
some
way to stop this.”

Gunfire had already started ringing out. About a dozen of the hominids were lying on the ground, some of them still twitching. But that didn’t slow the rest down in the least. In fact, they responded by speeding up. And they were springing around from side to side, making harder targets of themselves. Going up on lampposts, walls, and the roofs of parked cars. Closing in on us like a devouring nightmare. We were going to be overwhelmed, and I could see it.

“If you can’t fix the power, think of something else!”

“What do you want me to
do
?” Maycott shouted back at me. “Make the sun come back? I can’t do that!”

His face was drained of blood, his expression desperate. And there was a look in his eyes that I’d not seen previously. He was afraid, and it wasn’t the creatures scaring him. He was frightened for the entire town. For the first time in his life, responsibility for the safety of the place had fallen on his shoulders. And it didn’t sit with him well. He didn’t even look like he was thinking straight.

I grabbed him by the shirt and shook him.

“
Quinn!
”

“Okay, okay!”

He knocked my hands off, then tucked his head down. He’d apparently come up with something, but was trying to work through the details.

Shots continued blasting out. And somebody off in the distance was screaming for help. My whole frame was vibrating, adrenalin banging around inside me with nowhere to go.

Quinn’s face finally bobbed back up. His expression had lost its numb, blank quality and become quietly determined. It was still pale, but not with fright. It almost had an ethereal glow, like there was some soft power source beneath the skin.

The witchcraft was building in him strongly. I could see that. So I was careful to not distract him, letting him do what he needed to.

He spread his arms out to his sides, at hip height. Closed his eyes. Maybe he was visualizing what he wanted to make happen. And then he did the most remarkable thing.

I’d seen adepts use their talents plenty of times in the past. And most times, their magic had been accompanied by some kind of wordy, fairly complicated chant. But -- as he’d claimed -- Quinn didn’t bother with anything like that. He simply drew in a slow breath. And then exhaled a single word, a whisper.

Despite the gunfire and other racket, I could hear it perfectly clearly.

“Firefly.”

I didn’t know what the hell that meant. But a sensation like a skirling wind passed across my skin, and there’d not even been a breeze before.

And then I looked at my own hands. And felt my jaw drop.

* * *

Cassie stopped firing. She’d already taken down four of the hominids, none of whom she recognized. But her gut was heavy from it. These had been townsfolk, her own kind. So when they stopped coming at her without any slightest preamble, just paused and then shrank back, relief rushed through her body.

This was a pretty huge surprise. So what had changed their minds?

Then she saw that a glow had appeared on the skin of her forearms, telling her the lights had somehow come back on. Everybody else stopped shooting too, the same thing happening everywhere she looked.

But then she did a double take and peered around. And took in the fact that she was mistaken. The globe-shaped lamps of Union Square were still completely dull. And there was no electric glow coming from the surrounding buildings, nor when she peered down O’Connell. Not a single brightened window or a flicker from a neon tube.

Her head swam. If the light wasn’t coming from any of those sources ...?

And she almost lost her balance when she realized where it
was
coming from. She suspected she had started to hallucinate.

It was the people around her who were glowing.

She looked at her own arms again and tried to recoil. Except she couldn’t. She would only be recoiling from herself.

Her skin was sparkling with a pale gold sheen. She spread the fingertips of her free hand -- they left brief smudges on the darkened air. Her top had ridden up slightly from her midriff, and she could see that her whole body was the same.

Everyone’s
was!

They didn’t cast out much in the way of tangible illumination. It was far more like those novelty glow-sticks that got popular from time to time. The light was there, but self-contained.

A hominid got its nerve back and came scuttling at her. But it drew to a halt a couple of yards off, blinking at her strangely. She got a fresh shock when she saw its face. This had been Lavinia Mainchamp, one of the notably lesser adepts and an author of learned books. Except her good looks and intelligence had vanished.

There was no sense in taking chances, and so Cassie aimed the Mossberg at her. But the woman showed no desire to get any closer. She cocked her head to one side, raised a hand. Croaked something in that insectile rattle and then wiggled her fingers, the tips of which were covered with scratches from spending too much time down on the ground.

