Speak of the Devil - 05 Read online

  But then something else occurred to me.

  “You really thought that there were people practicing the dark arts in Raine’s Landing, and you kept on coming back?”

  She thrust a tongue against the inside of her cheek and smirked. “You might not know this, but I used to be a pretty wild kid. And that album cover stuff still has a certain draw.”

  Yeah? Well, if she said so. I decided it was time to change the subject.

  “Where’re you planning on staying tonight?” I asked her.

  She reached into her pocket and produced a set of keys.

  “Cassie’s let me have her place, so long as I look after Cleveland.” That being her big pet tomcat. “Unless …?”

  “No,” I came back quickly. “That sounds fine.”

  Lauren’s gaze became a little awkward. “Please don’t tell her, but I’m really not that fond of cats. I’m more of a dog person, except the job keeps me away from home way too many hours to own one.”

  “Can’t have everything,” I shrugged.

  “Can’t have much, if you ask me,” she grunted. Then her head came up. “Where exactly are we going?”

  Rows of brick-built townhouses were taking shape ahead of us. And she had never been down here before.

  As we entered the Tyburn neighborhood, she sat up straight and began studying the narrow streets around us. What stared back at her was crumbling brickwork, overgrown front yards, and curbside trees that had never in their lives been pollarded.

  “This some kind of slum?” she asked.

  “No, not quite that.”

  And I explained to her how Tyburn worked.

  Back three hundred years ago, when Regan Farrow put her curse on us, most of Raine’s Landing’s inhabitants had tried to carry on with relatively normal lives. We could never leave this town, and almost no one could get in. But we’d persisted with our stores, our businesses, our jobs and chores and schools and courts. Magic was an influence in our lives, for certain, but we didn’t let it dominate us.

  The inhabitants of Tyburn were a different matter. Seeing as they were now isolated, why not give their whole existence over to the magic arts? Need a nice meal? Conjure one up. Your roof is leaking? Plug it with a spell.

  They’d grown separate from the rest of town, leading an entirely different kind of life. And most townsfolk saw them as weird, to say the very least. But I’d had dealings with the Tyburners before, and had formed a far better opinion of them. I knew how strong, brave, and united they could be when facing down a crisis.

  Added to which, there was one of them I had a little slice of personal history with. Let’s call it that, and then move on.

  “You think somebody here’s been practicing black magic?”

  “Given how obsessed these people are, I think it’s a good place to start.”

  We finally reached Morgana Park. It was hemmed in by a square of houses, and was nothing more in plain truth than a decent-sized community garden. It had high iron railings, trees and bushes beyond those. But there were some gaps in the foliage, and we’d started catching glimpses of the dim interior by this stage.

  Hundreds of people of all ages, many of them in long, dark cloaks, were facing in the same direction and were chanting.

  “A ceremony?” Lauren asked, the bridge of her nose crinkling up curiously.

  “Well, of course. They hold them regular as clockwork.”

  “How come they aren’t getting soaked?”

  My wipers were still pounding, but I shook my head and pointed up.

  Some twenty feet above the crowd there was a canopy of sparkling silver light. It looked no more substantial than a mirage on a hot, flat street. But somehow, it was holding back the rain and spilling it off to the sides.

  “Who’s doing that?”

  “They all are. They’re very close, and often work in unison.”

  “But there has to be someone in charge, right?”

  I smiled tightly, pulling over to the curb.

  “You’ve met a load of adepts, even confronted some demons,” I told Lauren. “And now, it’s time for you to meet your very first High Witch.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Doctor Lehman Willets’s eyes were glowing red from lid to lid. He was using his exceptional powers to heal Judge Levin’s wound. Once that he was done, Martha brought across a cloth and wiped away the surplus blood. And, between them, they got him seated back on the couch as comfortably as they could.

  Levin winced as he was lowered down. Some nerves had been severed – there was nothing that the doc could do to fix that. But in time, he would recover.

  The bright hue in Willets’s eyes receded until only his pupils were still glowing scarlet. He was a prematurely aged black man in his forties, dressed like a university professor, which he had once been.

  His face was very hard and grim, his nostrils flaring and his breathing taut. But his voice was reasonably steady when he spoke.

  “Can I get you something that might help to calm you down? A brandy, perhaps?”

  “A champagne cognac would be nice.”

  And a smile forced its way up past the angry mask of Willets’s features. Even in extremis, the judge still tried to hang onto his fancy tastes. But what the heck. The man deserved it.

  Willets snapped the fingers of his left hand and a Montgolfier glass, partly filled with palely golden fluid, appeared in his cupped right palm. He swirled and sniffed it before handing it over.

  “Thank you.” Levin nodded weakly. “Won’t you join me?”

  “Not right now,” the doc replied.

  He waited patiently while the judge pulled himself together and then started to describe this evening’s events. And Willets’s stare grew fiercer as he listened to the horrible chronology of it. The intruder coming in without the front door being opened. Sam’s attempts to use his powers, and the way they had entirely failed him. That was pretty unexpected – when it came to using magic, Levin was no slouch.

  And then the knife attack, the savagery of it. And the words the cloaked assailant had used.

