The acrid aroma of burning flesh permeated the room and Doyle frowned and glanced away from the ectoplasmic face to find that the body of Yvette Darnall had begun to smolder, the tight bun of her hair emitting a gray, oily smoke.
'Indeed. And in this pocket of frozen time, I might work my power through these decaying idiots and destroy the interloper, the next fool. I never expected the next fool to be you.'
Doyle could not help but smile. 'You have always underestimated me, Lorenzo.'
The entity appeared to seethe. Flames burst from the bodies of the other mystics, as if the very fire of its anger, their clothes and parchment-dry flesh consumed by fire. 'You're a careless fool, Arthur, and this latest misstep only proves it.'
Eve stifled a laugh with a perfectly manicured hand, refusing to make eye contact with him. It was moments like this when he remembered why it was that he so often chose to work alone.
'Cast all the aspersions you like, but they will not alter the truth. Dark powers descend upon you,' Doyle declared, fingertips crackling with magickal energy leaking. 'Better that I should find you than some malevolent — '
'Imbecile!' Sweetblood bellowed, enraged, his voice erupting from the gaping lips of the medium who had become his conduit. The ectoplasmic features that loomed above the fire-engulfed cadaver contorted, and the ghostly tendrils that connected it to the dead woman writhed and pulled away to flail whip like above them. 'Persist, and you may doom the world.'
The burning corpse of Yvette Darnall stood up abruptly, knocking over the flaming chair in which it had sat for the last sixty-one years. Like some fiery marionette, embers of flesh falling from her form, the dead woman leaned across the table to point an accusatory finger at them.
'Go home, apprentice,' said Lorenzo Sanguedolce, through the charred and smoking remains of the medium. 'You meddle in matters beyond your comprehension.'
And with those final words, the instrument of the mage's admonition exploded, spewing fiery chunks of flesh and bone. Doyle and Eve watched as the room was consumed by fire, the ectoplasmic manifestation of the arch mage evaporating with a sizzling hiss. The spell that had kept the room in a timeless stasis had collapsed, age rushing forward, drying the wood, speeding the fire. Time and flame sapped the moisture from the dark mahogany, reducing it to kindling. The heat seared his face, yet Doyle stared into the flames until he felt Eve's powerful grip close upon his arm.
'I wouldn't count on the last word,' she snarled over the roar of the fire as she began to pull him toward the exit.
Doyle roughly removed her hand and ventured further into the room.
'Have you lost your mind?' she shouted after him.
'Go,' he told her. 'There's still a chance I can salvage what we came for.'
It was becoming ever more difficult to see, as well as breathe, and Doyle quickly scanned the floor for the precious item he sought. Silently he prayed to the Ancient Kings that it had remained intact.
'Arthur, let's go!' Eve called from the doorway, as his tearing eyes fell upon his prize: Darnall's blackened, jawless skull lying upon the smoking wood floor.
Removing a handkerchief from his pocket, Doyle folded the white silk and used it as a buffer to protect the soft flesh of his hand from the searing heat emanating from the charred skull. There was only the slimmest chance that what he was about to attempt would work, but there was far too much at stake not to at least try. He inserted his index and middle fingers into the hollow eye sockets of the medium's skull, searching for the soft gray matter of the brain beyond the missing eyes. The tips of his fingers sank into the gelatinous muscle of thought. He let slip an exultant sigh; the flames had not yet melted the woman's brain. There were still things to be learned from her.
The beams and walls of the burning room moaned and creaked. It would not be long before the ceiling caved in, the upper floors of the brownstone coming down as the entire building was consumed by the supernatural conflagration. Beneath his breath, Doyle uttered an incantation of retrieval, letting the ancient magick travel through his body, coursing down the length of his arm, through his fingers and into what remained of the dead psychic's brain. Images of Yvette's past — of heartbreak and ecstasy and quiet contentment — flooded his mind, making themselves at home, as if eager not to be forgotten with the passing of their host. The deluge of memories was overwhelming, and he nearly stumbled into the fire as he magickally ransacked the recollections of a lifetime.
Behind the remembrance of a torrid lesbian affair with a beautiful dark-haired girl nearly half her age, and beyond an exceptionally awful production of La Boheme, Doyle found the elusive bit of information that he had been searching for, and claimed it as his own.
He plucked his fingers from the skull, tossed the now-empty shell back into the flames, and wiped the viscous, hideously warm gray matter from his fingers upon his scorched handkerchief. The fire raged all around him, attempting to block his path and consume him, but the mage knew the language of fire, speaking to the conflagration politely and with respect, and it allowed him to pass unharmed through the doorway and into the smoke-filled hall.
In the corridor, where smoke billowed and flames had already begun to lick across the ceiling and ripple up the walls, Eve waited. Her face was covered in dark patches of soot that resembled war paint. Her eyes darted about like those of a desperate animal. Her kind did not do well with fire.
'I can't believe you're not burned to a crisp.'
Doyle moved past her silently on his way toward the exit.
'At least tell me that you got whatever it was you risked being burned alive for,' she said, following close on his heels.
'I did indeed,' he said as they hurried across the entryway and out into the damp night air. 'Time is short, now. We must act swiftly. He's far closer than I would have guessed.'
Squire awaited them on the sidewalk in front of the burning brownstone. The goblin held an open umbrella, rain sluicing over the edges, and he wore a nervous expression upon his grotesque features.
'A real gentleman's gentleman,' Eve muttered as she reached him.
Sirens wailed in the distance, but they would be far too late to save this building. As they moved toward the car, Eve cursed loudly. Doyle turned to face her, only to flinch as something wet and heavy struck his shoulder, slippery on his neck. Suddenly the pre-dawn was alive with the staccato thunder of one damp impact after another. In the midst of the rain, something else was falling from the sky.
'What the Hell?' Eve snapped, shielding her head as the toads continued to fall, bouncing off the brick steps, the streets, and the cars below them. Multiple car alarms wailed, partially drowning the rather offensive sound of soft flesh striking hard pavement.
Doyle stared about in alarm. Things are far worse than I thought. Squire scrambled up the steps to shield them both from the pummeling rain with the large, black umbrella.
'This can't be good,' Eve snarled, pushing bloody, ruptured amphibian corpses out of her way with the tip of her designer boot.
'Be thankful it ain't cats and dogs,' Squire said, as the rain of toads continued to fall all around them.
Far worse.
Julia Ferrick turned off the engine of her Volvo wagon in the underground parking garage on Boston's Boylston Street and wondered, as she so often did, what had happened to her real son.
'I was listening to that,' the imposter growled from the passenger seat. He had insisted on listening to one of his homemade music mixes on the drive to their family appointment, and when she had turned off the engine, it cut off a headache-inducing grind in mid-verse.
'And you'll hear the rest of it on the way home,' she said with exasperation, placing her keys and the parking garage receipt into her handbag. His name went unsaid. More and more, of late, she had trouble calling him Daniel, or even Dan. She didn't know him anymore. Jesus, she craved a cigarette.
'I wanted to hear it now,' he said curtly, refusing to make eye contact with her.
Julia looked at him, avoiding her gaze as if he would turn to stone if their eyes met, and wondered when exactly the aliens or the goblins or maybe even the Gypsies had come and taken away her real son and replaced him with this grim doppelganger. She ran her thumb over the tips of her fingers, where the nails were short and
