Shadows in the Mist Read online

  “Shabiri assisted with that, no doubt.”

  “You made that special arrow. Poisoned it by…by sticking it in your eye. Will that kill Andras?”

  “It might.”

  “Will it be enough to send him back?”

  “It…might.”

  I threw my head back. “I wish you had more definitive answers.”

  “So do I. I’m sorry. I’ve never been required to do such a thing before.”

  I swung open the car door and stepped out. It was bitterly cold. Each night seemed to be getting colder, and I didn’t like the look of that mist. Erasmus seemed to think the Draugr were laying low now, but I didn’t trust any of these Netherworld denizens.

  I clutched the crossbow and moved with Erasmus to the door. It was dark. No lights or even motion sensors around. I guessed little Moody Bog generally didn’t have trouble with vandalism or break-ins. At least, until a certain party from Hansen Mills came to town.

  I got my phone out, turned on the flashlight, and shined the light on the door. “How do we get in? Do you have a special breaking-in trick?”

  He smiled and vanished. And then someone was opening the door from the inside. Before I could run, I realized that it was Erasmus.

  “Well, that’s handy,” I muttered, trying to mask my doubling heartrate.

  “This is very strange,” he said, frowning. “Why do you keep your dead in such a place?”

  “Uh… It’s just a place to keep them before the funeral.”

  He didn’t seem convinced. I ignored him to look around outside. “Jeff!” I whispered as loud as I could. “Jeff!”

  Out of the mist came a four-footed shape—a blond wolf. He stopped before me, stuck out his tongue, and panted.

  “Do you want to come in or stay out here?”

  Somehow, I expected him to say something, but of course, he couldn’t in wolf form. Instead, he trotted past me inside.

  I peered down the darkened hallway. “Now what?” I whispered.

  Jeff’s ears pricked up. He gave a deep growl and crept into the darkness. Erasmus took up the rear guard as I readied the crossbow. And looky there. It had armed itself.

  Never in a million years had I imagined creeping around what was essentially a morgue in the middle of the night. With a demon. And a werewolf. So okay. There were a lot of “nevers” to go around.

  Both Erasmus and Jeff kept lifting their noses, presumably following the scent of the ghoul. We passed a time clock, a break room, and then turned a corner. Over a big double door hung a sign saying, “Morgue.” I really didn’t want to go in there, but where else are you gonna go when a ghoul needs to snack on a corpse?

  I motioned for my companions to stay quiet as I carefully pushed on the door. Relieved it made no sound, I looked around at the stainless-steel wall of refrigerated doors. Slabs, I guess. One had been opened and rolled out. I knew it was the child, because the ghoul was bent over it and had taken on the appearance of a four-year-old boy in torn jeans and a striped shirt.

  I raised the crossbow, aiming square in the middle of its back. It hadn’t noticed me yet. And it was making lip-smacking eating noises, messily devouring the kid that the Draugr had killed. Except that the ghoul itself looked like a kid. And I couldn’t shoot, even though I could feel Erasmus beside me urging me on.

  I had to be sure. I had to know.

  So I cleared my throat.

  The ghoul stopped. When it moved its head to listen, I cleared my throat again.

  It sprang into action and leapt to the side, leaving me a clear view of the child, naked, laid out on the stainless-steel tray. His guts had been torn out. Some ribs poked upward through the gore—broken, bitten through. I quickly looked away before the queasiness took over and tried to breathe out of my mouth. That way I couldn’t smell it, the thick tang of metal in the air, of blood.

  Jeff began to growl behind me.

  I turned. “Jeff, you…” But his eyes. They weren’t the normal wolfy eyes. They had turned red, and he was looking at me, lips snarled back, teeth bared, saliva dripping from his jaws.

  I backed away. “Jeff?”

  “It’s the blood,” said Erasmus. He stepped forward and pushed me behind him. “The blood drives them mad.”

  “But it’s Jeff.”

  “It’s a werewolf, Kylie. You must never forget it.”

  “What do we do? I can’t shoot him. I won’t.”

