The image of the darkness as it poured from the skyscraper came into his thoughts again, followed by a surge of panic, but he pushed it down beneath the fire of anger he’d continued to stoke.
What’s happening at Hermes Plaza? he wondered with equal parts fear and intense curiosity. He thought of others like him, before he’d learned the truth about the world—the real world—and experienced a surprising urge.
Mulvehill left the living room, entering his bedroom and going to the dresser in the far corner. Pulling open the bottom drawer, he rooted around beneath a stack of old sweatshirts for the cigar box he kept there. Opening the lid, he looked at the old service revolver, something he had kept as a backup weapon since first making detective. In the drawer there was also a box of ammunition, and he loaded the gun.
For what he was about to do, he thought that he might need some protection, and hoped that bullets fired from a gun would be enough.
He grabbed his jacket from the back of his closet door, shoved the loaded handgun into his pocket, and headed for the door.
Before he lost his courage.
Algernon Stearns wasn’t quite sure, but didn’t think he had ever seen anything so magnificent that filled him with so much rage.
A blast of fire so hot that it started to melt the metal of the apparatus he wore sprang from the fingertips of his foe. A quickly erected spell of shielding was the only thing that prevented him from becoming nothing more than smoldering ash on the studio floor.
He conjured his own offense, casting the spell at the sorcerer who appeared to be wielding power of some divine origin.
There had always been a part of him that suspected that Konrad Deacon had survived the cabal’s betrayal of him, that the sorcerer had gone off someplace to hide and lick his wounds, but Stearns never imagined him returning in such a way.
Commanding a level of power that practically made Stearns’ mouth—mouths—water.
He felt the hungry orifices on his hands open up, eager to feed upon the unimaginable power now in the control of his enemy.
Where did he go? And how did he come to possess a power this great? Stearns wanted to know as he evaded another rush of unearthly flame that scoured the rubble-strewn ground where he’d been standing.
The exoskeleton was still functioning on a reserve-battery charge, a precaution that he’d enacted when considering how important this operation was and how many things could possibly go wrong. Hiding behind a crumpled section of soundproofed wall, the sorcerer adjusted the suit’s functions to allow him to collect and utilize some of the energies that were now being cast at him.
“Are you hiding from me, Algernon?” Deacon asked, a sickening tone of superiority dripping from his words.
Stearns waited, wanting to be certain that the suit was functioning properly before reentering the fray. Seeing that everything appeared to be in working order, he uttered a spell of destruction, felt the magick of murder collect in his hands, and emerged from hiding, throwing the death spell with the controlled precision of the murderer he was.
“Hiding, Konrad?” Stearns asked, the magick leaving his possession in the form of a humming ball of roiling energy. “It appears your time away has certainly bolstered your confidence.”
One of Deacon’s fiery wings folded down to block the spell. The magick detonated just in front of its target, but its effect was still devastating, shrapnel of pure magickal force peppering the air and slicing into his body.
“What was that, Konrad?” Stearns asked, striking while the iron was hot. He unleashed another blast of concentrated magick, blowing away part of the floor beneath Deacon’s feet, causing him to stumble. Stearns watched as Deacon attempted to recover, imagining the death magick from the shards protruding from his foe’s skin already starting to permeate his blood, weakening him from within.
“Was that a scream? Don’t tell me that even with all that power you’ve managed to acquire, you’re still no more of a threat than a child.”
Stearns came in closer, a corruption spell now encircling his fist. He brought that fist down, connecting with Deacon’s face and driving him to his knees.
He was stepping in for another strike when Deacon retaliated. His wings of fire exploded to life, flapping wildly and flicking globules of divine fire.
Stearns was driven back, wiping frantically at the flashes of fire that clung to the armored skeleton he wore.
“Impressive,” he sneered. “But still not enough.”
Deacon’s body had begun to radiate an insane amount of heat, the air warping around his form as he readied himself for what was to happen next.
“It was my biggest fault, you know,” Deacon said, stalking toward Stearns.
Stearns was ready, hundreds of different spells floating around in his mind, just waiting to be used.
“No matter how powerful I became, or how much knowledge I acquired, I always felt myself second to you,” Deacon continued.
Stearns erected a shield of magickal protection while propelling another wave of pure, undiluted malice at his foe. Deacon responded effortlessly, catching the spell in his hand and allowing it to fizzle into nothing.
“Even when I knew that I was better, there was still that nagging voice at the back of my mind,” Deacon explained.
“A voice to trust,” Stearns said with a sneer, unleashing a barrage of destruction to attempt to drive his enemy back.
But Deacon kept coming.
“Now there’s a new voice speaking inside my head,” he said, a hint of a smile on his lips. “Whispering that the old Konrad Deacon is gone.”
A rush of hurricane-force wind swirled from Stearns’ fingertips; he hoped it would give him the time he required to consider his situation. He needed Deacon to be unprepared for what was to happen, unable to fight back when he began to feed on the energy he so coveted.
“But there was still something that nagged at me, that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.”
