In the House of the Wicked: A Remy Chandler Novel

  “Hey,” she said with a stunning smile, coming into his arms for a hug and kissing him on the neck before planting a noisy one on his lips.

  She pulled away, arms still around his neck, and looked at his face.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Is it Ashley? Is she all right?”

  “I don’t really know,” he answered in all honesty. Linda let him into the apartment, closing the door behind him.

  “Still no luck?”

  “Some nibbles,” he said. He would have loved to explain more but was unable. Marlowe was trying to get his attention, jumping up to lick at his face, flipping his hands to be petted. He could see the dog was eager to communicate with him as he always had, but Remy found that he was now deaf and dumb to his best friend’s language.

  He looked deeply into Marlowe’s eyes, attempting to reach him on an emotional level, but all he could see was panic in the Labrador’s gaze.

  “What are you going to do?” Linda asked, as they sat side by side on the sofa.

  “I haven’t a choice, really,” he told her. “I’m going to keep flipping over rocks until I find something.”

  He didn’t want to alarm her any more than he already had, so he tried to be casual with his next question. “So, somebody approached you in the Common? I wonder who it could have been.”

  “I have no idea, but Marlowe certainly didn’t care for him,” Linda said.

  Remy was frustrated that he couldn’t talk with Marlowe, but the fact that his friend didn’t care for the mystery man was very telling.

  “He gave me a piece of paper with a phone number on it and said what I told you on the phone.” She stood up. “That he needed to speak with you…that it was an emergency and…”

  “That the Watchers were going to do something terrible,” Remy finished.

  Linda nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “For something that you did. What the hell does that mean?”

  He shrugged, trying not to show any emotion, pretending to be as perplexed as she. “Do you have that piece of paper?”

  “Sure,” she said as she headed for her bedroom. “It was in the pocket of my jeans. I took it out before I put them in the wash.”

  Marlowe was sitting at Remy’s feet, staring up at him with great intensity in his dark brown eyes.

  “I know that you can sense something is wrong with me,” Remy said softly, taking the dog’s blocky head in his hands. “And you’re right. Something has happened to the angelic part of me…. Something has made it so that I can’t talk to you…. I can’t understand you.”

  Marlowe barked and then began to whine, shifting himself closer in a panic. Remy could only guess that his basic message was getting through to the Labrador.

  He was still holding the dog’s heavy face in his hands, and Marlowe leaned his snout over to lovingly kiss his wrist.

  “We’re going to be okay,” Remy tried to reassure him. “I’m going to get better. All right? We’ll be able to talk to each other again very soon—I promise.”

  There was a twinge in his heart then, a feeling that told him that maybe he shouldn’t have made such a promise to the dog. He had no idea if what he was experiencing was only temporary.

  The dog jumped up, licking his face with his thick pink tongue.

  “You’re a good boy,” Remy told Marlowe, hugging the dog to him. “We’ll be chatting up a storm again in no time.”

  Linda returned from her bedroom, reading the piece of scrap paper, before handing it to Remy. He read, with zero recognition, the phone number that had been scrawled there.

  “He said it wasn’t my place to understand,” Linda said, as Remy read the number again. “But you would. Do you?”

  Remy shook his head slowly, not wanting to lie but having no choice. He and the Watchers—the Grigori—had a long, sometimes violent history, and they couldn’t have picked a worse time to start something new with him. He got up, slipping the paper into the pocket of his slacks.

  “Aren’t you going to call?” she asked curiously.

  “Not from here,” he answered. “I have to get back out there, follow up on a few things about Ashley.”

  Linda nodded, but he could see that she was disappointed. She was better off in the dark. He just couldn’t have anyone else he cared for being dragged into the unusual world he frequently lived in.

  “I’ll give you a call the next free minute I get,” he told her, leaning in for a kiss. “You and Marlowe still getting along?”

  She pulled him close for another peck on the lips.

  “He’s a bed hog, but we’re doing all right,” she said, eyes shifting to the animal who sat before them, tail wagging.

  “Talk soon,” he told her, eyes then dropping to Marlowe. He hoped that the statement was true on many levels.

  “Hey, Remy,” she called out just before he shut the door.

  He stuck his head back in.

  “You be careful, all right?”

  “Only because you asked,” he told her with a smile that he tried to make reassuring before closing the door and heading on his way.

  Deacon felt as though he could change the world. And wasn’t that what he had always wanted?

  As a child he had feared the dark—not so much the nighttime environment, but what he feared was lurking there, just beyond his vision.

  It was the fear that had fueled his desire to pursue the art of sorcery—that and some gentle urging from a Romanian housekeeper who had looked after him. He had shared his secret with her, how he feared the darkness, and she had shared with him the knowledge that his fears were justified, that there were things out there waiting for the opportunity to claim a life, a soul, a world.

  She had shown him real magick, and his world had been changed forever. In the mystical arts he had found a way to beat back the darkness, to protect himself and his loved ones from the sinister forces that lurked in the shadows. He became voracious, using his family’s wealth to pursue his hunger for the arcane, but also using that newly found power to increase his fortune exponentially.