Then her twisted expression became even more baffled, scrunching up. Cass understood what had been going on. Lavinia had tried to conjure the strange golden glow away. And had not been able to. So it had been put there by a power far greater than her own.

Which could only mean one person, so far as she was able to guess.

“Quinn?”

Forgetting about the hominid -- however close it came, it obviously could not touch her -- Cassie turned around. Quinn was still standing with Ross. He was the only person in the crowd who was not glowing. And the people surrounding him had finally figured out exactly what had happened and were gawking at him amazedly.

As she watched, several people from the bar last night emerged. They were his crew, his closest buddies. But right at this moment, they were staring at him like they’d never even met before.

Quinn couldn’t meet their inquiring gazes. She could understand precisely how uncomfortable he had to be feeling.

Cassie hurried over to his side.

* * *

“What is this, man?”

That was his oldest friend, Denny. She had heard last night how they’d been pals since the fourth grade.

“You’ve been,” Nadine asked slowly, “an adept this whole time?”

They were holding themselves at a stiff distance from him, apparently afraid to get too close. And last night there’d been clasped hands, kissed cheeks, hugging. It seemed like a very distant memory from this perspective. Cass felt awful, watching this unfold. Like somehow, she’d had a hand in betraying him. She’d been amongst the group who had discovered him, let’s face it. None of this would have happened if they’d just left him alone.

“You’ve been lying to us?” a bespectacled guy called Brett asked.

At which point, she jumped to his defense.

“He didn’t lie! You never asked!”

Brett blinked, seeming to digest that. Chewed his lower lip. There was a profound silence for a while.

Which was broken by Nadine, who came to a decision and then acted on it.

“Well I don’t care either way,” she said firmly.

Throwing caution to the wind, she stepped forward and wrapped her arms around Quinn’s neck.

“Doesn’t matter what you are, it’s
who
you are. And adept or not, you’ve always been one of my very dearest friends.”

When she kissed him on the cheek, a faint smile returned to his eyes. And Cassie was delighted to see that.

* * *

The people around him, his friends and others, were crowding in to shake his hand a short while later, a load of “thanks, man” and “owe you” being mumbled, a load of squeezed shoulders and kisses from the women. Cassie watched it happily, her shotgun clasped in her folded arms.

The people started to disperse once that was done. There were other matters that needed attending to, and everybody knew it. Quinn turned to Cass, his hands both thrust in the back pockets of his jeans. And from her point of view, it was like they were the only ones around, the rest of the square lost from view.

“Well,” he muttered, letting out a breath. “I guess it’s a windy old mansion on the hill for me.”

“Why?” she came back at him, a little crossly. “Can’t you be both things, an adept and an ordinary man?”

The look in his gaze told her he’d not even considered it.

“I don’t see how that’s possible, now everybody knows …”

“They’ll be a little wary of you for a while, sure. But you heard what Nadine said. You’re the same Quinn Maycott that you always were. People adapt to altered situations. If I’ve learned anything the past couple of years, it’s that.”

She grinned and reached out, stroking his hair gently.

“Tell you what? You’d pass even easier for normal if you had a regular girlfriend.”

So here she was, throwing herself headlong at a man again. She knew it, but felt not the slightest apprehension. There was no small voice holding her back. She knew that she was making the right choice this time.

Quinn reached up and took hold of her fingers, smiling at her almost mischievously.

“Did I ever mention how direct you are?”

She nodded.

“But my head’s still going round in circles. Honestly, Cassie, let me get calmed down and think about all this. Okay?”

She wasn’t sure she liked the sound of that. What was there to really think about? But that was an unfair impulse, and she saw that and believed she understood. This had to be difficult as hell for him. He had built up his whole life a certain way, only for it to come crashing down on him in less than a minute.

She’d been through something very similar, back when her kids had disappeared. And knew he had to sort it out in his own way and his own time. There was nothing anyone could do to make the process easier or speed it up.

So she nodded again, more awkwardly than before. Then edged forward and kissed him hard.

