Something scuttled and rustled its way through the undergrowth to our left, and I caught a glimpse of a pair of eyes that were way too yellow to belong to anything with friendly intentions. The rustling quickly scurried around behind us.
Imala’s eyes suddenly went huge. I looked where she was looking.
Uh-oh.
I couldn’t see the gate. It was probably still there, but I couldn’t see it through the hedge that had moved—yes, moved—across the path. Our exit had just been completely blocked by plants, plants with roots that should’ve kept them from doing things like that.
Imala tapped Tam on the shoulder. He turned and saw.
“Kesyn ever do that before?” she asked.
“Son of a bitch.”
“I’ll take that as a maybe.”
Mychael cautiously started toward the door. “Looks like we’re being encouraged to come in.”
We went inside.
The only light was from the open door, spilling a single beam of sunlight onto the black-and-white-tiled marble floor. Though neglect had turned that into black and dingy yellow. Above our heads was a massive wrought-iron chandelier, beyond that only featureless murk. Tam and Imala could see in the dark just fine. Neither of them went for additional weapons, so I assumed nothing carnivorous or merely homicidal was charging out of the dark at us.
In response, the door slammed shut behind us.
And locked.
Instantly my hand was on my sword hilt. I didn’t draw it, but I wanted to. I really, really wanted to. But before the lights had gone out, the only people close enough to stab were friends. Hopefully they still thought I was a friend, not someone they suddenly decided needed murdering.
“Easy,” Tam said, making no attempt to keep his voice down. Maybe he was talking to me; maybe to a mage whose door slamming might be about to escalate into deadly spell slinging.
Or a vindictive house.
“Easy,” he repeated.
I’d take it easy, but I wasn’t taking my hand off of my sword.
The lights slowly came up. Pinpricks of flame like tiny eyes grew into candlelight. Either Kesyn Badru or the house was being polite to a pair of night-vision-impaired elves, or he and/or it wanted to get a good look at our last expressions before he/it killed us.
Tam’s home had been stripped clean. This house was badly in need of cleaning. It was all too obviously untouched, either by Kesyn, Khrynsani, or a housekeeper. The marble floor in the entry wasn’t the only thing that looked like it hadn’t been cleaned since Chigaru’s mom was on the throne. A long hallway extended into spooky darkness on our right. The furnishings appeared to be nice enough, but it was difficult to tell for sure since everything was covered in sheets of cobwebs, moving as if with a life of their own in the disturbance of air when the door had slammed shut. I hoped we wouldn’t be meeting the spiders that had made those.
“My nerves don’t need this,” I muttered.
“Well, that locked door will keep anyone from coming at us from behind,” Imala noted.
“I’m more concerned about what’ll come at us from the front.”
“Sir,” Tam called.
Silence.
Mychael shimmered slightly with a protection spell; Tam likewise shielded. Their combined wards reached back and around, enfolding me and Imala in their protection.
Imala gave an exasperated sigh, stopping just short of an eye roll.
“It’s a big house, Tam,” Mychael said. “If he’d barricaded himself anywhere, where would it be?”
Tam took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and I assumed tried to sense Kesyn Badru.
I began to sense the house.
I didn’t hear any sound other than our own breathing, and nothing moved except for the shifting cobwebs. Yet I had a growing awareness of a presence, a solitary entity, not the haunting of spirits or demons that I’d expected. I’d never been able to detect anything like this before, even when I’d had my magic. Maybe the absence of magic enabled me to perceive other things, other levels of existence. Who knew? I certainly didn’t. And the how and why didn’t matter; finding Kesyn Badru and living long enough to get out with our sanity intact did. However, my awareness of this thing could be knowledge; and an opponent you knew was an opponent you stood a better chance of surviving.
The entity didn’t live—or whatever—in the house; it was the house. Not merely the stones and wood, this thing had been here before the house had been built, buried for literal ages, deep in the bedrock below the foundation. When the house was built, its foundation bit into the bedrock containing the entity. Over the years it had become a part of the house itself, indistinguishable from the timber and granite. The closest my mind could comprehend was that the house’s wooden frame had become the entity’s skeleton; the granite walls its outer shell.
It was ageless, crouched and waiting.
And it was hungry.
Like certain predators, the entity knew how to attract its preferred prey. People with volatile emotions, unbalanced minds, violent tendencies—the entity called to them when they passed close enough to the land and later the house built on the land that it had taken for its own. It called to them and eventually claimed them—as well as those who its seduced ones had brought with them—friends, lovers, family, children. It fed on the violent emotions of its chosen prey, and the terror of their victims.
Fed and was content.
The entity wasn’t content now.
It hadn’t called to us, and we sure as hell didn’t want to be here. Which meant that none of us were certifiable, which was good to know. But just because none of us were nuts now didn’t mean the entity didn’t have the ability to make us that way, and the thing had locked the door so it could give it its best shot. It wasn’t like we didn’t have anything for the entity to work with. We all had violent tendencies aplenty. This thing hadn’t survived and thrived for however long as it had by starving. When it hungered, it would feed, one way or another.
Exactly like the Saghred.
I hadn’t fed the Saghred—at least not of my own free will. And I wasn’t feeding this thing, either.
“Raine?” A voice called my name from far away.
I snapped out of my thoughts to Mychael’s hands on my shoulders, shaking me.
I looked up into a pair of concerned and wary blue eyes: concerned for me, wary of what might be in my mind with me.
“Think happy thoughts,” I told him.
His fingers tightened on my shoulders. “What?”
“This thing feeds on the other kind.” I gave them the quick and dirty version of what I thought the house was and what it wanted.
Tam glared down the long hallway that suddenly seemed to have gotten longer. “Then let’s get what we want and get out.”
I’d like nothing more. Though other than Tam’s process of elimination with Kesyn Badru’s possible hideouts, we had no guarantee that the old man was even here. And if he was, had the house turned him into its pet loony—a magical heavyweight loony who believed he had every reason to strike Tam dead and anyone else in his immediate vicinity?
The entity didn’t wait for the old man to put in an appearance.
It literally unleashed Hell.
Creatures out of a psycho’s nightmare charged us from all sides, including overhead and underfoot. The floor buckled and tilted, sending us sliding toward the gaping maul of what looked like a giant rat with a mouthful of serrated fangs. Tentacles tipped with hooks shot up through the floor. I didn’t have magic, but I had steel, and I put what I had to good use. Tam shouted two words of incantation, stopping Imala’s slide into the rat’s mouth as if she’d slammed into an invisible wall. The borderline panic in her eyes screamed how Imala felt about really big rats and somehow the entity had known it. Apparently the insight I had into it worked both ways. The entity knew what scared me, what scared each one of us. Since none of us were crazy, at least not to the point of making us a decent meal, the thing went with violence and terror. Either one would make us tastier to it, so the entity set about forcing us to strike at it, scare the crap out of us or, best of all, both.