“Easy,” Tam said, making no attempt to keep his voice down. Maybe he was talking to me; maybe to a mage whose door slamming might be about to escalate into deadly spell slinging.
Or a vindictive house.
“Easy,” he repeated.
I’d take it easy, but I wasn’t taking my hand off of my sword.
The lights slowly came up. Pinpricks of flame like tiny eyes grew into candlelight. Either Kesyn Badru or the house was being polite to a pair of night-vision-impaired elves, or he and/or it wanted to get a good look at our last expressions before he/it killed us.
Tam’s home had been stripped clean. This house was badly in need of cleaning. It was all too obviously untouched, either by Kesyn, Khrynsani, or a housekeeper. The marble floor in the entry wasn’t the only thing that looked like it hadn’t been cleaned since Chigaru’s mom was on the throne. A long hallway extended into spooky darkness on our right. The furnishings appeared to be nice enough, but it was difficult to tell for sure since everything was covered in sheets of cobwebs, moving as if with a life of their own in the disturbance of air when the door had slammed shut. I hoped we wouldn’t be meeting the spiders that had made those.
“My nerves don’t need this,” I muttered.
“Well, that locked door will keep anyone from coming at us from behind,” Imala noted.
“I’m more concerned about what’ll come at us from the front.”
“Sir,” Tam called.
Silence.
Mychael shimmered slightly with a protection spell; Tam likewise shielded. Their combined wards reached back and around, enfolding me and Imala in their protection.
Imala gave an exasperated sigh, stopping just short of an eye roll.
“It’s a big house, Tam,” Mychael said. “If he’d barricaded himself anywhere, where would it be?”
Tam took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and I assumed tried to sense Kesyn Badru.
I began to sense the house.
I didn’t hear any sound other than our own breathing, and nothing moved except for the shifting cobwebs. Yet I had a growing awareness of a presence, a solitary entity, not the haunting of spirits or demons that I’d expected. I’d never been able to detect anything like this before, even when I’d had my magic. Maybe the absence of magic enabled me to perceive other things, other levels of existence. Who knew? I certainly didn’t. And the how and why didn’t matter; finding Kesyn Badru and living long enough to get out with our sanity intact did. However, my awareness of this thing could be knowledge; and an opponent you knew was an opponent you stood a better chance of surviving.
The entity didn’t live—or whatever—in the house; it was the house. Not merely the stones and wood, this thing had been here before the house had been built, buried for literal ages, deep in the bedrock below the foundation. When the house was built, its foundation bit into the bedrock containing the entity. Over the years it had become a part of the house itself, indistinguishable from the timber and granite. The closest my mind could comprehend was that the house’s wooden frame had become the entity’s skeleton; the granite walls its outer shell.
It was ageless, crouched and waiting.
And it was hungry.
Like certain predators, the entity knew how to attract its preferred prey. People with volatile emotions, unbalanced minds, violent tendencies—the entity called to them when they passed close enough to the land and later the house built on the land that it had taken for its own. It called to them and eventually claimed them—as well as those who its seduced ones had brought with them—friends, lovers, family, children. It fed on the violent emotions of its chosen prey, and the terror of their victims.
Fed and was content.
The entity wasn’t content now.
It hadn’t called to us, and we sure as hell didn’t want to be here. Which meant that none of us were certifiable, which was good to know. But just because none of us were nuts now didn’t mean the entity didn’t have the ability to make us that way, and the thing had locked the door so it could give it its best shot. It wasn’t like we didn’t have anything for the entity to work with. We all had violent tendencies aplenty. This thing hadn’t survived and thrived for however long as it had by starving. When it hungered, it would feed, one way or another.
Exactly like the Saghred.
I hadn’t fed the Saghred—at least not of my own free will. And I wasn’t feeding this thing, either.
“Raine?” A voice called my name from far away.
I snapped out of my thoughts to Mychael’s hands on my shoulders, shaking me.
I looked up into a pair of concerned and wary blue eyes: concerned for me, wary of what might be in my mind with me.
“Think happy thoughts,” I told him.
His fingers tightened on my shoulders. “What?”
“This thing feeds on the other kind.” I gave them the quick and dirty version of what I thought the house was and what it wanted.
Tam glared down the long hallway that suddenly seemed to have gotten longer. “Then let’s get what we want and get out.”
