Chills, page 21
“Now what, love?” he asked in a voice barely above a whisper.
Before she could answer, a sudden spotlight appeared to the left of Kathy. In it, her brother was sitting on a folding chair like they had at the hospital.
She felt her stomach bottom out and was only vaguely aware of squeezing Teagan’s hand even harder. It couldn’t possibly be her brother sitting in that chair—part of her knew that, not just in her mind but in her bones. But a thousand thoughts cascaded over each other at once. Toby did have ties to the Hand of the Black Stars cult, after all. That he might have lied about the extent of his knowledge and/or involvement in this whole mess would not have surprised her. But Toby was under surveillance, and the monitoring system at that hospital—she had looked into it herself—was maximum security. So how had he gotten there? Had the Blue People or even the cleaners whisked him away with their dark magic? Or was this a trick, a thing masquerading as Toby to somehow get her to leave the circle? It sure looked like her brother, down to birthmarks and tiny scars. He wore the same bland hospital-issued clothes she had last seen him in. He looked pale. The bags under his eyes were dark and his eyes themselves flashed in the dim light, but otherwise . . .
“Hello, little sister,” he said with a sly grin, and for a moment, the world wavered. She willed it to steady itself again.
“You are not my brother,” she said.
He looked amused as he leaned forward toward her. “Aren’t I? A monster’s a monster, right?” Before she could answer, he added, “Oh, I know you like to think you see them as people, all those creatures who can kill their own, can rape women and molest children, can beat old people to a pulp, all to feed the darkness inside them. You like to think you believe that darkness doesn’t make them less human, but that’s only because you need to see me as human . . . and yourself, as well. Isn’t that right?”
Teagan didn’t try to get in the way of the conversation, but Kathy felt him squeeze her hand.
“Does your ex-pat here know about me? About any of your family? Your dead mother, your dead drunk father, your serial killer brother . . . I mean, wow, Kathy. If only he could have come to Thanksgiving or Christmas sometime. You know, back when all those little squares in your bedroom picture frame actually had pictures in them of people who at least pretended to still care whether you lived or died.”
Kathy clamped down on her embarrassment until it turned to rage, and then she clamped down on it even harder. To let it go would have been exactly what the Toby-thing wanted. For her to lose control and lunge at him, leave the circle . . . or make Teagan so horrified by or disgusted with her that he would leave it to get away from her.... That was exactly what it wanted.
Neither was happening.
“What, Kathy? What are you thinking right now? Are you thinking about the night I gave you that scar?”
Kathy breathed slowly, counting her breaths, just like her college therapist had taught her years ago. Teagan squeezed her hand again in the dark.
“Oh, Kaaathyyy, I know you can hear me. It’s very hard to have a rapport when the conversation is so one-sided.”
“I was thinking about how good it is going to feel to send you back to the hell you came from.”
The Toby-thing gave her a sly grin. “Oh, you think you can do that? You and the IRA sympathizer, with your broken minds and your broken hearts and your silly optimism? You both have faith in nothing. You think either of you is strong enough to close the Sixth of Nine?”
Kathy locked her gaze with those eyes that looked so much like Toby’s, those dead eyes, but dropped Teagan’s hand and slid down to pick up the kitchen lighter from the floor inside the circle. Then she rose and clicked it on so Teagan could see the papers with the invocation.
“Keep going,” she told him, and Teagan began to read again.
The Toby-thing frowned, then wavered like a picture on a scrambled TV channel. The face that looked like her brother’s, the voice that sounded so much like his, distorted as it cried out in frustration, and the ice-crusted shadow beneath it retreated into the dark.
For a while, the only light in the room came from the lighter’s tiny flame. Kathy shivered with the cold, but held the lighter as still as she could. She could feel the things all around them, seething, looking for a way in.
Then another patch of light appeared, this time near Teagan, and at first, he only glanced at it, but then recognition crossed his face and he stopped reading.
“Reece?” Kathy’s voice was small.
