The Dark Ones (29 page)

“Hello, Natasha.”

“Hello, master.”

Andras shrugged off his jacket and joined her on the bed.

She curled her nude body around him and kissed his neck, suckled hungrily at his flesh. His cock stiffened, straining his jeans. He rolled her over and climbed atop her. He kissed her mouth and neck, eliciting whimpers. “Remember how you resisted me the first time I took you?”

She tugged at the snap of his jeans. “I remember. I was stupid. I didn’t understand yet.”

He chuckled. “And now you do?”

“Of course.”

“What do you understand?”

“That you are my master and I am your bride. And that Satan is my lord.”

“Do you remember drinking your mother’s blood?”

“Yes.”

“And how did it taste?”

“Wonderful.”

He ran a hand up the length of one of her long, lean legs. She unfolded it for him, lifting it high into the air, extending her painted toes toward the ceiling. “Your father is with us now. My people were waiting for him when he returned home and saw what we had done to his beautiful wife.”

“My dad? Here?”

Andras smiled. “Yes.”

Natasha smiled. “Good.”

“You’re going to kill him for me. A gesture of your allegiance and obedience.”

Natasha resumed tugging at his jeans. “Yes. Please. I want you again.”

“Of course you do.”

He removed his clothes and gave her what she wanted. She screamed and clutched and clawed at him. Her eyes filled with tears from the intensity of the pleasure. When it was over, he dressed again and moved to the door. “Remember, you are not to leave this room while I’m gone. You are my bride. No one else is to touch you.”

“Where are you going?”

“To fetch my other young bride.”

“Fiona.”

“Yes.”

Natasha pouted. “But I thought—”

“Don’t think. Just obey.”

The pout lasted another second or two, then gave way to another smile. “Yes, master.”

Andras left the room and closed the door behind him.

Downstairs, he saw flashing blue lights visible through gauzy sitting-room curtains. Someone pounded on the front door. “Open up! Police!”

Andras tossed his head back and laughed heartily.

The pounding came again. “Open up! This is your last warning!”

Andras opened the doors. There were two uniformed cops on the porch, both standing there with their weapons drawn and pointed right at him.

“Good evening, gentlemen.”

The cop closest to him snarled and said, “Hands in the air! We’ve had reports of screaming coming from this house and . . . what the hell is happening in there?” The cop’s scowl gave way to a look of astonishment as he peered around Andras and got a glimpse of what was happening on the staircase.

Andras knocked the gun out of the cop’s hand and seized him by the throat, making the man gurgle as he lifted him off the ground. “We’re having a party of sorts. And guess what? You’re both invited! Come on in!”

Andras backed into the house and dropped the wheezing cop on the floor.

The other cop had already lowered his gun. He started to follow them inside, but Andras held up a hand. “You. Turn off those lights. Tell your superiors the reports you had were unfounded.”

The cop holstered his gun. “Yeah. Okay.”

He turned and walked back out of the house. Andras was not concerned by the arrival of the cops. It had been inevitable. And it was good it had happened at this stage. These men could prove useful in any number of ways.

Meanwhile, he still had this other task to tend to.

He left the house and traversed the streets of Wheaton Hills until he arrived at the Johnson residence.

He was not pleased by what he found inside.

Or, rather, what he did not find.

T
HIRTY-NINE

A powerful sense of precognition hit Clayton as he turned down the street to his house. Something had changed in his absence. Something he couldn’t quite pinpoint, an elusive sense of
wrongness
. The air in Wheaton Hills felt strangely charged. He was more intensely aware of his heartbeat. He didn’t much care for the way the irregular thump-thump resonated in his chest. His teeth were on edge and his skin was crawling. Paranoia encroached as he scanned the yards and the windows of the houses he passed. He didn’t see anyone, but he could almost feel unseen eyes tracking him as he continued down the street. The really fucked thing was he couldn’t just attribute the feeling to nerves or a runaway imagination.

