Lord of the Feast, page 21
When the elevator opened on the subbasement, she stepped out and the antechamber’s fluorescent lights activated. The air here felt colder than usual, and the runes and sigils etched into the Repository’s iron door seemed to be glowing faintly. Before she could lose her nerve, she stepped forward, spoke the words that would allow her to pass through the Repository’s wardspells unharmed, then unlocked the door. She drew in a deep breath, pulled the door open, and stepped inside.
As usual, the light from the antechamber failed to penetrate the Repository, and she found herself surrounded by darkness. She waited and within moments soft white pinpoints of light began to glow all around her as the Gathered manifested. The specks grew larger, joined, formed featureless humanoid shapes. The wraiths flowed through the air like ethereal swimmers moving through invisible water, slowly at first, then with increasing speed. They whirled around Caprice, and she felt like a small fish surrounded by a school of hungry sharks. The protective spells that prevented the Gathered from immediately attacking anyone who entered the Repository would only keep them at bay for so long, so she needed to work fast.
She wished she had The Book of Depravity to guide her, but it had been lost in the destruction of the Shardlow mansion. She had acquired other occult tomes over the years, but none as powerful, and none contained spells designed to accomplish what she hoped to do here now. She would have to wing it, and when it came to conducting magic, improvising was dangerous as hell.
Enough stalling, she thought.
She raised her arms, hands up, palms outward, and began.
“You who have been freed from the shackles of mortality, heed me! You can see many things which are hidden from the living, and I command you to use that sight to aid me now. My niece and nephew hid two of the Lord’s parts from me, and I desire to learn their location. You are in the presence of the Lord—” she gestured to the recessed area in the wall that contained the eyeless, brainless head, “—and thus you are connected to the great one. Use that connection to trace the parts I seek and tell me where I might find them! Tell me what I need to know to succeed!”
The Gathered didn’t respond at first, and Caprice thought she’d failed to reach them. But then the wraiths coalesced, merged into a single glowing form, its light so intense that Caprice was forced to shield her eyes. A thin tendril extruded from the mass and stretched toward the Lord’s head. The tip of the tendril curved down into the skull cavity, and the eye sockets blazed with light. The tendril emerged from the Lord’s mouth, streaked toward Caprice, and stabbed her forehead. She felt as if a metal spike had been driven into her mind, and she let out a cry of pain. An image appeared in her brain, row after row of storage units. She saw a sign that said Stronghold Self-Storage, and then she saw a number: 342. She heard a word whispered in her ears. Collier…. Other images flashed through her mind, ones she sensed were unconnected to the storage unit. A small nondescript building with a plain white door and three people walking toward it. There were two words on the door, painted in black letters. The words were blurry at first, but after a moment they came into focus.
Caprice grinned in triumph. She’d gotten more than she’d bargained for! She’d bade the spirits tell her what she needed to know to be successful, and they’d not only given her the information she’d come for, they’d given her more. She needed to leave and call Ethan back so he—
She felt the icy tendril drill deeper into her brain, into her very soul, and she screamed in agony. She heard a chorus of voices echo within the stone chamber then, speaking as one.
You Gathered us, now we Gather you. We will tear the spirit from your body and use you as our plaything. Pain is different for beings such as us. So much more intense than the merely physical, and there are so many new levels to experience…. We’re going to enjoy introducing you to them all.
Caprice felt energy draining from her body, and she knew the wraiths were killing her. If she couldn’t find a way to break free from them in the next few moments, she knew she was a dead woman, and she had no doubt the spirits would make good on their promise to hurt her in ways that she couldn’t yet conceive of. The pain spread throughout her body, and she found it almost impossible to think. She tried to concentrate past the agony and search her mind for a spell that would allow her to repel the Gathered’s attack, but she couldn’t focus. She continued to weaken, and she knew she was going to die. The Incarnation would not be fulfilled, and the Lord of the Feast would never come into being. She had failed, and the Omniverse was doomed to suffer slowly as the Gyre devoured it one subatomic particle at a time over the course of a trillion-trillion years.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered, voice faint and thin. “I tried….”