“You’re not pissed at me?” he asked her when she pulled away.

“Nuh-uh, because I know one thing,” she told him, holding up her shining hands. “You make me glow, Quinn. No one’s ever done
that
before.”

The set of his expression became slightly gentler.

It was only when he’d started heading back toward the alley that she took in the fact the situation in the square had changed. Several dozen hominids were back here, in amongst the people. And that startled her at first. She brought the muzzle of her shotgun down.

But they were not attacking anyone. The unnatural glow prevented that. Instead, they were slipping in between the townsfolk’s ranks, stalking past them for all the world like a pack of apes that had escaped from their cages in a zoo.

Most people froze as they went by. Gun barrels followed them, but no one fired.

Cassie glanced across at Ross.

“What are they doing?”

He looked unsure and shrugged.

Four of the hunched shapes reached the Town Hall steps, then scuttled up and vanished inside. And a few seconds later, there were some heavy crashes, furniture being overturned.

So they were looking for the Clavis again. Even Quinn’s magic had not stopped them doing that.

Me and Cassie both looked at each other, and I could see that we were thinking the same thing. If only we knew what this Clavis was, or where it might be hidden. If we could only beat them to it. But a little chunk of normal-looking rock, in a town this size …?

As it stood, we were at an impasse. Both types of creature -- humans, and these loping, transformed things -- were currently occupying pretty much the same space without having much to do with each other. More of them continued to strut past us, and we watched them go. They couldn’t bother us. And we no longer wanted to hurt the things unless we absolutely had to. I thought I saw a hunched-up Nick McLeish go around a corner, and that gave me a nasty turn. How exactly was I going to break that to his wife?

Everyone looked weird, glowing this way. But Lehman Willets more than most. There wasn’t just the gold light coming off his skin -- there was the redness of his eyes to take account of. When he came over to me with a stern expression on his rumpled face, I guessed he had some more news, and not good.

His voice was somber and his whole manner subdued. I listened carefully as he explained that he’d been following the footprints left by magic once again. But this time, it was Maycott’s powers he’d been studying.

“I do believe I’ve found out why he can’t use violence.”

Which got my complete interest. Cassie’s too, of course. It turned out that the sequence of events went back before our newfound adept had been born.

Her affair with August had already finished. He had brought it to an end, disgusted with himself, after barely a month. But once Ursula Maycott learned that she was pregnant, she began to panic. The inescapable fact was that her child, when it was born, would be a full-blown adept. He would not need to learn witchcraft. He would have it in his blood.

And for most families on Sycamore Hill, that was not much of a problem. They had figured out ways, down the last few centuries, to keep their magically empowered progeny in check. But Ursula had no such knowledge. She was facing the prospect of giving birth to a tiny baby she had no way to control. So she went back to August, begging him for help.

“He couldn’t rid Quinn of his powers,” Willets explained to us. “No force on earth could manage that. But he cast a spell on his new son, five months before he even came into this world.”

Quinn could never use his powers in a destructive way, nor create any kind of protective barrier, which was something I’d been wondering about. It made sense. But I felt my shoulders clenching with exasperation.

Here we were, facing what might literally be our darkest hour. And we’d been handed a potential weapon that did not have any ammunition. Quinn Maycott had turned out to be -- to all intents and purposes -- a big gun with its catch stuck permanently on safety.

Cassie looked surprised and rather wistful, like the whole idea appealed to her in some way. But -- like I’d said -- she wasn’t really thinking straight.

It was left to me to ask the obvious question.

“Can you lift the spell?”

“I doubt it,” the doc came back at me. “ In the first place, August cast the strongest one that he could manage. And secondly, he bound it with a Hallows Knot.”

Which gave me another real bad shock. A Hallows Knot was a form of words -- a kind of supernatural codicil -- that made a magic spell as strong and immovable as galvanized steel. But more than that. If you were the subject of such witchcraft, if it had a Hallows Knot around it … if you ever tried to break free of it, then you’d suffer very badly, your body crumbling beneath the strain.