  Erasmus said nothing before he pounced. He grabbed Jeff’s furry neck, holding off the barking and snapping muzzle. Jeff went wild, as if he were a real wolf, snarling and scratching. Erasmus bared his own teeth, too numerous for a human mouth. His mouth suddenly stretched unnaturally wide and then all his teeth were sharp shark teeth. Barely escaping the snapping jaws, he pushed the werewolf, struggling, toward the double doors until they were out in the hall, where the growls and screams bounced off the walls and echoed.

  I locked the door behind them, pushing up the deadbolts into the lintel. When I turned back, the ghoul was in the corner hissing at me, still looking like the Warren child. There was no way out.

  “You shouldn’t have done it,” I said. But was it to the ghoul…or to me? I opened the Booke, after all. I brought these things to Moody Bog. I killed that child.

  I wiped my sleeve over my suddenly wet eyes but kept the crossbow trained on the ghoul. “You’re not getting away this time.”

  It hissed again, and I could tell it was ready to spring away. Maybe up to those transom windows.

  I lifted the crossbow, and with my trigger hand against my cheek, I fired.

  The bolt soared true and pierced the ghoul right in the chest. It screamed, and the mask of the Warren child shed like Jeff’s blond fur. It was the ghoul again, bugged eyes rolling in its head. It scrabbled at the arrow, but a beam of light was already shooting from the hole. More beams of lights began to tear through its body.

  A transom window shattered and the Booke of the Hidden appeared before me, quill pen at the ready. It lay open to the next empty page, and I dropped the crossbow and picked up the quill. Jabbing the point of it into my left palm, I used the pooled blood to write on the blank page.

  I first saw the ghoul on the street in front of my shop, and I pursued it to the cemetery…

  I didn’t even know what I wrote. I just kept writing, telling the story of the ghoul and what I knew about it. Every time I looked up from the page, I saw each word tear another hole through the ghoul, or the gateway, or…whatever. I didn’t really understand it, but I kept writing until it disappeared completely into a painfully bright dot of light until that, too, was gone with a pop. The Booke slammed closed and fell to the floor.

  And then my legs gave out. I sat beside the Booke, nursing my hand from all the pokes I had given it in the last few weeks. I was going to have to pick a different spot to get my blood, I decided vaguely, when Erasmus appeared in the room with a puff of dark smoke.

  “Kylie, what happened?”

  I showed him my bloody hand and gestured toward the Booke.

  “You sent it back already?”

  “Yeah. Come to think of it, didn’t that seem a little too simple?”

  He didn’t say anything, but we both turned when the doors rattled. Jeff snarled and howled from the other side.

  “How do we turn him off?”

  He stalked over to the body on its tray and looked it over dispassionately, then shoved it back in the drawer and slammed the door. There was a little blood and…stuff…on the floor, and he knelt to scoop it up. He vanished, and immediately reappeared.

  The snarling and howling suddenly stopped, replaced with whining.

  Erasmus crossed to the door. Before I could shout for him not to open it, he did. The wolf bounded in right for me. I cowered, covering my head, but instead he nudged me, whining. He closed his mouth gently on my wrist without piercing the skin and pulled me toward him, then began to lick the blood away. I almost snatched my hand back—I certainly didn’t want Jeff getting a t
aste for my blood—but Erasmus stopped me.

  “He’s only trying to heal you, Kylie. He’s attuned to you. He knows you’ve been injured.”

  “Jeff,” I said with a tremble to my voice. “Jeff, shift already. Be Jeff again.”

  The wolf stopped. He looked at my face, cocking his head to the side, when the fur started to shed in great handfuls. I thought I was used to it by now, but I wasn’t. I wasn’t used to watching his face shrink back from a muzzle to a human nose and mouth, from ears that were wide and pointy to two shell-like protrusions on the sides of his head, from back legs lengthening and twisting to human legs.

  He sat beside me, holding my hand. Naked.

  “I’m sorry, Kylie,” he said sorrowfully. “I don’t know what came over me. I smelled the blood and suddenly I wanted to kill. I’m so, so sorry.”

  “We…we have to work on that, I guess. I thought the potion you take is supposed to…”

  “I didn’t take it today. I thought I could learn to wean myself off of it.”

