I removed the pendant from my neck in the elevator and put it around hers. I think she recognized it. She looked up at me without fear for the first time after that. But there was still no warmth or engagement. She was detached from every one and every thing. I couldn’t tell if that was her natural state or a defense mechanism she’d developed to cope with the trauma of everything that had happened over the last nine years.
“I was just holding onto it for you,” I said.
The elevator opened and we walked past the pair of security guards and across the columned hall to the street. I felt eyes on me. I didn’t know if that meant electronic surveillance or other means, but I knew we were being watched as surely as I knew I was walking and breathing and fleeing without a plan. I hadn’t really expected to survive. I certainly hadn’t expected to become responsible for an innocent life in the process. I didn’t believe for a second that this was the end of it, that they were just going to let us go. They’d gone to great lengths to set me against the chef. One of six, apparently. I wondered what had happened to the others, how he had deflected them. I was the one who struck true. By whatever spell had been cast, the world unfolded to their will. And everyone played a part, even Kent Cormack, who filled his idle hours with hatred and vengeance. Whether Dr. More and Dr. Caldwell were the same person or whether one had eaten the heart of the other and assumed his identity, I would never know. But where the other five drawn had apparently been too weak, I was not. The spell worked, and I removed all their enemies. Not just the chef, I realized, but Granny, too, who didn’t like them muscling into her business and had poor Mrs. Landry with the werewolf brother shoot one of their accountants with a gold bullet, which none of their magicks would repel, built as they all were to accumulate it.
But like all good financiers, they hadn’t paid for the magic up front. They’d bought on credit. If it failed, no one need bother with payment. The old man shot himself inside the circle and so joined his gods—a sacrifice and a martyr. Or so he believed. Somehow I doubted it worked that way. But whether it did or not, I was a loose end. I’d lost my job after months of inconclusive therapy in which I admitted to seizures and hallucinations. A gun that would be made traceable to me was just used to kill a man. If I was found dead with a suicide note expressing guilt over the Cormack affair, it wouldn’t sound any alarms. Some honest reporter would write the story just as they saw it and good people would read it and shake their heads and go on with their day, just as we’d all done with the saints.
Except Hammond. He’d know. He’d do something stupid, too, like risk his family—his wife and girls—trying to find justice for me. I couldn’t let that happen.
But then, maybe I could kill two birds with one stone.
Alexa was near-catatonic in the car. She just sat in the back, immobile. I wondered what had happened to her. It took some coaxing to get her out again. I think being inside a solid, enclosed space was comforting for her then, like a den. I reached in to lead her and she scrambled back on the seat and swatted at me. Eventually, the prospect of being alone brought her out. I went to the trunk to get my heavy metal roadside flashlight, first aid kit, and emergency blanket. I was out of her sight for only a few moments, but when I shut the trunk, I saw her sitting on the edge of the seat, feet on the curb. She still wouldn’t let me touch her, but it seemed like she didn’t want me too far away either.
I started walking and she followed some distance behind. She left the rear door of the car wide open. In that neighborhood, there was no guarantee the vehicle would still be there five minutes later, but I had little choice. If I walked back, she’d get in the car again for fear of being left behind. So, I led her across the weedy lot and around to the back of the brick church assembly. I lifted the slanted doors, which shed flecks of paint, and climbed down.
“Hello?”
The lights were off and it was dark, but then, it was still a couple hours before sunrise. I clicked the flashlight and pointed it at the floor as I walked around the boiler room.
“Hello?” I called again.
I didn’t smell shit anymore. But I smelled something else.
The beam from the flashlight hit the grate of the metal cage, which cast wide shadows on the back wall. Small squares of light moved about as I stepped. The dancing shadow made it difficult to see, more even than if I’d had no light at all, and it wasn’t until I was standing at the gate, peering through, that my eyes made sense of the scene. I dropped the blanket and first aid kit, which broke open on the floor.
I heard footsteps on crackling paint.
“Don’t come in!” I called back. “Alexa, wait there! Do you hear? Just wait there.”
The gate was unlocked—it had been forced—and I pushed into the storage room. The witch doctor was strung from the back wall, arms out, head slumped, like some live reenactment of the Crucifixion. With the beam from my flashlight squarely on him, I could see wet skin and red smears on his clothes.