Something broken flitted behind Teagan’s eyes, something old and never quite forgotten. “It’s me grandmother,” he told her, and his voice sounded even smaller.
An ancient woman sat rocking in an old-fashioned rocking chair. She wore a wool shawl over a pale and shapeless dress, with heavy black shoes. Her face was deeply lined, so much so that it reminded Kathy of the striations of rock. Her skin was pale and paper-thin, veined with thin lines of blue-black. She regarded Teagan with one rheumy blue eye; the other was fogged over with a thick cataract.
“You’re wrong to be in it, lad,” the woman said in a thick, watery voice. “To be caught up in all this. ‘Tis the divil’s work, it is.”
Teagan seemed to be remembering a night prior to this; his eyes, his stance, were someplace else. “I’m not,” he told her. “I’m where I’m meant to be, máthair mhór.”
“You say so,” the old woman replied, pointing a long, crooked finger at him. “But what good’ve ye done, eh? Have you changed any minds? Saved any lives? It’s a war you can’t win, against an enemy that has been stronger, more powerful, and more numerous than ye for centuries.”
“That don’t mean it’s not a war worth fighting,” he told her.
“Not so worth fighting that you can’t walk away, as you did before, under similar circumstances. You remember, she nearly got you killed, that lass, because you wanted to get in her knickers. Blowed her own damn self up, she and her terrorist brother, and how many others? How many children? And you would have been a part of it, a murderer, but for your own lack of loyalty to anyone or anything. Even your own mum knew you were nothing, just bullheaded anger and faithlessness.”
“I was a child. And I didn’t walk away. I grew up. Became a police officer. I found a side to fight on in a war I could join with a clean conscience, if not a heavy heart.”
Kathy could see that despite the evenness of his tone, the woman was getting to him, agitating him, cutting him open with the sharpness of his own memories, just as she (it) had done to her. The difference was, Kathy had been cut deeply before, and thought she knew something about the way to block out the pain.
She took his hand and squeezed it. “She’s not your grandmother,” she said.
Teagan looked at her, his eyes coming back to that night and that place, but when he and Kathy both glanced back, a little girl stood where the old woman had been. She had one blue eye as well, a doll’s eye; the other was lost to the mess of charred black which had eaten that half of her face. She stood perfectly still on a single leg; the other was missing.
“I hope you haven’t forgotten me, Reece Teagan,” the little voice rasped. “I haven’t forgotten you.”
“Bloody hell,” Teagan whispered.
“Remind you of little Gracie Anderson, do I? Oh, I know her. Dead girls whisper to each other on these winter breezes.”
“You’re not my fault,” he said in a voice thick with emotion. “I tried to get there in time, but—”
“You could have stopped it and you didn’t,” the girl-thing told him.
“I tried!” he shouted.
“Read,” Kathy prodded. “Forget that thing over there. It’s not a little girl. It’s nothing but ice dust and shadows.”
“I. Am NOT. NOTHING!” the little girl screamed, seeming to grow, to bloom in Teagan’s direction. He flinched, dropping the papers. Immediately, a gust of wind blew the papers up into a little dervish. Teagan and Kathy tried to grab them, but the wind whisked them out of the circle, out of reach.
“Damn it!” Teagan shouted, turning to Kathy. “I’m so sorry—”
She shook her head. “Don’t worry about it. We can still finish this.”
The girl and the light surrounding her winked out. When the sourceless spotlight blazed on again, it was across the room, where the papers were, and Jack Glazier stood in the center of it.
“No bloody way,” Teagan said.
Behind Jack was one of the cleaners. Jack tried to speak to them, but as soon as he parted his lips, his mouth filled with ice. The pain in his eyes made Kathy wince.
One of the tendrils of the cleaner behind him whispered over his clothes to his throat. It wrapped itself around his neck and began squeezing. Jack—or the thing that was pretending to be Jack—began flailing, his hands slapping uselessly at the tendril. It took all of Kathy’s will not to step out of the circle, to help him. Sensing Teagan was feeling the same, she placed a hand on his arm to keep him there. She fought back tears. It was hurting her heart to watch.