  “Did Doc say you could?”

  He looked away. “I just thought I could.”

  “Well…now we know you can’t.”

  “I fucking hate this!”

  I put my arms around him. Ironically, as a man, Jeff didn’t have a lot of body hair. I rubbed his smooth back and tried not to think about his nakedness. After all, I’d seen him naked plenty of times while we were living together.

  “It’s not your fault,” I kept repeating. But in my head, I also kept saying, It’s mine.

  He wiped at his face and drew back. “So you got the little dope, huh?”

  I looked back where the ghoul had stood and nodded. “Yeah. That was it.” We both glanced at the Booke on the floor.

  I should have been celebrating. But I couldn’t help but feel it had been anti-climactic. Far too easy. Almost as if the ghoul had been a kind of placeholder for something worse. I had only a split second of waiting for the other shoe to drop when it did.

  The wall with the transom windows exploded. I was flung back along with the bits of glass and broken cinder blocks, as something landed in the room.

  Chapter Twelve

  In the cloud of dust and debris in the air, I got the merest glance of a giant winged creature. For a second, I assumed it was Andras, but... I blinked and narrowed my eyes.

  Baphomet!

  He roared with a weird half-cow, half-otherworldly sound, before resting his gaze on me with a frown. And when he pointed right at me and opened his mouth, it was like the voice of doom.

  “Kylie Strange,” he said, in a deep booming voice. “I am angered.”

  He was big, bigger than the last time we saw him. He filled the height of the room, his wide bat wings touching from wall to destroyed wall. How had he not been noticed out there? His tall, twisting horns stood straight up from his head, and his human-looking male torso was incongruous to the goat head. He flexed his pecs as well as the muscles in his arms that tapered down to human hands with black talons instead of fingernails. His torso transitioned into shaggy goat legs and black cloven hoofs. And all of him was massively oversized, like a statue in a temple.

  My heart was throbbing and pounding in my throat. I didn’t think I could talk my way out of this, but I sure tried. “I...I’m sorry. I didn’t know who you were. I thought you were just another…something…from the Booke.” My voice sounded tinny and pathetic to my own ears.

  He cast a glance of disdain toward the Booke of the Hidden lying on the floor. The Booke didn’t seem to care about his presence. In fact, I could feel exactly what the Booke thought of him, and it wasn’t impressed. Easy for you to be brave, I thought at the Booke. You can’t be destroyed like I could.

  Baphomet pointed toward the floor. “Bow down to me, and I’ll consider your fate.”

  Jeff had shifted back into a werewolf, snarling with his blond hackles up, and Erasmus shied away toward the wall. When I looked to him for what to do, he was at a loss.

  Hey, if it would get us all out of this alive, I was all for a little humiliation. I got down on one knee, when Jeff suddenly howled.

  Baphomet stepped forward, his cloven hoofs clacking on the linoleum floor. “Keep your beast in check.”

  “Jeff!” I hissed desperately. “No!”

  He growled but stayed beside me. I was afraid he’d leap at any moment, and I didn’t know how to get across to him that you didn’t attack gods. I had done it before with my crossbow, and he’d broken it. In fact, he was staring at it with annoyance—a strange expression to see on a goat face.

  Well, I must be terrified if I’m making these comments in my head, I thought. Because I pretty much was terrified. Too terrified to speak. I finished getting down on both knees and hung my head, but I still kept a tight grip of the crossbow. It was armed with God knows what.

  The god moved forward again, moving past me to glare at Erasmus. “Demon. You anger me, as well.”

  Erasmus said nothing. He kept his head down and looked at the floor. I didn’t like seeing him so cowed. He was supposed to act superior to everyone around him. This was not the demon I knew.

  Baphomet sneered and snarled, “I never liked you and your book.”

  Still Erasmus said nothing.

  The god took a step forward, reared back, and kicked Erasmus with that hard hoof. If Baphomet had been the size of a man it might not have hurt so much, but he was ten times bigger. Erasmus crumpled, and I jerked toward him.

  Talons suddenly dug into my scalp, and I was yanked up by my hair. I screamed.

