Chapter 25
I make my way down the hallway.
The sconces burn along the walls, dull amber pools of light spaced too far apart, but between them the corridor stretches in long bands of shadow.
My shoes are wet from the rain, and every footstep sounds too loud against the old floor. The building groans softly around me, a tired old sound that might be pipes or wind or wood expanding in the storm. Not far away, I hear the faint creak of an apartment door opening.
I stop.
The sound hangs in the hallway.
I wait for some new dead thing to lurch out of the shadows but nothing appears so I just keep moving.
By the time I reach Eleanor’s door, my hand is already on the broken pendant at my throat. I tell myself that if the thing upstairs is watching, if it can feel me moving beneath it, then maybe the pendant still means something. It’s broken but perhaps it still holds some power.
I push the door open and enter the apartment.
The dead pigeons are still scattered across the living room floor, dark lumps of feathers and blood against the hardwood.
I close the door behind me.
For a moment I stand there, listening.
The roof is silent.
That frightens me more than the stomping would have.
I move toward the bar cart because my body seems to have decided it needs a stiff drink. My fingers close around a bottle of whiskey. I don’t check the label. I twist the cap off and take a long swallow.
It burns all the way down.
I keep the bottle in my hand and look toward the windows. Rain lashes the glass. The city beyond is smeared into light and shadow. Somewhere above me, the grotesque waits. I know that now with the same certainty that I know the book is open on Eleanor’s desk.
My gaze moves there.
The old leather-bound volume lies where I left it, its yellowed pages spread beneath the desk lamp. The illustration stares up from the page. The grotesque’s blank eyes somehow look more alive in ink than most living things do in flesh.
Eleanor’s familiar.
That’s what Dominik called it.
I have a feeling Eleanor called it something else. A name spoken in this room late at night, through walls and vents, while Marian lay downstairs listening and slowly going mad.
I take another swallow from the bottle, smaller this time.
The whiskey steadies nothing.
My eyes lift to the ceiling. The thing up there is waiting for me to make the next move.
I lower the bottle, and my hand starts toward the book. Then my phone buzzes. The sound cuts through the apartment so sharply I flinch. It’s Paul.
My heart lurches. I answer the call. “Paul?”
For half a second there is only rain and fast breathing on the other end. Footsteps splash through water.
“I’m outside your building,” Paul says.
Everything in me goes cold.
“Paul, no. You shouldn’t have come.”
“You really thought I was going to let you walk into that place alone?”
I move toward the windows before I realize I’ve done it.
“Listen to me,” I say. “You need to leave. Right now.”
“I’m a journalist,” he says, softer now. “Walking into danger is kind of the gig.”
“It’s not safe for you. Please, go away!”
“Buzz me in, Sara.”
“Paul, listen to me. I have to do this alone!”
A dull thump echoes faintly through the phone.
“…what the hell?”
I go rigid and stand there trembling as a few silent seconds tick away.
“Paul?”
“Sara…”
His voice sounds smaller now.
“There’s something on the?—”
Static tears through the line.
His voice distorts into a yell, then disappears beneath a metallic screech so violent I pull the phone away from my ear. The sound cuts off all at once.
Dead silence.
No.
I go rigid. The apartment seems to go still with me.
“Paul?”
No answer.
“Paul, talk to me.”
A few seconds pass. Silent except for rain. “Paul?”
Nothing.
“Paul!”
The line remains open, but there is no voice now. Only a soft electronic hiss and the distant crackle of rain.
Slowly, I turn toward the windows.
At first I see only my reflection: wet hair, pale face, broken pendant dark against my chest. Behind the reflection, the city is a blurred arrangement of black towers and silver rain.
Then something moves in the sky.
A shadow detaches from the storm.
Large. Fast. Rapidly moving closer.
For one suspended second, my brain cannot understand the shape. It is too big for a bird, too heavy for anything the wind should be able to carry.
Then it hits the glass.
Paul’s body slams into the window six feet in front of me.
The glass doesn’t shatter, a dark force controlling the power of the impact.
I scream and drop the phone.
Paul’s face is pressed sideways against the rain-lashed glass, his whole body upside down, eyes wide and wild with terror.
Blood runs from his forehead where he banged into the window, mixing with rainwater as it streaks across the pane.
His mouth opens, but no sound comes through.
The glass separates us by inches, yet he might as well be on the other side of the world.
Behind him, something massive shifts in the wet darkness.
Not visible. Never fully visible.
Just wings and pressure and size. A suggestion of claws. A depth of shadow that moves with intention. A force keeping Paul aloft thirty floors above the asphalt below.
“Paul.”
My voice is barely a rasp.
Paul’s eyes find mine through the glass.
Somehow he’s alive. Relief mixes with even greater terror.
The beast is playing with him, drags him sideways.
Paul’s body scrapes across the window with a horrible wet sound, leaving a red trail behind him.
His fingers claw weakly at the glass as he slides from one window pane to the next, past the desk, past the wall of books, his face contorted with agony as the darkness outside pulls him along the length of the apartment windows.
“Paul!”
I run with him, stumbling over the rug, slipping in pigeon blood, my hand reaching toward the glass as if I can catch him through it. I can see his chest jerking, his body trying to breathe while pinned against the building thirty floors above the street.
The grotesque jerks him hard to the west-facing windows.
A predator playing with something it knows is already caught.
Helplessness floods me so completely I almost fold under it.
Then Paul vanishes upward.
One violent rush of motion, and he is gone into the darkness above the apartment.
The red trail remains.
I stand frozen, staring at the blood-smeared window.
For several seconds, I cannot move. I can barely understand that my body is still standing. My mind keeps trying to hold on to the image of Paul’s eyes, the look in them when they found mine.
My phone rings.
The sound is soft compared to what just happened, almost absurdly ordinary.
I look down.
UNKNOWN CALLER.
I don’t want to answer.
Still, I bend and pick it up with a hand that does not feel like mine. I press accept and hold the phone to my ear.
At first, there is only static.
Then a voice comes through. Dominik’s voice. Or what is left of it.
“You can still save him, Sara.”
The words scrape through the line, hollowed out and layered with evil amusement and an ancient hunger.
I close my fist around the broken pendant.
The grotesque didn’t kill Paul. It took him. He’s the lure.
It knows me now, knows my weakness.
I look from the bloody windows to the open book on Eleanor’s desk. Then to the ceiling.
Dominik’s ruined voice whispers through the phone.
“Come upstairs.”
I lower the phone.
A cold certainty settles inside me.
I know what I have to do next.