Chapter 27. Jenny #2
I leaned against Annette to keep from falling. I felt like the blood was draining from my body. Sparks flickered at the edge of my vision. She was definitely going to win her bet.
From the ceiling, a new piece of trim board grew down like a white stalactite.
“Do you hear voices?” asked Annette.
I started to explain about end-of-life hallucinations and brain activity, then frowned. “That sounds like Temple.”
He was whispering in a slow, raspy voice. I could barely pick it out over the squelching of the thralls and my own labored breathing. I didn’t recognize the language.
Not only could I hear him, I knew where he was. I saw him sprawled on his side in the grass out front with his cane held tightly against his chest. I knew he was looking toward the house—toward us. I knew he was exhausted and afraid.
In the same way, I saw Annette sitting beside me. I shared her worry for me and Temple and her family. I felt her determination. I felt her love.
“Looks like we’re fully networked now,” said Annette.
The wainscoting board clattered to the floor. The sound made both of us jump. Nails scratched the concrete as it crawled into place.
“Help me pull the thrall’s arm back so the house can complete the circle.” Somehow, I pulled myself to my feet and helped Annette up.
We stumbled toward the portal. I grabbed the thrall’s arm and braced myself like before. Annette wrapped her arms around me and pulled.
I wouldn’t have been able to do it alone, but the two of us pried the arm back just enough for the board to slide past and link with the rest of the spell.
As before, I felt the magic take effect, like a weight lifted from inside of my chest.
“I’ll be damned,” said Annette. “It actually worked.”
“That was the first step.” I wanted to close my eyes, but I wasn’t sure I’d be able to open them again. “We stopped the bleeding. We still have to close the wound.”
Cold blasted from the wall, so frigid it spread a skin of yellow-brown ice across the wall and onto the ceiling. The fire bordering the portal flickered and turned a darker green.
“That can’t be good,” said Annette.
Behind us, Alex gasped. Frost rose from his mouth. A thin layer of dirty yellow ice covered his eyes. His lips were purple, and the tentacle Artemis and I had cut off was regrowing from the stump of his arm, thicker than before.
“Alex?” I asked. “Are you in there?”
“What did you do?” he wheezed. “What’s happening to me?”
“Maybe we should go,” said Annette. “Leave the mighty Hunter of R’gngyk here until his dick freezes off.”
I pulled her back a step, trying to keep us out of range of that tentacle. But it wasn’t coming for us. It stretched instead toward the portal on the wall.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if we could do some harm right now?” Annette asked.
“We cut off the thralls. Ringo’s using Alex instead, feeding through him. We have to—” Before I could finish, a thin tendril emerged from the wall, flattened itself to the stone, and ripped away a chunk the size of a rocking chair.
I reached for my sword before remembering I couldn’t use it anyway.
“Tell me that’s just a shoggoth coming to say hello,” said Annette.
I shook my head. The smell was different from the shoggoth at the Gauntlet—stronger and stranger and unlike anything I’d experienced. It made me think of frozen suns and billion-year-old fossils. And that tendril hadn’t been black but dark and glistening and iridescent, full of impossible colors.
Most telling was the fear I felt from Artemis. I’d never known this fear from the goddess before. She’d withdrawn as much as she could without severing our bond completely, but even so, her instinctive revulsion screamed through my nerves.
“Jenny!” Alex’s voice was weak and raspy. “Help me!”
“I’m truly sorry,” I said. “This is your wiener-dog moment.”
Annette cocked her head. “His what?”
“I’ll explain later.”
Alex strained at the ropes. “I’m a Hunter of R’gngyk. I completed the ritual. I sacrificed—”
“Nobody cares.” I grabbed Alex’s tentacle and tried to hold it back from the portal. “I doubt Ringo’s even aware of you. No more than you’re aware of an individual bacterium in your gut.”
The tentacle was too strong. It tore free, taking strips of skin from my palm in the process, and stretched to touch the crack in the wall.
Alex’s breathing tightened to a barely audible squeak. His heartbeat slowed. His human eye stared blankly at the ceiling.
Two more tendrils emerged from the crack and grabbed the wall. I felt the strain on the stones like they were my own bones.
I pressed my hands to the wall and concentrated on blocking R’gngyk’s way through, guiding and helping the house to fight back.
Annette joined me. Together, we shifted brick and stone and old timber from other parts of the house.
Thick beams slid through the ceiling to brace the broken wall. Powdered mortar poured into the cracks.
