They moved over to a pair of worn easy chairs and seated themselves. Sunlight filtered, sharp-edged, through cracks in the drawn blinds, and Matchbox cars lay overturned on the carpet like miniature accidents.
“Mr. Spence, as a law enforcement officer yourself, you are undoubtedly familiar with the work we do,” Findo Gask opened the conversation. “I’m here in Hopewell because of my work, and I need your help. But I don’t want anyone else to know about this, not even your superiors. Usually, we try to work openly with the local law enforcement agencies, but in this case that isn’t possible. At least, not yet. That’s why I’ve come to your house rather than approach you at your office. No one but you even knows we are here.”
He paused. “I understand you are acquainted with a young woman named Nest Freemark.”
Larry Spence looked startled. “Nest? Sure, but I don’t think she would ever—”
“Please, Mr. Spence, don’t jump to conclusions,” Gask interrupted smoothly, cutting him short. “Just let me finish. The bureau’s interest in Miss Freemark is only peripheral in this matter. Our real interest is in a man named John Ross.”
Spence was still holding the dish towel, twisting the fabric between his big hands nervously. He saw what he was doing and set the towel aside. He cleared his throat. “I never heard of anyone named John Ross.”
Findo Gask nodded. “I didn’t think you had. But Nest Freemark knows him quite well. Their friendship was formed some years ago when she was still a little girl and highly impressionable. He was an older man, good looking in a rugged sort of way, and very attentive toward her. He was a friend of her dead mother, and Nest was eager to make the connection with him for that reason if for no other. I suspect that she had quite a crush on him. She formed a strong attachment to him in any case, and she still thinks of him as her close friend.”
Gask chose his words carefully, working on the assumption that Larry Spence already felt possessive about Nest and would not welcome the idea of a rival, particularly one to whom she was attracted.
“John Ross is not the man Miss Freemark thinks he is, Mr. Spence,” he continued earnestly. “He is a very dangerous criminal. She believes him to be her knight in shining armor, the man she knew fifteen years ago, the handsome, older man who paid so much attention to a young, insecure girl. She has deceived herself, and she will not be quick to change her thinking.”
He was laying it on a bit thick, but when dealing with a man as enamored of a woman as Larry Spence was of Nest Freemark, he could get away with it.
“What’s he done?” Spence demanded, stiffening in his seat, ready to charge out and do battle with his duplicitous, unsavory rival. Gask smiled inwardly.
“I’d prefer not to discuss that aspect of the case with you, Mr. Spence.”
Let him use his imagination,
Gask thought. “What should be of concern to you, as it is to us, is not so much what he’s done elsewhere, but what he may do once he comes here.”
“He’s coming to Hopewell?” Spence swallowed. “So you think he’ll look up Nest?”
Gask nodded, pleased that the deputy was doing all the work for him. “There is every reason to believe he will try to contact her. When he does, he will ask her to keep his presence a secret. He will lay low for the duration of his visit. He will not show himself readily. That’s where you come in.”
Larry Spence leaned forward, his hands knotted. “What do you want me to do?”
Findo Gask wished everything in life were this easy. “Miss Freemark is your friend. She knows of your interest in her, and she will not be suspicious if you find an excuse to visit her. Do so. Do so at least once every day. Get inside her house any way you can and look around. You may not see Ross, but you may see some sign of his presence. If you do, don’t do anything foolish. Just call this number immediately.”
Gask drew out a white business card and handed it to Larry Spence. It bore his fake identity and rank and a local number to which an answer phone would respond.
“I don’t have to tell you how grateful the bureau is for your cooperation, Mr. Spence,” Gask announced, rising to his feet. “I won’t take up any more of your time today, but I’ll stay in touch.”
He shook the deputy’s hand, leaving a final imprint of his presence so that the other would not be quick to forget what he had been told. “Penny!” he called down the hallway.
Penny Dreadful emerged on cue, smiling demurely, trying to hide the hungry look in her eyes. She was like this every time she got around children. Gask took her by the arm and steered her out the front door, nodding in the direction of Larry Spence as they departed.
“I was just starting to have fun,” she pouted. “I had some of my toys out, and I was showing him how to cut things. I took off one of my fingers with a razor.” She giggled and held up the severed digit, then stuck it back in place, ligaments and flesh knitting seamlessly.
“Penny, Penny, Penny,” he sighed wearily.
“Don’t get your underwear in a bundle, Gramps. I made sure he won’t remember any of it until tonight, after he’s asleep, when he’ll wake up screaming. Deputy daddy will think it’s just a bad dream.”
