The End of the World As I Know It (The Ghosts & Demons Series Book 2) (2 page)

“Hi, Rory. Where are you today?”

“Here and there, hither and thither. There’s a potential new recruit in Minnesota I’m watching. She’s reading
The Haunting Lessons
now. She doesn’t know how much to believe yet, but she has seen things she can’t explain at the edge of her vision. She’s ready to open up to the possibilities. Soon, she’ll begin to see ‘misty wistfuls,’ as you call us. Then she’ll start saving money to come to New York, I suppose.”

“You’re watching her read? That’s kind of creepy.”

“She is comely.”

“‘
Comely
?’ Really?” I said. “That’s an old fashioned word, man. It sounds creepier now, like if you typed that into a Google search you’d wind up on a porn site.”

Rory chuckled, which sounded like a stone rolling down a pipe. “I have no need of such devices. The world is my porn site.”

I cleared my throat. “Where else are you, besides spying on women reading books?”

He frowned and his eyes lit up with the dim orange light which told me he was a little more present for me. “I’m monitoring a bomb plot that’s being hatched in Munich and there’s a man in Manitoba who is thinking of doing terrible things to his wife. He plans to kill her and then get the local constabulary to kill him.”

“What are you doing about them?”

“C&C is alerted and they’ve contacted the local authorities.”

Lesson 92: Don’t lose sight of the smaller encroachments that compromise us. We’ve lost the magic that might have saved us and we have to get it back. That happened because we were so focused on the big war to come that we lost sight of the little battles that make a war.

Since the first attack on the Keep, the demons destroyed most of our library. C&C stands for Command and Control. It’s located beneath the ruins of the church at the far end of the west courtyard. Spellcasters speak their protection spells and a ring of monks are always on duty, doing a walking meditation and chanting as they circle the C&C. The hope is we can recover at least some of the data we lost from the library. There were secrets in there that could have stopped the D-Day invasion. Just like
Battlestar Galactica:
this has all happened before and it will happen again. (Geek test!)

The tunnels walls scraped my elbows. “I didn’t think I was claustrophobic, but I think I could learn easily. How much farther to the sounding chamber?”

Rory got more translucent again and said, “No more than a league or so.”

“What?”

“Humans,” he said. “Always so serious.”

He retreated another fifteen feet and, by my headlamp beam, I could see the walls pulled back.

As I entered the chamber, a new, shimmering light came up from the floor and filled the stone room. I could see my breath. I shivered. “God, it’s cold.”

“I used to feel the cold,” Rory said. “I miss that. And heat, too. You know…next chance you get, you should get yourself to a beach with really fine sand. I remember landing on the pink beaches of Bermuda. There’s nothing like the feeling of warm sand between your toes. Also, when was the last time you had Yorkshire pudding?”

I’m from Iowa. I don’t think I’ve ever had Yorkshire pudding. New to New York, I was still discovering the many varieties of dim sum and sushi Brooklyn had to offer. I gave Rory a shrug.

“I really wish you would indulge your senses, child. It’s important to do so while you still can.”

I turned my attention to the hole in the floor. It was filled with a golden, liquid light. “How’s this thing work, exactly?”

“It can give you the answers you’re seeking, if you ask the right questions. I can’t find the demon what killed your first love — ”

“My
only
love,” I said.

“You’re young yet.”

I sighed. “What’s the right question?”

“That’s up to you,” Rory said. “Excuse me. Developments in Munich are calling me away.”

“Wait!”

“Must go. I don’t care for the energies here. The frequencies disturb my equilibrium.”

I blinked and he was gone. I was alone with the hole in the floor, bathed in shimmering light. If a ghost doesn’t care for the energies of a place, you can bet it freaks out the average human.

I had asked a powerful Wiccan — a Preceptor of the Spellcasters Brigade — about the sounding chamber. She was a tiny woman from the Philippines named Chumele. She said the sounding chamber focused all the energies from words spoken over the dead.

“The most powerful sounding chambers lie deep beneath graveyards,” Chumele said. “Since the battle with the demons and our many losses within the Keep, the sounding chamber is more powerful than it has been in a hundred years. It feeds off our tragedy.”

