Moments later, Harper Scott appeared in the kitchen doorway, all sleepy-eyed and lost-looking. “Mommy?” she asked.
Nest walked over and gathered her up. “Mommy’s taking a bath, pumpkin. She’ll be right out. How would you like a fresh-baked sugar cookie while you’re waiting?”
Great dark eyes regarded her solemnly. A small nod followed. Nest sat her down at the table, poured milk into her baby cup, and went to work on the first batch of cookies, taking them from the oven and off the cookie sheet, stacking them on a plate. She gave one to Harper when it had cooled enough to hold and watched the little girl nibble around the edges as she held the cookie carefully in both hands.
Oh, child, child.
Fifteen years ago, she had saved Bennett Scott’s life when the feeders had lured the frightened sleepy child to the top of the bluffs at the turnaround. When Pick and Nest found her, she had been close to walking off the edge of the cliffs. Terrified and confused, the little girl had barely known where she was.
That was a long time ago, Nest thought, watching Harper eat her cookie. Bennett hadn’t been much older than her daughter then—just a little girl herself. It was hard to reconcile the grownup with the child. She remembered how Bennett had looked back then and how she had looked an hour earlier when Nest had helped her step into the old bathtub. How had Bennett gotten so far away from herself? Oh, it was easy to rationalize when you factored in drug usage and child abuse. But it was emotionally jarring nevertheless; the memory of who she had been was not easy to dismiss.
By the time Harper was working on the last few bites of her sugar cookie, Bennett reappeared, wrapped in the old terry cloth robe Nest had left for her by the tub. She gave Harper a hug and sat down to share a cookie with her. Her pale skin looked translucent in the kitchen light, and her dark eyes were sunken and depthless. Beneath the robe, needle tracks walked up and down her arms and legs; Nest had seen them, and the image flashed sharply in her mind.
She smiled at Nest. “You were right about the bath. I feel a lot better.”
Nest smiled back. “Good. Stick Harper in the tub next. Borrow anything you need in the way of clothes. There’s a casserole in the fridge for dinner; just heat it up. I have to go out with the church youth group, but I’ll be back around eight or nine.”
She finished up with the cookies, shutting down the oven and washing up the metal sheets. She glanced at the clock. Five-fifty. Allen Kruppert and his wife, Kathy, were picking her up in their big Suburban at six-thirty. She had just enough time to take a plate of cookies over to the Petersons.
She picked up the phone and called to see if they had started dinner, which they hadn’t.
“I’ve got to be going,” she called over her shoulder to Bennett as she finished putting together her cookie offering. “Don’t worry about the phone; the answer machine will pick up. And don’t wait up. You need to get some sleep.”
She went out into the hall to pull on her parka, scarf, and gloves, then came back for the cookies and whisked them out the back door.
The cold was hard and brittle against her skin as she tromped down the porch steps, and she shivered in spite of herself. The clouds were breaking up, and moonlight illuminated the stark, skeletal limbs of the trees, giving them a slightly silver sheen. All about her, the darkness was hushed and still. She blew out a breath of white vapor, tucked her chin into her chest, and hurried across the backyard toward her neighbors’ home.
She had gone only a few steps when she saw the feeders. They were gathered at the lower end of her yard, tucked up against the hedgerow in formless clumps, their yellow eyes blinking in the night like fireflies. She slowed and looked at them. She hadn’t seen any feeders this close to her home in months. She glanced in either direction from the hedgerow and found others at the edges of the house and garage, shadowy forms creeping stealthily, silently through the cold night.
“Get out of here!” she hissed in a low voice.
A few disappeared. Most simply moved off a bit or shifted position. She glanced around uneasily. There were too many for coincidence. She wondered suddenly if they knew about John Ross, if the prospect of his coming was drawing them.
More likely it was just the stink of the demon who had visited her earlier that was attracting them.
She brushed the matter aside and hurried on across the frosted carpet of the lawn.
