In the House of the Wicked (26 page)

“Caught her trying to lift a few ounces of my powdered saints’ bones.” Francis took a box from the shelf. “Can you imagine what a snort of Saint Pelagius would do?” he asked as he peeled back the flaps on the box to look inside. “Hey, I was wondering what happened to my bowling shoes,” he said, then placed the box back on the shelf.

“Where’s Angus?” Remy questioned.

“He’s in the paper-goods section. Found some old scrolls and texts that I bought at an estate sale a few years back. They used to belong to a combat magician I’d had few run-ins with over the centuries.”

Francis disappeared for a few minutes, and then Remy saw him heading toward him down the aisle, carrying a large black gym bag. He stopped and picked up a plastic container. “These are good,” he said, pulling off the lid to reveal tiny hand grenades. They were a coppery color and covered with strange, runic designs that made them look almost like Christmas decorations.

“Grenades?” Remy asked, as Francis stuffed the container in the bag.

“Souped up for magickal barriers,” the former Guardian angel explained. “Lotsa bang for your buck.”

Remy found a black case on a bottom shelf and pulled it off, unlatching the clasps and opening the case to reveal two black service Colt .45s. “These are nice.”

“Oh yeah,” Francis said. “With the right ammunition, the twins can be killer.”

“And do you have the right ammunition for the twins?” Remy asked, closing up the case but deciding to bring it with him.

“In the ammunition aisle. I think they’re on special today.”

Remy’s phone began to vibrate in his pocket, and he removed it to see that Linda was calling. She had already left a couple of voice messages while he had been in the shadow place; this time she was leaving a text.

Please call. Important.

He slipped the phone back into his pocket and found Francis staring at him.

“Same person that called back at the motel?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Remy answered.

“Anybody I know?” Francis inquired, and for a moment Remy wasn’t sure if his friend knew who it was or not.

Francis had had a crush on Linda Somerset, and although they had never met, the former Guardian had spent many a night watching the pretty waitress at Piazza, fantasizing about a relationship that had never transpired.

It was after Francis had gone missing in Hell that Remy and Linda met and something drew them together.

Francis had yet to be told.

“Nobody that I’ve talked about,” Remy answered.

“I love it when you’re coy.” Francis headed off down another aisle. “Just as long as she keeps you from moping…. I hate it when you mope. Follow me. The bullets for the twins are over here.”

They found Angus pushing a battered shopping cart filled with boxes of books and ancient-looking scrolls toward them.

“A shopping cart?” Remy looked at Francis.

“Anything to make your experience at Weapons Mart a pleasant one.”

“We just about done here?”

Angus looked into his cart and nodded. “Yeah, I’d say so. Maybe a few more this and thats, but I think we’re good.”

“Can you open a passage to my house?” Remy asked Francis. “There’s something I need to check before we get going.”

“I think I could do that,” Francis said, putting the gym bag down and rubbing his hands together. “While you’re making your booty call, Angus and I’ll check out Stearns’ place.”

Remy made a face, staring at Francis as if he didn’t know him.

“Did you just say booty call?” he asked incredulously.

“I did,” the former Guardian answered, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath before starting to conjure the passage that Remy would use to get to his car. “It was the word of the day on my calendar,” he said, as the air before them grew incredibly thin. He reached out to tear through it, revealing another place on the other side.

“And I swore I’d use it in a sentence.”

The little black bugs tasted like peanuts—peanuts boiled in bat piss and then sprinkled with dried shit, but, yeah, he could taste peanuts somewhere in the rancid mix.

Squire took a handful of the squirming insects and dropped them in the pan of boiling black oil. He’d never get used to the screams the little fuckers let out when they went into the hot drink. This brought a smile to the hobgoblin’s face as he squatted before the tiny fire in the shelter he’d made from the skin and bones of one of the shadow region’s larger predators.

There’s no place like home,
he thought, stirring the boiling bugs. The little beasties had already started to break down, releasing their fine, stinking aroma.

He couldn’t stop thinking of another home…not
his
home, but one that felt like the home he’d lost. All he’d seen was the motel room, but Squire got a sense of the world he’d passed into almost immediately. It wasn’t like the one he’d left in ruin, but then again, it was.

