Chills (21 page)

Inside, the lobby was cold and dark. Jack noticed right away that Big Bar was not at his usual place at the guard station—another bad sign. What he did see there was a light frost that covered the surface of the desk. The sign-in book, like the telephone, was firmly rooted to it in a small sheath of ice. In fact, as he looked around, he saw the entire lobby was defined by a surreal, hoary halo of ice crystals. A cocoon of ice encased the light bulb in the overhead light. Patches of black ice covered random parts of the floor all the way to the elevator. At least, it looked like black ice until he looked closer. A wide drag mark of blood had been covered over with layers of ice. Jack also noticed what looked like two sets of bloody footprints, a child's and an adult's, scattered around the room and ending near the front door. He hoped whoever the footprints belonged to had made it out and to somewhere safe.

The lobby silence hung over everything like a low fog, a haunting kind of silence that held on to soundless echoes of things that had happened but not the voices that perpetrated them. He skidded a little as he made his way to the elevator, his heart leaping into his chest. His breath clouded in front of him as he huffed at the control panel—ice hung over the down arrow button. He cracked it with the ice-chipping end of his snow brush and dusted away the shards, then pushed the button, watching with a wary eye the precariously hanging icicles just above his head. He had an ugly mental image of one of them cracking and spearing him straight through the skull, and it made him shiver.

After a moment, the elevator
ding
ed and the silvery doors opened. Stepping inside was like walking into a refrigerator. He pushed the button for the basement morgue as the doors slid closed and after a moment, the elevator lurched into movement. He half-believed that by the time he reached his floor, the elevator doors would be frozen shut and he'd be trapped in there like a steak in a freezer.

To his relief, though, the elevator chimed again and the doors opened onto the hallway to the morgue. As Jack stepped out, that relief crumbled away. There was blood on the floor, frozen in a small pool and in a splatter pattern against the outside of the elevator doors. He drew his gun and clicked off the safety.

He hoped Morris was okay. He was still a little wet behind the ears, but he was a decent, hardworking man whom Jack had come to very much admire.

His boots crunched against the ice on the floor, and to Jack, it sounded unnaturally loud. When he reached the morgue, he turned the knob slowly and quietly and opened the door.

Two gurneys were set up in the center of the room, but otherwise, the place was empty—no sign of Cordwell or Morris.

“Fuck,” Jack muttered to himself, glancing helplessly around. Where could they have gone?

The door to the refrigerated room was ajar. Both hope and fear interlocked in Jack's chest.

He pointed the gun at the door as he advanced, acutely aware of every tick and hum around him. The steel of the door was almost painfully cold to the touch, even through his gloves. He eased it open and looked into the darkness.

From what he could make out in the gloom, all the drawers for the corpses were closed. He didn't relish the idea of opening any of them, but if Morris was in there....

The first drawer was either locked or jammed shut. He gave it several good tugs, but it wouldn't budge. Frustrated, he moved onto the next one. This one slid out so easily it startled him, and he flinched at the smack of both the smell of decaying flesh and the numerous cuts crisscrossing the eyeless young man on the slab. The face belonged to Morris—but only for a second. Similar age, hair color, build, but the dead man was most definitely not his detective. Jack breathed a sigh of relief.

The next drawer contained a young blond woman—also definitely not Morris—and the next, a young boy of about twelve or thirteen. What he did find in those drawers was that damned symbol carved on the woman's forehead and the boy's empty eye sockets (Jack turned away from that one, sick in his heart with disgust for the people who had done that to the boy). What he didn't find was Oliver Morris.

He had reached the end of the row of drawers when he noticed the small door. He had never seen it before, but then, he had seldom been in this particular part of the morgue. It was a narrow metal door with a lever handle, sandwiched between the wall and the leftmost column of drawers in the back corner of the room, and only visible if one moved far enough to the left to see past the drawers. Gut instinct told him if Morris was anywhere, he was through that door. Jack thought if he turned sideways, he might be able to fit through it. With some trepidation, he pushed down on the handle and pulled open the little door.

The gloom inside the refrigerated room was nothing compared to the lightless void before him. He could see a single step, and assumed others followed, leading away into the pitch. He took a deep breath and squeezed through the door. Feeling for each step with his foot, he moved forward and let the darkness surround him.

K
athy figured they had one shot at getting the door-closing ritual right. What they did have on their side was the delicacy of the opening ritual, and its tendency to collapse if anything deviated from the very precise order of things. However, it had been noted in all the books that made reference to this particular ritual that the side effects of simply disrupting the opening ritual varied from the tragic to the outright ghastly. To achieve low-risk results in their favor, she and Teagan would have to perform their ritual with a minimum of error, and even then, with her unfamiliarity and inexperience being what it was, things could still go terribly wrong.

No pressure
, she told herself, and added,
Yeah, right. Your life
is
pressure.

She gathered some pure beeswax candles—silver, in this case, to channel astral energy, and magenta for its intense energizing properties in difficult rites such as the one she was attempting. She gathered the printed-out copy of the words Teagan needed to read, the miniature dollhouse door, and a straight pin, as well as the lighter she had used to torch the monster whose remains were melting in her den. She rummaged through a small trunk she kept in the secret compartment behind her headboard in her bedroom for a bottle of dark, iridescent liquid, and some sticks of yerba santa leaf and desert sage incense and their holders, plus some more salt and chalk. All these things she piled on the hallway floor, since the coffee table in the den was now in charred splinters.

All the while, Teagan watched her, hovering nearby in case she instructed him to do something. She felt a little sorry for him in a way. His helpless pacing and the occasional quizzical expression told her he was clearly out of his element, and the way he puffed on his unlit cigarette and ran a hand through his hair told her he was nervous.