He was on the edge of a nervous breakdown by the time he pulled into his garage and reached overhead to stab the button on the garage door opener. The door started to rattle down but got stuck about halfway down. He sighed.
Of fucking course
. Another push of the button caused the door to roll back up. He glanced at the rearview mirror and bit down on a shriek as he watched a police cruiser roll slowly by in the street.

They’re coming for me!

But the cruiser kept rolling and was soon out of sight. Clayton scrambled out of the car and sidled over to the edge of the open garage, where he carefully peered out at the receding back end of the cruiser as it continued its slow crawl through Wheaton Hills. Then it turned down another street and was gone from view.

Clayton felt almost sick with relief. “Holy shit. Thank fuck.”

Hours had passed since the hit-and-run death of the officer who had stopped him, but the memory was still nauseatingly fresh in his mind. The guy was a dick, true enough, but that didn’t make what had happened to him any less horrible. And Clayton doubted his fellow officers gave a damn that he’d been an asshole. He was a fellow member of the fraternity, that fabled thin blue line. So he’d been dreading the return home, so certain was he there’d be a bunch of cops waiting to clap him in handcuffs and drag him off to jail for a rough-and-tumble round of “routine questioning.”

On the other hand, there was a lot going on in Ransom today.

A lot of bad craziness.

So maybe they were just super busy and merely hadn’t gotten around to dealing with him yet. Or maybe today was just his lucky goddamn day. Whatever the case, he didn’t have time to stand here and speculate. Mark was waiting for him. He’d want to hear the explanation he’d been promised. Clayton had one, but whether it amounted to anything truly helpful was yet to be determined.

He got the garage door closed on the next attempt. He then retrieved some things from the car and entered the house. The first thing he noticed was Fiona Johnson. She was tied to a chair and there was a strip of duct tape across her mouth. One side of her mouth was swollen. She glared at him through eyes puffy with tears. Mark and Jared were also in the kitchen. The boys were not bound to anything and appeared to have consumed a large amount of his beer. The tabletop was littered with green and brown glass empties.

Clayton bumped the door shut with a hip and came farther into the kitchen. “Okay. Obvious question. Why is Fiona bound and gagged?”

“She was gonna kill us all. Starting with you, I think, was her plan.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. She had a gun.”

Mark nodded at the kitchen counter.

Clayton stared at the gun. “I repeat, wow. She have a reason for this insanity?”

“She’s fucking crazy.”

“Right, well. That sort of follows, I guess.”

Fiona strained hard against her bonds, causing the chair to wobble. Her jaw worked as she tried to speak around the gag in her mouth. The words were only half-intelligible, but the anger and frustration came through loud and clear. She was staring right at Clayton, her eyes wide and beseeching. He had a fleeting moment of doubt. It was possible, of course, that something else was going on here. Maybe Fiona was the victim and the boys were just trying to silence her. It was clearly what she wanted him to think, what her eyes and body language were trying to communicate. On the other hand, this was the same girl who’d goaded that cop into attacking him for no other reason than spite. And he had a good sense of what kind of guy Mark Bell really was. He was a fuckup, but one with a strong moral center. He wasn’t a scumbag, in other words.

Mark tipped back a swallow of Heineken. “Take the gag out, if you want. You ain’t gonna hear anything but bullshit, though.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“You bought more beer.”

Clayton grunted. “I can’t remember the last time I ventured into town and returned
without
beer. Oh, wait. 1998. Had a couple weeks there where I was thinking about going into rehab.”

“What happened?”

“Girlfriend dumped me.”

Mark drained the last dregs from the Heineken bottle and set the empty on the table. “Oh. Yeah. Girls can fuck you up.”

Clayton’s smile was rueful. “Truer words never spoken.”

Jared belched. “What’s in the box?”

A small metal lockbox was tucked under Clayton’s left arm. It didn’t weigh much, because there wasn’t much in it. Some of its contents did rattle around when he moved. He set the box on the table and watched them for a moment as their eyes fixated on it. Even Fiona craned her neck around and stared at it. There was a strange kind of reverence in their expressions. Not one of them had any clue what was inside the box, but they all seemed to be regarding it as some kind of holy object. He couldn’t blame them. They were caught in what appeared to be an impossible situation, facing a foe that was ancient and powerful, a genuine agent of the forces of darkness. A fucking demon. Not some fairy-tale monster or bogeyman, but a real thing. In such circumstances, it was only human nature to hope for some miraculous and magical solution.