She saw nothing of the figure who stood at the top of her walk in the deep shadow of the cedars.
Chapter 7
Findo Gask waited for Nest to cross the lawn to the Petersons’, then for her to come out again when the big Suburban pulled into her driveway. He stood without moving in the darkness, virtually invisible in his black frock coat and black flat-brimmed hat, his leather-bound book held close against his chest. The night was bitter cold, the damp warmth of the sunny day crystallized to a fine crust that covered the landscape in a silvery sheen and crunched like tiny shells when walked on. Even the blacktop in front of the Freemark house glimmered in the streetlight.
When Nest Freemark climbed inside the Suburban and it backed out of her driveway and disappeared down the street, Findo Gask waited some more. He was patient and careful. He watched his breath cloud the air as it escaped his mouth. A human would have been freezing by now, standing out there for better than an hour. But demons felt little of temperature changes, their bodies shells and not real homes. Most of Findo Gask’s human responses had been shed so long ago that he no longer could recall how they made him feel. Heat or cold, pain or pleasure, it was all the same to him.
So he waited, unperturbed by the delay, cocooned within the dark husk to which he had reduced himself years ago, biding his time. It had taken a bit of effort to find out Nest would be gone this evening. He didn’t want that effort to be wasted.
He passed the time keeping watch on the house, intrigued by the shadowy movements inside. There were lights on in a few of the rooms, and they revealed an unexpected presence. Nest had left someone at home. The wrinkled old face creased suddenly with smile lines. Who might that someone be?
When everything was silent with the cold and the dark and there was no longer any reasonable possibility that Nest Freemark might be returning for something she had forgotten, Findo Gask left his hiding place and walked up onto the front porch and knocked softly.
The door opened to reveal a young woman wrapped in a terry cloth bathrobe. She was rather small and slender, with lank hair and dark eyes. It was the eyes that caught his attention, filled with pain and disappointment and betrayal, rife with barely concealed anger and unmistakable need. He knew her instantly for what she was, for the life she had led, and for the ways in which he might use her.
She stood looking out through the storm door, making no move to admit him. “Good evening,” he said, smiling his best human smile. “I’m Reverend Findo Gask?” He made it a question, so that she would assume she was supposed to be expecting him. “Is Nest ready to go with me?”
A hint of confusion reflected on her wan face. “Nest isn’t here. She left already.”
Now it was his turn to look confused. He did his best. “Oh, she did? Someone else picked her up?”
The young woman nodded. “Fifteen minutes ago. She went caroling with a church group.”
Findo Gask shook his head. “There must have been a mixup. Could I use your phone to make a call?”
His hand moved to the storm-door handle, encouraging her to act on his request. But the young woman stayed where she was, arms folded into the robe, eyes fixed on him.
“I can’t do that,” she announced flatly. “This isn’t my house. I can’t let anybody in.”
“It would take only a moment.”
She shook her head. “Sorry.”
He felt like reaching through the glass and ripping out her heart, an act of which he was perfectly capable. It wasn’t anger or frustration that motivated his thinking; it was the simple fact of her defiance. But the time and place were wrong for acts of violence,
so he simply nodded his understanding.
“I’ll call from down the road,” he offered smoothly, taking a step back. “Oh, by the way, did Mr. Ross go with her?”
She pursed her lips. “Who is Mr. Ross?”
“The gentleman staying with her. Your fellow boarder.”
A child’s voice called to her from somewhere out of view, and she glanced over her shoulder. “I have to go. I don’t know Mr. Ross. There isn’t anyone else staying here. Good night.”
She closed the door in his face. He stood staring at it for a moment. Apparently Ross still hadn’t arrived. He found himself wondering suddenly if he had been wrong in coming to Hopewell, if somehow he had intuited incorrectly. His instincts were seldom mistaken about these things, but perhaps this was one of those times.
He couldn’t afford to have that happen.
He turned around and walked back out to the street. The ur’droch joined him after a dozen paces, all shadowy presence and rippling movement at the edges of the light.