I’d like nothing more. Though other than Tam’s process of elimination with Kesyn Badru’s possible hideouts, we had no guarantee that the old man was even here. And if he was, had the house turned him into its pet loony—a magical heavyweight loony who believed he had every reason to strike Tam dead and anyone else in his immediate vicinity?
The entity didn’t wait for the old man to put in an appearance.
It literally unleashed Hell.
Creatures out of a psycho’s nightmare charged us from all sides, including overhead and underfoot. The floor buckled and tilted, sending us sliding toward the gaping maul of what looked like a giant rat with a mouthful of serrated fangs. Tentacles tipped with hooks shot up through the floor. I didn’t have magic, but I had steel, and I put what I had to good use. Tam shouted two words of incantation, stopping Imala’s slide into the rat’s mouth as if she’d slammed into an invisible wall. The borderline panic in her eyes screamed how Imala felt about really big rats and somehow the entity had known it. Apparently the insight I had into it worked both ways. The entity knew what scared me, what scared each one of us. Since none of us were crazy, at least not to the point of making us a decent meal, the thing went with violence and terror. Either one would make us tastier to it, so the entity set about forcing us to strike at it, scare the crap out of us or, best of all, both.
My worst fears didn’t take a genius to figure out. I wasn’t what anyone would call complex, so my opinions, emotions, and fears all lived together close to the surface. The entity scooped them up like dice on a table. The Saghred, Sarad Nukpana, torture, dagger through the heart, eternity inside the rock—all were there for the knowing and exploiting.
Apparently Mychael, Tam, and Imala were better at hiding any fears they had, as evidenced by the increasing fury with which the entity attacked with anything in its arsenal.
Hornets the size of giant bats threw themselves by the dozens against Tam and Mychael’s shields in sacrificial waves, their bodies bursting into flames on contact, making room for the next attack. The shields were holding, for now. But Mychael and Tam couldn’t hold it for long. We’d all fought for our lives multiple times since breakfast, and Tam had taken out four Magh’Sceadu that had nearly eaten—
Four Magh’Sceadu appeared as if on cue.
Dammit.
“Sorry!” I yelled while trying to unthink them. It didn’t work and wouldn’t work, at least not with bat-hornets igniting inches from my face.
“Shut up!” The bellow seemed to come from everywhere at once. Neat trick. A master spellsinger’s trick.
I froze; so did the others. Even the Magh’Sceadu looked around.
“Idiots! Get in here!”
Mychael and Tam’s so-called impenetrable shield was ripped from top to bottom, opening it into the long hallway that wasn’t dark anymore—and wasn’t a hallway. A tunnel of blue light extended from the shield to what had been a blank wall. A small section was open and filled with an enraged old goblin, aged somewhere between sixty and roadkill.
Kesyn Badru, I assumed.
Tam hesitated, torn between possible death by the entity and equally likely death by his pissed-off teacher. That Tam was afraid of him—and that he’d ripped our shield like a piece of wet paper—told me Kesyn Badru was seriously badass. That was all I needed to know. I ran down the tunnel toward him. I’d take badass over bat-hornets anytime.
When I got within sniffing distance, I knew what the old man had been doing to pass the time while hiding out in a possessed house. Coming from a family of pirates, I knew what a crew coming back from shore leave smelled like. My nose told me loud and clear that Kesyn Badru had been on shore leave a long time.
Once the four of us were inside, he slammed the section of wall closed and rasped out some wicked-sounding words. The opening vanished, leaving us in a single room that had been sealed—walls, floor, and ceiling—with a thick, gelatinous coating. Ick. It must have been some kind of solid ward. Fortunately, the coating on the floor had hardened. However, since we were in here, and the entity and its playmates were out there, being in a room coated in ick was perfectly fine with me.
Kesyn Badru glared at us with some seriously bloodshot eyes. “What the hell are you trying to do, bring the roof down on my head?” He didn’t pause for an answer; he just turned those bloodshot eyes on me. “You’re that Benares girl, aren’t you?” His eyes darted up and down, taking me in, inside and out. He snorted. “That’s all you’ve got? I’m not impressed.”
I just stood there and blinked. “Uh…”
Badru turned on Tam. “And thank you once again for fucking up my life,” he snarled, “or what you left me of it. What are you going to do next, boy? Stomp my balls?”
The room shook like a toy building block some evil kid was trying to break in half.
That didn’t even slow Badru down. “The best damned hiding place in the whole city, and you screwed it up.”