Blood began to pour from the place where the tendril touched Jack (not Jack, not Jack, she kept telling herself), and his eyes grew wide. His skin grew pale and began to turn blue, and slivers of ice fell from his mouth.
Teagan fired at the Jack-thing before Kathy even knew he’d taken out his gun. Both it and the cleaner behind it splattered like an ink spot, froze, then pulled back together.
Now they were angry; Kathy could feel it pulsing off the cleaners. The Blue People, in the unlit corners of the room, were angry, too. She and Teagan had proved more formidable opposition than they had expected.
The light came on again, and Kathy could see the papers fluttering in the wind. They were held down by a man’s bare foot. Kathy followed that foot to the hem of a silvery robe, and up the folds of the robe to a face—a human face. She didn’t recognize the face, but she recognized the tattooed symbol on the muscular forearm. This man was one of the cultists.
He looked disoriented for a minute, and then, taking in the cleaners and the Blue People, he bowed his head in awed reverence, and turned to Kathy and Teagan.
Kathy realized what the Blue People had done. Neither they nor the cleaners could access Kathy or Teagan as long as they were in the circle. The monsters had tried to lure them out, to make them angry or scared, to play on their senses of loyalty, guilt, and sympathy, and none of that had worked. If they couldn’t draw Kathy or Teagan out, then they would have to send someone in.
The cultist strode purposefully over to them and reached into the circle. Teagan pointed his gun at the man’s head. The man regarded the gun with a patient look before suddenly yanking Kathy over the border. She cried out as her toes skidded over the circle, smearing the chalk and oil. Her heart sank. Nothing would protect them now.
“Stop right fucking there,” Teagan said. “I swear to God, I will shoot you dead where you stand. Get your hands off her.”
The man let Kathy go, holding up his hands palms up in a gesture of acquiescence. But he was smiling. The damage had already been done.
Teagan hadn’t fully understood what the man had done until he looked down at Kathy’s feet. Then the light dawned in his eyes. With a kind of resignation, he took a step voluntarily out of the circle.
“No, don’t!” She cried out, but it was too late.
“I’m not leaving you out here alone,” he told her.
Then the cultist punched him. Teagan shook it off, touching the corner of his mouth. His fingers came away with blood on them. He chuckled sardonically and said to the man, “Bring it, arsehole.”
The man swung again, and this time Teagan dodged out of the way. His return swing hit the cultist squarely on the jaw and sent him stumbling backward. The cleaners caught him in their tendrils. He looked triumphant for a moment, and then scared, and then in pain as the tendrils yanked off first one arm, then the other, then his head and legs. The tendrils didn’t stop there, though. They tossed the body parts in the air, and the ice sheaths covering them grew stiff and sharp. The tendrils lashed wildly, slicing the icy body parts to shreds before they hit the floor with a messy, pulpy plop. Kathy felt her gorge rise and fought to keep down the bile.
Having served his purpose to them, the creatures no longer needed the cultist.
One of the tendrils snaked its way over to Teagan. She cried out to warn him, but it was around his ankle, yanking him off his feet. He fell with a thud, and the tendril lashed him across the face, drawing blood on his cheek.
Kathy lit the kitchen lighter and rushed the thing, thrusting the fire under the nearest tendril. It jerked back in pain, forming first a face twisted in anger and then a hand that it clamped down on her bad wrist. A liquid cold formed a band of pain over her injury so intense that she dropped the lighter. The tendril let go and immediately smacked her in the face, knocking her off her feet.
The cleaner surged forward over her, forming a montage of angry faces in bas-relief. She reached blindly for the lighter; she thought it was somewhere nearby. Another tendril dropped like a sewing needle, spearing her in the side, filling her with that crippling, acid-etching cold, and Kathy groaned, feeling more frantically for the lighter. Her fingers closed around it and she gratefully pulled it toward her as another tendril injected its frozen agony into her shoulder. She could feel the cold slowly spreading outward from each of the wounds, and felt sure that it would begin killing tissue and then organs if she couldn’t banish these creatures quickly.
