Chapter 35
The same constraints that made Perthrux send Ligat as its spy in the first place also made it impossible for either of them to know what happened when the demon’s new construct attacked Hazel.
Perthrux occupied itself by stalking its lair, sitting long enough to play a whining, discordant tune on a set of bone pipes, then pacing again.
It reminded Ligat absurdly of an expectant father in a hospital waiting room, which was not an observation he felt like sharing.
Ligat couldn’t get much humor out of it either.
His hopes and fears ran just about to the opposite of the demon’s, but tenterhooks were still tenterhooks.
Perthrux had commanded his presence, though, and pacing would probably have made it suspicious, so he stood out of the way and tried to detach his mind from the situation.
That had always served him decently well.
He couldn’t quite manage it this time, not when Hazel was Perthrux’s target.
All his attempts at turning his attention elsewhere—silently reciting lines of poetry, focusing on the cycle of his breath, listing types of bird or the capital cities of Europe—could only occupy him for a few minutes before he started wondering whether Hazel had gotten to the house and whether it and her wards had helped at all.
Other times his meditation broke with the thought that her peril was his fault: By mentioning human killers and Chapman, he’d likely pushed the demon to move more quickly and forcefully than it would have otherwise.
Objectively, the time went quickly, for what time was worth in the ethereal. It came as no surprise to Ligat that he felt every second.
It was a surprise when Perthrux suddenly threw its flute across the room. Ligat’s nerves were taut enough that he let out a yell, one that would surely have brought retribution under other circumstances, but it was lost in the demon’s screech of rage.
“Failed. FAILED.” It raked taloned fingers across the walls of its lair, slicing through the stone like meat. “There will be a price for this. A high price indeed.”
Ligat’s heart, which had lifted as soon as he realized that Perthrux was angry and what that meant, froze. Had the demon caught on to his treachery? He braced himself for pain.
Perthrux wasn’t looking at him, though. The demon seemed to have forgotten his presence. “The mortal is fortunate,” it spat, and the venom from the word sizzled on the stone floor. “The mortal persists in being fortunate, or she’s found knowledge beyond what she had.”
We do have the most irritating way of learning, don’t we?
Before Chapman’s room and the odd television, before Hazel and her knife and her wit, Ligat wouldn’t even have bothered with the silent thought. Snide comments required observation, and he’d spent decades making himself as unobservant as he could.
“What do you know of her resources?” Perthrux suddenly whirled around and whipped the question at Ligat.
“Very little, my lord.” Ligat bent his head, knowing that the answer was unsatisfactory.
“She goes out a fair bit, she brings books back to her house, and she gets letters. Any of them might have told her more. She could have gotten information from her phone, too, and her computer before it failed.”
The demon struck him on the side of the face.
Ligat staggered back, bleeding from the cuts Perthrux’s talons had opened and thankful that he’d gotten off lightly.
Calling, binding, and sending the minion had drained Perthrux’s magical strength, but it still had plenty of ways to act very unpleasant if it chose, and it had essentially boxed Ligat’s ears.
It probably needed him in decent shape, which was both reassuring and alarming.
Ligat had kept testing his bindings, and the little slack he’d gained had let him loosen them still more, but he doubted he could resist a direct order. If Perthrux grew bored or too frustrated and decided to settle for giving Chapman a new vessel—
He didn’t like to think about the likely results. He imagined them every few hours, but he didn’t like to think about them.
“Find out,” it thundered. “Read her books. Read her letters.”
“Yes, my lord,” said Ligat. He judged that he could sound grateful without giving the game away—he could always just be glad that he hadn’t lost his head. “And her devices?”
Perthrux considered that, long arms tapping against the stone. “No,” it finally said, revulsion clear in its voice.
The demon had influenced Hazel’s phone once, the first and last time it had tried to interact with any sort of technology newer than internal combustion, and that had been a very arm’s-length affair: Perthrux had simply found an opening and projected a tendril of malice.
Even then, it had dropped the connection as soon as Hazel had countered its power.
Ligat had initially put its reaction down to unfamiliarity, frustration, boredom, or all three.
Perthrux was an inconstant creature when it didn’t have its sights set on a particular tactic, and it would have been in the demon’s nature to simply give up on learning the quirks of new devices.
