Chapter 24. Temple
Temple
I remembered my mother explaining our house to me. This was before she was cursed to wander the moonbeams forevermore. “Sometimes, when a wizard and a house love each other very much—”
Wait, no. I was confusing that with a different and more uncomfortable conversation.
The house talk had come earlier, when I was four years old. Like many interactions at that age, it began with me getting in trouble.
“Tempy, do you know what happened to my summoning bracelet?”
I remembered sitting in the dark of my closet and shouting, “No, Mommy!”
I’d known exactly what had happened to that bracelet, seeing how I’d been using it for an hour to summon sweets from the grocery store.
The closet door had swung open a minute later, revealing me in all of my chocolate-faced glory, surrounded by cellophane wrappers and Hostess Ding Dong crumbs. I knew the game was up, and I handed over the gold bracelet without a word.
“This was locked in my dresser. How did you find it?”
“House told me how to get it.”
She rubbed chocolate off the abyss-black jewel in the center. “Tempy, our house is special. You know that. But it can’t talk.”
She’d been right, of course. The house couldn’t talk the way people did. But it could share impressions and images and memories of what had come before.
Magic was literally built into its foundation: spells etched into stone in the early 1820s to ward off the chill of winter and the heat of summer, to keep mundane and supernatural threats at bay, to preserve food and drink, and so much more.
Each generation added new enchantments. Their presence and their power strengthened the house and the land.
The connection between the house and its residents had deepened over the decades. By the time I came along, it could recognize and respond to our wants and needs. And that morning, I had wanted—needed—chocolate cupcakes.
I’d seen Mommy use her bracelet to retrieve items from throughout the world. Ever helpful, the house had shown me exactly where in the master bedroom to find it.
“House likes you better than Grandpa,” I said. “But it loves me best. Me and the chipmunks under the porch. They tickle. House thinks I should learn how to change into a chipmunk.”
“How long have you been able to communicate with the house?”
“All my life.” I remembered being confused that she couldn’t hear it. I also remembered clutching my stomach and saying, “My tummy hurts.”
I’d had many friends, enemies, lovers, and competitors in my lifetime. Occasionally all in the same person. But my best friend and closest companion had always been that old brick house on Essex Street.
And now that friend was screaming.
“What’s happening?” Annette held my arm as she helped me back to her car.
“Alex has reached the house,” I said. “He’s trying to break in.”
Jenny was on the phone with Ronnie. Their voices were tinny and hard to understand. I wondered if the thunder had done permanent damage to my hearing.
Annette held my arm while I climbed into the back seat.
Then she pulled out her own phone. “I’m checking the security feeds.
The good news is nothing’s on fire this time.
Alex is out front. I count six kids with him, all of them further gone than Morgan or Sage.
No civilians standing around livestreaming things yet. ”
That was good. It meant the house’s suggestion spell was still running, encouraging people to ignore anything outside of their worldview.
“How do you kill a house, anyway?” asked Annette.
“The same way you kill anything else,” I said. “Destroy the physical, and the rest follows.”
She started the car. “How much time do we have?”
“I’m not sure.” The house had been weakened from Morgan’s cursed spell cards and Sage’s eldritch fire. We were slower to heal than we used to be. And I’d borrowed so much strength to call the lightning and destroy the shoggoth. “Not long. He’s peeling through our wards.”
As each one fell, I felt a tearing sensation, like a scab ripped too early from the skin.
The house called for help. I felt its confusion. Why wasn’t I stopping this? Why wasn’t I there?
Traffic was a mess. The car crept down the street, stopping and starting again like an injured tortoise. Police directed us around damaged streets and uncleared accidents. I knew Annette and Jenny were as frustrated as I was, so I said nothing.
This was the beginning of Ronnie’s prophecy. We were too far out and moving too slowly. Alex would complete his sacrifice and waken R’gngyk. And then he’d lose control, because fools like that always lost control, and everyone around them suffered the consequences.
The Finn ancestral home would become ground zero for the end of the world.
I cried out as a pair of Alex’s thralls pulled the last of the burnt rosebushes from the earth and tore it apart.
Jenny was arguing with Ronnie. From the pieces I heard, it sounded like Ronnie wanted to go out and make a heroic last stand in the hopes of taking Alex with him.
Jenny told him he was an idiot.
She was right, but it was the same heroic nonsense any of us might have done at his age.
We needed to buy time. I closed my eyes and waded through the pain and fear from the house. I teased out the various minds until I found the ones I wanted.
The mice in the attic were tense. They knew their home was under assault. They didn’t understand the nature of their enemy, but they didn’t particularly care. Like Ronnie, they wanted to run out and attack.
Their arrogance was very unmouselike. They’d lived and evolved with humans for too long.