  “He said that he was one of our new rulers?” Willets echoed.

  Levin nodded again, seeing what his friend was driving at. “Yes. There’s more than one of them, apparently.”

  “And you’ve no faintest idea who he was, or why he chose you in the first place?”

  “None.” The judge’s chest rose slightly and fell. “As I said, he sounded young and educated. Could have been one of my neighbor’s sons. That apart, that’s all I know.”

  Doc Willets went very quiet, his strange eyes fixing on a bare patch of the air in front of him. He became so motionless, you could mistake him for a photograph. But neither of the others got alarmed, because they understood what he was up to.

  Strong magic had been used tonight. Spectral barriers had been broken down and elemental force defied. And that took serious power. So Willets was now doing the best he could to trace it to its source, following the path it might have left against the damp night air. He was an expert when it came to doing things like that.

  But when he finally snapped out of his half-trance, his expression was a formless blank.

  Martha whispered, “Well?”

  “Nothing,” the doc grumbled. “I got absolutely zip. Not an inkling. Not a hint. Whoever these sons of bitches are, they’re damnably good at covering their tracks. But still, we can be sure of one thing.”

  He looked round at the others gravely.

  “When our town has been attacked before, the threat has come here largely from the outside world. This time however, it is coming from inside Raine’s Landing. From some of the people here. That’s something we thought we’d never have to deal with, right?”

  And no one even knew how to respond to that.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “What’s wrong with you, you imbecile?”

  There was the briefest pause, and then:

  “How dare you? Are you insane, that you could even sugges
t such a thing?”

  Emaline Pendramere – the High Witch for this district – had greeted us warmly enough at first. She’d been on a raised section at the top end of the park, leading the ceremony, when we’d come in. But then she saw us approaching. She had faltered, smiled, and handed over her duties to one of her attendants before hurrying down to greet us.

  She’d hugged me hard and kissed me firmly on the cheek. Like I said, we have a bit of history between us. Then she turned around and greeted Lauren like she’d known the blond lieutenant her whole life.

  “You got in past the Curse all by yourself?” she asked. “Without the slightest use of magic? You are obviously a sister of enormous inner strength, and it’s a privilege to meet you.”

  She’d led us over to her house at the corner of the square, even conjuring up a miniature version of that glowing canopy so that we didn’t get wet. Invited us cordially in, and listened patiently to the first few questions I had asked her.

  But then her face had started twitching noticeably.

  And right now, she was beside herself with rage.

  Emaline was tall and slim, with curly yellow hair and eyes of almost the same color. She was wearing a thin, floor length purple gown. Her feet were bare, the way they always are. But her raised forearms were shaking violently, and her gaze was wild and livid.

  I drew back, half suspecting she was going to cast a spell that turned me into some small, ugly bug.

  “Try looking at this sensibly,” I managed to get out.

  But she was having none of it.

  “Somebody using black magic here?” she screamed. “At the heart of this sublime community? Under the gaze of the Goddess? How could you even hint at such a dreadful thing? Do you even know what you’re talking about?”

  We were in what I suppose passed as her living room. The debris of several decades of strange living had been allowed to gather here. Leather-bound books and rolled up charts. Bottles and beakers and peculiarly shaped jars. Several musical instruments – I wasn’t sure if they had anything to do directly with the arts. A moth-eaten old Afghan coat flung across a table. An empty fish-tank and the front end of a bicycle. More than a dozen wicker baskets, filled with what smelled like dried herbs. And a stuffed cat, a black one with white paws. What that was for, I didn’t have a clue.

  But my attention was completely held by Emaline, and I could see the way that the look in her eyes had turned practically acidic.

  “I know what this is!” she hollered, her tone going up another notch. “Something goes wrong, something to do with magic, so blame it on us, the outsiders, the different ones! The Tyburners, with all of their peculiar ways! It has to be us, doesn’t it? Isn’t that your way of thinking?”

  “Are you going to calm down?” I asked her.

  “No!”

  She snatched a jar from a nearby shelf and flung it furiously against a wall. A cloud of orange powder billowed from it, and a curious smell – like boiled cabbage mixed with sump oil – filled the room around us.

  Jeez, and I thought Cass was bad. I could only gawk at the enraged High Witch, my limbs turning to stone.

  But Lauren was perhaps more used than I’ve become to dealing with unruly members of the public. She stepped across as smoothly as she could, and murmured a quiet, “Ma’am?”

  Which was something that the High Witch probably had never been called once in her entire life. She slowed down a little and stared round at the lieutenant. Her lower lip had begun quivering, and her gaze was starting to fill up with dampness.

  “You’re a police officer, aren’t you?” she asked.

  I noticed that her voice had gone much tighter, hoarse. But when she got a nod, the High Witch raised a thin, trembling finger, pointing its sharp nail at me.

  “Then kindly arrest this man. He has insulted me and all my people, grossly.”

  Lauren made a decent job of keeping her own features sympathetic and composed.

  “No insult was intended, ma’am. If that’s how you’ve interpreted it, then I have to say you’ve got it wrong. We’re merely investigating a serious crime here. The evidence that we have so far seems to point to some form of satanic craft. And since this particular community uses magic a good deal more than any other, this simply seemed like the best place to start. We’re not accusing anyone.”

