Chapter 44
Perthrux grabbed a handful of Maxwell’s hair and yanked his head upward, forcing him to stare into the pallid eyes above the double set of mouths. The upper one opened to snarl at him. “Did I order you to speak with the medium? To befriend her?”
The chill that had settled around Maxwell’s heart worked for him in that moment, slowing the world down so that he could think of an answer.
Denial wouldn’t work—what information Chapman had obtained had apparently been convincing.
The only thing to do was step inside the blow.
“You ordered me to watch her, my lord, and to find out what she knows. Is there a better source than the woman herself?”
It might have just been his perception keeping the room still in the seconds after he stopped speaking, but all he could hear was his own heart. He counted every beat.
Then Perthrux’s grip relaxed slightly, still hard but no longer deliberately brutal. The smirk left Chapman’s face. “You didn’t tell me,” the demon said, small gray threads wriggling in its eyes.
“I didn’t think it worth troubling you with the details, my lord. You never cared for them before. Besides, you’ve been occupied.”
The demon didn’t respond. Maxwell waited, careful neither to shift his weight nor let his head fall.
Any motion that struck Perthrux as resistance would likely set its temper off again.
“I don’t know how you came by this information,” he went on, “but if your…sources…had come to me, I would have been perfectly willing to explain it.”
“Would you?” The mouth curled at one end. Perthrux suspected a lie.
Maxwell gave it half of an admission. “Perhaps not perfectly. I would have found the question presumptuous from one who hasn’t served you for half the time I have, and I would question where he got his knowledge, since I haven’t sensed his presence of late.”
Without relaxing its hold of Maxwell’s hair, Perthrux swiveled its long, headless body to face Chapman. “A ghost, you said.”
“Yes,” said Chapman, stepping forward for the first time. “And—”
“A young man? A reporter?” Maxwell asked. “I talked to that one. Found him tiresome. Told him to be gone, or I’d take action. I’m sure whatever he said about me is likely colored by that.”
Chapman scowled. “I’m sure you’re sure. You have no experience questioning witnesses.”
“Is that how you describe your practices?” Maxwell shot back.
He couldn’t forget Perthrux’s anger or his own dire situation, but he couldn’t resist the response either.
“Your strutting and posing may have worked on the poor sods you abused when you were pretending to uphold the law, Sheriff, but they hold very little weight in this world.”
Perthrux swiveled its raw red face back to Maxwell. It was smiling now, for good or ill. “A rivalry, is it? Should I be flattered?”
“You should—” Chapman began, and then jerked upright, the remnants of his eyes widening. A knucklebone popped through the skin as his hands clenched.
“A problem?” Maxwell asked him.
“Trespassers. The witch.”
Perthrux hissed with its lower mouth. “Go,” it ordered with the upper. “This is between me and Ligat now.”
* * *
Now Chapman’s house looked haunted.
Construction crews had cleared away the rubble, propped up the few remaining walls with scaffolding, and boarded up the hole leading to the basement, leaving a hatch to let in the crime scene team.
The police had left it padlocked when they were done and given the key to Lee Chapman, whose wife had given it to Hazel at a McDonald’s that morning.
As Hazel kneeled to unlock the hatch, the afternoon sun shone hot on the back of her neck, and she could hear a lawnmower a block or two away, but her skin rose in goose bumps anyhow.
The clunk of the lock opening made her flinch.
She didn’t stop, though, and she didn’t hesitate after she shoved the hatch open to show a safety ladder leading down into the darkness. A quick pass with a flashlight showed that the basement floor was still solid, so she tucked it back into her backpack and started down.
’Twere well it were done quickly, and all that jazz.
Hazel descended into the smell of earth and concrete, into darkness that meant she had to feel with her feet and hands for each step on the ladder.
Chapman’s basement hadn’t really been very far below ground, but in his day he’d walked down a set of stairs to store his hideous trophies, not groped around to get a decent footing on a shallow metal rung.
The concrete floor had looked hard. If she judged badly, if she slipped—
It took her almost ten minutes to reach the bottom.
She grabbed her flashlight as soon as she got a hand free and shone it around the room, lingering on the corners like a kid who’d just had a bad dream. The place was empty, thank God, although the emptiness itself rapidly became spooky.
Hazel left the flashlight on when she set it down, giving herself what visibility she could, then slipped off her backpack and prepared: candles, cloth, water, knife, runes. The tiles clicked against the floor, barely muffled by the silk.
Thurisaz in the east: giants, thorns, trouble from men.
Raido nearest her. Tiwaz in the south: Tyr, the steadfast god, who sacrificed his hand to hold a wolf while others chained it.
Nauthiz nearby, for need and constraint.
In the southeast, Uruz, the ox, which generally meant a guy.
Hazel took them all in, swept them up, and set the rest of her supplies out accordingly.
Just before she lit the first candle, she placed a small iron jar at her feet.
