The Nimble Man (A Novel of the Menagerie) (8 page)

The guardian demon was dead. Doyle saw one of the Night
People greedily dragging its head away from the others as a keepsake. Eve
fought alone, but she was not quite so buried as she had been in those
rust-colored bodies. Her talons flashed and throats were torn and skulls
crushed.

Still, there were too many.

Doyle inhaled deeply and rose to his full height, glaring
down at the creatures that began to gather in a hesitant circle. They were wary
of him now and he tried to adopt his most imposing air. Sparks still danced
from his hands and his vision was tinted with blue as some of the magic
contained within him leaked out his eyes. He focused his will and sensed the
power of Sweetblood emanating from the amber slab behind him.
I can feel it,
Doyle thought.
Perhaps I can siphon some of it
.

He clawed the air in front of him, leaving shimmering
streaks of light hanging there. The Night People hesitated once more, but only
for a moment before they began slowly edging toward him again, closing in.

"Corca Duibhne. You have no idea who you're dealing
with," he thundered, voice booming across the platform, echoing off the
walls. "I am the only student Lorenzo Sanguedolce ever taught."

One of them, a female whose form was almost elegant in
comparison to the others, shuffled several cautious inches nearer. Doyle tried
to count them. There were dozens.

"We're not here for the student, but the master,"
she said, upper lip curling back, nostrils flaring.

Doyle raised his hands again, quivering as he began to draw
on the magical energies within and around him. "You'll have neither!"

But even as he summoned the power to attack again he heard a
click-clack from far above him. Doyle glanced upward in alarm, but too late. Corca
Duibhne had skittered up the walls and along the ceiling and now they leaped
down at him, limbs flailing so that he could not judge their number.

He released a wave of destructive magic from his hands and
it burst upward, destroying those shadow-crawlers who had thought to surprise
him. But the distraction was enough. The others on the platform leaped at him,
talons tearing his clothing and his skin, preternaturally strong arms driving
him down to the platform so that he struck the back of his head on the tile. For
a moment he was disoriented and in that moment one of them pounced upon him. Its
fetid breath was in his nostrils and its mouth gaped wide, jagged teeth
dropping toward his throat.

"
Ferratus
," Doyle muttered.

The sound that filled his ears was a keening, static buzz, a
nighttime field full of crickets, but it accompanied a crimson glow that
enveloped his entire body. The creature attempting to tear at his throat was
burned where it touched him. All of them were. And yet the Night People did not
stop. Doyle was protected within the magical shield he had woven around himself
but they continued to attack him, those behind forcing the others to pile onto
him, though it burned their flesh. The Corca Duibhne attacking him began to
scream and though his magic protected him from harm, it did not keep out the
acrid stench of their burning flesh.

Doyle slowly focused his will, steadying himself, healing the
gashes he had received. He caught a glimpse past his attackers and saw that Eve
was up on her feet now, hair and eyes as wild as he had ever seen her, covered
not in her own blood but in that of her enemies. She was snarling, having
sloughed off any pretense at humanity, and when one of the Night People came
near enough she tore its head from its shoulders.

Then the melee of ancient horrors attempting to kill him
shifted and he could see her no more.

"That is enough!" Doyle shouted.

The burst of magic that erupted from him then incinerated
all of the Corca Duibhne that had surrounded him. Shaken and weak, he staggered
to his feet amidst a shower of rusty ash that had once been the flesh of the
Night People. For just a moment he looked to Eve, but she was already regaining
some of her composure. The handful of Corca Duibhne who remained was fleeing
back into the shadows of the tunnels, slipping along the walls with impossible
speed. Eve looked in disgust at her ruined clothes.

Doyle shivered as he saw the last of the Night People creep
away across the ceiling of the subway tunnel. But it was not this sight that
caused him to shiver. Rather, it was the absence of the tremor in the air he
had felt before, the electric presence of the barely contained power of Sweetblood
the Mage.

Even before he turned, Doyle knew what he would find.