The feel of my thoughts was familiar, as much a part of their home as the rafters and the insulation. So, they listened as I tried to explain what was happening.
One of the mice scampered through the gable vent and onto the roof. It crawled down a gutter and opened its senses to me, allowing me my first real look at our attacker.
Mouse vision was strange. They perceived a slightly higher and more limited spectrum of color than humans. They were also rather nearsighted.
A blurry Alex Barclay stood in front of the equally blurry porch with his tentacle arm slithering through the air like a snake.
The movement was both hypnotic and nauseating.
All around him, his oily-skinned shoggoth-fed children pounded windows and dug up plants.
One had climbed onto the roof and was trying to tear off the shingles.
From Alex’s movements, I realized he could see the spells keeping him out. He was directing the others to attack specific physical nodes while he tugged the invisible strands of magic, unraveling the net one strand at a time.
I shared with the mice what I needed, along with what would happen if Alex succeeded. They were frightened. I felt their tiny hearts vibrate faster. But they weren’t convinced.
“What’s going on back there, Temple?” asked Annette.
Splitting myself between two locations was giving me a stabbing headache. “I’m asking the mice for help. They want to know what’s in it for them.”
“You told them the end of the world includes mice, right?” she asked.
“They think they’re clever and tough enough to survive the coming of R’gngyk.”
Jenny covered her phone. “Ronnie says he has a sling that was blessed by Pope Formosus. He thinks he can get to the roof and take Alex out from there.”
“Bad idea,” said Annette. “From what I saw on the Widowmaker, Alex can reach the roof with that tentacle.”
I covered my ears to shut them out and asked the mice what they wanted.
They showed me.
“You’re out of your tiny minds,” I replied. No way in any hell was I going to give them unlimited access to my power. An army of magic-wielding mice would be just as dangerous as R’gngyk in the long run.
The mouse outside scurried back up the gutter and into the relative safety of the attic. They turned their minds away from me, preparing to go back to whatever mouse business they’d been up to.
I sent a counteroffer. They couldn’t have unlimited access to my knowledge of magic, but I’d teach them two simple defensive spells.
They conferred and demanded a thousand defensive spells. Numbers weren’t their strong suit.
We settled on five spells in exchange for their help. Twelve mice volunteered to let me deeper into their thoughts. We ran out of the attic and down to the ground.
Outside, we gathered a short distance from Alex. We stood on our hind legs in a circle six inches wide. Our front paws traced the patterns of a spell. My words emerged from their mouths as a series of high-pitched chirps.
Alex turned. He didn’t see us at first. Then his gaze dropped.
Jenny would have had a witty quip at the ready, something snarky and irreverent and triumphant to say as she knocked his block off.
I wasn’t like her. I triggered my spell in silence.
A tiny fireball appeared in the center of our circle. It shot toward Alex, growing to the size of a large pumpkin by the time it struck.
Through the mice’s eyes, I saw Alex coil his tentacle like a shield. Fire crackled over the limb. He cried out, but the spell was dying more quickly than it should have. Cold poured from Alex’s burnt skin. The flames flickered and vanished.
“Mggoka’ai R’gngyk ngth na’ghtagn,” Alex whispered. “Hotept R’gngyk na’shub.”
Any triumph on my part died a quick, decisive death.
Blackness sealed the damaged skin. Alex smiled, and I felt R’gngyk’s power growing. Just as Morgan had given his blood, Alex had turned his injuries into a sacrifice. His words were the equivalent of Take, eat. This is my body, which is barbequed for you.
I had the mice grip the grass with our paws, drawing strength for another attack. But before I could begin, Alex’s tentacle smashed down like a club.
I yelled and jerked back in my seat.
“What happened?” Jenny twisted around to take my hand. Her fingers felt my wrist while she studied my eyes. “Temple, talk to me.”
“He killed them.” Darkness ringed my vision. Between the strain of working through other bodies and the shock of feeling their death, I’d be lucky if my heart didn’t explode before we got home.
The Temple Finn of old would have stopped him. He would have found a way. He’d have blasted Alex to ash and gone out for drinks and dessert to celebrate.
A part of me hated that Temple Finn. The bastard hadn’t appreciated how good he had it.
“How close are they to getting inside?” asked Annette.
I wanted to answer, but her words were so far away, and my pulse was so loud. “I’m sorry,” I mumbled. I didn’t know if I was talking to Annette or to the house. “I can’t stop him.”
“Oh, that’s clever. The spell is woven right into the doormat.
Then it spreads out to every ingress. ‘An it harm none . . .’ This had to be Jenny Winter’s idea.
What shall we do with you, little spell?
What shall— I wasn’t asking you, Noah. It was a rhetorical question. Get back to breaking those windows.”