The Gathered laughed with malignant glee, but as Caprice’s awareness dwindled, she caught a flash of movement in her peripheral vision, and she heard Axton shout her name.
* * *
She returned to consciousness in the elevator, Axton’s arm around her waist, holding her up. She felt so small, so frail.
“What…” she began, but was unable to complete the thought.
“I tried to use the elevator, but when it took too long to come up, I realized it had been stopped at the subbasement. Only you and I have reason to go there, so I went down to the Repository to see if there had been a security breach of some kind. I found you lying on the floor, the Gathered all around you. I picked you and carried you out of there. The Gathered tried to stop me, but I made it out. What the fuck were you thinking, Caprice? You almost died!”
The elevator reached the basement level where the living quarters were, and when the door opened, Axton helped her out of the car. She wanted to walk on her own, but she wasn’t strong enough yet. She allowed Axton to take her to her room, and once there, she motioned for him to put her in the chair next to her bed.
Axton stood close by, clearly concerned.
“You should really lie down, Caprice. You need to rest, regain your…your strength.”
There was something about the way Axton was looking at her that she didn’t like, but she couldn’t figure out what it was. It didn’t matter right then. She needed to get the information she’d learned to Ethan. She reached inside her suit jacket and pulled out her phone. Her hands felt too stiff and achy to operate the device, so she handed it to Axton.
“Text Ethan. Tell him Stronghold Self-Storage in Collier, unit 342. He’ll know what it means.”
Axton started to do so, and as he worked her phone, she looked down at her hands to see why they hurt so. At first, she didn’t understand what she saw. The hands weren’t hers – they couldn’t be! The finger joints were swollen, skin liver-spotted and paper-thin, and they shook with small, constant tremors. They were the hands of an old woman, one in her eighties or even nineties. She reached up with one of those trembling hands and touched her cheek, found the skin soft, saggy, wrinkled. She understood then what had happened. The Gathered had drained her life energy, just as theirs had been absorbed after their deaths and transferred down to the Repository. Axton had pulled her out of there before the wraiths had been able to drain her completely, but not before they’d turned her into a crone.
She started laughing then, the sound a strained cackle. Fuck those ghosts! She was still alive, and she’d gotten the information Ethan needed. Soon the Lord would walk the face of this world, and even the dead would tremble in its presence.
“Also, tell him not to hurt Kate, that we need to have representatives from both sides of the family during the Incarnation and she should be present during the rite.”
Axton frowned. “That’s not precisely true.”
“No.” She tried to stifle a yawn but it came out anyway. “But I can’t very well tell him the complete truth, can I?”
“Point taken.” Axton tapped on the phone screen for a few moments, then said, “Text sent.” Instead of returning Caprice’s phone to her, he put it on the nightstand next to her bed.
She looked at the phone. Her eyelids were drooping, and it was all she could do to keep them open. Wasn’t there one more thing she was supposed to tell Ethan, an additional bit of information that she’d acquired from the Gathered? Something about a small building with a white door? She was so very tired, though, and she couldn’t remember the details. Maybe they would come to her later.
“Thank you. Now, if you wouldn’t mind, could you help me to the bed?” She yawned again. “I could use a nap.”
* * *
“That’s it.”
Kate pulled the Camry up to unit 342, parked, and cut the engine. Stronghold Self-Storage was an outdoor facility, and all the units looked alike – ugly rectangular orange doors set in long, flat-roofed buildings without much space between them. The car fit in the aisle with room to open the doors on each side of the vehicle, but just barely. Haksaw sat in the passenger seat next to her, hugging the torso tight to his body, as if he feared it might somehow try to escape him.
