Speak of the Devil - 05 Read online

  I slowed down for an intersection, turning my thoughts over carefully before responding.

  “You don’t know her, and I do. Emaline’s straightforward, even when it gets to be embarrassing or hurts. I don’t think a dishonest word has ever passed her lips. And the magic that she showed us – it was very real, believe me.”

  “But you don’t like magic,” Lauren pointed out.

  “That’s right, I don’t. But there are times it can be helpful, and tonight was one of them.”

  She was staring at me with a distant look, still trying to figure what was going on. She might have become our friend and helper, but she’s not from round here, wasn’t raised here, doesn’t fully get the way it works. People who have spent their entire lives in this place know and understand when they are in the presence of a genuine spell. And that was an enormous gap her mind was finding hard to bridge.

  Except that, in the end, she showed the same amount of common sense she almost always does. She eased herself back in her seat, and decided to accept what I’d said at its face value.

  “Okay, Ross, scratch Tyburn. So then … where do we go next?”

  And that was the real question, wasn’t it? We had the best part of an entire town to choose from.

  Something very dark was lurking out there, and we knew it. Only – as of right now – that was all we knew.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  As soon as the rain had eased off a little, Saul Hobart got his uniformed people out into the woods again, as many of them as this town could spare. Because it had been occurring to him, the past couple of hours, that if there was one corpse out there then there might be others.

  Some thirty or so cops were at work around him, Raine’s Landing being a rather large provincial town, due to the fact that nobody could leave. There were plastic wrappers on their caps and they were wearing oilskin ponchos. They’d brought flashlights, a pair of sniffer dogs, thin metal rods to push into the dirt and several shovels, the latter of which Saul hoped would not be needed.

  They’d started where the first cadaver had been found, and then spread out.

  And by this stage, they were moving in a single line across this section of the forest. Saul could see the broken dazzle of their flashlight beams. The trees and branches around him were all casting misshapen shadows. God, but this was eerie. He had never come out here on such a task.

  He’d gone home long enough to change out of his winter clothes into a raincoat and a hat, since there was definitely no doubting that – by gradual degrees – the temperature was going up.

  But what was causing it? Winters here had been pretty much the same for as far back as he could remember, hard and unrelenting till the end of March. Ross had mentioned global warming, and could that be true … might the entire world be changing?

  There wasn’t too much color out here, but the little Saul could see was dull and strangely muted. Even the flashlight beams around him had a curiously faded quality. The noises that his people were making had a hollow echo too. They sounded shallow and unreal, as though he were dreaming them. That was down to Regan’s Curse. He knew the story just as well as anybody else

  Three hundred years back, she had used her magic far too much. She’d angered this community so badly they had burned her at the stake. And – being a truly powerful witch – her dying words had savage strength.

  “If I cannot leave, then none of you ever shall. And you shall dwell alone here.”

  That one utterance had condemned Raine’s Landing to three centuries of solitude. And had left the township vulnerable in other ways as well – bad stuff came here quite a lot, attracted to its supernatural nature. And when that happened, there was nowhere realistic you could run and hide. You simply had to stand and fight.

  Saul peered out further through the dark and tangled forest. And an impulse overtook him for a few brief seconds, the urge to just start walking and then keep on going forward. But he knew that that would lead to nothing – he would never get out of this place. No one ever did, unless you counted Lehman Willets, who had not been born here. It was not an option.

  Besides, there was his family to think of, his wife Amelia and their three little daughters. He wouldn’t walk away from them for all the riches in Creation. That was what genuinely tied you to a place, now wasn’t it? The people that you cared about. The responsibilities you had, and the fact that other folks were counting on you.

  So forget walking. Saul snorted quietly.

  As if on that signal, one of the dogs started barking before being hushed. Saul’s head jerked in that direction.

  “Got anything?” he called out.

  “We’re not sure, sir,” came a younger voice, maybe fifty yards off.

  Even that was made to sound dull and muted by the curse, so that it could have been a good deal further. But Saul headed toward it. He could see more flashlights starting to converge on the same spot.

  The ground was like loose porridge underfoot. There were occasions, on the way, when one of his big feet sank in it right up to the ankle. Twigs snagged at his tidy clothes. And there were large thorn bushes he was forced to detour to avoid.

  But when he finally arrived, a dozen of his uniformed men had gathered round a freshly dug hole. Two of them were hard at work with shovels. And a frozen face had started showing in the dirt.

  Saul could taste rank acid on his palate. For the love of God, this second corpse hadn’t been in the ground any mere twenty-four hours. Bugs and worms had gotten to it. Half the flesh was gone, but there were faint symbols carved into the stuff remaining. Both sections of jaw were smashed … deliberately? Which was going to make identification difficult.

  But he fixed his gaze on the rotted cadaver, trying to spot anything that might be useful. Finding nothing, he backed off a little, thinking this thing through. Maybe Lauren Brennan had been right, and they did have a serial killer.

  In which case, people ought to know. But who should he tell first?