We had lost many in the attack. Everyone remembered my induction into the Choir because the demons chose that moment to attack. I’d lost two singers I’d considered friends. If something more, something good, could be gained from their deaths, I was eager to exploit the advantage over our enemies.

I tried to get more information from Chumele, but she just shook her head and told me to go ask my questions in the sounding chamber. “Rory will guide you. You’ll find the entrance to the tunnel behind the oldest suit of armor in the Blade Room.”

“Who do I ask questions of, though?”

Chumele patted me on the shoulder. “The Well of Sorrows, of course. If the subject of your query is connected to you personally, and if you ask the right question, the answer will be dredged up from the Mindfield.” She waved me away and went back to chanting protective spells over the entrance to the C&C.

Lesson 93: In my experience, people involved on the magic end of the Choir’s business are always unnecessarily vague and mysterious. I think it’s in the Magicals’ nature to be annoying. Manny says it’s just that they reflect Nature.

I took a few deep breaths to calm my nerves. Then I started quizzing the Well of Sorrows about my boyfriend’s murder.

Chapter 3

Lesson 94: What you turn your thoughts to is what you manifest. That’s why every great invention begins with one obsessed person. Every terrible idea starts the same way.

Lesson 94 sucks if you happen to be in a Sounding Chamber staring into the Well of Sorrows. Across the shimmering surface I saw the love of my life, Brad Evers, die again. I didn’t want to see that, so I closed my eyes. I listened to the pulse in my ears and waited for my heart to slow its slamming against my sternum.

The right question is…
what?

I struggled with that for a while, mostly because I was crying about Brad. Even a glimpse of the murder scene set me off.

Here’s the short story, minus the gory details. Through some magic detective work using the light cast from the lamp of Tighloon, I saw capital E Evil at work, killing my high school sweetheart. Skip ahead, skip ahead, skip ahead and bam, here I am in the Choir Invisible.

If we used ranks like the military, I’m kind of a sergeant, I guess. Manhattan calls me a legacy kid when she’s annoyed and wants to needle me. Since Peter Smythe was one of the founders, my official rank as his child is Scion of the Choir. We’re supposed to be all about saving mankind, blah-de-blah, rah, rah, rah…the same speech I gave to the noobs. However, I wish my title wasn’t linked to the man who killed Brad. Sometimes I think my mission would be complete if I killed my father.

Lesson 95: after you’ve done battle with demons and survived, you realize what you’re really capable of. My private mission is to avenge Brad’s death. Peter Smythe killed him so he has to die. I guess a lot of us want to murder our fathers, so most of you aren’t very shocked, right?

Lesson 96: when you ruin your daughter’s life, you don’t get to be called Daddy anymore. I have no idea what turned Peter Smythe against the human race. Don’t really care, either. He must die. Okay? Just so we’re clear.

Deep cleansing breath.

I opened my eyes and stared into the Well of Sorrows. Its surface was shimmering gold again.

The right question is…?

“It’s not Peter Smythe, so who is buried in my father’s grave?”

Peter Smythe’s face emerged from the well’s shimmering surface and stared at me. I shrieked, of course. You would, too.

The shrieking went on for a while. When I was done with that and panting for air, he was still staring at me. It was a liquid representation of him in 3D, of course. Still, don’t laugh. It was freaky, especially when the face changed to a demon’s face with wide yellow eyes. Instead of eyebrows, it had a line of small, jagged horns along the ridge of his brow. Each came to a point, like filed teeth.

“Where is Peter Smythe at this moment?”

The Well showed nothing.

I repeated the question.

Still nothing.

“Does that mean you don’t know or — ”

The Well became a fountain. It was pretty for a moment. Then the wall of water reached out with a quick, hot hand and slapped me across the face so hard I fell to the ground.

When I pulled myself to my feet, golden water ran down my body in thick rivulets, more viscous than water. My body shook with revulsion.

The Well of Sorrows isn’t like a computer screen showing you a Google calendar of events or Tumblr photos documenting how you spent your summer holidays. It’s a living thing that apparently watches everything and records it. It’s a
creature
, like the NSA, but slightly less scary and powerful.

I received a message before the creature unwrapped itself from my ankle and slithered back to its home in the well. The message was unspoken, more like an inkling of a coming storm from a sudden change in wind direction.

“He’s not on Earth,” I said. “Peter Smythe’s beyond the veil. He’s in Ra, isn’t he?”