The wind drove Deacon back, but only by inches. The sorcerer planted his feet, the ground crumbling into dust as he held his place and started to advance again.
“And then I realized what it was,” Deacon said. He flapped his wings of fire and propelled himself across the brief expanse.
Stearns would be a liar if he said that he wasn’t afraid. But, as is often the case, from great fear comes great reward.
Deacon pounced on him, driving him back to the floor with inhuman strength.
“I realized that it was still you, Algernon,” Deacon said, looming over him. “No matter how powerful I felt or how powerful the new voice inside told me that I was, I knew that you were still out there.”
Lying on his back, Stearns looked up at Konrad Deacon. There was a fire in his eyes and something else—something that hadn’t been there seventy years ago.
It was madness.
“You were still out there, ready to take what belonged to me.”
Stearns watched as Deacon raised a hand that started to burn like a miniature sun.
Oh, how he coveted that power.
“So the only way that I could truly be at peace was to find and deal with you,” Deacon said. “To finally take something away from you…your life.”
“You’re quite the prophet,” Stearns spoke, focusing not on the idea that his own death was merely moments away, but that he would soon have his latest desire.
The mouths beneath his metal gauntlets were dripping in anticipation as Stearns raised his hand to Deacon’s face, grabbing hold of the magician’s cheek in a steely grip.
At first Deacon was smiling, amused by his enemy’s struggles, but that look quickly turned to unease and then to pain as the mouths, aided by the sorcerous mechanics of the exoskeleton, proceeded to feed.
“You should have heeded that voice, Konrad,” Stearns said gleefully. “For there is nothing that you can possess that I am not strong enough to take away.”
There’s no place like home…. There’s no place like home….
r /> The line from her favorite movie echoed over and over inside Ashley’s head as she and the others made their way slowly down the hallway.
Just seconds ago, they had passed a wicked old library, its high wooden bookcases stacked from floor to ceiling with books, and now they were in the corridor of one of those fancy office buildings. Ashley wondered what awaited them in the shadows up ahead and where they might be after they passed through them.
She pictured them all entering the cool shadow and emerging in the crowded and damp-smelling basement of her Beacon Hill home. The thought caused the corners of her mouth to tick upward as she imagined them all climbing the stairs up from the basement, she leading the way, eager to introduce her new friends to her parents.
My parents.
How long have I been missing? They must be worried sick.
Squire’s hand reached out, snagging her arm and violently yanking her back and from her thoughts.
“Pay the fuck attention!” the goblin screamed at her.
She was startled, and at first didn’t know what he was talking about, until she saw that she had been on the verge of treading across a circular patch of shadow. She stared into the blackness, witnessing a ripple of distortion across the liquidlike surface as something moved beneath it.
“Sorry,” she said. They were all stopped now, watching her. The building moaned like some kind of haunted house, and it sounded as if something big might be moving around behind them, where they’d just come from.
“I think there’s a stairwell up here,” the guy Francis said, taking all the attention from her.
He’d turned with the fat guy, and they were moving again.
“Here, take this,” Squire said beside her. She looked down to see that he was trying to force some sort of small sword into her hand. Ashley hesitated, slipping her hands into the back pockets of her jeans.
“No, that’s okay…I’m good.”
“Take it!” the goblin demanded, roughly pulling at her arm and shoving the cool grip of the weapon into her hand. It was heavier than she imagined it would be, and it served as yet another reminder of how absolutely insane this all was.
“I don’t want this,” she then said, letting the sword drop on the carpeted floor. “I can’t…”
“You can and you will,” Squire said angrily, picking up the sword and shoving it right back into her hand. “If you don’t, you’re gonna die.”
She was suddenly back in her senior college-placement biology class with Mr. Harpin. Adapt or die, she heard the old man with the extremely large Adam’s apple proclaim as they discussed evolution.
“Adapt or die,” she said aloud, clutching sword’s hilt.
“Yeah, something like that,” Squire agreed. “Now, let’s keep an eye on where we’re walking or…”
“Where are they?” Ashley asked.
Squire followed her gaze and saw that Angus and Francis were gone.
“Son of a bitch,” the goblin hissed. “Whatever the fuck is going on in this building must’ve caused shit to shift again. Who knows where those two are now? There goes our safety in numbers.”
She felt bad for slowing them down, causing them to lose their numbers.
“Yeah, but now I got this,” she said, waving the short sword around.
“Be careful you don’t poke your eye out,” the goblin grumbled. He grabbed her elbow more gently this time and urged her to start moving.
“Let’s go. Maybe we can catch up to them.”
They started down the hallway again, careful to avoid any puddles of shadow spreading across the red-carpeted floor. She was being extra careful now, hefting her sword, ready.
Ready for what?
Ashley didn’t know…didn’t want to know…She just wanted to get home and see her parents.
There’s no place like home…. There’s no place like home…. There’s no…
It was as if a curtain of solid black material had dropped down in front of them. Squire’s arm shot out to prevent her from going any farther, but she had already come to a complete stop.
