Chills (13 page)

Kathy frowned, reholstering her gun. It was the most reaction from her that Teagan had seen since they'd arrived. He supposed it was possible that she had encountered her share of threatening behavior from cultists and other criminals trying to shake her up, throw her off their trail. Maybe she'd even had her apartment broken into before. But there was likely to be something more upsetting about knowing they'd been in the bedroom, her private space, than anywhere else in the apartment.

Teagan moved off and checked her closet. It, too, was clear. “Did they take anything?” he asked, putting his own weapon away.

“No,” Kathy said with a sigh. “No, it doesn't look like it. I'm guessing the HBS were tipped off by my visit to Charlene Ledders. Now that their precious, delicate ritual of destruction is in motion, they probably don't want us doing anything to upset it.”

“What about your occult research? I'm guessing they were intending on taking it?”

Kathy went over to the bed frame, pulled it with a grunt of effort away from the wall, and gestured toward a slightly worn patch of plaster. She dug a nail under the upper left corner and a slab came away in her hands. “I hid it,” she told him, “in the event that something like this happened.” She pulled a small notebook-sized laptop from the hole, as well as some papers and a thin book. She dropped them on the bed.

“Before we do anything else,” she said, reaching into the hole again, “let's lock this place up again, shall we?” She produced two large mason jars that appeared to be filled with powders or tiny grains of something.

“What are those?” Teagan asked, gesturing with the Camel before he put it back in his mouth.

“This one,” she said, holding up the jar in her left hand with orange-ish powder in it, “is mostly turmeric. It is usually more powerful if ingested, but it'll do for now as a means of warding off whatever watchdogs the cult may have left behind to keep an eye on us. There's also some sea salt in here, a little powdered chalk, and, if you can believe it, some pulverized black tourmaline that I got as a thank-you gift from a client on one of my cases. This jar's kind of like a combination of a security system, barbed wire, and an electromagnetic field. This other one”—she held up the purplish one in her right hand—“is mostly sage. We can burn that. I've found it helpful in clearing out whatever's in the air that entities of various types can latch on to.”

Teagan's expression must have betrayed his skepticism because she smiled sheepishly at him, putting the sage down on the night table to unscrew the cap on the other mixture. “You'll just have to trust me that it works, Reece.” She handed him a scoop of the mixture, which smelled kind of funny, though not unpleasantly so.

“Oh, I trust you, Kat, regarding those particular things that go bump in the night, but what about keeping the human intruders out? Assuming they were the ones who broke in here, how are you going to keep them from coming back?”

She patted her .45. “I'm a light sleeper. Besides, past behavior of the Hand suggests they won't be back tonight. Leaving aside that they have the next phase of the ritual to plan for, it would be too risky now for any one of them to return here. They're like lightning, like that. Now let's get to work.”

Teagan helped her sprinkle the powders around all the doorways, windows, vents, and every other conceivable opening in the bedroom, and then likewise, throughout the apartment. When they were finished, she set out a glass candleholder in each room, sprinkled the sage from the other jar in each, and, with a long-necked kitchen lighter, she set each on fire. The sage smoldered, creating a fragrant smoke that overran the smell of the other stuff she had used. Nevertheless, Kathy opened a few of the windows in the apartment just enough to let the smoke out to prevent it from becoming cloying or setting off the smoke alarm in the hall. When they were done, Kathy closed the windows, then scooped up the laptop, papers, and book from her bed.

“Ready?” she asked him.

“Lead the way into the realm of darkness, my lovely,” he said, grinning, and was pleased to see it elicited a grin back.

Teagan followed her and her research into the den. She righted her chair, dropped the papers and book on the desk with a thump, and then flipped open the cover of the laptop and turned it on.

“I keep everything in an encrypted file on here. I have it saved to one of those password-protected cloud things, too.”