They climbed back into the car, clicking their seat belts into place. Findo Gask wondered how much longer he was going to be able to keep her in line. It was bad enough with Twitch, but to have Penny pushing the envelope as well was a bit much. He rolled down the window and breathed in the winter air. The temperature had risen to almost forty, and the day felt warm and crisp against his skin. Odd, he thought, that he could still feel things like that, even in a body that wasn’t his.
He thought for a moment about the enormity of the struggle between the Word and the Void. It had been going on since the dawn of time, a hard-fought, bitter struggle for control of the human race. Sometimes one gained the upper hand, sometimes the other. But the Void always gained a little more ground in these exchanges because the Word relied on the strengths of humans to keep in balance the magic that held the world together and the Void relied on their weaknesses to knock it askew. It was a foregone conclusion as to which would ultimately prevail. The weaknesses of humans would always erode their strengths. There might be more humans than demons, but numbers alone were insufficient to win this battle.
And while it was true that demons were prone to self-destruct, humans were likely to get there much quicker.
“Home, Penny,” he instructed, realizing she was waiting for him to tell her what to do.
She pulled out into the street, swerving suddenly toward a cat that just barely managed to get out of the way. “I was listening to you in there,” she declared suddenly.
He nodded. “Good for you.”
“So what’s the point of having this dork hang around Miss Olympic Big Bore to find out if this Ross guy is staying with her?”
“What’s the matter, Penny? Don’t you believe in cooperating with your local law enforcement officers?”
She was staring at the road intently. “Like that matters to you, Gramps. We could find out easy enough if Ross is out there without help from Deputy Dawg. I don’t get it.”
He stretched his lanky frame and shrugged. “You don’t have to get it, Penny. You just have to do what you’re told.”
She pouted in silence a moment, then said, “He’ll just get in the way, Gramps. You’ll see.”
Findo Gask smiled.
Right you are,
Penny,
he thought.
That’s just exactly what he’ll do. I’m counting on it.
CHAPTER 4
D
riving home from church, Nest Freemark brooded some more about John Ross. It was a futile exercise, one that darkened her mood considerably more than she intended. Ross was a flashpoint for all the things about her life that troubled her. Even though he wasn’t directly responsible for any of them, he was the common link. By the time she parked the car in her driveway and climbed out, she was ready to get back in again and start driving to some other time zone.
She went inside resignedly, knowing there was nothing she could do to stop him from coming to see her if that’s what he intended to do, nothing she could do to prevent yet another upheaval in her life. She changed into jeans and a sweatshirt and pulled on heavy walking shoes, then went into the kitchen to fix herself some lunch. She sat alone at the worn, wooden table she had shared with Gran for so many years, wondering what advice the old lady would give her about John Ross. She could just imagine. Gran had been a no-nonsense sort, the kind who took life’s challenges as they came and dealt with them as best she could. She hadn’t been the sort to fantasize about possibilities and what-ifs. It was a lesson that hadn’t been lost on her granddaughter.
Polishing off a glass of milk and a sandwich of leftover chicken, she pulled on her winter parka and walked out the back door. Tomorrow was the winter solstice, and the days had shortened to barely more than eight hours. Already the sun was dropping westward, marking the passing of the early afternoon. By four-thirty, it would be dark. Even so, the air felt warm this winter day, and she left her parka open, striding across her backyard toward the hedgerow and the park. Her old sandbox and tire swing were gone, crumbled with age and lack of use years ago. The trees and bushes were a tangle of bare, skeletal limbs, webbing across the blue sky, casting odd shadows on the wintry gray-green grass. It was a time of sleep, of the old year and its seasons passing into the new, of waiting patiently for rebirth. Nest Freemark wondered if her own life was keeping pace or just standing still.
She pushed through a gap in the bare branches of the hedge and crossed the service road that ran behind her house. Sinnissippi Park stretched away before her, barren and empty in the winter light. The crossbar at the entrance was down. Residents living in the houses that crowded up against its edges walked their dogs and themselves and played with their kids in the snow when there was snow to be played in, but there was no one about at the moment. In the evenings, weather permitting, the park opened from six to ten at night for tobogganing on the park slide and ice skating on the bayou.
If the temperature dropped and the forecast for snow proved out, both would be open by tomorrow night.
She hiked deliberately toward the cliffs, passing through a familiar stand of spruce clustered just beyond the backstop of the nearest baseball diamond, and Pick dropped from its branches onto her shoulder.
“You took your sweet time getting out here!” he snapped irritably, settling himself in place against the down folds of her collar.
