Eve's eyelids fluttered as she inhaled. She glanced at the stairs that led up into darkness. 'Nothing that way.' Then she narrowed her eyes as she stared into the shadowed corridor that led toward the back of the brownstone. 'But that way…'
'Magic. Yes. I feel it.'
Doyle went past her, heedless of any danger. The blue light around his fingers and leaking from his eyes grew brighter and he was a beacon in the darkened corridor. Eve tried to make sense of the layout of the place in her head. Living room and parlor in front. Probably a back staircase somewhere, a pantry, big kitchen, and the sort of sprawling dining room that had been popular in the first half of the twentieth century.
There were framed photographs on the walls that had obviously hung there for decades and wallpaper that had gone out of style before John F. Kennedy was President. Yet there was no dust. No cobwebs. No sign that time had continued to pass within that home while it went by on the outside.
The corridor ended at a door that was likely either a closet or bathroom, but there were rooms to either side, elegant woodwork framing their entrances. Doyle did not even glance to his left, but turned into the room on the right. Eve was right behind him and nearly jammed the shotgun into his spine when he came to a sudden stop.
She moved up beside him, staring into the dining room.
Six figures sat in a circle around the elegant dining room table, all of them clasping hands as if joining in prayer — or a seance. There were candlesticks on the table and several on a sideboard; Doyle waved his hand and each of the wicks flickered to life, those tiny flames illuminating the room. Perhaps the old magician needed the light to see by, but Eve did not. She saw better in the dark.
Of the six, five were very clearly dead, and had been so for a very long time. Though their skeletal fingers were still clasped they were withered, eyes sunken to dark sockets, only wisps of hair left upon their heads. In many places all that remained of their flesh were tattered bits clinging to bone, like parchment paper. Eve peered more closely. She had not smelled death in this place and so she wondered if it was some sort of illusion. But no. There was an earthy, rot odor that lingered in the air. It was simply that, like dust and other sediment of time, the stink of putrefying flesh seemed to have been suspended somehow.
The five withered corpses were of indeterminate age and race but at least one of them had been female. And then there was the sixth member of this chain, a woman in a blue dress, her brown hair up in a tight bun, with small-framed glasses resting on the bridge of her nose. Her eyes were closed and her face peaceful, as though she might well have been in the midst of a natural slumber rather than eternal repose.
'Yvette Darnall,' Doyle observed.
Eve glanced at him, saw the puzzlement on his face and knew that it matched her own. 'You know her?'
'A mystic and psychic. She disappeared in 1943.'
'Or maybe she didn't,' Eve said, her gaze once more surveying the hideous gathering, the sunken faces waxy and yellow in the candlelight. 'Maybe it was just that nobody knew where to look.'
Doyle frowned thoughtfully and stepped further into the room. Eve followed but her nostrils flared and the hair rose on the back of her neck. Her fingers hooked into talons. She sensed something in the room and she knew that Doyle had felt it too.
Yvette Darnall opened her eyes.
Eve and Doyle froze. For just a moment there was a kind of terrible awareness in the psychic woman's gaze and then her eyes rolled upward so that they seemed completely white. Her head lolled back and her jaw went slack, mouth falling open.
One by one, the five cadavers did the same. Some of their jawbones cracked. When the most desiccated among them lay his head back it simply tore off above the jaw with a sound like snapping kindling. Upon hitting the hardwood floor his skull shattered into dust and bone fragments.
Yvette Darnall began to moan, and so did the chorus of the dead.
She choked as a stream of milky, opalescent mist issued from her throat, and a moment later thinner tendrils of the same substance flowed from the gaping mouths of the dead. Eve recognized the material. Ectoplasm. Malleable spirit-flesh. But she did not think it was the ghosts of these dead summoners or even of the medium herself who was manipulating the ectoplasm here.
It coalesced in the midst of the table and as it did, Eve saw that Yvette Darnall had begun to decay. Whatever this power was, it was drawing on whatever essence remained in her; it had kept her here for more than sixty years as a spiritual battery, and now it was using her up.
The ectoplasm churned like thick, heavy storm clouds and began to take shape. In a moment Eve could see human features forming there, a face, a man with a long, hawk nose and thin lips, with wild unkempt hair and a shaggy beard.
The face in the pooling ectoplasm narrowed its eyes as though it had seen them and it sneered imperiously, gaze rife with disapproval. When it spoke, its lips moved without sound, yet its voice issued from the wide, gaping mouth of Yvette Darnall.
'Doyle,' the voice rasped scornfully. 'You damned fool.'
CHAPTER TWO
The ectoplasmic head of Sweetblood the Mage drifted in the air above the circular table. Tendrils of supernatural matter extended from the manifestation to anchor itself to the ceiling, the walls and the table below it. The ghost flesh moved, its lips forming words, but the voice of the world's most powerful sorcerer growled at him not from the ectoplasm but from the grotesquely open maw of the withering spiritualist, Yvette Darnall.
'And to think I once called you 'apprentice.''
'I always respected you, Lorenzo,' Doyle said, attempting to conceal the exhilaration he felt at moving so much closer to actually locating the arch mage. 'But I never understood your decision to retreat, to hide yourself away. The world has need of you.'
Doyle recalled his first meeting with Lorenzo Sanguedolce, in Prague, during the spring of 1891, and their immediate dislike for one another. Even after the relationship shifted to that of teacher and student, their animosity stood firm. There wasn't anyone, on this plane of existence anyway, that he disliked as much, but the ways of the weird did not take into account one's personal feelings. Sweetblood was needed; it was as simple as that.
'Do you have any idea the risk you have taken in searching for me?' the undulating spiritual mass asked, the power of its voice causing the psychic's body to visibly quake. 'Do you think I have stayed away from the world all this time on a whim?'
Eve stood beside Doyle, tensed for a fight. He could feel the aggression emanating from her lithe form, millennia of experience having taught her always to expect a fight. 'I could be wrong,' she said, 'but I'm going to guess he isn't all that pleased to see you.'
Doyle shot her a hard look. 'Your enhanced senses are absolutely uncanny,' he said dryly. Then he turned his focus to Sweetblood again.
'You must listen, Lorenzo. Damn me if you will, but others are on your scent as well. One way or another, you've been found. But the others who track you have grave intentions.'
' And you, fool that you are, you think I need your help?' Sweetblood rasped. ' You may have done their work for them, Arthur.'
The disembodied head gazed down upon the grotesque gathering at the table beneath him, at the rapidly degenerating form of Yvette Darnall and the circle of desiccated corpses clutching hands, with a look of utter disdain forming upon his spectral features.
'You're no better than this damnable woman and her band of psychics. They too attempted to locate me. Their curiosity cost them their lives,' the spectral head went on, showing not the slightest hint of compassion. 'Fortunately, I was able to use their folly for my own ends.'
Eve sniffed. 'Nice guy.'
Doyle ignored her, focusing on Sweetblood, trying to gauge by the rate of Darnall's deterioration how much longer their connection would remain active. 'Obviously,' he said, gesturing toward the circle of cadavers. 'You used them as an alarm to warn you when someone, or possibly something, was coming too close. The psychic residue of their search led us here, drawing us away from your true location.'