“Smart, that,” he said, impressed. She'd often professed to be an utter Luddite when it came to computers, but it didn't really surprise him that she'd downplayed the extent of her technical skills. She was a little bit like Columbo like that, letting people believe whatever preconceived limitations they formed, and occasionally encouraging those notions so that she would be underestimated. Teagan thought she took a certain pleasure in swooping in on a case with a victory that stunned those who had judged her.

After what felt like several long minutes of clicking and typing, clicking and typing, a PDF popped up on screen.

“Here we go,” she said, sinking into the chair.

“What is it?” he asked, leaning in over her shoulder. This close to her, he could smell her perfume—something light and floral—and it pleased him immensely.

Some of the document was in other languages. Teagan recognized Latin, Greek, Japanese, German, and Egyptian hieroglyphics, but there were portions in a language he had never seen before. It looked like a cross between complex pictographs and cuneiform. Interspersed between these sections and wrapping around diagrams and other graphics was the English text.

“Well, not a counter-spell,
per se
, but a pretty good idea of where to find it. See, these passages here”—she pointed to the language he didn't recognize—“are in a special sort of secret language of traders—people in, uh, my line of work, I guess—who need to exchange information from forbidden or banned grimoires. It looks like nonsense, a made-up language, right? It's not. It's designed so that sensitive information isn't accidentally accessed by the uninitiated, and so it can pass without trouble under the noses of most gatekeepers. There is an underground compilation series of books in this language—I have a copy of every volume except the most recent—that contains accumulated knowledge from all of the most important books, scrolls, and documents on the occult in the world—
The Munich Manual
,
Codex Seraphinianus
,
The Voynich Manuscript
, the
Heptameron
,
The Book of Doors
, the
Libro Novem Saecula
,
The Picatrix
, the
Oera Linda Book
, oh, and
The Red Dragon Grand Grimoire
, of course . . .”

Seeing Teagan's polite but confused nodding, she moved on. “Anyway, if there is a spell to counteract the one used by the Hand of the Black Stars, one of these PDFs will have it, or tell us where to find it.”

“Right then. Ah, anything I can do to help? Other than try to read that?”

“Pour me a drink?” She winked at him, then turned back to the computer. “Glasses are in the kitchen cabinet all the way to the right. Bottom shelf. Vodka . . . that should be on the counter by the sink.”

Teagan headed toward the kitchen. The occult aspects of the case were, frankly, beyond him. He'd grown up in a strictly, stiflingly Roman Catholic family, and he had shirked most aspects of religion, anyone's religion, a long time ago. While his upbringing had given him some understanding of a worldview on supernatural evil, what Kathy was talking about was different. It was science and science fiction and magic and religion and physics and mathematics all sort of rolled into one. That somehow made it more terrifying. It wasn't just a matter of simple faith, but also of invasive and immutable truths that belief systems of pure faith and no proof sought to bury under layers of condemnation.

He found the glasses and poured out two vodkas, and was set to carry them back into the den when his cell phone rang. The sound was jarring. It had been days since he'd gotten so much as a text message, and the ringtone seemed almost unearthly and out of place in that little kitchen. He put the glasses down and took the cell out of his back pocket. It was Morris.

“Hey there, mate,” he answered the phone.

“Teagan! It works! The cell, I mean. I had my doubts I'd be able to get through. I couldn't reach Jack at all.”

“Aye, I was a bit surprised meself to hear the mobile ring,” Teagan admitted. “How're you holding up out there in the snow?”

“It's . . . quiet. It's kind of how I imagined a nuclear winter might be.”

“Spend much time imagining such things, do you?”

“In this line of work,” Morris said, “I imagine a lot of ways the human race will ultimately fuck itself over.”

Teagan smiled thinly. “Not much left to the imagination these last few days.”

“Tell me about it. How are you and Kathy?”

“Fine. We're at her apartment. She's looking for the counter-spell to the one that caused this mess.”

“I hope she finds it,” Morris said. He didn't sound all that confident.