Nearby, Teagan was struggling with tentacles looking to spear him in the chest. He was holding his own, but his grip on the whips of darkness was awkward and weakening.
She had to stop this. With effort, she crab-crawled backward toward the circle, and the amorphous shadow above her kept pace, readying for another attack. Kathy felt around the circle again, and gave a little victory cry when she found what she was looking for.
With the lighter, she set fire to the little door.
From the corners of the room where the Blue People had been directing the cleaners, their mouths opened as one and the light in those cavernous throats became so bright it hurt her head and chest as well as her eyes. A thunderous roar issued forth like a storm wind through a cave, and as the light got brighter, the sound rose in pitch until it was a wail, then a scream, then a shriek as bright and painful as the light.
The cleaners flickered and roared, their tendrils waving wildly, snapping at the air above and around them with tiny blue electric sparks.
She heard Teagan’s voice. He had left behind the cleaner that had been attacking him, its own tendrils speared through a solid part of its otherwise amorphous mass. Teagan had made it over to the papers while she had been fighting off her own cleaner, and he had begun reading the incantation again, his voice steady and clear, all his sanity and sense of self control hanging from that single thread of focus.
They were close. The hold the winter had over Colby was finally weakening.
The Blue People advanced on her as one, and she lit another part of the door to make it burn faster. From the reaction of the creatures, it was as if she had set fire to them . . . which, she decided, wasn’t a bad idea.
She touched the lighter to the hem of the robe closest to her and was delighted to see it blaze up. The creatures screamed as if she had set fire to the lot of them, and the light from their throats was blinding. She shielded her eyes but it did little good, so she started swiping blindly in wide arcs with the lighter. The light surrounded her, swallowed her whole. For several long seconds, the light and their screams were all that existed. They filled her body and soul, inside and out.
There was a flash of light so bright she could practically see it through her eyelids.
Then it was gone. The screams, the light, the cold—all of it was gone.
She opened her eyes. The cold in her wounds was receding slowly, and although she was bleeding, she saw the wounds weren’t too deep. She looked up. Teagan was in the same place on the floor, breathing heavily and clutching the papers, looking visibly relieved. He smiled broadly at her when he caught her eye. She smiled back, then slowly surveyed the room. The ice and snow were mostly gone, and the temperature, though still cold, was rising. The creature they had killed was gone, the cleaners were gone . . . and the Blue People were gone, too. The little door she had burned had been reduced to a tiny splinter and a pile of ash.
“Did we get them, love? Is it over?”
“I think it is,” she told him, still amazed. “I think we did it.”
She stood on shaky legs, helped Teagan up, then made her way over to the window. It was still the blue of early morning, but she could see well enough to notice that, outside, the snow was already melting. She could see the icicles dripping from the eaves of the roofs across the street, and the snow drifts looked, at least to her, significantly smaller than they had the night before. Teagan’s car tires were visible now, as were the tops of some of the mailboxes.
The snow was melting. Winter was finally leaving Colby.
* * *
While Kathy and Teagan were fighting cleaners outside the circle of protection, Jack was watching the pit at the center of the cultist’s ice altar and hoping to his own God that wherever Kathy and Teagan were, they could stop anything from coming up through it.
It was no longer completely dark down there; there was a faint greenish light now, and although it didn’t even begin to illuminate the bottom, Jack could see gray tentacles climbing upward. They were hideous things that made Jack’s stomach turn—hell, they made his soul turn. He could see black orbs full of intelligence and malicious intent swimming in the substance of what passed for flesh. Mouths with rows of shark-like teeth moved freely, too, gaping to reveal impossibly deep throats, deep as the pit from which they were rising.
Within minutes, they were close enough for the tips of the tentacles to snap at the stones within feet of him, and he could finally see with some clarity what those tentacles were attached to.
“Oh my God,” he breathed.
The Old Gods were coming.
He didn’t have to look up to know that Morris had seen them, too; he was firm in directing Katie to shield the children’s eyes, and his efforts at breaking the lock were renewed with vigor.