“Anything?” he asked.
When the shadow-demon gave no response, he had his answer. It was not unexpected. It wasn’t likely Ross was there if the young woman hadn’t seen him. Who was she, anyway? Where had she come from? Another pawn on the board, waiting to be moved into position, he thought. It would be interesting to see how he might make use of her.
He walked back down the road to where he had left the car parked on the shoulder and climbed inside. The ur’droch slithered in behind him and disappeared onto the floor of the backseat. He would give Ross another three days, until Christmas, before he gave up his vigil. It wasn’t time to panic yet. Panic was for lesser demons, for those who relied on attributes other than experience and reasoning to sustain them.
He started the car and wheeled it back onto the roadway. It was time to be getting home so that he could enjoy the little surprise he had prepared for Nest Freemark.
Nest climbed in beside Kathy Kruppert, squeezing her over toward her husband on the Suburban’s bench seat. In the back, somewhere between six and nine teens and preteens, two of them Krupperts, jostled and squirmed while trading barbs and gossip. She exchanged hellos with everyone, then leaned back against the padded leather while Allen backed the big Chevy onto Woodlawn and headed for the next pickup.
Her thoughts drifted from John Ross and Findo Gask to Bennett and Harper Scott and back again.
“Everything okay, Nest?” Kathy asked after a few minutes of front-seat silence amidst the backseat chaos. She was a big-boned blond carrying more weight than she wanted, as she was fond of saying, but on her the weight looked good.
Nest nodded. “Sure, fine.”
“You seem awfully quiet tonight.”
“For a basically noisy person,” Allen added, straight-faced.
Nest gave him a wry grin. “I’m just saving myself for later, when the singing starts.”
“Oh, is that it?” Allen said, nodding solemnly. He glanced at her over the top of his glasses, beetle-browed and balding. “You know, Kath, it’s always the quiet ones you have to look out for.”
They hit a bump where weather and repeated plowing had hollowed out a section of the roadway. Ouch! Hey, watch it! the kids all began yelling at once in back, offering myriad, unnecessary pieces of driving advice.
“Quiet down, you animals!” Allen shouted over his shoulder, giving them a mock glare. When they did, for what must have been a nanosecond, he declared with a smirk, “Guess I showed them.”
Kathy patted his leg affectionately. “Father always knows best, honey.”
Allen and Kathy had been married right out of high school, both graduating seniors, six or seven years older than Nest. Allen began working as a salesman with a realty firm and found he had a gift for it. Ten years later, he was running his own business. Ten years earlier, he had approached Nest with an offer for her house at a time when she was seriously considering selling. Even though she had decided against doing so, she had been friends with the Krupperts ever since.
“How are the Petersons?” Kathy asked her suddenly.
“Pretty frail.” Nest dug her hands into her parka pockets with a sigh. The truth was, time was running out on the Petersons. Their health was deteriorating, there was no one to look after them, and nothing anyone said or did could convince them to consider moving into a care facility.
“You do the best you can for them, Nest,” Kathy said.
Allen shifted his weight in the driver’s seat and brushed back his thinning black hair. “They’re determined people. You can only do so much to help them. There’s no point in fussing about it. They’ll go on, just like they have been, until something happens to force them to change their way of life. You have to respect that.”
“I do, but I worry anyway. It’s like sitting around waiting for the other shoe to fall.”
“Sure enough,” Kathy agreed with a sigh. “My uncle Frank was like that.”
“Gran, too,” Nest said.
Allen chuckled. “Good thing you two understand the problem so well. That way, you won’t become part of it later on. That’ll sure be a relief to a lot of folks.”
They picked up two more teens from the Moonlight Bay area, then headed back into town for a rendezvous with a van-load of kids driven by Marilyn Winthorn, one of the older ladies who still worked assiduously with the youth groups. From there, they started on their rounds, following a list of names and addresses supplied by Reverend Andrew Carpenter, who had taken over the ministry after Ralph Emery retired three years ago. At each stop, they sang a few carols at the front door, deposited a basket of Christmas goodies supplied by the ladies’ guild, exchanged Merry Christmases and Happy New Years, and moved on.