  Erasmus moved toward me, and Jeff barked.

  “Kylie Strange,” growled Baphomet, turning me this way and that, glaring into my face with those weird goat eyes. I grabbed his wrist trying to spare my poor scalp and hair. He glanced at Erasmus, then back at me. “Why aren’t you dead by now, Kylie Strange?”

  “I’ve…got a job to do,” I gritted out.

  “That’s never stopped the demon before.” He chuckled. “Maybe he’s not done playing with you yet. You are very amusing.”

  I lifted the crossbow and shoved it into his stomach.

  “Kylie, no!” cried Erasmus.

  The god looked down…and we locked gazes.

  I fired.

  He howled in pain as the bolt shot through him, and he dropped me. I tumbled to the floor and rolled toward Erasmus. He grabbed me just as another winged beast descended from the broken roof and set upon Baphomet.

  Andras.

  He scratched and clawed, but it was like swatting at a hummingbird. Baphomet was so much bigger, yet Andras was so much angrier. “She’s my kill!” he cried over and over.

  Erasmus didn’t stick around for the floor show. Everything vanished. I felt the strange coldness as we transported to the car.

  I stood unsteadily, stunned at what had just occurred, when a blond wolf burst through the door. As he ran, he shifted into a naked man, scooped up his discarded clothes, and jumped into the car.

  “Go, go, go!” he yelled, slapping the outside of my Jeep through the open window.

  He didn’t have to tell me twice. I slammed the car into drive and tore out of there. Amid the cries and howls coming from the mortuary, no one would notice the squeal of my tires.

  Erasmus was suddenly in the back seat, twisting around to look behind us.

  “Thanks, Erasmus,” I said breathily. “That was fast thinking.”

  “You never should have shot him again.”

  “He was already angry enough to kill me. How much deader could I get?”

  “There are things he could do. He’s a god. He can prolong your agony. Keep you barely alive enough to suffer in torment for years.”

  “Oh.” That didn’t sound good.

  I gripped the wheel, driving like a bat out of hell, fish-tailing all over the road. When I dared look back through my rearview mirror, I saw something tear through the sky and then felt the deep boom of explosions. Crimson and yellow flashes sparked over roof tops in the dis
tance, and smoke billowed from different parts of town.

  “Baphomet is angered,” said Erasmus.

  “What’s he doing?”

  “He’s wreaking havoc throughout your village. I have seen him raze entire cities to the ground.”

  “What? He can’t do that!”

  “He can. He’s a god.”

  “What can we do?”

  “Keep driving!”

  I slammed my foot down on the accelerator and squealed down the wet streets. Cranking the steering wheel hard at the last minute, I made a dicey turn at Alderbrook Lane. The Jeep titled precariously before finally righting itself. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Jeff grip the grab handle above the window with both hands as he slid around his seat. No one had had time for seatbelts.

  Then he stared out the windshield, blinking. “What’s that glowing thing?”

  I looked, trying to catch a glimpse of what he was seeing and nearly sent us off the road. “What do you mean? I don’t see anything.”

  “Those glowing lines.”

  “He means the ley lines,” said Erasmus.

  “Wait. You can see them, Jeff?”

  “Yeah. Like a greenish glow heading up the hill toward the house.”

  “Ley lines,” Erasmus said again. “Lines of power.”

  We didn’t say anything else until we made it to my grandpa’s house. Behind us in Moody Bog, the fury in the sky seemed to have calmed. It didn’t look like Baphomet was bent on destroying everything. At least, not yet.

  As if we hadn’t just escaped certain death, Jeff was studying the ley lines I couldn’t see. “They’re glowing,” Jeff said in wonder as I parked the car.

  “Didn’t you see them before?” I asked.

  Erasmus got out of the Jeep. “He is becoming more and more attuned with the Netherworld. He can already read demon languages. He’s become more creature than man.”

  “Don’t say that.” I grabbed Erasmus and pulled him aside as Jeff made his way to the darkened porch. “He’s having a hard enough time with all this,” I whispered harshly. “Don’t start calling him a…a monster.”

  “But that is what he is.”