The recess in the wall where the amber encasement had been
was now empty. In the handful of moments in which he and Eve had both been
overcome, the Night People had made off with the inert form of the most
powerful sorcerer in the history of the world.

Outside the rain of toads had become a bloody drizzle.

Leonard Graves sat on the metal bench in the small, oval
park in the center of the affluent Louisburg Square section of Boston's Beacon
Hill. Its bow-front 1840's townhouses faced each other across a private oasis
of green amongst the brick and still functioning gaslights.

He had been there since early morning, surrounded by the
first signs of spring in New England. The recently mowed grass was a healthy,
dark green from April's cool rains. Forsythia buds were just starting to bloom
and crocuses forced yellow heads up from the dark soil at the enclosure's far
end. Graves had always loved spring time. It brought a sense of renewal he had
always considered poetic; the cycle of life beginning again after a season of
death.

If only that was the case with all things
.

Dr. Graves gazed through the wrought iron fence at his
current residence. The corner townhouse, which belonged to Mr. Doyle, had been
built in 1846, one of the last homes to be constructed in this privileged
neighborhood, or at least that was what he had been told by the original
architect. With its brick, brownstone lintels, and granite steps, it resembled
the other houses on either side of the square, but there was also something
that gave it an air of difference. At times the townhouse felt alive, as if
imbued with a spirit all its own by the powerful magicks wrought within its
walls. Graves often thought of it as a great, monolithic animal, its windows
open eyes gazing out upon a world in which it believed itself supreme.

Doyle's was the first of a row of seven homes in front of
him, and another six stood opposite them, all of the residents holding partial
ownership to the beautiful park in which he sat. Graves doubted that Doyle had
ever noticed the beauty just outside the front of his home.

The magician and Eve had gone away late the previous
evening, and he pondered the success of their mission. It had been this concern
that drove him outside to the peace of the park in bloom. There had been no
calls, no attempts at communication; even the spirit realm had been strangely
quiet, and it made him anxious. In the old days, this would have been a call to
action, a chance to strap on his guns and throw himself full bore into the
thick of things, but now . . . There was no use worrying about it, he would
know their accomplishments, or lack thereof, soon enough.

He turned his face up toward the murky sunshine. The clouds
were thick today with the slightest hint of gray, as if soiled, but the sun's
beams did manage to break through in places. What he wouldn't give to be able
to feel the sun upon his flesh again. He recalled how dark his already
chocolate brown skin used to become when exposed to long doses of the sun's
rays. What was it that Gabriella used to say to him?
From mocha to mahogany.

He smiled with the memory of his fiancée; she had loved this
time of year as well. Graves looked down at the translucence of his hands, his
smile fading. There were always so many reminders of the things he missed,
simple things that he had once taken for granted. The touch of a cool breeze
that prickled the flesh, the smell of a garden in bloom, the love of a good
woman. The list was infinite.

Irony there. He had eternity to miss infinity.

Graves rose from his seat and strolled through the garden.
Why
do I insist on torturing myself?
But he knew full well the answer. He liked
the pain and what it did for him.

It made him feel alive.

The sound of a key turning in a lock distracted him from his
ruminations, and he gazed over to see an older woman, toy poodle cradled in her
arms, letting herself into the park. She was from old money, her family having
lived in Number Ten Louisburg Square since the 1830's. Not long ago he'd had a
conversation with one of the bricklayers who had worked on the Number Ten's
construction and didn't have very flattering things to say about the family
then, or the generations that followed. Greedy bastards and bloodless crones,
Graves believed the laborer had called them. He watched as the woman put the
fluffy white dog — Taffy — down in the grass, and in a baby talk,
urged the animal to relieve itself. Taffy looked in his direction, sensing his
presence, and began to growl menacingly, or at least as menacingly as an
eight-pound poodle could. The woman chastised the dog with more baby talk.