If anyone had told Kate this morning that by late afternoon she’d be riding around with a necrophiliac serial killer sitting next to her, she’d have told them to lay off the drugs for a while. She wasn’t sure why she’d come to accept Haksaw’s presence so easily. Maybe it was because the whole day had been crazy since Tressa had given her the Lord’s eyes and charged her with collecting the rest of the god’s parts before Ethan did. Maybe she was in shock from having lost four family members in the course of only a few hours, and she wasn’t thinking straight. Maybe it was because she came from an extended family of cultists who worked with magic tomes that had titles like The Book of Depravity. Or maybe it was a combination of all these things. Whatever the reason, Haksaw was, for the moment, a necessary evil – even if she wasn’t yet sure why he was necessary. That didn’t mean she trusted him, though.
Her stomach gurgled loudly. She hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast this morning and it was close to dinnertime now. She might’ve picked up something at a drive-thru along the way but breathing in Haksaw’s horrific body odor during the drive to Collier had made it impossible for her to seriously consider eating. She doubted she’d be able to keep anything down. Hell, the way she felt right now she never wanted to even think about food again.
Lee will never get this stench out, she thought.
Tears threatened then. She’d done her best not to think about her argument with Lee while she’d been driving, but she’d kept her phone on the seat beside her in case they called or texted. But they hadn’t. She wondered if she’d ever hear from them again.
Of course, you will. They’ll need to get the car back eventually.
Maybe they’d be able to talk things out then. She hoped so. But right now she didn’t have time to worry about her relationship. She had work to do.
“Are you okay?” Haksaw asked.
“Hmm? Oh, yeah, I’m all right. Just thinking.”
“About your friend. Don’t worry. The torso says you’ll be together at the end.”
At the end. Kate didn’t like the sound of that.
“It also tells me that there are other parts inside this unit. It’s very excited to be close to them again.” Haksaw patted the torso’s back. “Be patient, love. They’ll be here soon.”
Kate didn’t sense the parts that Reyna and Weston had stored here. Even this close to the torso, she only felt a faint echo of the pain she’d once experienced when in the presence of one of the Lord’s parts. She supposed she was getting used to it or maybe being in the proximity of the parts was changing her somehow. She didn’t want to think about that, so she opened the car door and got out. A moment later, so did Haksaw. He arranged the torso on the passenger seat and buckled the safety belt around it to keep it in place.
“I’ll be close by,” he said, then closed the door and walked over to join Kate. “So now what? We just unlock the door, roll it open, take the arm and leg, and leave?”
“Seems too easy, doesn’t it?”
Kate removed the key from around her neck. It looked ordinary enough. She’d had to use it in order to get the facility’s security gate to open, and presumably all she needed to do now was insert it into the lock on the door, turn it, and voila! Access would be granted. But there had to be more to it than that. Reyna had said that she and Weston had placed wardspells on the unit to protect the arm and leg. What if she needed something more than the key to deactivate them? Thinking of her cousins almost started her crying, but she told herself that she couldn’t give in to sorrow right now. She needed to stay strong and ensure their sacrifice wasn’t wasted.
You also need to be careful, she thought. Once the door was open – assuming they managed to open it – Haksaw would be able to get at the arm and leg. He hadn’t tried to take the Lord’s eyes from her when she’d shown them to him earlier, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t wanted them. He might’ve been biding his time, waiting for the perfect opportunity to take them. And once he added the arm and leg to his collection, he would be well on his way to having a complete set. He claimed the torso spoke to him, at least in some fashion. What if it wanted to join with the other parts and become the Lord of the Feast again? It could be manipulating Haksaw into acquiring the rest of its pieces, and since the man was a killer, Kate doubted he’d hesitate to murder her if she stood in his way. Now she really wished Lee was here. She would’ve felt safer knowing they had her back.
Reyna hadn’t given her any special instructions on how to use the key, maybe because there hadn’t been time, but maybe because none were required. She hoped it was the latter.