Cable television, pork rinds, Internet porn, dollar stores, Doritos; he bet they were all there. He could feel it in the pit of his protruding belly. So much like the one he’d had to abandon.

He poured his steaming bug stew into the open end of a hollowed-out shell and carefully began to eat.

He couldn’t stop thinking about that other world, but he had to. There was no sense in getting attached to another, only to have it yanked away like the first. Squire wasn’t sure he could survive another loss like that.

He sipped at the edge of the shell bowl, sucking pieces of beetles into his mouth. He chewed them quickly, searching for that peanut taste before the other, less appetizing ones, kicked in.

Nope, this was his home now. And it was just the way he liked it: dark, cold and bleak. Nothing to get attached to.

Through the membranous cover of the shelter he’d erected, Squire thought he saw a flash of something…something so bright that it cut through the pervasive shadow like an ax blade through muscle. He sat, sipping his meal, eyes locked to where he thought he’d seen it, waiting in case it happened again.

And it did.

The sudden explosion of light was bright, and it left dancing snowflakes of color on his eyes, now used to the total darkness of the world of shadow.

Downing the remainder of his bug stew, he placed the empty bowl on the ground at his feet and rose to check out what was happening outside.

Squire pulled aside the flap of skin and stepped out into the harsh environment. His goblin eyes scanned the shadows.

“Big fucking surprise,” he grumbled as he caught sight of the mansion that had been nothing but trouble since it had entered his world.

The explosion of light came again, and Squire witnessed firsthand the aftereffects. The air around the mansion pulsated like a long black curtain billowing in the wind. It was as if the very substance of the shadow realm was being tested, reminding him of the time just before the mansion had first appeared.

“That ain’t good,” Squire muttered. He had a bad feeling about what he was seeing, and as he listened to the wails and moans of the various life-forms of this dark, alternate reality, he knew they could sense it, too. Squire always knew that the residents of the mansion were troublemakers, but now he suspected they were something worse than that.

Another flash erupted from the front of the building and radiated out from all of the windows. A rapidly expanding halo of fluctuating darkness around the home again began to show signs of duress.

Squire had a sudden, sinking feeling in his awesome gut that the shadow realm was being threatened, that whatever was going on inside that house was doing something to the fabric of this world’s shadowy existence.

Something that it might not be able to recover from. And then where would that leave Squire?

“Up shit’s creek without a paddle.” The hobgoblin answered his own question, knowing at that very instant what he had to do.

Squire turned and went back into his shelter. He was going to need a few things. From the corner he hefted the old leather golf bag into a standing position and reviewed its contents. There were a few swords, a spear, and his personal favorite: a battle-ax. He had made many of those over the years, but these were the last of them. His babies, tools of his violent trade that he had not been able to part with.

Squire figured that this would be more than enough to deal with what he would find inside the mansion. Slinging the bag over his shoulder, he headed out across the sprawling expanse of shadow.

He’d been wanting to have a little chat with his new neighbors. Now seemed as good a time as any.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The passage that Francis had summoned brought Remy to the small backyard of his Beacon Hill brownstone, giving him enough time to zip into his house for a change of clothes. He doubted it would be wise to show up at his girlfriend’s place covered in blood.

He’d already called Linda and found out she and Marlowe had returned to her apartment that morning to do some laundry. Remy had sensed a bit of tension in their conversation, and he’d guessed that it had something to do with the mysterious stranger she had met in the Common. When pressed, she had said that the guy had been kind of weird, but when she mentioned something about the Watchers going to do something terrible and that it was all because of him, Remy felt his blood go ice-cold.

In his calmest voice, he’d told her that he would be there in a few minutes and ended the call. A familiar dread gripped him. It was that same horrible feeling he’d experienced when he’d realized that Ashley had been taken because of what he was.

Now Linda had been touched, as well.

Remy made amazing time from the Hill to Brighton, taking the first parking space he could find and sprinting to her building. She buzzed him in, and he took the steps two at a time, banging on her door perhaps a little too eagerly, hearing Marlowe’s barking response on the other side.

Linda opened the door, an ecstatic Marlowe by her side.

“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.