“This is what I’m talking about,” the goblin muttered. “Everything’s shifting around.”
She could see that he was leaning forward slightly now, like he was sniffing the air in the darkness.
And then they heard the sounds.
“Hey, there you are,” said a voice from behind the curtain, and at first she thought that it sounded like Francis. But she realized that it was too happy-sounding for the balding man with the golden pistol, and before she could say something there was a flash, followed by a crack of thunder, and Squire went flying backward.
The white-skinned man with the tattooed face slithered out from behind the curtain of shadow, smoldering pistol in one hand, the stump of the other pressed to his chest, a length of leash leading to a collar around the creepy little boy, Teddy’s, scrawny neck, wrapped tightly around it.
“Thought we’d lost you,” the pale man said with an unnerving smile.
Squire lay on his side, clutching a bloody leg, weapons from his golf bag strewn about the hall.
“Get out of here Ashley. Run!” he roared.
There was a moment’s hesitation, as she didn’t want to leave her friend, but there was also something in the pale man’s eyes, something that told her that he was even more dangerous than the things that swam in the shadows. Ashley turned and started to run down the corridor. She had no idea where she was running or even what she might run into, but she knew that she had to do this if she was going to survive.
Running as fast as she could, avoiding the puddles of shadow on the floor around her, she heard the ominous words of the tattooed man following her.
“Go get her, Teddy…. Bring your toy back to me.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“Never let them take anything away from you,” Konrad Deacon remembered his dementia-wracked grandfather saying to him. “And if they do…make them pay dearly for taking it.”
Even as he experienced the excruciating pain of Algernon Stearns attempting to steal away his divine power, Deacon could still remember the old man’s urgings and the disturbing smile that adorned his ancient face as he spoke them.
“Make them pay dearly for taking it.”
As soon as Stearns laid his hands upon him, he’d felt his strength, his angelic power, gradually being drained away.
How is he doing this? Deacon wondered, always questioning, always the seeker of knowledge. He could see that his rival was adorned in complex mechanics—something akin to the exoskeleton he himself had worn to siphon the collected life energies from his golem receptacles.
But there was something different about Stearns, something that went beyond the special suit.
Deacon struggled in the sorcerer’s grasp, reaching up to pull away the hand that was pressed against his face. And that was when he saw how much Stearns had been changed by that experiment so many years ago.
That was when he saw the mouths.
“They’re hungry, Konrad,” Stearns said, “And now that they’ve gotten a taste of you, they’re absolutely ravenous.”
For a brief instant, Deacon had to wonder how drastically the others of the cabal had been altered by his experiment, but his thoughts were replaced by agony as Stearns laid his hungry hands on him and resumed his feeding.
From the corner of his eye, Deacon saw his wife. Of course she would be here to see this.
It’s exactly as I told you, she chided, never lifting a finger to help. Stearns is going to take it all away.
“No,” he screamed aloud, but that just made Stearns laugh, and he felt himself growing weaker all the faster.
A supernatural halo of fire had started to burn around his enemy’s head, and that infuriated him to the brink of madness.
This was his power…his…He had taken it from one of Heaven’s soldiers himself…not Algernon Stearns…Konrad Deacon.
He had taken it…. He was the master.
Deacon looked up i
nto Stearns’ smiling face and smiled back. He watched as his rival’s expression went from one of joy to confusion…
And then to concern.
This was his power…and he would control it.
Deacon reached within himself, stopping the flow of divine energy into Stearns’ body.
His wife’s nagging voice was replaced by that of his grandfather, urging him to make his enemy pay. Flashes of a moment from his past exploded within his memory as he took control of the power. He recalled the first time he had truly listened to his grandfather’s words.
When he was just a boy of six or seven, the family’s driver was a man named Keady, a cruel man who resented young Konrad and the life of wealth and privilege into which he’d been born. And on one particular day, when Mr. Keady was supposed to be driving Konrad to a child’s birthday party at the home of another family of wealth and privilege, that resentment reared its ugly head. Young Konrad was enjoying a lollipop—cherry flavored; he’d always loved cherries—when Mr. Keady ordered him to throw it away, or he wouldn’t be allowed in the car. Of course, he had protested, and the driver took full advantage of the authority he had been given when it came to the car, citing rules laid down by Konrad’s father himself that there would be no food or drink allowed in the vehicle.
And still Konrad had refused, attempting to climb into the back of the limousine with his cherry treat, which was when Mr. Keady happily acted, tearing the lolli from his mouth and tossing it to the ground.
Konrad remembered crying as if he’d lost a loved one, but he also remembered Mr. Keady laughing, as if this act of cruelty was one of the funniest things he had ever seen.
Konrad remembered.
The recollection of his past trauma now gave him the strength to stand. Stearns fought him, fought to feed, but Deacon had stopped the flow of power, keeping it all to himself.
Make them pay for taking it.
After he had gone to the birthday party, where treats of every conceivable imagining had been available to him, but not his cherry lollipop, he had gone to see his grandfather, to tell the old man what Mr. Keady had done.