“You might want to stay back,” she told Haksaw. “Just in case.”
The man smiled, displaying his rotten teeth. “Don’t have to. Nothing connected with my love would ever hurt me.”
“I hope you’re right.”
She stepped up to the door, inserted the key into the lock, and then – after hesitating only a second – turned it. There was a soft click, but that was all. No shrieking alarms sounded, no mystic defense systems activated. Evidently Reyna had enchanted the key so that when it was used, the defenses were deactivated. Kate removed the key from the lock, put it around her neck again, then bent down to grip the door handle. The door had been closed a long time, and she expected it to be hard to open, but it rolled upward smoothly and with minimal effort on her part. The unit was empty except for a pair of towel-wrapped objects lying in the middle of the concrete floor. She felt a twinge of pain in her head, not severe, but enough to let her know that she’d found what she’d come here for: the Lord’s right arm and right leg.
She started forward but then she felt a hand come down on her shoulder.
This is it, she thought. He’s attacking me.
She spun around, ready to defend herself – although she had no idea how she might do so – but Haksaw made no threatening move toward her. He wasn’t even looking at her. Instead, he was looking into the storage unit.
“The corners,” he said.
She turned back to the unit. At first she didn’t know what he was talking about, but then she saw it: thick shadows clustered in the corners, and the longer she looked at them, the more she realized there was something wrong. The shadows were moving.
“What is that?” she said.
“Something bad,” Haksaw said.
No shit.
The shadows flowed out of the corners like thick black liquid and moved toward the storage unit’s entrance, taking on shape, separating, becoming….
“Rats,” Kate said.
Not ordinary ones, though. These were the size of small dogs, with prominent, almost tusk-like teeth, and their eyes blazed with burning crimson light. They glided toward the wrapped bundles – the arm and leg, Kate assumed – and surrounded them. The creatures fixed their baleful gazes on the humans that dared to invade their territory and hissed. The creatures didn’t move to attack, though, and for this Kate was grateful.
“They don’t like the light,” Haksaw said. “That’s why they’re not coming at us.”
It made sense. This was likely the first time in almost a decade that unit 342 had been opened. These things weren’t used to light. Good thing, too. Kate didn’t know whether she and Haksaw could’ve made it back to the Camry before the rats could swarm over them.
“Have you ever seen rats like these before?” Kate asked.
“Yeah, in the Cannery. When things live too close to Shadow for too long, they change, you know?”
Evidently that was also true for things that lived near the Lord’s body parts. She glanced at Haksaw. He’d had the Lord’s torso in his possession for years, and from what she’d seen, he handled it constantly. What changes had it caused in him?
As long as she and Haksaw remained out here in the sunlight, they’d be safe, and it would be several hours before the sun started to go down. The shadow rats would be confined to the storage unit until then, which was good, but Kate didn’t see how she and Haksaw could get at the Lord’s arm and leg while the creatures guarded them, which was bad.
“How do people in the Cannery deal with creatures like these?”
“We stay the hell away from the fucking things,” Haksaw said. “But when we can’t, we bring the light to them.”
He walked to the Camry’s passenger side, opened the door, reached past the torso, took hold of the rearview mirror, and yanked. The mirror snapped off easily, and he withdrew his arm, shut the door, and returned to Kate. She smiled as he handed the mirror to her.
“Smart.”
She looked up to check the sun’s position, then she experimented with the mirror, turning it one way then another to see which position was best to catch and reflect its rays. The rats hissed in anger and fear when the reflected beam came close, and when it finally struck some of them, they squealed in pain and fled toward the back of the unit, smoke curling from their ebon hides. She moved the mirror around, directing the beam at the other rats with similar results. The problem was that once the beam moved away from where the rats had been, they swiftly returned. She moved the mirror faster, trying to drive away all the rats and make them stay away, but it was no good. Smoking hides or not, they always returned to the arm and leg in the middle of the floor and clustered around them, hissing louder.