“You'll be fine,” she said to him over her shoulder as she went into the little foyer area of the apartment. She'd decided that space between the kitchen, den, and hallway to the bed- and bathrooms was the only area large enough for their purposes.

She crouched on her haunches and began drawing a very large circle, about six and a half feet across, on the hardwood floor with the chalk. She left a small opening, then drew an inner ring about three inches smaller around than the first, leaving an opening in the same place. Next, she began copying with great care the symbols from one of the printed-out pages in the space between the inner ring and the outer ring.

Teagan had followed her out of the kitchen, and stood with his lips clamped around his cigarette and his hands in his jeans pockets as he watched her. “I hope you're right, love,” he muttered. “All of this is . . .” He gestured around him, dropping the smoke back in his front pocket. The frost around the apartment was starting to melt, dampening the couch cushions in uneven patches and making slippery wet spots on the floor. From time to time, though, a sourceless gust of cold wind would blow across their skin, making them shiver. The winter had relinquished its grip on the apartment for now, but it was never too far away.

“I know. It's a lot to digest. But we're going to be okay.” Referring to the printed pages again, she drew the appropriate greater sigils in the four directional corners surrounding the circle, and some lesser sigils in between those. On the greater sigils, she placed the magenta candles, and on the lesser sigils, the silver ones. She poured one of the dark-colored oils just outside the outer chalk border, and another of the oils just inside the inner one, leaving the same small opening. The heavy, musky scents of them mingled in her nose. It reminded her, for reasons she couldn't quite place, of her brother's old room.

She stuck the straight pin horizontally through the soft wood of the dollhouse door frame and into the center of the wood of the little door, effectively jamming it closed. Then she poured a little of the oils onto her fingertips and rubbed them around the outline of the door where it met the frame, as well as underneath it.

“What's that for, the opening there?” Teagan asked, pointing.

“For us to enter. If I seal the circle up now and then we step inside, we're not really inside it, so we're not protected by it. We have to finish the circle once we're both in the center of it.”

“Ahh. Okay. And the oils?”

“Like the chalk, they strengthen the wall around the safety zone we're creating.”

Teagan clapped his hands together. “Aye, okay. Now what?”

Kathy let out a long breath as she stood. It had been getting colder since they'd been talking, and her exhalation condensed in wispy plumes of white. “Well, first, I need you to come into the circle through that opening, with those papers you're going to read.” Teagan did so, joining her in the center. With the chalk and the oils, she sealed the circle. “Now we light each of the candles.” She lit the magenta ones in order of the directions where they were placed—north, south, west, and then east—and then lit the silver ones in a counterclockwise direction from the one to the right of the northern candle. The little flames danced in unfelt breezes.

Teagan gave her a nervous look, the papers with the closing ritual fluttering in his hand as he shifted his weight from one leg to the other. “Do I . . . ?”

“Not yet,” she told him. She set eight incense holders out, one between each of the candles, and alternated types of incense sticks. She lit them with the kitchen lighter and once the sweet smoke began floating through the circle, she rose.

“Okay,” she said, taking a deep breath. “Now you read. Go slow—read each word correctly, and with as much belief in the words as you are capable of feeling. When you get to the end, start over and read it again. I'll tell you when to stop. You can do this, Reece.” She gave him a quick, reassuring squeeze on his forearm. “I'm right here with you.”

Teagan regarded her with a tender look that warmed every part of her. Then his gaze dropped to the pages as he scanned the words in his head. Finally he nodded, ran a hand through his hair, popped the unlit cigarette in his mouth, considered that, then took it out and dropped it back in his pocket. He looked up at her. “I'm ready.”

She nodded. In a soft voice, she said, “Let's do this.”

Teagan began to read:

As Teagan spoke the words—which, he'd told her, were mostly pleas to the Master of Doors and Keys to banish these creatures and close the door behind them—Kathy felt the room get both darker and colder. A thin sheen of ice began knitting a fractal pattern of tiny sparkling crystals from the far corners of the room right up to the chalk-and-oil boundary of the circle.

Kathy thought the physical evidence around her, despite its eeriness, was probably a good sign. They were getting the attention of the winter creatures, which were recognizing their limits, the boundaries to their power in the presence of whoever or whatever the being known as the Master of Doors and Keys actually was. Personally, Kathy found the concept of any entity that could bend the wills of lesser gods to its demands to be just beyond the outer edge of a sane and comfortable zone of beliefs, but she did her best to squash such thoughts. Evidently, the oldest elements from multiple universes believed this Master was a just and reasonable creature who could be called upon to assist in ridding a world of chaotic, hostile, negative forces, and that had to be of some comfort.

Teagan continued reciting the spell.

The dimness in the room had begun to take on a faint, blue-tinted glow, and the temperature dropped enough that Kathy could see her breath again. If Teagan noticed any of it, he didn't let on. He was focused on the words, on the power behind the words, and on the unspoken notion hanging as heavy as the cold in the air that the unimaginable could happen if he screwed up.

He started the invocation over as Kathy had instructed. She had told him that it gained power, a kind of magical momentum, each time he recited it, and he figured they needed all the momentum they could get.

It was then that part of the gloom resolved itself into shapes suggestive of humanoid entities. Kathy's eyes grew wide, and speech failed her. They gave off a bluish light that filled the room, pushing the darkness toward the outermost corners. The cold, though, became an almost living, breathing thing, pacing and panting all around them. As the details of those humanoid entities became more defined, Kathy touched Teagan's arm and he looked up, the rest of his words trailing off.

Kathy couldn't say for sure, but she thought the five beings standing before them just outside their circle of protection were the Blue People.