Before she could answer, a sudden spotlight appeared to the left of Kathy. In it, her brother was sitting on a folding chair like they had at the hospital.
She felt her stomach bottom out and was only vaguely aware of squeezing Teagan’s hand even harder. It couldn’t possibly be her brother sitting in that chair—part of her knew that, not just in her mind but in her bones. But a thousand thoughts cascaded over each other at once. Toby did have ties to the Hand of the Black Stars cult, after all. That he might have lied about the extent of his knowledge and/or involvement in this whole mess would not have surprised her. But Toby was under surveillance, and the monitoring system at that hospital—she had looked into it herself—was maximum security. So how had he gotten there? Had the Blue People or even the cleaners whisked him away with their dark magic? Or was this a trick, a thing masquerading as Toby to somehow get her to leave the circle? It sure looked like her brother, down to birthmarks and tiny scars. He wore the same bland hospital-issued clothes she had last seen him in. He looked pale. The bags under his eyes were dark and his eyes themselves flashed in the dim light, but otherwise . . .
“Hello, little sister,” he said with a sly grin, and for a moment, the world wavered. She willed it to steady itself again.
“You are not my brother,” she said.
He looked amused as he leaned forward toward her. “Aren’t I? A monster’s a monster, right?” Before she could answer, he added, “Oh, I know you like to think you see them as people, all those creatures who can kill their own, can rape women and molest children, can beat old people to a pulp, all to feed the darkness inside them. You like to think you believe that darkness doesn’t make them less human, but that’s only because you need to see me as human . . . and yourself, as well. Isn’t that right?”
Teagan didn’t try to get in the way of the conversation, but Kathy felt him squeeze her hand.
“Does your ex-pat here know about me? About any of your family? Your dead mother, your dead drunk father, your serial killer brother . . . I mean, wow, Kathy. If only he could have come to Thanksgiving or Christmas sometime. You know, back when all those little squares in your bedroom picture frame actually had pictures in them of people who at least pretended to still care whether you lived or died.”
Kathy clamped down on her embarrassment until it turned to rage, and then she clamped down on it even harder. To let it go would have been exactly what the Toby-thing wanted. For her to lose control and lunge at him, leave the circle . . . or make Teagan so horrified by or disgusted with her that he would leave it to get away from her.... That was exactly what it wanted.
Neither was happening.
“What, Kathy? What are you thinking right now? Are you thinking about the night I gave you that scar?”
Kathy breathed slowly, counting her breaths, just like her college therapist had taught her years ago. Teagan squeezed her hand again in the dark.
“Oh, Kaaathyyy, I know you can hear me. It’s very hard to have a rapport when the conversation is so one-sided.”
“I was thinking about how good it is going to feel to send you back to the hell you came from.”
The Toby-thing gave her a sly grin. “Oh, you think you can do that? You and the IRA sympathizer, with your broken minds and your broken hearts and your silly optimism? You both have faith in nothing. You think either of you is strong enough to close the Sixth of Nine?”
Kathy locked her gaze with those eyes that looked so much like Toby’s, those dead eyes, but dropped Teagan’s hand and slid down to pick up the kitchen lighter from the floor inside the circle. Then she rose and clicked it on so Teagan could see the papers with the invocation.
“Keep going,” she told him, and Teagan began to read again.
The Toby-thing frowned, then wavered like a picture on a scrambled TV channel. The face that looked like her brother’s, the voice that sounded so much like his, distorted as it cried out in frustration, and the ice-crusted shadow beneath it retreated into the dark.
For a while, the only light in the room came from the lighter’s tiny flame. Kathy shivered with the cold, but held the lighter as still as she could. She could feel the things all around them, seething, looking for a way in.
Then another patch of light appeared, this time near Teagan, and at first, he only glanced at it, but then recognition crossed his face and he stopped reading.
“Reece?” Kathy’s voice was small.
Something broken flitted behind Teagan’s eyes, something old and never quite forgotten. “It’s me grandmother,” he told her, and his voice sounded even smaller.