Hazel had no names to call when she let in the ethereal.
She didn’t know for certain if any of Clarence’s victims still lingered in the basement.
The hands she’d seen during the séance had suggested it, but suggestion wasn’t proof, and the place had changed considerably since then.
She had no trench to dig, no libations to spill.
Any spirits that lingered in Chapman’s basement wouldn’t need a lure.
As she lowered the knife and stepped back, the cracks in the cinder-block walls began to fill up with blood.
The smell of it, old and rotten, blended with the basement’s overall scent as rivulets started running down onto the floor.
Larger dark spots appeared on the upper walls and rapidly solidified, becoming gruesome parodies of the trophy heads Clarence had kept in his room.
The young man’s head on one of them dropped its jaw down improbably far to show the stump where his tongue had been.
Hazel took a deep, slow breath through her mouth. “No,” she said, “it’s not a nice place.”
A slight echo gave her words back to her: nice place.
“Let any spirit trapped here present themselves before me if they wish freedom,” she went on. “For those who don’t offer violence, I’ll do what I can. For those who do—”
A shrieking, tearing sound interrupted her. She knew better than to turn away from the candles, but peripheral vision showed her that the wall to the east had started rippling. Hazel swallowed hard. She’d come prepared. She thought she knew what she was doing.
Now she was going to find out.
Bony hands tore open the wall, shoving through the cinder blocks with so little sound or effort that they might have been paper. Hazel picked up the iron jar, holding it with both hands, as Chapman forced his way into the room.
* * *
“You’re frightened, bondsman,” said Perthrux.
It let go of Maxwell’s hair only to grab his shoulders, claws piercing robes and skin as it dragged him up onto his feet.
The uncanny light of its lair twisted through its dead eyes, now just a bit above Maxwell’s face, and a scent like curdled milk wafted out of its mouth.
It smiled like a wound. “I can smell you. I can hear your heart racing. What scares you?”
Chapman’s hands closing around Hazel’s neck, bits of his dead skin sloughing off as she chokes and struggles. Chapman sneaking up behind her, knife raised high. Chapman’s teeth closing on—
He tried to shake the images away. It didn’t really work, but he cleared enough space in his mind to let him respond sensibly. “What shouldn’t, my lord? You’re an intimidating presence even when you’re not angry.”
Perthrux chuckled. Long experience kept Maxwell from gagging at both the smell and the sound.
“And,” Maxwell went on, “it’s not exactly a comfort to know that Chapman’s trying to discredit me.”
“You’ve earned yourself a rival, yes. How flattering for me,” said the demon. It lifted its hands from Maxwell’s shoulders, and he fought back a cry of relief. “But it doesn’t further my goals, does it?”
“No, my lord. I can try to settle matters—”
“Don’t bother.” Perthrux stalked back over to its throne and settled its spindly, spongy form against the almost-basalt. “It would make little difference.”
Such a statement could mean disinterest or doom. Maxwell decided his best response was a dutiful nod.
Perthrux kept watching him, still with a little smile on its first mouth. “A clever strategy, getting close to the mortal. What have you found?”
“She works with runes and sigils,” said Maxwell, quickly sorting through facts to find the most harmless.
“Fairly talented, from what I can tell, fairly decent materials. Might be some of the protection. There are runes that help with prophecy and forewarning, I think, which could have let her avoid your creature.”
“Go on. She’s bright. She’ll know a little of her fate by now. How will she plan to avoid it?”
“She’s been looking through old grimoires, trying to find one that describes you. I think she thinks she can learn your true name that way.” Perthrux laughed. Maxwell’s lungs started feeling only one size too small rather than three.
Headless torso tilted back, arms dangling almost bonelessly down the sides of the throne, the demon inspected him. “Chapman was very convincing,” it said, sounding bored.
There went his lungs again. “He would have been trained to sound that way,” Maxwell replied carefully, knowing that pits surrounded him on each side and that the path was very narrow. “And maybe he believed his source.”
“Maybe. As I said, your strategy is clever. You may have won us an opportunity.” Perthrux raised one of its wet red hands, long fingers extended. It frowned for a moment in concentration before a small, clear bottle appeared in its cupped palm. “Come. Take your weapon.”
Practice carried Maxwell forward as he stared at the bottle. The glimmering red liquid inside moved of its own accord, tendrils reaching up and falling back down. “What is it?”
“An accelerant. This fire’s a little too slow to catch. Give me your hand.”
Wanting nothing less except the penalty for not doing so, Maxwell obeyed.
Perthrux’s fingers were squashy against his skin as the demon placed the bottle in his palm, then closed his fist around it.
“Take good care,” it said. “If you haven’t managed to make her drink this in three days, I may have to start doubting your… approach.”
It gave his hand a squeeze for emphasis. The cold flesh almost bruised his hand, but Maxwell barely felt the pressure.
He knew exactly what the demon meant.