“You should have heeded that voice, Konrad,” Stearns said gleefully. “For there is nothing that you can possess that I am not strong enough to take away.”
There’s no place like home… There’s no place like home…
The line from her favorite movie echoed over and over inside Ashley’s head as she and the others made their way slowly down the hallway.
Just seconds ago, they had passed a wicked old library, its high wooden bookcases stacked from floor to ceiling with books, and now they were in the corridor of one of those fancy office buildings. Ashley wondered what awaited them in the shadows up ahead and where they might be after they passed through them.
She pictured them all entering the cool shadow and emerging in the crowded and damp-smelling basement of her Beacon Hill home. The thought caused the corners of her mouth to tick upward as she imagined them all climbing the stairs up from the basement, she leading the way, eager to introduce her new friends to her parents.
My parents.
How long have I been missing? They must be worried sick.
Squire’s hand reached out, snagging her arm and violently yanking her back and from her thoughts.
“Pay the fuck attention!” the goblin screamed at her.
She was startled, and at first didn’t know what he was talking about, until she saw that she had been on the verge of treading across a circular patch of shadow. She stared into the blackness, witnessing a ripple of distortion across the liquidlike surface as something moved beneath it.
“Sorry,” she said. They were all stopped now, watching her. The building moaned like some kind of haunted house, and it sounded as if something big might be moving around behind them, where they’d just come from.
“I think there’s a stairwell up here,” the guy Francis said, taking all the attention from her.
He’d turned with the fat guy, and they were moving again.
“Here, take this,” Squire said beside her. She looked down to see that he was trying to force some sort of small sword into her hand. Ashley hesitated, slipping her hands into the back pockets of her jeans.
“No, that’s okay…I’m good.”
“Take it!” the goblin demanded, roughly pulling at her arm and shoving the cool grip of the weapon into her hand. It was heavier than she imagined it would be, and it served as yet another reminder of how absolutely insane this all was.
“I don’t want this,” she then said, letting the sword drop on the carpeted floor. “I can’t…”
“You can and you will,” Squire said angrily, picking up the sword and shoving it right back into her hand. “If you don’t, you’re gonna die.”
She was suddenly back in her senior college-placement biology class with Mr. Harpin. Adapt or die, she heard the old man with the extremely large Adam’s apple proclaim as they discussed evolution.
“Adapt or die,” she said aloud, clutching sword’s hilt.
“Yeah, something like that,” Squire agreed. “Now, let’s keep an eye on where we’re walking or…”
“Where are they?” Ashley asked.
Squire followed her gaze and saw that Angus and Francis were gone.
“Son of a bitch,” the goblin hissed. “Whatever the fuck is going on in this building must’ve caused shit to shift again. Who knows where those two are now? There goes our safety in numbers.”
She felt bad for slowing them down, causing them to lose their numbers.
“Yeah, but now I got this,” she said, waving the short sword around.
“Be careful you don’t poke your eye out,” the goblin grumbled. He grabbed her elbow more gently this time and urged her to start moving.
“Let’s go. Maybe we can catch up to them.”
They started down the hallway again, careful to avoid any puddles of shadow spreading across the red-carpeted floor. She was being extra careful now, hefting her sword, ready.
Ready for what?
Ashley didn’t know…didn’t want to know…She just wanted to get home and see her parents.
There’s no place like home… There’s no place like home… There’s no…
It was as if a curtain of solid black material had dropped down in front of them. Squire’s arm shot out to prevent her from going any farther, but she had already come to a complete stop.
“This is what I’m talking about,” the goblin muttered. “Everything’s shifting around.”
She could see that he was leaning forward slightly now, like he was sniffing the air in the darkness.
And then they heard the sounds.
“Hey, there you are,” said a voice from behind the curtain, and at first she thought that it sounded like Francis. But she realized that it was too happy-sounding for the balding man with the golden pistol, and before she could say something there was a flash, followed by a crack of thunder, and Squire went flying backward.
The white-skinned man with the tattooed face slithered out from behind the curtain of shadow, smoldering pistol in one hand, the stump of the other pressed to his chest, a length of leash leading to a collar around the creepy little boy, Teddy’s, scrawny neck, wrapped tightly around it.
“Thought we’d lost you,” the pale man said with an unnerving smile.
Squire lay on his side, clutching a bloody leg, weapons from his golf bag strewn about the hall.
“Get out of here Ashley. Run!” he roared.
There was a moment’s hesitation, as she didn’t want to leave her friend, but there was also something in the pale man’s eyes, something that told her that he was even more dangerous than the things that swam in the shadows. Ashley turned and started to run down the corridor. She had no idea where she was running or even what she might run into, but she knew that she had to do this if she was going to survive.
Running as fast as she could, avoiding the puddles of shadow on the floor around her, she heard the ominous words of the tattooed man following her.
“Go get her, Teddy… Bring your toy back to me.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“Never let them take anything away from you,” Konrad Deacon remembered his dementia-wracked grandfather saying to him. “And if they do…make them pay dearly for taking it.”
Even as he experienced the excruciating pain of Algernon Stearns attempting to steal away his divine power, Deacon could still remember the old man’s urgings and the disturbing smile that adorned his ancient face as he spoke them.
“Make them pay dearly for taking it.”
As soon as Stearns laid his hands upon him, he’d felt his strength, his angelic power, gradually being drained away.
How is he doing this? Deacon wondered, always questioning, always the seeker of knowledge. He could see that his rival was adorned in complex mechanics-something akin to the exoskeleton he himself had worn to siphon the collected life energies from his golem receptacles.
But there was something different about Stearns, something that went beyond the special suit.
Deacon struggled in the sorcerer’s grasp, reaching up to pull away the hand that was pressed against his face. And that was when he saw how much Stearns had been changed by that experiment so many years ago.
That was when he saw the mouths.
“They’re hungry, Konrad,” Stearns said, “And now that they’ve gotten a taste of you, they’re absolutely ravenous.”
For a brief instant, Deacon had to wonder how drastically the others of the cabal had been altered by his experiment, but his thoughts were replaced by agony as Stearns laid his hungry hands on him and resumed his feeding.
From the corner of his eye, Deacon saw his wife. Of course she would be here to see this.
It’s exactly as I told you, she chided, never lifting a finger to help. Stearns is going to take it all away.
“No,” he screamed aloud, but that just made Stearns laugh, and he felt himself growing weaker all the faster.
A supernatural halo of fire had started to burn around his enemy’s head, and that infuriated him to the brink of madness.