An ancient woman sat rocking in an old-fashioned rocking chair. She wore a wool shawl over a pale and shapeless dress, with heavy black shoes. Her face was deeply lined, so much so that it reminded Kathy of the striations of rock. Her skin was pale and paper-thin, veined with thin lines of blue-black. She regarded Teagan with one rheumy blue eye; the other was fogged over with a thick cataract.
“You’re wrong to be in it, lad,” the woman said in a thick, watery voice. “To be caught up in all this. ‘Tis the divil’s work, it is.”
Teagan seemed to be remembering a night prior to this; his eyes, his stance, were someplace else. “I’m not,” he told her. “I’m where I’m meant to be, máthair mhór.”
“You say so,” the old woman replied, pointing a long, crooked finger at him. “But what good’ve ye done, eh? Have you changed any minds? Saved any lives? It’s a war you can’t win, against an enemy that has been stronger, more powerful, and more numerous than ye for centuries.”
“That don’t mean it’s not a war worth fighting,” he told her.
“Not so worth fighting that you can’t walk away, as you did before, under similar circumstances. You remember, she nearly got you killed, that lass, because you wanted to get in her knickers. Blowed her own damn self up, she and her terrorist brother, and how many others? How many children? And you would have been a part of it, a murderer, but for your own lack of loyalty to anyone or anything. Even your own mum knew you were nothing, just bullheaded anger and faithlessness.”
“I was a child. And I didn’t walk away. I grew up. Became a police officer. I found a side to fight on in a war I could join with a clean conscience, if not a heavy heart.”
Kathy could see that despite the evenness of his tone, the woman was getting to him, agitating him, cutting him open with the sharpness of his own memories, just as she (it) had done to her. The difference was, Kathy had been cut deeply before, and thought she knew something about the way to block out the pain.
She took his hand and squeezed it. “She’s not your grandmother,” she said.
Teagan looked at her, his eyes coming back to that night and that place, but when he and Kathy both glanced back, a little girl stood where the old woman had been. She had one blue eye as well, a doll’s eye; the other was lost to the mess of charred black which had eaten that half of her face. She stood perfectly still on a single leg; the other was missing.
“I hope you haven’t forgotten me, Reece Teagan,” the little voice rasped. “I haven’t forgotten you.”
“Bloody hell,” Teagan whispered.
“Remind you of little Gracie Anderson, do I? Oh, I know her. Dead girls whisper to each other on these winter breezes.”
“You’re not my fault,” he said in a voice thick with emotion. “I tried to get there in time, but—”
“You could have stopped it and you didn’t,” the girl-thing told him.
“I tried!” he shouted.
“Read,” Kathy prodded. “Forget that thing over there. It’s not a little girl. It’s nothing but ice dust and shadows.”
“I. Am NOT. NOTHING!” the little girl screamed, seeming to grow, to bloom in Teagan’s direction. He flinched, dropping the papers. Immediately, a gust of wind blew the papers up into a little dervish. Teagan and Kathy tried to grab them, but the wind whisked them out of the circle, out of reach.
“Damn it!” Teagan shouted, turning to Kathy. “I’m so sorry—”
She shook her head. “Don’t worry about it. We can still finish this.”
The girl and the light surrounding her winked out. When the sourceless spotlight blazed on again, it was across the room, where the papers were, and Jack Glazier stood in the center of it.
“No bloody way,” Teagan said.
Behind Jack was one of the cleaners. Jack tried to speak to them, but as soon as he parted his lips, his mouth filled with ice. The pain in his eyes made Kathy wince.
One of the tendrils of the cleaner behind him whispered over his clothes to his throat. It wrapped itself around his neck and began squeezing. Jack—or the thing that was pretending to be Jack—began flailing, his hands slapping uselessly at the tendril. It took all of Kathy’s will not to step out of the circle, to help him. Sensing Teagan was feeling the same, she placed a hand on his arm to keep him there. She fought back tears. It was hurting her heart to watch.