“Alexa, stay back!” I called.
I set the flashlight on the table, beam up. It reflected only dimly off the brown pipes and wood joists in the ceiling. I stepped closer to feel for a pulse and tripped over a box on the ground and landed hard on my palms. I saw Graskul then, grinning at me from the other side of the slat window. I stood and reached to the witch doctor’s wrists, but they were suspended too high. His chest wasn’t moving.
Standing there, looking at the cords that dangled him from the pipes in the ceiling, I noticed the beam of light from my flashlight moved behind me. I turned. Alexa held it. She swung two-handed and whacked me hard across the temple. The second blow, the one to the back of my head, came after I fell to my hands and knees.
There was a Lord of Shadows. He existed. He existed the way money existed. He existed because people believed he existed, just as slips of paper have value because people believe they do. He existed in the minds of the devout. He existed in the acts they carried out in his name. They’d even built him a throne—a throne of martyrs from which to rule the world, a throne for all to see. And in that way, his power was indestructible. He was the ultimate adversary: one who could never be confronted.
The eternal foe.
I was sideways on old concrete. My hands and feet were bound together behind me and attached to each other via nylon rope that stretched over my butt to my feet. The knots were strong, but the line was slack. I was inside a circle splattered on the concrete—a circle of blood. There were marks spaced around the outside, like the numbers of a clock. There was an identical circle next to me which overlapped the first, like a Venn diagram, leaving a foot-wide arc of space inside both, just like in the basement of the derelict house. The witch doctor’s corpse was now headless and slumped in the corner. The wound was jagged, and curls of skin hung off what was left of his gashed neck.
Graskul must have followed me, told them about the safe house. And so got his revenge.
Help was out of the question. That much was certain. No one knew about that place, not even Hammond. That was the whole reason I’d picked it. It was a long-forgotten hole.
My flashlight was on the workbench, pointed toward the hall, but it was no longer the only source of illumination. A couple dozen irregular candles—some small, some quite large—lit the room in flickering yellow. They rested on the floor in no discernible pattern, except that none disturbed the circles in the center, for which space had been cleared. The card table was overturned in the hall. The cot and mattress leaned against the wall, covering one of the windows. My talisman hung from one of the cot’s legs.
She saw that I was awake. She saw me looking at it.
“You thought it would keep you safe.” She shook her head. “But it doesn’t have any more effect on me than it does you.”
It wasn’t Alexa’s voice. It couldn’t have been. It was older, and there was a slight Caribbean twang.
“Jesus, you’re human,” I said.
“I was. Once.”
She was crouched on the floor in the adjacent circle with her back to me. She was naked except for her cotton panties. She was working on something, cleaning it perhaps. Her arms were covered in blood up to her elbows, and there was quite a bit of splatter over the rest of her. Candlelit shadows danced across her back.
She turned then, and over Alexa’s face and shoulders I could see a swirl of vapor—another face and torso, vaguely female in appearance with wisps of long hair in braided in beads. There was a blood-covered skull in her hands. Bits of sticky red flesh still cling to it. She set it on the ground between us, directly between the circles, in the overlap. As Alexa moved, her smoky inhabitant moved with her.
I took a deep breath and fought the urge to tug at my bonds. It’s a reflex. Your body wants to rebel, to straighten, to stand. I forced myself to stay in that terrible backward U shape and to focus on what I knew.
An exorcism is like a hostage negotiation.
“You have a name?” I asked.
She smiled at me. She stood and moved to the workbench. As she stepped out of the circle, I could no longer see the smoke. Alexa removed a long bloody knife from the bench and set it on the floor between two candles. The blade was pointed at my back.
“Josephine,” she said.
“You killed them, didn’t you?” I accused. “The best people on the planet. You killed them all.”
“Some of the worst, too.” The accent was gone. It had disappeared with the smoke. “It all balances in the end.”
“What do you mean?”
She stood at the bench with her back to me, making preparations I couldn’t see from the floor.
“That woman you found,” she said in Alexa’s young voice.
“Dr. Massey?”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to.
