Chills (23 page)

“Now you will die,” the voices said. The mouths shut and the light snapped off. A cool blue puff of her breath was the last thing Kathy could make out clearly before she and Teagan were engulfed by the alien darkness.

J
ack had managed to get off head shots to one older man, a woman, and another twenty-something young guy, dropping them where they stood, before Cordwell turned on him. Jack had just enough time to see the glow fade from their hands before Cordwell's fingers were clawing Jack's throat with one hand while a stone dagger had been raised above his head with the other. Jack caught the descent of the knife with his free hand, but not before the blade bit into his palm. He winced from the pain, but wrestled the gun around Cordwell's arm and aimed it at his face.

Cordwell tossed him with amazing strength against the altar, and for one dizzying moment, Jack thought he was going to go right over the edge, into what he now confirmed was a deep black, a black that seemed to go all the way to the center of the earth—or more likely, all the way through this universe and into another one.

Jack turned to take another go at Cordwell, but a moose of a man was standing there between them, his eyes flashing with lunatic purpose. He swung a meaty fist like a sledgehammer against the side of Jack's head, and Jack reeled a moment, seeing bright fireworks of light. The man hit him again, this time in the mouth, and Jack tasted blood as it flowed over his teeth and tongue. The side of his eye was already beginning to swell and tear, making it hard to see, but Jack knew immediately what the man intended when he wrapped his steel cable arms around Jack's midsection.

He hoisted Jack off his feet, and a flash of fear lit Jack up inside. He felt himself pushed backward toward the opening in the altar and his feet kicked out, trying to connect with the big man. His arms were pinned, but Jack managed to raise his gun enough to fire a gut shot.

The big man staggered backward, dropping Jack, whose elbow connected hard with the side of the altar. Jack saw stars. It was nothing, though, compared to the look of shock on the other man's face as he pressed a hand to his wound and studied the blood flowing between his fingers. Jack felt no sympathy. He dispatched the man with a shot to the head.

Three of the remaining cult members' hands still glowed, but their faces looked worried as they mouthed the words of their spell. Jack shot a woman in the shoulder, but she took the hit and kept conjuring. That resolved Jack's last remaining shred of hesitation regarding killing them, and he shot her in the head.

He looked up to check on Morris's progress with his family. He could see Morris working on smashing the cage's lock with the snow brush. Jack suspected he was doing more damage to the snow brush than the lock, but he gave Morris credit for trying.

Then he felt a bright explosion of pain in his right shoulder. It was gigantic, the kind of pain that made him nauseous, and he felt his grip on the gun weaken. He turned to see Cordwell stepping back with a smug smirk, and with his left hand, he felt for the source of the pain. His hand closed around the hilt of the ceremonial dagger, but his awkward grasp kept slipping. He tried to raise the gun, but the fireworks went off again.

“Sonofa . . .” he muttered, and tried to raise his arm again. His whole arm felt like it had been lit on fire, but Jack squeezed the trigger anyway. He hit Cordwell in the leg, and the coroner dropped with a howl.

Jack turned to the other two cultists, but they were running away. Jack allowed himself a small smile of victory—until he heard the echoing animal call coming up out of the well in front of him. Behind him, he heard Cordwell crying and laughing. Both were terrible sounds.

* * *

In the dark, Kathy could hear the cleaners hovering around the circle. Teagan had stopped reading; it was too dark to see. But just before the light had gone out, he had grabbed her hand, and she could smell his cologne, and it was reassuring that he was still there with her.

“Now what, love?” he asked in a voice barely above a whisper.

Before she could answer, a sudden spotlight appeared to the left of Kathy. In it, her brother was sitting on a folding chair like they had at the hospital.