Blood began to pour from the place where the tendril touched Jack (not Jack, not Jack, she kept telling herself), and his eyes grew wide. His skin grew pale and began to turn blue, and slivers of ice fell from his mouth.
Teagan fired at the Jack-thing before Kathy even knew he’d taken out his gun. Both it and the cleaner behind it splattered like an ink spot, froze, then pulled back together.
Now they were angry; Kathy could feel it pulsing off the cleaners. The Blue People, in the unlit corners of the room, were angry, too. She and Teagan had proved more formidable opposition than they had expected.
The light came on again, and Kathy could see the papers fluttering in the wind. They were held down by a man’s bare foot. Kathy followed that foot to the hem of a silvery robe, and up the folds of the robe to a face—a human face. She didn’t recognize the face, but she recognized the tattooed symbol on the muscular forearm. This man was one of the cultists.
He looked disoriented for a minute, and then, taking in the cleaners and the Blue People, he bowed his head in awed reverence, and turned to Kathy and Teagan.
Kathy realized what the Blue People had done. Neither they nor the cleaners could access Kathy or Teagan as long as they were in the circle. The monsters had tried to lure them out, to make them angry or scared, to play on their senses of loyalty, guilt, and sympathy, and none of that had worked. If they couldn’t draw Kathy or Teagan out, then they would have to send someone in.
The cultist strode purposefully over to them and reached into the circle. Teagan pointed his gun at the man’s head. The man regarded the gun with a patient look before suddenly yanking Kathy over the border. She cried out as her toes skidded over the circle, smearing the chalk and oil. Her heart sank. Nothing would protect them now.
“Stop right fucking there,” Teagan said. “I swear to God, I will shoot you dead where you stand. Get your hands off her.”
The man let Kathy go, holding up his hands palms up in a gesture of acquiescence. But he was smiling. The damage had already been done.
Teagan hadn’t fully understood what the man had done until he looked down at Kathy’s feet. Then the light dawned in his eyes. With a kind of resignation, he took a step voluntarily out of the circle.
“No, don’t!” She cried out, but it was too late.
“I’m not leaving you out here alone,” he told her.
Then the cultist punched him. Teagan shook it off, touching the corner of his mouth. His fingers came away with blood on them. He chuckled sardonically and said to the man, “Bring it, arsehole.”
The man swung again, and this time Teagan dodged out of the way. His return swing hit the cultist squarely on the jaw and sent him stumbling backward. The cleaners caught him in their tendrils. He looked triumphant for a moment, and then scared, and then in pain as the tendrils yanked off first one arm, then the other, then his head and legs. The tendrils didn’t stop there, though. They tossed the body parts in the air, and the ice sheaths covering them grew stiff and sharp. The tendrils lashed wildly, slicing the icy body parts to shreds before they hit the floor with a messy, pulpy plop. Kathy felt her gorge rise and fought to keep down the bile.
Having served his purpose to them, the creatures no longer needed the cultist.
One of the tendrils snaked its way over to Teagan. She cried out to warn him, but it was around his ankle, yanking him off his feet. He fell with a thud, and the tendril lashed him across the face, drawing blood on his cheek.
Kathy lit the kitchen lighter and rushed the thing, thrusting the fire under the nearest tendril. It jerked back in pain, forming first a face twisted in anger and then a hand that it clamped down on her bad wrist. A liquid cold formed a band of pain over her injury so intense that she dropped the lighter. The tendril let go and immediately smacked her in the face, knocking her off her feet.
The cleaner surged forward over her, forming a montage of angry faces in bas-relief. She reached blindly for the lighter; she thought it was somewhere nearby. Another tendril dropped like a sewing needle, spearing her in the side, filling her with that crippling, acid-etching cold, and Kathy groaned, feeling more frantically for the lighter. Her fingers closed around it and she gratefully pulled it toward her as another tendril injected its frozen agony into her shoulder. She could feel the cold slowly spreading outward from each of the wounds, and felt sure that it would begin killing tissue and then organs if she couldn’t banish these creatures quickly.