Graves looked away from the pet and smiled. What had Eve
called the animal when she saw it from the window of Doyle's parlor the
previous night?
A ratdog?

Thoughts of Eve returned his mind to the task that had drawn
her and Doyle out of the house. Graves wished he could have accompanied them,
but they had little need of a ghost. After sixty-odd years, it still irked him that
he had been taken out of action. The great Leonard Graves, explorer, scientist,
adventurer extraordinaire, put out to pasture by an unknown assassin's bullet.

Stay and monitor the murmurings in the ether,
Doyle
had told him as he and Eve departed. Those same murmurings had alerted Graves
to the potentially catastrophic situation in the first place, but since his
comrades' departure, the voices had grown strangely silent, as if too
frightened to speak.

A sudden chill went through him. Graves wasn't sure how it
was possible, for he had no real sense of feeling, but he knew, even before
looking up at the sky, that something had happened to the sun.

An unusual cloud of solid black, miles wide and thick, was
moving across the sky, blotting out the burning orb. He studied the dark,
undulating mass and determined that it wasn't an atmospheric condition, but
something altogether horrible. A droning hum grew in intensity, caused by the
beating of millions of insect wings. Flies blotted out the sun, more flies than
he had ever seen. His concerns went to his compatriots, and their mission, when
a screech cut through the air like a surgeon's knife through flesh, diverting
his attentions yet again.

The woman at Number Ten Louisburg Square was screaming, her
hands clawing at her face as she looked down upon the grass in the grip of
terror, her feet stamping the freshly cut blades as if in the midst of some
wild, ceremonial dance.

Graves drifted closer, and arrived just in time to see the
last of the Taffy's fluffy, white fur disappear beneath a sea of glistening,
black-haired bodies and pink, fleshy tails. Rats, many of them the size of
housecats, had swarmed the dog, the sounds of tearing flesh and the crunching
of bone perverse evidence of an unnatural hunger.

The sky sun blotted out by flies, a dog attacked and
consumed by rats. Graves again thought of Doyle and Eve, suspecting that he
already knew the level of their success.

It was enough to fill him with fear.

Enough to frighten even a ghost.

All shadows were connected.

A twisting maze work of cold black passages entering into
realms of further shadow, or worlds of light.

Squire had parked the limousine, after their five-hour drive
back from the Big Apple, inside the townhouse's private garage. Parking was at
a premium on the narrow streets of Beacon Hill, and he thanked the Dark Gods
that Doyle had the foresight to purchase the property behind his residence and
eventually convert it from storage to garage space.

Eve wasn't doing too well. She seemed better than she had
when Doyle first helped her into the back of the car after their little scuffle
at Grand Central, but still looked pretty much like a stretch of bad road.

"I'll take her up into the house," Doyle told him
as he helped the injured woman from the backseat of the limousine.

She had been unusually quiet for most of the drive, telling
Squire to shut his trap only once. He figured she must have been hurt pretty
badly. There was quite a bit of blood on the back seat's upholstery, and he had
made a mental note to have it cleaned when things settled down.
If things
settle down,
he cautioned himself
.

"Go to the freezer in the cellar and bring her back a
little something to help pick her up," Doyle told him.

Leaving the two to make their way up into the residence,
Squire found the nearest patch of shadow and disappeared within it. Hobgoblins
traveled the shadowpaths. It was their gift and their greatest defense. This
day he used them to reach the basement beneath the Louisburg Square townhouse. Squire
had his pick of places to emerge, the cellar ripe with huge areas of gloom. It
didn't matter the size or shape, a hobgoblin could bend and fold himself into
just about any position.

The drive had been exhausting, and he welcomed the ease with
which he was able to enter the cellar. In Doyle's employ, things were rarely so
easy. He emerged into the basement from a patch of darkness beside a shelving
unit that held the burial urns of some of Mr. Doyle's closest friends and
business acquaintances.
You never know when you're going to need to talk to
one of them again,
the magician had told the goblin once, shortly after
acquiring another urn for his collection.