He carried the beer cartons over to the fridge and talked as he began the task of restocking his diminished booze supply. “Until today that box hadn’t been opened in more than ten years. It’s been in a safety-deposit box since about a week after my dad put a gun to his head and blew his fucking brains out.”

Jared picked up the box and shook it, making its contents rattle again. “What’s in it?”

Clayton pushed bottles toward the back of the fridge, making room for more as he ripped open the second carton. “Like I was telling Mark the other night, my father had some knowledge of the thing you geniuses let out of that basement a couple weeks ago.”

Jared frowned. “What, did he put it there?”

“No, that happened long before he got involved. And a lot of what he knew he learned secondhand. Which is why I thought it was all bullshit, just stupid stories he told when he was drunk. Should have known better. The stories were too crazy to be anything he’d come up with on his own. Outside of his business ambitions, he didn’t have what you could describe as a big imagination.” The second carton was empty. He ripped apart the glued-together tabs and folded it flat. He dropped the broken-down carton in the wastebasket and took a seat at the table, positioning himself as far as possible from Fiona. She twisted her head and glared at him across the table. “My dad was one of the bigger movers and shakers locally for a long time. Made a lot of money. Left me a lot of it. I could tell you how much, but it’d be sort of embarrassing. A guy like that, involved on an intimate level with the local power structure, he has a lot of favors he can call in when something bad happens. Well . . . something bad happened and Dad called on Luke Harper, the mayor at the time, and Harper took care of it.”

Mark got up and went to the fridge. “Who needs a beer?”

Clayton and Jared answered in the affirmative. Mark popped the tops off three bottles of Guinness Extra Stout, came back to the table, and passed them around.

Mark sat down. “So . . . this bad thing that happened . . . what was it?”

“That house you kids broke into? My father murdered a woman there on December 6, 1984.”

“Whoa. What?”

Clayton drew the lockbox closer and folded his hands over it. “He confessed to the murder the night he died. It was a few hours before he . . . you know. Anyway . . . he was drunker than I’d ever seen him. I was embarrassed for him and figured it was just more of his bullshit. Again, should have known better. I’d never seen him so distraught over anything, just crying and blubbering while he tried to tell me about this terrible thing he’d done.”

Mark shifted in his chair, making the chair legs squeak. “So why did he kill this woman? And why did he tell you about it so long after the fact? Why not just take the secret to his grave?”

Clayton’s face bore a cloudy, unfocused expression. He wasn’t looking at any of them as he continued, his mind somewhere back in time. “He’d already made up his mind to kill himself and wanted to confide in somebody while he still could. He wasn’t a bad man. He did some bad things, but he was still human, still had a conscience, and the murder, I guess, weighed heavily on him all those years. It was part of why he did what he did.”

“Just part? What was the rest of it?”

“The rest of it was living with what he knew about the demons and that house. My dad did a lot of looking into occult stuff in the years after the murder. He didn’t tell me this himself, but it’s all in here.” He tapped the lockbox with an index finger. “The whole sordid tale.”

Jared went to the fridge and came back with another beer. “Okay, so your father killed a bitch. How did he know about the demon?”

“Luke Harper told him.”

“And how did Luke Harper know?”

“Because Harper was one of the men who did the original demon summoning. He and his partner called and bound Andras. They thought the demon could be useful in their business dealings.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Well, no shit. Clearly we’re not talking about stable people here. We are, in fact, talking about dangerously deranged people with delusions of grandeur. Who seriously thinks you can mess with shit like that without facing serious consequences somewhere down the line? These guys eventually realized they were in over their heads and tried to banish the demons. Andras got sealed up in the basement. His henchman, Flauros, got tucked away inside a corner of Luke Harper’s head, where he stayed until Mark’s father put a bullet through the old guy’s brain and let him out.”