Nearby, Teagan was struggling with tentacles looking to spear him in the chest. He was holding his own, but his grip on the whips of darkness was awkward and weakening.
She had to stop this. With effort, she crab-crawled backward toward the circle, and the amorphous shadow above her kept pace, readying for another attack. Kathy felt around the circle again, and gave a little victory cry when she found what she was looking for.
With the lighter, she set fire to the little door.
From the corners of the room where the Blue People had been directing the cleaners, their mouths opened as one and the light in those cavernous throats became so bright it hurt her head and chest as well as her eyes. A thunderous roar issued forth like a storm wind through a cave, and as the light got brighter, the sound rose in pitch until it was a wail, then a scream, then a shriek as bright and painful as the light.
The cleaners flickered and roared, their tendrils waving wildly, snapping at the air above and around them with tiny blue electric sparks.
She heard Teagan’s voice. He had left behind the cleaner that had been attacking him, its own tendrils speared through a solid part of its otherwise amorphous mass. Teagan had made it over to the papers while she had been fighting off her own cleaner, and he had begun reading the incantation again, his voice steady and clear, all his sanity and sense of self control hanging from that single thread of focus.
They were close. The hold the winter had over Colby was finally weakening.
The Blue People advanced on her as one, and she lit another part of the door to make it burn faster. From the reaction of the creatures, it was as if she had set fire to them . . . which, she decided, wasn’t a bad idea.
She touched the lighter to the hem of the robe closest to her and was delighted to see it blaze up. The creatures screamed as if she had set fire to the lot of them, and the light from their throats was blinding. She shielded her eyes but it did little good, so she started swiping blindly in wide arcs with the lighter. The light surrounded her, swallowed her whole. For several long seconds, the light and their screams were all that existed. They filled her body and soul, inside and out.
There was a flash of light so bright she could practically see it through her eyelids.
Then it was gone. The screams, the light, the cold—all of it was gone.
She opened her eyes. The cold in her wounds was receding slowly, and although she was bleeding, she saw the wounds weren’t too deep. She looked up. Teagan was in the same place on the floor, breathing heavily and clutching the papers, looking visibly relieved. He smiled broadly at her when he caught her eye. She smiled back, then slowly surveyed the room. The ice and snow were mostly gone, and the temperature, though still cold, was rising. The creature they had killed was gone, the cleaners were gone . . . and the Blue People were gone, too. The little door she had burned had been reduced to a tiny splinter and a pile of ash.
“Did we get them, love? Is it over?”
“I think it is,” she told him, still amazed. “I think we did it.”
She stood on shaky legs, helped Teagan up, then made her way over to the window. It was still the blue of early morning, but she could see well enough to notice that, outside, the snow was already melting. She could see the icicles dripping from the eaves of the roofs across the street, and the snow drifts looked, at least to her, significantly smaller than they had the night before. Teagan’s car tires were visible now, as were the tops of some of the mailboxes.
The snow was melting. Winter was finally leaving Colby.
* * *
While Kathy and Teagan were fighting cleaners outside the circle of protection, Jack was watching the pit at the center of the cultist’s ice altar and hoping to his own God that wherever Kathy and Teagan were, they could stop anything from coming up through it.
It was no longer completely dark down there; there was a faint greenish light now, and although it didn’t even begin to illuminate the bottom, Jack could see gray tentacles climbing upward. They were hideous things that made Jack’s stomach turn—hell, they made his soul turn. He could see black orbs full of intelligence and malicious intent swimming in the substance of what passed for flesh. Mouths with rows of shark-like teeth moved freely, too, gaping to reveal impossibly deep throats, deep as the pit from which they were rising.
Within minutes, they were close enough for the tips of the tentacles to snap at the stones within feet of him, and he could finally see with some clarity what those tentacles were attached to.
“Oh my God,” he breathed.
The Old Gods were coming.
He didn’t have to look up to know that Morris had seen them, too; he was firm in directing Katie to shield the children’s eyes, and his efforts at breaking the lock were renewed with vigor.