“This was his own son,” I breathed. “So why would he do that?”

“The man was feeling very guilty, like I said,” Willets replied. “He genuinely wished that Quinn had never been conceived. He couldn’t get rid of the child, and so he did the next best thing. He made sure his unwanted son could never interfere with the Raine bloodline.”

And I’d always thought that August was a good man. But when it came to the inhabitants of Sycamore Hill, it always boiled down to the self-same thing. Their power and prestige came foremost. There was nothing more important. The man had behaved the way the people up there had always done.

“I’ll investigate further, try and find if there is any way in which the Knot can be undone,” the doctor added. “Although I wouldn’t hold out too much hope. I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

I was aware how anxious Cassie had become, listening to him talk. Her face had gone extremely taut, her eyebrows raised in high, thin arches. And I felt bad talking about this so openly in front of her, but there was still another question to be asked.

“What if
he
tries to lift it?” I put in. “Surely he’s strong enough that …?”

At which point, I heard my voice trail off. Willets was staring at me in a way he’d never done before. And when he shook his head, it was with absolute finality.

“If he attempts to go against it, Ross, then God alone knows what might happen to him.”

* * *

Nearly all the adepts gone. The only ones we had left were the doc here, Martha, and a guy who had the power to light up a town and its population, but could not so much as crack an eggshell without bringing something awful down upon himself. Which led me to the same conclusion I’d arrived at several times before. If witchcraft couldn’t resolve matters, it was up to ordinary folk. Guys like me and Cassie, with our guns, our fists, our wits.

I turned the whole thing over for the dozenth time.

Then, “Erin Luce,” I muttered to myself.

“What’s that?”

Willets was peering at me oddly. I explained to him the course of action I’d decided on.

“Are you sure that’s wise?” he asked.

No, I was pretty sure it wasn’t. But it was still the only thing that I could think to do.

Look at it this way. What did we really have to lose?

* * *

Before much longer, Cass and me were heading out into the darkened suburbs once again. Up Sycamore Hill again, although we took the car on this occasion. It was filled with lanterns, just like last time. Venturing this deep into enemy territory, we didn’t want to rely merely on the glow our skin was casting out.

I kept on wondering for how long that would last. But Quinn had kept the townsfolk safe until the sun had risen, the first time that he’d intervened. So I supposed that this would not be any different.

The gloom reflected in my rearview mirror kept on shifting constantly, before we’d gotten even halfway up. Segments of it would detach themselves from the surrounding murk, moving up closer. But once they’d figured out what we were, they would opt for caution and hang back. There had to be whole cadres of hominids following us. Keeping a close eye on us, and wondering what we were up to in their own dull way.

Of the angels, there was not a sign. We hadn’t seen them for a while, in fact. That ought to have been a blessing. But I’d been doing stuff like this for long enough to understand that what seemed fortunate might be the reverse. It felt ominous. I genuinely doubted they had given up -- they had no reason to. So I was left guessing what they’d be doing when they showed up next.

We went by Gaspar Vernon’s mansion. There were crouched shapes on the move on its extensive roof.

Two intersections later we turned right, then did the same again, onto a gravel path. It took us in among rows of trees, then brought us to a pair of huge gates, which were hanging open. The shadows were so deep that you could barely make out the house beyond, until sections of it began appearing in my headlamp beams.

It was built of dark gray stone rather than brick. Great, roughly hewn chunks the approximate size of a truck’s engine block. They made the place look like a castle. And a pair of conical turrets in the roof reinforced that first impression.

This grand mansion had once belonged to Erin Luce. And was now the property -- so far as I was aware -- of her great-granddaughter, Holly Masterton, who’d lived there with her husband and their three young children.

The whole load of them would have been taken over by the angels, I expected. This entire damned hill had gone that way. It occurred to me that I had not seen any children in the mobs that had attacked us. Maybe they were far too small and weak. Or was there something else?

Shapes were on the move here too. We could see them bobbing about everywhere. And something darted across the front wall, a split instant before my headlamps struck it. But we’d come prepared for that. We drew up to the porch and climbed out, both of us clutching Very pistols.