With the binding on her tongue, Amber wouldn’t have been able to reveal anything to the chef, even if she’d wanted to—not unless he cut her tongue out. He hadn’t done that. I suspect he let her go on the hope she’d lead him to the Lords of Shadow. But she hadn’t. They sent their assassin. The perfect killer. A disembodied spirit, unable to feel. Amber was captured and tortured to see what she had revealed. Then she was killed, her body dumped with the rain.
When my colleagues did a canvas of the neighborhood around the reservoir, they would’ve asked the typical questions, such as “Have you seen anything out of the ordinary lately?” Even if they’d seen Alexa, and even if she’d been behaving a little strangely, would the neighbors have thought enough of it to say anything? Would the officers have bothered to write it down? Stereotype or not, a person with a mental handicap acting strangely isn’t exactly out of the ordinary. And no one wants to be the type of person who casts suspicion on someone like her.
“That’s how you got close to them,” I said. “That’s why you took her. Because she’s special.”
“Retarded, you mean. Yes. Mediums are already easy to take. They’re sensitive. Their spirits are wide open. That’s how they receive. And the retarded have no defense. They’re easy to control. And with them, it’s easy to control others.”
She leaned down to me. Her fingers were soaked and dribbling blood, like she’d just dunked her left hand in a tub of it. As she passed through the blood circle, the smoky apparition appeared again. She put her wet hand to my forehead. She was close to me and I could see the wisps of a face.
“What happened to you?” I breathed.
She drew something on my face, marks of some kind.
“I made a fair bargain.” She made lines on my cheeks. “With a man who no longer wanted his heart. He asked for nothing in return. He just wanted it gone. He could no longer bear the weight it carried. So I took it for him.”
She finished her work and stood to examine it. She stuck a short bundle of dried herbs into one of the candles and lit it. It didn’t so much burn as smoke like incense, and she waved it around.
“But the shaman . . .” She spat. “He said it was wrong.”
Étranger.
“It was a fair trade!” She walked, bundle in hand, to the adjacent circle and crouched down. “But he came for the heart. He got angry when he saw who I sold it to. I had no choice but to escape into the flames, to disappear, to become this . . . thing.”
She shook the bundle back and forth over the blood-wet skull, muttering to herself with her eyes closed.
“The dark ones found me. They have a book. The Book of Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar’s book. I seen it. With words that move. Like a knot of snakes. They showed me and promised me revenge. They bartered fair. They promised me revenge on the shaman. And a new body.”
A body.
They promised her a body.
So that was how they were going to be rid of me. Only she wasn’t going to possess me, as she had Alexa. A possession can be driven out. I wasn’t a medium. She was going to become me. That’s what the ritual was for. No more loose end.
“They have evidence against me,” I objected quickly. “You think you’re being freed but you’ll be a slave. You’ll have to do whatever they want or spend the rest of your life in jail.”
She shook her head. “They don’t need me no more. I was just to hold them over while they made something worse. Something the book showed them how to create.”
“Worse?”
Alexa’s mostly naked body slumped to the floor and the smoky apparition floated about with the incense. It wound through the air to the witch doctor’s skull, resting in the overlap between the circles. I understood then. As long as she was inside the conjuring circle, her spirit would remain patent, the same way the salt ring bound the carrion ghoul. She wouldn’t dissipate, but neither could she escape. She couldn’t cross the boundary. Not without a host. That was why the cage in the puzzle-box house could only be opened from the inside. She needed a place to hold her hosts, and a way to get out once she took them. Only she knew the combination.
But I’d burnt that rig when I set the house on fire. She’d had to improvise.
The smoke gathered inside the blood-wet skull, a natural vessel to contain a mind. I could see it swirling behind the eye sockets and nasal cavity. Now it was wholly inside both circles. It could pass either way.
Wisps emerged from the sockets and moved toward me.
“No . . .”
I pulled hard against my bonds, over and over. The slack line went taut and I realized: Josephine had left that rope a bit too long for a reason. She needed some way to free herself after the transfer. She would inch my body like a caterpillar to the knife she’d left by the candles and cut herself free. Only it was too late for me to try. My nose caught a whiff of the vapor. It wasn’t smoke. It smelled of breath and memories. I pulled and pulled frantically. The rope that connected my hands to my feet behind me served as an anchor and was just long enough to allow me a few hard tugs. The nylon fibers dug into my skin. It burned. I could feel the thin skin on the back of my hand stretch like elastic and tear. I screamed as the smoke entered my eyes and nose and ears and mouth.
