Sorren nodded. “That’s why there are no rats,” he said. He looked as if he were listening intently. “No rats, no mice, nothing but spiders and roaches. We must be very cautious. Expect the worst.”
Spiders and roaches are drawn to dark magic, while nearly every other living thing runs the other direction. Figures.
We moved carefully around the old building. From the layer of dust, it didn’t appear that anyone had been here for a while, though there were signs that vagrants had tried to stake a claim. Over in one corner, I saw some ratty mattresses, pieces of dirty clothing, and empty liquor bottles. They looked like they had been here for a long time. I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to spend the night here, no matter how high or drunk. The huge building was mostly empty, except for a few stacks of old wooden crates that looked as if they had been looted long ago. I shone my light around the cavernous space. The floor was littered with papers and garbage.
“What did the last owners sell?” I asked as my beam hit a couple of opened wooden crates.
Teag shrugged. “They took consignment shipments for other companies – and my bet is that not all of them were legal.”
He went over to one of the large wooden crates. Some long-ago looter had already pried open the top and riffled through the packing material. “Industrial fasteners,” Teag said, gingerly poking at the contents with a piece of wood he had found on the floor.
“Not a likely place for Jimmy Redshoes to get his merchandise,” I said. We pried open another couple of boxes and poked through several more that someone else had already mostly looted. We found a mishmash of merchandise ranging from trucking parts to bolts to laboratory beakers.
While Teag and I searched the boxes and the northern side of the building, Sorren searched the rest. I walked over toward the mattresses, wondering if there might be anything that could link Corban Moran or the murdered men to the warehouse.
I kicked at an old newspaper on the floor. The date was over six months ago. That meant whoever had holed up in here did it before the murders began. I looked at the discarded clothing. Maybe there was a reason they didn’t come back.
I shone my flashlight along the wall, and recoiled. “Y’all better come look at this,”
Sorren was beside me in a blur, sword in hand. Teag ran over a few seconds later. I pointed my light at the wall.
Hanging upside down against the stained bricks was the blackened, mummified body of a man. A dark, shriveled form had been nailed into the wall beside the body, and I realized with a lurch of my stomach that it was his skin.
A wooden basin lay under the dead man’s skinless, rotted head. I guessed that the dried, black residue had once been blood.
A twisted, shrunken rope made out of something I couldn’t identify made a circle on the floor in front of the murdered man. Teag glanced at the rope and blanched. “Is that what I think it is?”
Sorren nodded. “Entrails.” I swallowed hard to keep from retching.
Placed at intervals around the circle were the remnants of four thick pillar candles. The wax had a dark red cast to it, as if blood had been mingled with the paraffin. Between the candles were shriveled bird talons. Crow feathers were tied in bundles, attached to crude stone carvings with twine that looked suspiciously like sinew. The shriveled bodies of rats and birds lay with the feathers, an offering to the power woken here.
Marked in dried blood on the dirty concrete floor were symbols that seemed to shift whenever I looked at them. My mind shied away from them, and the resonance, even at a distance, felt cruel and remorseless.
“We found one the police didn’t,” I said quietly.
Sorren nodded. “And now we know where Moran called his demon.” He gestured to the occult items.
“Killing the man raised power, and stored it in the blood. The runes used that power to strengthen the evocation. The circle protected the wizard, and the skin opened a portal to the Otherworlds,”
“If he called the demon here, why isn’t it still here?” I asked, although I was happy it had worked out that way.
“Moran called it and bound it, which puts the demon under his control – for now,” Sorren said. “The real question is, how did a damaged wizard like Moran muster the power to evoke a demon, let alone control it?”
“Find out why the salvage team disappeared, and you’ll have your answer,” Teag said. “I have a couple of leads I’m chasing, so I should have some answers later tonight.”
I started to get a headache, as if a storm were coming. When I looked up, it seemed as if the far end of the warehouse was darker than it had been, and I could smell a faint whiff of smoke.
“Teag,” I said, growing more worried by the second. “When you were looking up deaths associated with the property, did you find any people who died in the warehouse?”
Teag was still poking through one of the wooden crates. “Yeah. There’ve been quite a few. Part of the warehouse caught fire in 1861 and a couple of workers burned to death. Two firefighters died putting out the blaze. Later on, one of the former owners hanged himself here. Then a night foreman was shot in a robbery.”
He paused, thinking. “There were some workers who got backed over by trucks on the loading dock, and stories of forklifts running amok and killing workers. A year or so ago, some addicts broke in and overdosed. Why?”
“Because I don’t think the people who died here ever left,” I replied. I pointed toward the far end of the warehouse. The shadows were now completely opaque, and they were moving toward us.
Though the night outside was quite warm, the warehouse was rapidly growing colder. The shadows were coming closer and moving fast.
“I think we’d better get out of here,” Sorren said. He stepped in front of Teag and me, but I wasn’t sure what one vampire could do against what might be a legion of ghosts.
I’m a psychometric, not a medium, but since I was in contact with the floor of the warehouse, I was getting a pretty clear connection to the spirits that were manifesting. Faces appeared in the darkness, only to fade and be replaced by other forms. I heard the sound of footsteps approaching. Some sounded like the thump of heavy work shoes, while others were the slap of sneakers or the scuff of boots, enough to tell me that there were dozens of spirits heading our way.
Some of the spirits were curious. Others resented that Teag and I were among the living. I felt their anger like a cold wave. They had been brooding for a long time.
“I think your count is off,” I murmured. “There are a lot more ghosts here than the ones you mentioned, and they’re pissed.” Teag lit his lantern, sheltering the flame of the lighter with his body.
“Run!” Sorren shouted. He reached into the messenger bag he carried and pulled out something that looked like a glass globe with a dim blue glow inside. He lobbed it over his shoulder toward where the demon summoning had been done. The orb shattered on the hard concrete and exploded in a blast of cold, white fire that flared high, burning without heat, consuming the corpse and the skin-portal along with the summoning circle.
Ear-piercing screams filled the cavernous space as the cold fire consumed the portal, and a hurricane force wind swept through the warehouse, raising a cloud of dust and dirt that stung our eyes and burned our skin, making it difficult to breathe.
The wind and dirt made it impossible to see where we were going. I lost track of where the door was, and the thought of that shadow horde waiting for us to blunder into range scared the crap out of me. In the wind, Alard’s walking stick was more dangerous than helpful, and I had no desire to incinerate myself or my friends.
Behind us, the wind did its best to snuff out the cold fire, but the blue flames licked at the walls and scoured the floor, rising toward the high ceiling above us. It burned without heat, consuming the awful remnants of the sacrifice.