  He’d always found Judge Levin to be a wise, insightful confidante, and so he got out his cell phone and dialed that number.

  Only it wasn’t the judge who picked up, but Martha Howard-Brett instead.

  Saul listened, his jaw dropping, while she explained to him what had been happening at Levin’s house.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  If I was unsure what to do or where to go next, that was an issue that was resolved pretty quickly. Once word had gotten out about the attack on the judge, it started to spread like wildfire among law enforcement. Saul called me himself.

  “Is he okay?” I asked

  Lauren was staring at me with her fingertips pressed to her collarbone, since she’d gotten on extremely well with Levin during earlier visits. It felt strange to somebody like me, who’s grown up with a lifetime’s isolation, but she genuinely cared about the people in this place.

  “He’s fine, mostly thanks to Willets,” Saul was saying. “But my reckoning is, the judge would’ve been toast if he hadn’t shown up.”

  He was keeping his voice low, since he was still inside Sam Levin’s home.

  “And we’ve no idea who’s behind this?”

  “It was only the one guy, Ross. But apparently, he mentioned others.”

  “I’ll be right there,” I said, pulling on my steering wheel and putting down the phone.

  My Caddy began gathering speed, hurtling toward the gradient of Plymouth Drive.

  “I don’t believe it,” I said, mostly to myself. “Another dead body, and the attempted murder of an adept.”

  “Do you suppose they’re connected?”

  Hopefully, we’d soon find out.

  The rain had almost totally eased off, by this late hour. The town around us was glistening and wet. And normally, after a downpour, the streets have a fresh and newly minted look. But that wasn’t the case this particular night. Raine’s Landing looked washed-out and bedraggled. Or maybe it was just my frame of mind making it seem like that.

  A notic
eable touch of mistiness was hanging on the air, forming nimbuses around the streetlights. So the temperature was definitely warmer than it ought to be in February.

  There was barely any traffic now, and so we sped back through the center and then began heading up.

  A pair of uniformed cops was standing guard outside Judge Levin’s house, when we arrived. I recognized them from my own days on the force, and nodded. They already knew who Lauren was, since she had been with them when they had stood against Cornelius Hanlon’s carnivorous demons.

  Willets, Martha, Saul and Levin were all gathered in the living room, the judge being the one guy who was sitting down. They peered at me, when I walked in, with expressions ranging from exasperation to despair. But first things first. I went across and spoke with Levin quietly, checking that he was all right. He’s one of the smartest and – deep down – one of the most decent of the adepts, and I’ve always liked him.

  And he was cordial enough to me, but obviously shaken up. Except the sight of Lauren, who was by my elbow, managed to cheer him up a little.

  “You’ve come to see me too?” He even managed a weak grin. “How very nice of you to take the trouble. Thank you so much, dear.”

  Lauren’s nose wrinkled up slightly at the ‘dear’ part. But she could see how upset he was and took that in her stride.

  He looked ten years older than he’d done before, the color in his face replaced by tepid blandness. And there was a startled blankness to his gaze I didn’t think would go away in too much of a hurry.

  “You’re probably in slight shock at the moment,” Lauren told the man. “It’s only natural, after what happened.”

  “No, it’s not that,” Levin answered, giving his head a brief shake. “People – and other things – have tried to kill me more than a few times. But never someone from my own community … not of their own volition.”

  His voice dropped to a low, thin whisper with those final words. I couldn’t help but notice that he wasn’t blinking very much. This whole business had lanced him to the core. And so I glanced across at Willets, who could only shrug.

  It wasn’t too much longer before everybody in the room was turning over this evening’s events, going through every detail. And the question that Lauren had posed was still the right one.

  Do you suppose they’re connected?

  “Hold on a minute.” And I turned to Willets. “If the judge’s senses couldn’t pick up anything, how did you know he was under attack?”

  “I didn’t. Neither of us did.”

  He looked to Martha for confirmation, and she nodded.

  “We only knew that Sam was on his own this evening,” she said, “and decided that we’d drop around and see if he could use some company.”

  The implications of which almost took my breath away.

  “You mean he’s only alive now due to a fortunate co-incidence?”

  “It certainly looks that way.”

  I spread my thumb and forefinger and put them to my temples.

  “So let me see if I’ve gotten this straight. At least two people have been murdered, not in any ordinary way. A man comes into this house – materializes in this house, apparently – negates its owner’s magic powers and tries to kill him. And there’s almost certainly been other stuff going on that we don’t even know about. And no one has sensed anything at all about it? Not even the vaguest hint?”

  Willets could see where I was heading with this.

  “There has to something far more powerful at work here than a simple Spell of Shielding,” he agreed. “If it were only that, I’d know about the presence of it, even if I couldn’t see what it was hiding.”

  We were dealing with a type of magic we had never encountered before, in other words.

  “Are you sure it’s not a Tyburner?” Saul asked me rather pointedly. “The guy who came here was wearing a cloak.”