By the twelfth visit, Nest had stopped thinking about anything but how good this was making her feel.
It was sometime around eight-thirty when they pulled into the driveway of an old Victorian home on West Third, an area of fallen grandeur and old money gone elsewhere. The name on the list for this home was smudged, and no one could quite make it out. Hattie or Harriet something. It wasn’t a name or address anyone recognized, but it might be a church member’s relative. They climbed out of the vehicles, walked to the front entry, and arranged themselves in a semicircle facing the door.
There were lights on, but no one appeared to greet them. Allen stepped up to the door, knocked loudly, and waited for a response.
“Creepy old place, isn’t it?” Kathy Kruppert whispered in Nest’s ear.
Nest nodded, thinking that mostly it seemed rather sad, a tombstone to the habitation it had once been. She glanced around as the kids whispered and shuffled their feet, waiting impatiently to begin. It was a neighborhood of tombstones. Everything was dark and silent along the rows of old homes and corridors of ancient trees. Even the street they bracketed was empty.
Someone came to the door now and inched back the curtain covering the glass. A face peeked out, its features vague and shadowy in the gloom.
The door cracked open, and a frail voice said, “Goodness.”
Taking that as a cue to begin, Allen stepped off the porch, and the youth group began singing “Joy to the World.” Their voices rang out through the darkness and cold, and their breath clouded the air. The door remained cracked, but no one appeared.
They had begun the refrain, “Let heaven and nature sing,” when the door burst open with such force that it shattered the glass pane, and a huge, hulking figure stormed through the opening and down the steps. Albino white and hairless, he stood seven feet tall and weighed three hundred pounds, but he moved with such quickness that he was on top of the group almost as quickly as their singing turned to shrieks of fear and shock.
“Joy to the world! Joy to the world! Joy to the world!” the big man shouted tunelessly.
The kids were scattering in every direction as he reached Allen Kruppert, knotted one massive fist into the startled realtor’s parka, and snatched him right off his feet. Holding him aloft with one arm extended,
he shook Allen like a rag doll, yelling at him in fury.
“Joy to the world! Joy to the world! Joy to the world!”
Fists pressed against her mouth, Kathy Kruppert was screaming Allen’s name. Marilyn Winthorn was herding the kids back toward the vehicles, intent on loading them in as quickly as she could manage, her face tight and bloodless.
Allen was kicking and shouting, but the big man held him firm, continuing to shake him as if he meant to loosen all his bones and empty out his skin.
“Joy to the world! Joy to the world!”
It all happened in seconds, and for the brief length of time it took, Nest Freemark was frozen with indecision. Her first impulse was to use her magic on the big man, the magic that caused people to lose control of their muscles and collapse in useless heaps, that she had used on Danny Abbott and Robert Heppler all those years ago, that she had used on her father.
But if she invoked it now, she risked setting Wraith loose. It was the reality she had lived with since she was nineteen. She could never know what might trigger his release. She had discovered that three years ago at the Olympics, and she had not used her magic since.
Now, it seemed, she had no choice.
She shouted at the big man, striding toward him, small and inconsequential in his shadow. He barely looked at her, but his shaking movement slowed, and he let Allen sag slightly. He was all misshapen, she saw, as if he had not been put together in quite the right way and his parts did not fit as they should, some too large and some too small. He had the look of something formed of castoffs and leftovers, the detritus of the human gene pool.
Nest shouted harder, and now the strange pink eyes fixed on her. Screwing up her courage and tightening her hold on Wraith, who was already awake and pressing for release inside her, she hammered at the big man with her magic, trying to make him take a sudden misstep in her direction, to lose his balance and release Allen. But it was as if she had run into a wall. He shrugged aside her magic as if it weren’t even there, and in his eyes she found only an empty, blank space in which nothing human lived.