“So what's going on?”

“Well, I found out about that figure you and Jack described,” Morris said.

“Really?”

“Yeah. Took some leg work, by the way. Not the kind of thing you can just Google, even if the Internet were working right now.”

“You're a prince among men.”

“No kidding. Just left the home of a local college professor to ask about it. Their theology expert, Trina Majoram. She's a recognized authority—right here in town, no less—on obscure ancient religious symbolism. The rituals, mythologies, gods and goddesses, all that sort of thing. I guess you could say she bridges the gap between the church of my Sunday school days and the cults of Kathy's, uh, devil worshippers.”

Teagan balanced the cell between his ear and shoulder and brought the glasses of vodka into the den. He handed Kathy hers, and she nodded a thanks, then mouthed out
Who?
and gestured at the phone. Teagan switched the phone to his free hand and responded with
Morris.
To Morris, he said, “Did she recognize the description of the figure? I'm putting you on speaker so Kathy can hear.”

“Yeah.” Morris's voice came through a little tinny on the speaker setting, but he was audible. “She confirmed that such descriptions historically have been found in relation to ritualistic torture-sacrifices offered to gods of other worlds. Almost exclusively, those rituals were attempted by that Hand of the Black Stars cult Kathy mentioned. She said there isn't much written about them, but she did know they were a bad, bad group of people. They're into some pretty freaky stuff. Cannibalism, piquerism, necrophilia, cryptozoophilia—hell, some of this stuff I don't know the meaning of, and I don't want to know. But they've been doing these things a long time. There's evidence of them at least as far back as the Nineteenth Dynasty of ancient Egypt. Old-school, pissed-off, violent group of psychos, as if we didn't know that by now.”

“Aye, that's what our Kathy says about them. What about the figure? How does it relate to this ritual?” He took a healthy swig of the vodka. It burned a little in his throat—Teagan was more of a whiskey man, himself—but it warmed his chest.

Morris cleared his throat. “Well, Majoram told me—” There was a sound like papers being shuffled on Morris's end. “Geez, it's complicated. Okay, so according to Majoram, they're scouts of sorts, I guess. They're mentioned as demons in other religions, but she recognized them all right. If evidence points to these Black Stars nut jobs finding a door to a dangerous alternate dimension, like Kathy said, a portal between worlds, then they must have found the keyhole, too. Fashioned a key and unlocked the door—you know, in a metaphysical, supernatural sense, I guess. When it opened—the door, I mean—the snow and everything in it came through. And those figures, the scout-demons or whatever, control it all—the snow and ice, the monsters, probably even the cultists at this point. Majoram called them the Blue People.”

“The Blue People? Charlene mentioned them,” Kathy said, then turned to the PDF to check for the phrase.

“Yup. They're . . . cleaners, I guess you could say. Interdimensional fixers. They and the monsters and the snow are meant to wipe out everything. All life, anything that might complicate the arrival of... others. Apparently, the cultists think that once the Blue People are done making Colby an empty, frozen wasteland, the conditions will be right for these ‘others' to come through that door and take over.”

“Sounds like that's bang on with what that header told Kat.”

“That's what I thought, too. And why go to all this trouble destroying Colby, you ask?”

“I did wonder,” Teagan replied with a small smile to Kathy.

“Because in exchange for preparing the way, these cultists will get their rocks off on being the new favorite pets of whatever ‘others' come through that door. Those ‘others' would, and I quote, ‘provide knowledge of the universe, of other universes, and of the forces which create and destroy, cure and kill, forces which bend time and fold space. Bodies would be changed to withstand the powers unlocked in the mind. ' ”

“So wait—” Kathy began.

“There's more.” Morris flipped through papers again on the other end. “These ancient beings were ‘formed in and of the pure dark of starless space from which all of creation and destruction springs forth.' Sound like those Greater Gods Kathy's nut job mentioned?”

“Aye.” The smile slipped from Teagan's face.