But then, I’d already felt the pain of skin torn free some weeks before. I knew it hurt. It hurt like a motherfucker. But I also knew I’d survive. I yanked hard with one more primal yell and my hand tore loose. I didn’t so much move my limp arm as launch it, bloody and burning, into the air like a Hail Mary pass, right as my mind was snuffed with the candles.
He said he gave me everything I needed.
In a box of risotto.
What I got was a message from the other side. A warning.
Beware the wolf with three eyes.
Well, they already have two, right? And the third eye is what sees beyond. It’s the eye of the spirit self, like on Hindu statuary and all that New Age spiritual crap. In the forehead. Right where the old woman in the vision touched me with the midnight blue dye.
The wolf is the hunter which takes down the lamb. The lamb is innocence. Peace. The symbol of renewal and salvation.
In all of this, there was only ever one hunter.
Me.
And that was the message. The wolf with three eyes was that part of me. The night stalker. The dark part of my soul that I pretended wasn’t there. I kept it away from Freddie and Craig and Kinney, that’s for sure, the way a lover hides an infidelity. I kept it away from them by pretending it was false. And in pretending to be ignorant of it, I let it be used.
That’s how evil grows. When we’re convinced of our own righteousness. When we believe our extremes are justified. Because a little sin is okay, right? As long as we’re stopping something worse.
“Beware the wolf with three eyes” was a warning from the other side, from the ghost walkers, the spirits-shamans of old, not to trade salvation for vengeance. Not to become the dire hunter. Because courage alone is tyranny.
I remembered a line from one of the old books I’d bought from Anson:
And I had become as a blade without a wise hand to guide it.
But here’s the thing. “Beware” doesn’t mean run from. It means “Be aware of.” “Watch out for.” Maybe even “Use with caution.”
So that’s what I did.
The conjuring circles were beyond my skill. But not Josephine’s. She’d done a good job, too—far better than the old witch doctor had done with the ghoul. I couldn’t have made those circles or traced those runes. But I could use them, same as her. I threw my limp arm. My mind went dark with the candles just as my torn hand landed on the skull and knocked it away. With my hand and blood at the center of the summoning circle, I called an apparition of my own.
I think it had been following me. On the other side. I think it had been following me since I was 13. It must have been pacing back and forth like a caged animal, waiting for the door to open, because I felt it burst forth like it had been running at full speed down a long hall.
A spectral wolf.
Its head was the size of a washing machine. Its coat, mottled gray. An ethereal beast, just like the voodoo priestess trying to become me. I couldn’t touch her. Even if my hands had been freed, they would’ve passed through her like air. But not the wolf’s teeth, which were made of the same ectoplasm. My totem hit Josephine’s spirit so hard it broke her from my body with an ethereal puff. It locked her in those powerful jaws, impaled her on its long canines. Then it shook. Back and forth. Growling. As it twisted around the room, passing through metal and brick alike as if none of it were real. I heard screaming. Terrible, awful screaming.
And then, just like that, they both were gone.
My eyes opened.
The room was quiet. Dark. The candles were out. Faint light from the street lamps came from the windows. I heard breathing. Mine. And someone else’s.
Alexa.
My free hand was shaking so badly and was so numb with pain that it was nearly useless, but one free elbow gave me enough leverage to crawl to the knife and cut myself loose. I struggled to my feet, almost falling twice, and ran to the prone girl resting sideways on the floor. I shook her and called her name. I called over and over. I don’t know how, but I knew she was far away—and slipping further. I called over and over. I repeated it like the beat of a drum. Once, twice, thrice. I called her but I couldn’t hear my voice. I was screaming, but inside that conjuring circle, there was silence. My voice didn’t go to the room but to the other place. I chanted her name.
She coughed hard, like she’d been drowning in a dry sea, and opened her eyes.
I didn’t wait for daylight. I just drove.