For a while, we held our own. Seconds or minutes, I couldn’t tell the difference anymore as we fought to rebuild and repair what R’gngyk strove mindlessly to destroy.
A larger limb punched through, scattering rock and wood and dust through the basement. It was thick as my neck and segmented like an insect’s leg.
I grabbed Annette and pulled us both down, ducking a blow that would have crushed our skulls. The limb gouged the stone as it drew back.
“Temple, can you hear us?” asked Annette. “I think it’s time for that rocket launcher.”
In my early years, I’d assumed I would die fighting monsters. I’d thought that assumption made me stronger. When death was a foregone conclusion, you weren’t as scared of it.
Somewhere along the way, I’d outgrown my fatalism and decided I wanted a life. I even began to believe I deserved one. I’d built a home and a family.
It looked like young Jenny was right about the cause of death, even if she’d been off on the timing.
Two more limbs reached for us. I pushed Annette aside. The second limb slammed into my ribs and pinned me against the wall. I felt the needle-jabs of a thousand spines piercing my skin. Every breath sent stabbing pain through my side.
A new smell caught my attention: death and decay and rot.
An overly long, mummified hand reached past me to grasp the limb holding me in place. After a moment, the fingers crunched into the alien flesh like it was a rotted tree branch.
I collapsed into the arms of a harvester.
I got a face full of shadows and death and rot and decay. After the otherworldly nastiness I’d been smelling and feeling and tasting, it was almost a relief. Though I had no idea what a harvester was doing here or how it had gotten inside to begin with. I pushed myself up and looked around.
The harvester wasn’t our only guest.
Glittering claws slashed another limb. Duke from the Gauntlet nodded in greeting. He wore stone gauntlets tipped with diamond-hard claws. A dragon-cat gargoyle perched on his shoulders, hissing and swiping at the nearest tendrils.
Hjálmar the selkie approached the hole in our basement wall. “Quite the storm of horrors you’ve got down here, isn’t it?”
“What are you doing here?” I croaked.
“Helping you, you daft lass.”
There was a metallic growl. It grew louder . . . I blinked and tried to focus. “Is that a chainsaw?”
Hjálmar grinned. “Your young friend didn’t say what the fuss was about. He just said to bring the best weapon I had.”
Annette stared at me. Her face was pale and sweaty, and her brow was crinkled. She looked as confused as I felt.
“Get back where you came from, you ugly spider-fucker!” Hob the hearth devil raced across the basement and smacked a limb with an aluminum baseball bat.
More and more people pressed into our basement—using both people and basement in the loosest possible sense.
There was the mothwoman I’d treated for burns, the Celadon Man who’d come in with a fungal infection, the girl with goblin blood whose hoarding tendencies had led her to collect the world’s biggest assortment of poisonous plants—the hoarding was less of a problem than the poison ivy outbreaks.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“It was Ronnie’s idea.” Temple Finn limped down the stairs, leaning on a wooden staff. No, not a staff. That was Phile, a dryad I’d treated for emerald ash borers.
“I told him to take the kids out of town,” said Annette. The fear and anger in her voice made my own pulse quicken. “He’d better not have—”
“Your grandson’s safe,” said Temple. “Ronnie just made a call while he was driving. On your phone, as I understand it. You still had Marmaduke Stone in your contacts. He called Duke and told him to gather everyone and anyone who might have any kind of bond to this place.”
“But these are all people I’ve healed,” I said as Hjálmar went after another tentacle with his chainsaw. “They accepted the contract to do no harm. How . . .”
“Their contract had a self-defense clause,” said Temple. “And once you and Annette hooked up with our home, I was able to rip out the vandalism Alex had done to our welcome spell so everyone could get inside.”
Hob spat. “Keeping this parasite from crawling up the world’s ass qualifies as self-defense, don’t you think?”
Temple limped toward the wall. “You gave your strength to this place. I hope you’ll forgive me for taking a bit of that strength for myself. Enough for me to finish things.”
I hated the finality of his words. “Temple, you can’t—”
“I can.” He stepped past me to face the burning portal. “This place will take good care of you and Annette. It loves you. We both do.”
“I prayed to Artemis to help me save you,” I whispered.
“You did.” He adjusted his hat, scratched his belly, and took Stuart Little from his fanny pack. “Thanks to you, I get to be Temple Finn one last time.”
“Oh. Oh, shit.”