  Emaline tried taking that in, but was still distraught. One hand had gone to her mouth, and tears had started dripping down her face. And I felt really bad about that, since I hadn’t meant to hurt her.

  “You don’t understand, lieutenant.” The words were coming out all snuffly now, her nose clogged up. “This community … we have devoted ourselves, our entire existence, to the most beneficent of magics. Everything we conjure is a tribute to the Goddess. So to do what this man is suggesting – it would be the vilest, most appalling sin. I can’t believe that anyone would do it.”

  “Besides,” she went on, “what you are describing is a living human sacrifice. Had such an evil ceremony taken place in Tyburn, I and many others would have sensed it.”

  “Yeah, but the thing is,” I pointed out, “we have our own guys, and they’re not half bad at picking up on that stuff too. If a sacrifice had happened in our part of town, they ought to have known about it. But so far as I’m aware, they didn’t.”

  Emaline blinked at me, her red-rimmed gaze clearing a little. Even she could see I had a point.

  “We’re dealing with something very powerful,” I told her, “and extremely well hidden. Even from the likes of you.”

  I fished a handkerchief out of my pocket, passing it to her. She gave a small nod and then blew her nose, her mood transforming quickly.

  “Very well,” she murmured, after a few seconds’ thought. “I’ll prove it wasn’t any of my people.”

  Then she got us heading back out to the park, and she didn’t even bother with the canopy this time.

  Within another minute, we were standing on the raised section, some kind of grassy elevated stage. The High Witch whispered to her underling, who raised her arms. The ceremony stopped.

  Several hundred thin and pasty faces were now staring at us curiously, gazing up from beneath the rims of their hoods. Lauren looked uncomfortable and kept on shifting around slightly. Me? I’ve been through much weirder experiences, and held my ground.

  Emaline took center stage, her voice becoming strident.

  “My beloved ones, my lambs! We have visitors among us this evening who are questioning the very integrity of this community!”

  A low, unhappy muttering started up. And I thought, Uh-oh. Was she about to prove her point, or trying to form a lynch mob?

  “I want you to join with me and show them they are wrong! Turn your faces upward to the Goddess and open your hearts to her! Reveal to her your inner souls!”

  But they worshipped the Goddess of the Moon, didn’t they? And tonight wasn’t the right one for …

  Every single head, in the sea of them before me, immediately tipped back. And the shining canopy above us disappeared. But no raindrops fell on me, or anybody else. I could feel a massive power surging from the crowd, crawling up along my skin like static. And then – to my astonishment – the dark clouds overhead all began parting.

  Emaline was smiling at me gently by this stage.

  “You see what kind of people these are?” she asked quietly. “What wonders they are capable of?”

  I swallowed hard, pretty impressed. And couldn’t drag my gaze away from what was happening above.

  The full moon came into view. Its thin glow washed across the garden square, lighting up the faces in it. And I wondered for a moment what this was about. But then my host’s intentions became clearer.

  The moonlight was not merely touching surfaces, but penetrating them as well. All the faces below me took on an ethereal sheen, the outline of the bone beneath the skin becoming suddenly apparent.

  And while that was happening, a peculiar hubbub rose into the air, despite the f
act that no one’s lips were moving. It took me a little while to figure out what I was listening to. But it had to be … these people’s inner thoughts.

  Emaline spread her arms out to the sides and tilted her head so far back that her whole body arced.

  “Hecate!” she called out in a beseeching tone. “We bare ourselves to you in our entirety! We surrender every aspect of our deeds and thoughts! If there is one of us of impure spirit, single that one out!”

  I stared down at the skull-like faces. Nothing in the least was happening.

  “Is there someone here who has committed murder? Is there one of us who has been steeped in mortal sin? If so, rip this evildoer from our midst! And do not hesitate, dear Goddess!”

  No one moved. The moonlight just kept shining down.

  “And the same is happening,” the High Witch told me, with a self-satisfied air, “all over Tyburn, with the same result. So, you still think I’m a liar?”

  “I never said you were a liar,” I came back at her annoyedly. “Hell, I was prepared to take you at your word, except you blew a gasket so damned fast.”

  The kindly manner she’d displayed when we had first arrived came partway back.

  “It was mostly your own fault, Ross. You’re not half as diplomatic as you like to think you are. So, are there any more inquiries you’d like to make in Tyburn?”

  And I huffed a little. “No. Of course not.”

  “Then good hunting elsewhere, you and Lauren both. And if there’s any way that I can help, you only have to call my name. You know that, don’t you?”

  Considering the fact that I’d been facing imminent bugdom just a short while back, this wasn’t such a bad result. And so I thanked her for her offer.

  “Keep the handkerchief,” I added.

  “I don’t get it!” Lauren objected during the ride out. “What on earth was that supposed to prove?”

  I asked her what she meant.

  “I mean, okay, there was that spooky stuff with the clouds and all, and then that totally weird X-ray glow. But she could have rigged those simply to impress us. How does it make clear those people’s innocence?”