The liquid retreated, back to the well. I got the distinct impression it was waiting to slap me again.

“Can you show me where he is in Ra?”

Nothing.

I didn’t want to get another slap down, so I took the hint and didn’t ask again. Peter Smythe was apparently beyond the creature’s sight.

“How about Ra? Can you show me what Ba’al’s kingdom looks like, past the bridge between dimensions?”

Hell.

I saw it briefly. You don’t have to look at Hell long to know what it is. You don’t want to look long.

There are legions of demon soldiers driven mad with fury. It’s not all fire. I saw volcanos and molten lava, but endless fields of ice, too. What’s common among the demons is they all desperately want to escape their dimension. Our world is where the grass is greener.

In terms the average human can relate to, if you’ve ever worked a customer complaints counter in a mall, Ra looks at least twice as bad as that.

The Well of Sorrows showed me Ba’al’s forces gathering at a towering wall of ice. I saw a gate made of fire and bones. I saw circles of red demons, just like the soldiers who attacked the Keep and killed so many of the Choir.

What I hadn’t seen was those of our number who had been dragged back through the rip in dimensions. I hadn’t known that some of the invasion force took some of our people back to their side of the bridge. I saw the demons feeding.
 

You guessed it. More shrieking. I wasn’t wearing my katana. I didn’t even have my umbrella sword on me. (Warrior or not, they’re tiresome to carry around all the time and, until now, I’d felt relatively safe that far under the Keep.)

When I got tired of screaming, I gasped for air. My father’s grave at the foot of the Keep’s wall by the church ruins held a demon. It was supposed to be Peter Smythe in that grave. It wasn’t, but I could set that right.

A spell that conceals something is called a glamor. A glamor can make your crappy apartment look like a jewelry store. If done really well, it can even make a dumpy, hairy slob look like the male models in the Jockey underwear ads. In other words, it’s like beer goggles at the end of a long night in a sad bar.

Victor Fuentes, head conductor of the Choir Invisible, says there are many dimensions. The dimension we’re supposed to move on to is commonly called Heaven. The land of our enemies, the Darkness Visible, might be our Hell. We’re unclear on the specifics, so no, I don’t know if you’ll ever see your dead pets again.

Disney says all dogs go to Heaven. Let’s go with that. If you’re looking for certainty and reassurance, I don’t have any for you. Lesson 97: Certainty is for dimwits, anyway. Of that, I’m
almost
certain.

I thought of Brad again and my father’s face disappeared from the Well of Sorrows. It started up the slow-mo replay of my boyfriend’s murder again. I squeezed my eyes shut and forced myself to think of Brad when he wasn’t being brutally dismembered.

“We had a lot of good times, too. Show me that.”

The Well showed nothing.

“Oh, I get it. It’s like Jeopardy. You’re Alex Trebek and I have to phrase my answer in the form of a question. When was I happiest with Brad Evers?”

If you were expecting a pornographic scene…well, so was I. Instead, the Well showed me a memory immediately after a pornographic scene. It was me and Brad in the long grass, holding each other close.

In the light of a full moon on a clear summer’s night, Brad’s deeply dimpled face was a lamp. The air was cool on our bare skin. We didn’t want to get dressed. Instead, we tried to do the impossible and hold each other closer.

I giggled and his dimples got deeper when he smiled wider. “What would you say if I said we should get married when we graduate?”

I stared at him for a while, smiling but suddenly serious. “Mama would kill me.”

“But she wouldn’t really, would she?”

“You’re right,” I said. “Mama would kill you.”

“That’s why we should elope once we’re out of town, on the way to college. We don’t want the good townspeople of Medicament to hurt themselves jawing over us. We’ll elope quietly and we can tell them when we move in with each other.”

“When will that be?” I asked.

“As soon as possible. You can’t be this awesome and expect me to stay away, Tam. That’d be cruel, wouldn’t it? I know you can kick my ass with hapkido, but you don’t have it in you to be cruel.”

Ha! Little did we know.

I turned away from the Well of Sorrows. Brad was so wrong. I did have it in me to be cruel. I’d learned to fight from my martial arts teacher, Mr. Chang. I’d learned to be brutal when I was attacked in a mental health hospital that wasn’t any good for my mental health.