She felt her stomach bottom out and was only vaguely aware of squeezing Teagan's hand even harder. It couldn't possibly be her brother sitting in that chair—part of her knew that, not just in her mind but in her bones. But a thousand thoughts cascaded over each other at once. Toby did have ties to the Hand of the Black Stars cult, after all. That he might have lied about the extent of his knowledge and/or involvement in this whole mess would not have surprised her. But Toby was under surveillance, and the monitoring system at that hospital—she had looked into it herself—was maximum security. So how had he gotten there? Had the Blue People or even the cleaners whisked him away with their dark magic? Or was this a trick, a thing masquerading as Toby to somehow get her to leave the circle? It sure looked like her brother, down to birthmarks and tiny scars. He wore the same bland hospital-issued clothes she had last seen him in. He looked pale. The bags under his eyes were dark and his eyes themselves flashed in the dim light, but otherwise . . .

“Hello, little sister,” he said with a sly grin, and for a moment, the world wavered. She willed it to steady itself again.

“You are not my brother,” she said.

He looked amused as he leaned forward toward her. “Aren't I? A monster's a monster, right?” Before she could answer, he added, “Oh, I know you like to think you see them as people, all those creatures who can kill their own, can rape women and molest children, can beat old people to a pulp, all to feed the darkness inside them. You like to think you believe that darkness doesn't make them less human, but that's only because you need to see
me
as human . . . and yourself, as well. Isn't that right?”

Teagan didn't try to get in the way of the conversation, but Kathy felt him squeeze her hand.

“Does your ex-pat here know about me? About any of your family? Your dead mother, your dead drunk father, your serial killer brother . . . I mean, wow, Kathy. If only he could have come to Thanksgiving or Christmas sometime. You know, back when all those little squares in your bedroom picture frame actually had pictures in them of people who at least pretended to still care whether you lived or died.”

Kathy clamped down on her embarrassment until it turned to rage, and then she clamped down on it even harder. To let it go would have been exactly what the Toby-thing wanted. For her to lose control and lunge at him, leave the circle . . . or make Teagan so horrified by or disgusted with her that he would leave it to get away from her.... That was exactly what it wanted.

Neither was happening.

“What, Kathy? What are you thinking right now? Are you thinking about the night I gave you that scar?”

Kathy breathed slowly, counting her breaths, just like her college therapist had taught her years ago. Teagan squeezed her hand again in the dark.

“Oh, Kaaathyyy, I know you can hear me. It's very hard to have a rapport when the conversation is so one-sided.”

“I was thinking about how good it is going to feel to send you back to the hell you came from.”

The Toby-thing gave her a sly grin. “Oh, you think you can do that? You and the IRA sympathizer, with your broken minds and your broken hearts and your silly optimism? You both have faith in nothing. You think either of you is strong enough to close the Sixth of Nine?”

Kathy locked her gaze with those eyes that looked so much like Toby's, those dead eyes, but dropped Teagan's hand and slid down to pick up the kitchen lighter from the floor inside the circle. Then she rose and clicked it on so Teagan could see the papers with the invocation.

“Keep going,” she told him, and Teagan began to read again.

The Toby-thing frowned, then wavered like a picture on a scrambled TV channel. The face that looked like her brother's, the voice that sounded so much like his, distorted as it cried out in frustration, and the ice-crusted shadow beneath it retreated into the dark.

For a while, the only light in the room came from the lighter's tiny flame. Kathy shivered with the cold, but held the lighter as still as she could. She could feel the things all around them, seething, looking for a way in.

Then another patch of light appeared, this time near Teagan, and at first, he only glanced at it, but then recognition crossed his face and he stopped reading.

“Reece?” Kathy's voice was small.

Something broken flitted behind Teagan's eyes, something old and never quite forgotten. “It's me grandmother,” he told her, and his voice sounded even smaller.

An ancient woman sat rocking in an old-fashioned rocking chair. She wore a wool shawl over a pale and shapeless dress, with heavy black shoes. Her face was deeply lined, so much so that it reminded Kathy of the striations of rock. Her skin was pale and paper-thin, veined with thin lines of blue-black. She regarded Teagan with one rheumy blue eye; the other was fogged over with a thick cataract.

“You're wrong to be in it, lad,” the woman said in a thick, watery voice. “To be caught up in all this. ‘Tis the divil's work, it is.”

Teagan seemed to be remembering a night prior to this; his eyes, his stance, were someplace else. “I'm not,” he told her. “I'm where I'm meant to be,
máthair mhór
.”