“Church ran a little long,” she replied, refusing to be baited. Pick was always either irritable or coming up on it, so she was used to his abrupt pronouncements and sometimes scathing rebukes. “You probably got a lot done without me anyway.”
“That’s not the point!” he snapped. “When you make a commitment—”
“—you stick to it,” she finished, having heard this chestnut at least a thousand times. “But I can’t ignore the rest of my life, either.”
Pick muttered something unintelligible and squirmed restlessly. A hundred and sixty-five years old, he was a sylvan, a forest creature composed of sticks and moss, conceived by magic, and born in a pod. In every woods and forest in the world, sylvans worked to balance the magic that was centered there so that all living things could coexist in the way the Word had intended. It was not an easy job and not without its disappointments; many species had been lost through natural evolution or the depredations of humans. Even woods and forests were destroyed, taking with them all the creatures who lived there, including the sylvans who tended them. Erosion of the forest magic over the passing of the centuries had been slow, but steady, and Pick declared often and ominously that time was running out.
“The park looks pretty good,” she offered, banishing such thoughts from her mind, trying to put a positive spin on things for the duration of her afternoon.
Pick was having none of it. “Appearances are deceiving. There’s trouble brewing.”
“Trouble of what sort?”
“Ha! You haven’t even noticed, have you?”
“Why don’t you just tell me?”
They crossed the entry road and walked up toward the turnaround at the west end that overlooked the Rock River from the edge of the bluffs. Beyond the chain-link fence marking the park’s farthest point lay Riverside Cemetery. She had not been out to the graves of her mother or grandparents in more than a week, and she felt a pang of guilt at her oversight.
“The feeders have been out,” Pick advised with a grunt, “skulking about the park in more numbers than I’ve seen in a long time.”
“How many?”
“Lots. Too many to count. Something’s got them stirred up, and I don’t know what it is.”
Shadowy creatures that lurked on the edges of people’s lives, feeders lapped up the energy given off by expenditure of emotions. The darker and stronger the emotions, the greater the number of feeders who gathered to feast. Parasitic beings who responded to their instincts, they did not judge and they did not make choices. Most humans never saw them, except when death came violently and unexpectedly, and they were the last image to register before the lights went out for good. Only those like Nest, who were born with magic themselves, knew there were feeders out there.
Pick gave her a sharp look, his pinched wooden face all wizened and rough, his gnarled limbs drawn up about his crooked body so that he took on the look of a bird’s nest. His strange, flat eyes locked on her. “You know something about this, don’t you?”
She nodded. “Maybe.”
She told him about Findo Gask and the possibility that John Ross was returning to Hopewell. “A demon’s presence would account for all the feeders, I expect,” she finished.
They walked up through the playground equipment and picnic tables that occupied the wooded area situated across the road from the Indian mounds and the bluffs. When they reached the turnaround, she slowed, suddenly aware that Pick hadn’t spoken a word since she had told him about Findo Gask and John Ross. He hadn’t even told her what work he wanted her to do that day in the park.
“What do you think?” she asked, trying to draw him out.
He sat motionless on her shoulder, silent and remote. She crossed the road to the edge of the bluffs and moved out to where she could see the frozen expanse of the Rock River. Even with the warmer temperatures of the past few days, the bayou that lay between the near shore and the raised levy on which the railroad tracks had been laid remained frozen. Beyond, where the wider channel opened south on its way to the Mississippi, the Rock was patchy with ice, the swifter movement of the water keeping the river from freezing over completely. That would change when January arrived.
“Another demon,” Pick said softly. “You’d think one in a lifetime would be enough.”
She nodded wordlessly, eyes scanning the tangle of tree trunks and limbs immediately below, searching for movement in the lengthening shadows. The feeders, if they were out yet, would be there, watching.
“Some sylvans go through their entire lives and never encounter a demon.” Pick’s voice was soft and contemplative. “Hundreds of years, and not a one.”
“It’s my fault,” she said.
“Not hardly!”
“It is,” she insisted. “It began with my father.”
“Which was your grandmother’s mistake!” he snapped.
She glanced down at him, all fiery-eyed and defensive of her, and she gave him a smile. “Where would I be without you, Pick?”
“Somewhere else, I expect.”
She sighed. Over the past fifteen years she had attempted to move away from the park. To leave the park was unthinkable for Pick; the park was his home and his charge. For the sylvan, nothing else existed. It was different for her, of course, but Pick didn’t see it that way. Pick saw things in black-and-white terms. Even an inherited obligation—in this case, an obligation passed down through six generations of Freemark women to help care for the park—wasn’t to be ignored, no matter what. She belonged here, working with him, keeping the magic in balance and looking after the park. But this was all Pick knew. It was all he had done for more than one hundred fifty years. Nest didn’t have one hundred fifty years, and she wasn’t so sure that tending the magic and looking after the park was what she wanted to spend the rest of her life doing.