I sent up the first flare. It climbed unevenly, leaving a corkscrewing trail of smoke behind it. And then, at its apex, it exploded into life, bringing the building into sharp relief.

There were abrupt rattling sounds as the hominids around us dived for cover. And before too much longer, we were completely on our own out here. Which was the way I liked it.

The front door was locked. But Cassie has a fairly shady past, and so that wasn’t the case for very long.

“Just an ordinary stone? No more than that?” she asked as we went in.

In a building this size, yeah, it was one hell of a long shot. But I figured that, wherever Erin Luce had hidden this Clavis, it might be someplace she could keep an eye on. Where better than inside her own home?

“Keep a lookout for paperweights and stuff like that,” I suggested.

But then, as I played my beam around, I began to see how crammed and cluttered this place was. There were vases and sculptures everywhere. Figurines, in bronze and stone and china. They covered the shelves and mantelpieces. There were more of them in cabinets. The fact that Holly had three kids under the age of eight meant that everything on view had to be protected by a Spell of Fixing. None of these objects would move if they were touched. But the sheer volume was daunting. Talk about haystacks, needles.

I began wishing we’d brought Willets along. He was extremely perceptive. But this wasn’t the time to go heading back.

“Split up?” Cass asked, keeping her voice steady.

Which had its good points, since we could cover more ground that way. But I could hear faint skittering noises deeper into this vast domicile. And decided we’d be safer if we stuck together.

“She must have had a study somewhere. That would be a place to start.”

And so we headed up the stairs.

We tried ten doors in succession before we found the right one. And when we finally stepped into the room, I took in the fact that it had never been modernized. No one seemed to use it anymore. It had been maintained as some kind of shrine to Erin Luce’s memory. Not a thing here dated past Victorian times.

There were lace antimacassars on the furniture. A map of the world on the wall across from us that had Persia, Ceylon, and Siam on it. The lampshades had amber-beaded fringes. And there was a brass barometer to one side of the map that would have fetched a fortune at an auction house.

All perfectly clean, though, not a speck of dust in view. I didn’t doubt that magic kept it this way, like it kept the ornaments safe. There was floor to ceiling shelving for the woman’s library of books, half of which were about varied matters and the other half on the subject of spells. Some of them were damned impressive volumes. On her desk were a lamp, a golden pen-and-inkwell set, a blotter, and another book. As wide and flat as a scrapbook this time, bound with dark red leather. It had the word ‘Journal’ printed on it in gold leaf, which made me decide to take a closer look.

February, 1898
was the first date I opened onto. The penmanship was copperplate. I’d no idea in which year Harmon Luce had created his device, nor the date that his wife had found out about it. So I kept on flicking through the brittle pages, desperately searching for the one word ‘Clavis.’

It came leaping out at me within a minute. I had started with the right year, but the entry was in August. I angled the flashlight down and squinted, my eyes straining, as I read through Erin Luce’s memories and thoughts.

Harmon is a good man, certainly, but too much filled with pride for his own good. This project of his … it was intended to impress me, without the slightest shadow of a doubt. And so, in that frame of mind, he paid no apparent attention to the awful dangers that this ‘Clavis’ might present us with. I thought him more mature than that. It really was extraordinarily foolish of him, and I found myself obliged to reproach him in the strongest terms.

The deed is done, however. The die is already cast -- there is no turning back. Since this ‘Clavis’ cannot be undone, I must assure myself that it will never be discovered. And here, if you will, is a literary twist. Whilst choosing a suitable hiding place for it, I was put in mind of Mr. Edgar Allan Poe’s infamous tale ‘The Purloined Letter.’ I shall say no more than that.

“A story about stolen mail?” Cassie said, right next to my ear. She’d leant across my shoulder to make out what I was reading. “Wow, sounds exciting!”

If there’d been a Nobel Prize for Sarcasm, she would have won it hands down, every year. But she was missing the point. I started explaining to her what that last line referred to  …

When something moved in a hallway outside.

Then my cheekbone got hit, really hard.