“You say so,” the old woman replied, pointing a long, crooked finger at him. “But what good've ye done, eh? Have you changed any minds? Saved any lives? It's a war you can't win, against an enemy that has been stronger, more powerful, and more numerous than ye for centuries.”

“That don't mean it's not a war worth fighting,” he told her.

“Not so worth fighting that you can't walk away, as you did before, under similar circumstances. You remember, she nearly got you killed, that lass, because you wanted to get in her knickers. Blowed her own damn self up, she and her terrorist brother, and how many others? How many children? And you would have been a part of it, a murderer, but for your own lack of loyalty to anyone or anything. Even your own mum knew you were nothing, just bullheaded anger and faithlessness.”

“I was a child. And I didn't walk away. I grew up. Became a police officer. I found a side to fight on in a war I could join with a clean conscience, if not a heavy heart.”

Kathy could see that despite the evenness of his tone, the woman was getting to him, agitating him, cutting him open with the sharpness of his own memories, just as she (it) had done to her. The difference was, Kathy had been cut deeply before, and thought she knew something about the way to block out the pain.

She took his hand and squeezed it. “She's not your grandmother,” she said.

Teagan looked at her, his eyes coming back to that night and that place, but when he and Kathy both glanced back, a little girl stood where the old woman had been. She had one blue eye as well, a doll's eye; the other was lost to the mess of charred black which had eaten that half of her face. She stood perfectly still on a single leg; the other was missing.

“I hope you haven't forgotten me, Reece Teagan,” the little voice rasped. “I haven't forgotten you.”

“Bloody hell,” Teagan whispered.

“Remind you of little Gracie Anderson, do I? Oh, I know her. Dead girls whisper to each other on these winter breezes.”

“You're not my fault,” he said in a voice thick with emotion. “I tried to get there in time, but—”

“You could have stopped it and you didn't,” the girl-thing told him.

“I tried!” he shouted.

“Read,” Kathy prodded. “Forget that thing over there. It's not a little girl. It's nothing but ice dust and shadows.”

“I. Am NOT. NOTHING!” the little girl screamed, seeming to grow, to bloom in Teagan's direction. He flinched, dropping the papers. Immediately, a gust of wind blew the papers up into a little dervish. Teagan and Kathy tried to grab them, but the wind whisked them out of the circle, out of reach.

“Damn it!” Teagan shouted, turning to Kathy. “I'm so sorry—”

She shook her head. “Don't worry about it. We can still finish this.”

The girl and the light surrounding her winked out. When the sourceless spotlight blazed on again, it was across the room, where the papers were, and Jack Glazier stood in the center of it.

“No bloody way,” Teagan said.

Behind Jack was one of the cleaners. Jack tried to speak to them, but as soon as he parted his lips, his mouth filled with ice. The pain in his eyes made Kathy wince.

One of the tendrils of the cleaner behind him whispered over his clothes to his throat. It wrapped itself around his neck and began squeezing. Jack—or the thing that was pretending to be Jack—began flailing, his hands slapping uselessly at the tendril. It took all of Kathy's will not to step out of the circle, to help him. Sensing Teagan was feeling the same, she placed a hand on his arm to keep him there. She fought back tears. It was hurting her heart to watch.

Blood began to pour from the place where the tendril touched Jack (
not
Jack,
not
Jack, she kept telling herself), and his eyes grew wide. His skin grew pale and began to turn blue, and slivers of ice fell from his mouth.

Teagan fired at the Jack-thing before Kathy even knew he'd taken out his gun. Both it and the cleaner behind it splattered like an ink spot, froze, then pulled back together.

Now they were angry; Kathy could feel it pulsing off the cleaners. The Blue People, in the unlit corners of the room, were angry, too. She and Teagan had proved more formidable opposition than they had expected.

The light came on again, and Kathy could see the papers fluttering in the wind. They were held down by a man's bare foot. Kathy followed that foot to the hem of a silvery robe, and up the folds of the robe to a face—a human face. She didn't recognize the face, but she recognized the tattooed symbol on the muscular forearm. This man was one of the cultists.