  The more he learned, the more knowledge he acquired, the safer he could make the world. When he had first met the cabal, he believed that he had found like-minded individuals, that they all shared responsibility for protecting the world from encroaching supernatural threats—from the things in the dark.

  But he had been wrong, and the lesson had been a painful one.

  What he had learned as a result of his ill-placed trust was now the distant past to him, the power that coursed through him directing him only toward the future.

  Spells and incantations that had been fading from his memory as the years raced past during his banishment here in the shadow realm were now ever present at the forefront of his thoughts.

  The divine power of the Seraphim had changed him, making him so much better than he had ever hoped to be. Now he had the power not only to continue his prolonged existence, but to at last return to the world of his birth, where those who had betrayed him would pay the cost for their treachery.

  Konrad.

  Deacon paused in the hallway of his home, listening. Not hearing it again, he continued on his way, preparing himself and his home for the journey they were about to undertake.

  Konrad.

  He was sure that he’d heard it now.

  “Who’s there?” he called out. “Scrimshaw, is that you?”

  Konrad, it’s me, said the voice. And now that he was listening, it seemed so very familiar.

  He thought that it might be coming from farther down the hall, and proceeded forward until he reached the dining room, doors still hanging from their hinges.

  In here, said the voice.

  “Who is it?” Deacon asked, stepping fearlessly inside. For what would dare challenge him now?

  The dining room had yet to be cleared. It looked as though a war had been fought there, and in a way it had.

  “Hello?” Deacon called out, but found nobody inside.

  Deacon, said the voic
e, and suddenly he knew from where it had come.

  “Veronica?” he asked, moving farther into the room. “Is that you?”

  Who else would it be? she answered, her voice raspy and dry. You left me…you left me in here alone.

  He found her withered body lying on the floor under broken pieces of the dining room set.

  “I’m so sorry, my dear,” Deacon apologized, gently picking her up. “Things have become a little crazy.” He found an unbroken chair at the back of the room and set his wife down on it. Stepping back, he allowed the divine fire that pulsed through him to light up his new body.

  “Things have changed,” he told her as he spread his arms to show off his magnificence.

  Have they? she questioned, her skeletal form slumped to one side in her seat.

  “Look at me,” he commanded. “Can’t you see how much has changed…how much I’ve changed?”

  I see the same man that I courted and married, she said. A man striving to be better for a world that barely realized he existed.

  Deacon was stunned by his wife’s hurtful words. Even after all this time, her opinion of him had still not changed.

  “But now I can…”

  You can what? she asked huskily. Show how powerful you are, only to have one more devious than you steal it all away?

  “That was then,” he muttered. “I would never allow Stearns to…”

  Stearns will smell your new might like a shark smells blood in the water, Veronica uttered harshly. And then he will come and he will take it from you.

  The power of the angelic now dwelling inside him surged with his rage, wings of fire unfurling at his back.

  “Stearns will do no such thing,” Deacon roared, body humming with the power to level cities in the name of God.

  I wonder what he will do with all that power, she pondered.

  “He will not have it!” Deacon raged.

  Perhaps after taking it from you, he will seek out others of a divine nature and take away their power, as well.

  “I won’t let him!”

  Maybe when all the power of Heaven on Earth courses through his veins, he will pay a visit to God.

  “He will not have it,” Konrad Deacon repeated, tendrils of living fire lashing out, setting the room ablaze…setting the corpse of his wife afire.

  “That power will be mine,” he told the woman he’d loved, whose dry flesh was burning away to reveal a yellowed skeleton beneath. “Algernon Stearns and all the members of the cabal will pay for their crimes….

  “And then I will make my way to God.”

  And even though Veronica’s skeleton had become blackened with the intensity of his fire, burning so hotly that the bone was gradually turning to ash, Deacon could still hear her inside his head.

  And she would not stop laughing.

  Remy called the number on the piece of paper, and the phone was picked up immediately. A voice that sent a slight shiver down his spine quickly asked who it was, and when Remy told him, it gave him an address and abruptly ended the call.

  He wished he could have been a little more surprised when he pulled up in front of the former Saint Augustine Church in West Roxbury. Saint Augustine was another one of those churches that everyone in the Commonwealth had read about, closed down by the Archdiocese because of poor attendance and even poorer contributions to the Catholic Church’s coffers, despite it having been a fixture in the old neighborhood for well over seventy-five years. The church had been deconsecrated, and now it was just an empty building waiting to be sold.

  Remy closed the door of his car and crossed the street to the steps leading up to the old building. There were two older women sitting in collapsible lawn chairs in front of the entrance.

  He knew why they were there; many parishioners of the closed churches had been sitting vigil twenty-four/seven, hoping that somebody with some power would take notice of their protest and eventually reopen their place of worship. Their faith in their cause was admirable, but it had all become matters of dollars and cents to the monolithic church; Saint Augustine, he guessed, wasn’t even a blip on their radar.

  One of the women was knitting furiously and looked up as he approached, reaching out to nudge the other beside her, who had fallen asleep, a hardcover book in her lap.