She looked off across the Rock River, at the hazy midafternoon twilight beginning to steal out of the east as the shortened winter day slipped westward. “What do you want to do today, Pick?” she asked quietly.
He shrugged. “Too late to do much, I expect.” He did not say it in a gruff way; he simply sounded resigned. “Let’s just have a look around, see if anything needs doing, and we can see to it tomorrow.” He sniffed and straightened. “If you think you can spare the time, of course.”
“Of course,” she echoed.
They left the bluffs and walked down the road from the turnaround to where it split, one branch doubling back under a bridge to descend to the base of the bluffs and what she thought of as the feeder caves, the other continuing on along the high ground to the east end of the park, where the bulk of the woods and picnic areas were located. They followed the latter route, working their way along the fringes of the trees, taking note of how everything was doing, not finding much that didn’t appear as it should. The park was in good shape, even if Pick wasn’t willing to acknowledge as much. Winter had put her to sleep in good order, and the magic, dormant and restful in the long, slow passing of the season, was in perfect balance.
The world of Sinnissippi Park is at peace,
Nest thought to herself, glancing off across the open flats of the ball diamonds and playgrounds and through the skeletal trees and rolling stretches of woodland. Why couldn’t her world be the same?
But she knew the answer to that question. She had known it for a long time. The answer was Wraith.
Three years earlier, she had been acclaimed as the greatest American long-distance runner of all time. She had already competed in one Olympics and had won a pair of gold medals and set two world records. She had won thirty-two consecutive races since. She owned a combined eight world titles in the three and five thousand. She was competing in her second Olympics, and she had won the three by such a wide margin that a double in the five seemed almost a given.
She remembered that last race vividly. She had watched the video a thousand times. She could replay it in her own mind from memory, every moment, frame by frame.
Looking off into the trees, she did so now.
S
he breaks smoothly from the start line, content to stay with the pack for several laps, for this longer distance places a higher premium on patience and endurance than on speed. There are eight lead changes in the first two thousand meters, and then her competitors begin boxing her in. Working in shifts, the Ukrainians, the Ethiopians, a Moroccan, and a Spaniard pin her against the inside of the track. She has gone undefeated in the three- and five-thousand-meter events for four years. You don’t do that, no matter how well liked or respected you are, and not make enemies. In any case, she has never been all that close to the other athletes. She trains with her college coach or alone. She stays by herself when she travels to events. She keeps apart because
of the nature of her life. She is careful not to get too close to anyone. Her legacy of magic has made her wary.
With fifteen hundred meters to go, she is locked in the middle of a pack of runners and unable to break free.
At the thousand-meter mark, a scuffle for position ensues, and she is pushed hard, loses her balance, and tumbles from the track.
She comes back to her feet almost as quickly as she has gone down and regains the track. Furious at being trapped, jostled, and knocked sprawling, she gives chase, unaware that she is bleeding profusely from a spike wound on her ankle. Zoning into that place where she sometimes goes when she runs, where there is only the sound of her breathing and beat of her heart, she catches and passes the pack. She doesn’t just draw up on them gradually; she runs them down. There is something raw and primal working inside her as she cranks up her speed a notch at a time. The edges of her vision turn red and fuzzy, her breathing burns in her throat like fire, and the pumping of her arms and legs threatens to tear her body apart.
She is running with such determination and with so little regard for herself that she fails to realize that something is wrong.
Then she hears the gasps of the Ethiopians as she passes them in the three and four positions and sees the look of horror on the face of the Spaniard when she catches her two hundred meters from the finish.
A tiger-striped face surges in the air before her, faintly visible in the shimmer of heat and dust. Wraith is emerging from her body. He is breaking free, coming out of her, unbidden and out of control. Wraith, formed of her father’s demon magic and bequeathed to her as a child. Wraith, created as her protector, but become a presence that threatens in ways she can barely tolerate. Wraith, who lives inside her now, a magic she cannot rid herself of and therefore must work constantly to conceal.
It happens all at once. Emerging initially as a faint image that clings to her in a shimmer of light, he begins to take recognizable shape. Only those who are close can see what is happening, and even they are unsure. But their uncertainty is only momentary. If he comes out of her all the way, there will be no more doubt. If he breaks free entirely, he may attack the other runners.