wearing variations of black leather. Their faces appeared oily, shining in what little light was available. He was reminded of how much he despised this species, and how the Twilight Wars never should have been declared over until each and every one of the foul creatures had been exterminated like the vermin they were.
One of the Corca Duibhne came forward, waving a fierce looking knife before him. 'Do you know, foolish little man?' it asked, a cruel, humorless smile upon its oily, black features. Conan Doyle noticed that one of its eyes was missing. 'Do you know whose house this is?'
Conan Doyle casually adjusted his shirt cuffs, matching them to the sleeves of his jacket. 'Of course I do,' he said, returning his hands to his side. His fingers twitched eagerly.
The Night People began to laugh, converging, forming a circle around him.
'Do you hear, brothers?' asked the creature with the missing eye. 'He knows full well whose house this is.'
'Tell us then,' hissed another, this one wielding a kind of axe. Again they all laughed.
Conan Doyle raised one hand, sparks of blue fire dancing from the tips of his fingers.
'Why, it's mine,' he told them, and then those cerulean flames arced out from his hand, engulfing them. The Corca Duibhne cried out in a pathetic mixture of surprise and agony as the magick took hold of them, the smell of their burning flesh filling the air.
Conan Doyle closed his eyes and breathed deeply, taking the heavy aroma of charred flesh into his lungs. Just like the good old days, he thought, images of the war cascading through his thoughts, and the mage slowly climbed the steps to his front door.
'And now I've come home.'
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It would have been wiser, perhaps, for Dr. Graves to lead. He might have gone right through the basement door and into the main house, done a bit of reconnaissance, and returned to give Clay the lay of the land. But Clay was not the sort of man — not the sort of creature — to wait while others put themselves at risk. Graves admired that about him. It might not be the wisest course of action for the two of them to rush headlong up those stairs, but Graves did not feel it appropriate to judge Clay by the standards of human wisdom. He was unique in all the world. Touched by the creator. Immortal. It was obvious that to Clay, strategy was necessary only when the lives of others were in peril. When it was his own life at stake, it was full steam ahead, and the consequences be damned.
And Dr. Graves, well, he was already dead, so what the hell did he care?
'Do we have any plan at all?' Graves whispered.
Clay had adopted his fundamental form, the one Graves assumed was his true self. He was a formidable figure, at least seven feet tall, with dried cracks in his flesh as though he were made of arid, hard-packed desert. The Clay of God. Someday, Graves would like to have heard the story of this remarkable being's life.
But that was for another day.
'A plan? Of course we have a plan,' Clay said, hurrying up the stairs, which creaked beneath his bulk. 'We kill or incapacitate everything that tries to stop us from freeing Ceridwen, and we make sure Morrigan doesn't set either Sweetblood or the Nimble Man free.'
Graves did not bother to pretend to walk. He drifted up the stairs behind Clay. He had willed his appearance to change, somewhat. Now he was the younger Leonard Graves, in the early days of his adventuring. Heavy boots covered his feet and suspenders crisscrossed his back. His sleeves were rolled up, his huge fists prepared for a fight.
'It lacks a certain finesse,' Graves told his ally.
Clay laughed as he reached the top of the basement stairs. He glanced back at Graves, eyes twinkling in the gloom. 'Leave the finesse to Conan Doyle. It's going to come down to magick. You know it, and I know it. I resent being the muscle as much as you do. In our time, we've both led armies, you and I. But this isn't about who can outsmart Morrigan. It's about who can destroy her.'
The words struck close to home. Graves had been a man of science as well as a man of action during his life. It was with a certain reluctance that he took the role of foot soldier. Yet with myriad worlds hanging in the balance and time of the essence, he knew that all that remained was to fight. And so fight he would. With all that remained of his soul.
'Let's get to it,' he told Clay.
The shapeshifter turned toward the door. He reached for the knob, but his hand paused an inch away from it. Clay sniffed the air.
'What is it?' Graves asked.
The door rattled and the stairs trembled with the pounding of footfalls beyond that door.
'Boggarts,' Clay said.
Graves hissed under his breath. 'Son of a bitch.'
Then the door exploded inward. Two enormous, hideously ugly boggarts crashed through the splintering wood and leaped upon Clay, jaws gnashing and claws tearing flesh even as the trio tumbled down the stairs in a tangle of limbs.
Graves darted into the air, soaring near the ceiling of the basement. Boggarts. He shivered. The Night People could not hurt him, nor could the walking dead. Morrigan had been able to do so with magick. But Boggarts were different. Boggarts ate ectoplasm. They could tear him apart, gulp down bits of his spectral body as if he were still flesh and blood. They could tear his soul apart, and eat it, and then there would be no eternal rest for Leonard Graves.
The things attacked Clay, but already one of them had scented him. It must have been how their presence was noticed in the first place. One of the creatures raised its heavy head and turned burning yellow eyes upward. Graves could have fled, but he would never have left Clay there alone. For the boggarts were not the only threat to come through that shattered door.
The first Corca Duibhne poked its head through the doorway, and it grinned, exposing razor fangs. It scrambled down the stairs after the boggarts, and then another appeared, and another, until there were six, no eight of them.
And at the last, behind them came another figure, so tall it had to stoop to get through the shattered doorway. It was a woman. Or a nightmare contortion of what a woman might have been. Nine feet tall, the hag had only opalescent orbs where her eyes ought to have been. Her hair was filthy, stringy, and hung over the shoulders of the rags she wore, belted with a chain of infant human skulls. Her teeth were long and yellow, her lips crusted with dried blood.
'What the hell is it?' Dr. Graves asked aloud.
On the concrete floor, Clay hurled a boggart across the basement to crash into the burner. The other was still focused on Graves himself. But both ghost and shapeshifter stared at the new arrival.
'Black Annis,' Clay said. 'It's a Black Annis.'
Eve had spent eternity paying for her sins, both those she had committed, and those to which she had given birth. Vampires. Her children. The bastard offspring of an Archduke of Hell and the castoff queen of Eden. The Lord might have made her, but the demon had remade her. Many times she had thought of giving herself over to the sun, letting its light purify her, end her damnation. But she would not.
She would not stop fighting the darkness until she had expunged her sins. And she would not know when that time had come until the Lord Himself whispered the words in her ear.
Come home.
Until then, she would fight, and she would fear nothing. The Lord would not allow her to die until she had done her penance.
Her knees scraped the house as she scaled the back wall. Another pair of pants ruined. Her talons dug into brick, and she raised herself up quickly, her body as light to her as if her bones were hollow. Such was the strength damnation had given her. Eve could have quickened her ascent by using window frames, but she avoided them, not wishing to be seen until a time of her own choosing.