  “Good morning,” Remy said, placing a foot on the first step leading up to the entrance of the church.

  The one who had been napping eyed him with suspicion. Remy could have sworn that he felt her eyes boring into the top of his shoe.

  “Good morning,” the old woman who continued to knit said with mock friendliness. “Can I help you? Are you lost?”

  “I don’t think so,” Remy said with a smile and a shake of his head. “I’m supposed to meet somebody.”

  The old women shared a cautious look.

  “I don’t know who you’d be meeting here,” the knitter said. “There’s only us until we’re relieved at two thirty.”

  “There’s no one else around?” Remy asked, suspecting that the old girls knew more than they were letting on.

  “Just Clara and me,” the knitter said, as Clara continued to practice her death stare.

  He was about to retreat to his car when he caught the sound of a lock being turned, and one of the large wooden doors opened a crack.

  “Let him in,” a voice whispered from inside.

  “Are you sure?” Clara asked, her beady eyes going from Remy and back to the door.

  “I’m sure.”

  The knitter dropped her needles for a moment and gestured for him to approach. Remy climbed the stairs.

  “Can’t be too careful,” she said, retrieving her needles and picking up where she had left off.

  Remy took note of how quickly her hands manipulated the twin needles, and also the fact that they were quite thick and golden in color. He also noticed sigils that he recognized as markings of power etched upon them.

  The knitter looked up, realizing that he was staring. She smiled, pulling one of the thick needles from her work in the blink of an eye and pointing its sharp end at him.

  “Can’t be too careful,” she repeated, and, having made her point, returned to the blanket she was making. It was then that he chanced a quick glance over at Clara to see her adjusting her book over the pistol in her lap.

  “Are you coming in, or do you plan to sit vigil with the girls?” asked the voice from behind the door.

  Remy took the heavy wooden door in hand and opened it enough so that he could enter. It was dark and cool inside, and he had to blink his eyes repeatedly to adjust to the gloom.

  “Where the fuck have you been?” an unfamiliar voice asked as the figure hurriedly walked away from the door into the empty church. “We don’t have much time.”

  “I’ve been on a case,” Remy said, following the man. “Would it be too much to ask why you bothered my dog and scared my girlfriend?”

  The figure turned and Remy recognized him as one of the Grigori. “Believe me, I didn’t want to get you involved. It’s just that when I realized how big a cluster fuck this was, and that it likely had something to do with you, I figured you might as well get involved.”

  “You’re one of Sariel’s,” Remy said, watching a steely reaction come over the fallen angel’s face.

  “Yeah. I’m surprised you recognized a face in the background. I’m called Garfial.” The angel quickly turned around again, motioning for Remy to follow him.

  Remy followed Garfial across the deconsecrated church. He was surprised how bare it was; even the wooden pews had been removed, leaving only a large, empty room where the faithful had once communicated with their God. There was a sadness to the space but also something more, and since his senses were still numb, Remy couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was.

  Garfial climbed the stairs to the altar, disappearing through another doorway and then down a set of stairs to more darkness.

  Even though his senses were practically dead, Remy could still feel the preternatur
al energies that filled the air in the cool chamber below the church altar. It was like some kind of strange laboratory filled with tables upon which beakers and test tubes sat. There were stacks of books everywhere, and a number of jars sweaty with condensation, their contents a mystery.

  “What is all this?” Remy asked.

  “This is what I do,” Garfial said. “I was kind of like the biologist of the Grigori. I was to keep tabs on the various life-forms that the Almighty had seeded the planet with, making sure that everything was going along as planned.” The angel paused, looking around his makeshift lab.

  “Which it was. Which is why I became bored and…”

  “You did something stupid,” Remy finished.

  Garfial snarled. “You should talk. I’m not the one who killed Sariel and got us into the mess we’re currently in.”

  Remy leaned against a table.

  “Why don’t you fill me in on what my stupidity has supposedly done,” he said.

  Garfial was staring at him now.

  “There’s something off about you,” the angel said. “You’re different…. There’s usually a scary vibe that isn’t there now.”

  “Let’s just say I’m a bit under the weather.”

  “Well, let’s just hope you’re functioning with all cylinders firing by the time things hit the proverbial fan,” Garfial retorted. He went to one of the steamed jars and carefully picked it up.

  Remy watched as the fallen angel unscrewed the top of the jar and reached inside.

  “I should have known killing Sariel would come back to bite me,” Remy said.

  “And then some,” Garfial agreed, pulling something from the jar between his fingers. Whatever it was hung limply for a moment, dripping with a slimy substance, and then it began to move.

  “This is one of the stupid things that I did when I got bored with the world of man,” the fallen said. “I learned how to create life.” The object dangling from Garfial’s fingers started to struggle, tiny arms and legs thrashing about, a faint squeal drifting in the air as the life-form showed its displeasure. “And then teaching humans how to do it was my next big mistake.”

  Garfial placed the squirming, artificial life-form back inside the jar and screwed on the lid. “That one isn’t even remotely ready,” he stated. Setting the jar back down beside at least ten others, he wiped his hands on his black pants.