He was rapidly discovering grounds to reconsider.
He bowed his head, recited the words of obedience he no longer had to think about even while he said them, and kept his expression completely blank while questions piled up in his mind.
What about Hazel’s electronics alarmed Perthrux?
How much disobedience would the bindings allow him?
Most importantly, was Hazel all right? She was free, alive, and probably in one piece—Perthrux’s rage gave Ligat that much comfort—but those three qualities allowed for pain of many sorts and vast quantities.
* * *
Crying hurt, which had always struck Hazel as a little unfair even when it had just meant aching eyes and a sore throat. Sobbing with bruised ribs produced the sort of sensation that made her question the basic goodness of the universe.
The one advantage was that she stopped crying relatively soon.
Psychologically, she knew that wasn’t particularly healthy, but logistically it was essential.
The outsider had broken her wards—she had to assess her injuries and figure out if she needed to make up a cover story to go to the hospital, she needed to clean up the mess from her window, and oh, right, there was a dismembered corpse on her lawn.
Hazel thought it was dismembered, anyhow. She hadn’t checked. The sounds certainly hadn’t suggested a very…membered one.
Checking herself over should have come first, but anxiety started gripping her intestines in a spiked fist and twisting as soon as the worst of her shock passed, so she grabbed her flashlight and headed for the porch. Casper paced beside her, whining and sniffing the air.
It was slow going despite her fear, or maybe because of it.
Hazel’s legs ached, her shoulder throbbed, she had half the dirt in her yard lodged firmly in her sinuses, and her lower back was preparing an entire manifesto, none of which helped her hurry along.
She still suspected she could have pushed herself to go faster.
Faster would get the discovery process over with, she knew, just like she knew waiting wouldn’t change the identity of the body on the porch.
Hazel froze for a second with her hand on the doorknob. She switched the flashlight on, her hand still shaking a little, and felt her whole body tense up in preparation for a scream she doubted she’d be able to stifle.
So I’ll scream, she thought, pushing herself back into the cold, detached place that got her through particularly bad séances. I did plenty of it before. If the neighbors haven’t called the cops yet, they won’t now.
She yanked the door open.
Blood glistened in the flashlight beam. It had sprayed up the stairs and spattered over the left side of the porch, its heavy iron scent mixing with the smell of shit and the sharp odor that the demon had left behind.
Two pillars of the porch railing had shattered, more blood coated the shards remaining, and lying against the wall was…
Yes, that’s a leg. Hazel could see the shoe.
Her stomach turned over, hard, but she fought down the urge to vomit. Identification first, then barfing, she told herself.
Casper was shaking at her knee. Hazel reached down and scratched him behind the ears. “Go home, boy,” she said. “You did a great job. I’ve got it now.” Whether or not that was true, Casper obeyed the command and vanished, leaving Hazel to look around on her own.
Motionless, irregular shapes littered the lawn.
The first one Hazel turned the flashlight on was really more of a pile.
She looked away in a hurry. No information there, or at least none she wanted.
Next came an arm and white bones that could have been part of a rib cage.
A small, dark object shone nearby. Hazel noted its location for later and moved on, buzzing flies providing an unwelcome soundtrack for her search.
The human body didn’t have many round parts, so Hazel had a pretty good idea that she’d found the head even before she started to swing the light in its direction. Her stomach cramped again, painfully this time, and the flashlight beam shook as she aimed it.
It wasn’t Maxwell.
Relief hit Hazel around the kneecaps, but there was no place to sit down without coating herself in blood.
Knowing she couldn’t hold out much longer, she stared hard at the head, trying to place it.
The dead person wasn’t Jess, Kathy, or any of her friends from outside the town, but they did look familiar, or as familiar as a mangled, severed head could look.
No hair, she noted, or none on the head. Blood covered a lot of the lower face. Hazel squinted to see more clearly.
Then she was staring into a translucent mask of rage, the face of a ghost that had slammed themselves into the physical world fewer than three feet from her.
Their head was shaved, like the one on the ground, and their ethereal form was more intact than their physical.
Hazel saw the soul patch and made the connection for which she’d been grasping.
You bitch, said Albert Gordon’s ghost, quiet and venomous. You got me killed.