  “And he was wearing shoes as well, presumably, and so do most other folks.”

  “Those marks on the first body?” Levin broke in. “Can you tell me what they looked like?”

  He was sitting straighter and had come around a little.

  “I can do better than that,” said Saul.

  He produced from his raincoat pocket several photographs that had been taken at the morgue. The judge’s lips skinned back with disgust, the first time that he leafed through them. But then he adjusted his spectacles and looked at them closer.

  “I thought that there was something rather odd about the knife that my attacker had. Didn’t have the time to take it in right then, of course. But there were some of these same markings down its blade as on this body.”

  But a slightly different matter kept on bothering me

  “If someone really is practicing the dark arts in this town,” I asked, “where’d they even get the knowledge?”

  Willets let out a faint humph.

  “There are thousands of books – maybe tens of thousands – about magic in Raine’s Landing, Ross. I own quite a library myself. And many of those books include chapters on black magic, since how could they possibly not? It’s the flip side of the coin, whatever our custom might be locally. Leaving out that subject would be like writing about great generals of the past, and forgetting Hannibal and Alexander.”

  “You mean … this stuff is freely available to anyone who wants it?”

  “Absolutely. And it always has been. It’s simply, nobody has tried to use it until now.”

  A ‘you’re kidding me’ kind of glaze came over most of the faces in the room, since that had never once occurred to us. We’d grown up so accustomed to the witching arts being used in a certain way, we’d not even considered the alternative.

  Right now, though, we were being forced to. And none of us looked particularly happy about it. Me … I’ve never been magic’s greatest fan, but I’d never imagined it would come to this.

  “Have we stopped searching for bodies?” Martha asked, trying to be practical and at the same time change the subject.

  She’s a beautiful, delicate-looking adept, slender, with long auburn hair. And she has an inner spirit I’m amazed at, sometimes. She is almost always positive these days, and nothing gets her down for very long.

  “Nuh-uh,” Saul came back. “We’re still looking, although hopefully we’ve found the last. Identification’s going to be a problem for the second one, however.”

  “Whoa, backtrack a moment.” That was Lauren. “You say you found the second body about sixty yards into the woods?”

  Saul nodded.

  “But the first corpse that you found was right up by the border?”

  The whole room’s attention had turned to her, because she sounded pretty sure what she was talking about.

  “Then our killers have just got a whole lot cockier,” she announced “Let me take a guess. The second body that you found was buried deeper than the first.”

  Which got her another nod.

  “The first one, the most recent victim, only had a pile of leaves across it. And they left that corpse where it could easily be found.”

  “They wanted us to know that they’d killed Irwin Maschler?”

  That was my guess. But it turned out I was wrong.

  “It’s far more likely that they didn’t even care. Whatever they were trying to achieve, they’ve done it. Whatever powers they were trying to attain, they’ve gotten them. They’re not trying to hide anymore, the way they originally were. It’s now game-on, so far as they’re concerned.”

  “But what game? All of this ‘rulers of Raine’s Landing’ guff?”

  The judge ducked his head, then answered that.

  “I think that my attacker … he was talking about power. Those with the greatest supernatural ability have always been the most important people in this town. And if these people have acquired the strength to challenge that, I’d say that this cloaked fellow and his chums are bent on pushing us aside, replacing us.”

  Which meant that all the adepts were in dan
ger.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Not too far from Levin’s home stood the McGinley residence. It had borne that name for many, many decades and a slew of generations. But it looked like that particular tradition might be coming to an end, because the last two in the family line – sisters so alike you’d think that they were twins – were both spinsters of a lifetime’s standing. It was in their nature. They preferred each other’s company, and did not appreciate anyone else intruding.

  Even in the grip of night, the weather had given the grounds around their house a quite lopsided look. The flowerbeds had been crushed by the recent rain. The lawns were not as flat and even as they usually looked, the downpour making them subside in places. The animal-shaped statuary was still in place, but had a rather drowned appearance.

  Once inside the house, the darkness seemed to thicken of its own accord. There were curious brass engravings, even stranger tapestries, and tall cabinets full of gruesome knickknacks.

  Each of the two sisters had her own spacious bedroom.

  Except that Cynthia came awake abruptly in her crumpled old four-poster bed. She was not quite sure why. Her fogged-up brain reeled muddledly. And she was struck – the way you sometimes are on waking – by a strange variety of smells. The musty odor of her bedsheets, and the slightly acrid tang of gathered dust. The faintest hint of burning yew bark from a conjuration they’d performed last night, and a soupcon of the flowery perfume she sometimes used.

  And then her eyesight started to unblur, and Cynthia took in her surroundings.

  Everything was as it should be. The drapes ahead of her, the outlines of the window frame beyond that. The silhouettes of her antique, expensive bedroom furniture. There was nothing out of place.

  But she got a curious and unpleasant sensation, like a spider marching down her back. Cynthia’s emerald green eyes widened as they tried to pierce the gloom. And then she reached out with her other senses, and found …