clean through it. Then she grabbed the corner of the gate and pulled. Freed of its track, the gate swung outward until the chain halted it, leaving a triangle three feet wide at its base to squeeze through.
“You boys wanna hurry this along? We don’t have much time until the cops get wise.”
We crawled through the narrow aperture. Theresa first, then me. Gio was last, and it’s a damn good thing — the opening was so narrow, we had to grab his arms and pull. Once he was through, we yanked the gate back into place. Maybe it’d take our pursuers a couple minutes to realize where we’d gone.
Unfortunately, it didn’t take Danny that long to figure it out.
“Sam?” he called down from somewhere high above —the voice unfamiliar but the accent unmistakable. “Sam, is that you? So nice of you to stop by, mate! Of course, if you hoped to get the drop on me, you’d have done better to leave the Giordano soul at home —I
Son of a bitch. I was hoping to approach the place unnoticed —to get the jump on Danny before he ever knew what hit him —but thanks to the fucking coppers’ interference, it looked like subterfuge was off the table. I guess the lesson is, if you plan on sneaking up on somebody, don’t leave a trail of mayhem half a continent wide in your wake. That, or never stop for breakfast at Rosita’s.
Once we’d cleared the gate, we’d taken refuge between a pile of cinderblocks and a heap of warped, discarded lumber, which served to shield us from the building and the street both. From our hidey-hole, I shouted back, “Don’t do this, Danny! It’s not too late!”
“Would that that were true, old friend. But I fear it’s been too late for quite some time.”
“I’m coming up!” I said.
“I wouldn’t, if I were you. You’ll find the path is not without protection.”
I took the shotgun back from Theresa, popped the floodlight nearest us. Night engulfed our quarter of the building’s lot.
“Come on,” I said.
We ran toward the building at a crouch. I kept my eyes on the ground ahead of me, scanning the uneven, sun-baked dirt for obstacles that might trip up Theresa, who ran with one hand on Gio’s back. Halfway to the unfinished, plastic-clad first floor, a line of pale gray dust cut across the earth. It stretched out to either side of us, and wended its way around the building in a ragged circle.
Alder ash, I assumed. Part of an ancient Celtic rite intended to shield those inside from the underworld’s reach. Explained why the crows were keeping their distance. I scuffed my feet along the dirt to break the circle as we crossed the threshold.
When the circle was broken, the crows atop the fence took flight as one, and lighted on the skeletal building frame.
“A-a-ah! It’s impolite to crash a bloke’s party, Sam, and doubly so for bringing unwelcome guests with you. And in your case, I fear, the penalties are steep.”
The floodlights surrounding the building cut out just as we pushed aside the opaque plastic sheeting and ducked into the building. The sudden darkness was stifling. A hand out to halt Gio and Theresa, I crouched low against a concrete support, waiting for my eyes to adjust.
The structure was scarcely more than a shell. Steel girders and molded concrete provided a sketch of the building the architect had intended —the building it would likely never become —but it was absent any touch of warmth or light. The floor was a vast slab of concrete, broken here and there with squares of black both large and small —no doubt to run conduits for plumbing, wiring, air conditioning and the like through. In our case, they were simply pitfalls to be avoided, lest this mission of ours end with us bleeding out in a basement courtesy of a compound fracture.
The elevator shaft was empty —a square column of concrete stretching from floor to ceiling in the center of the massive lobby, its doorless passageway a deeper dark among the shadows. There wasn’t even so much as a cable running up it one could climb —not that Gio could have, anyway. That left no way up but the stairs.
There were two sets of them, to the left and right of the elevator, set along the lobby’s outside walls. Gio jerked his head to indicate the nearest of them, and I nodded my assent. Taking Theresa by the hand, he inched along the wall toward it, and I followed close behind.
Turned out, the first stairwell was a bust. A good six feet of construction detritus clogged the stretch from ground floor to first landing —scraps of two-byfours, twisted lengths of copper pipe, jagged hunks of concrete run through with rebar —making any attempt to scale the stairs impossible.
Gio indicated the second set of stairs. But this time, I shook my head. If that’s where Danny wanted us, it was the last place I planned on being. I was through underestimating him.
I scanned the room, spotted what I was looking for: a ladder. Then I braced it against the edge of a goodly patch of darkness on the ceiling —an aperture intended, I suspect, for an air duct —and began to climb, the sawed-off clanking dully against the rungs as I ascended.
When I reached the top, I paused, scanning the second floor for any sign of danger before I climbed off the ladder. Then I whispered for Gio and Theresa to follow. For about the thousandth time today, I questioned the logic of bringing a blind woman into this. And for about the thousandth time today, I decided it didn’t much matter; if we failed, she was as good as dead anyways —washed away with the rest of humanity in the next Great Flood.
It wasn’t a comforting thought.
Whatever her handicap, Theresa was lithe and silent as a cat scaling the ladder. Gio was another story altogether. By the time he reached the top, he was huffing and puffing like he had a bone to pick with some little pigs, and he didn’t so much climb off the ladder as collapse beside it.
“Jesus, dude,” he whispered. “Your buddy couldn’t finish the goddamn elevator? And did you bother to look down when you climbed up here? There’s a hole just like this one right below it, and I’m pretty sure it don’t stop there —if the ladder’d slipped, we woulda wound up in the second subbasement or some shit.”
“I told you, neither of you have to come.”
“And I told you, you ain’t getting rid of us that easy. Now, let’s go kick some bad-guy ass.”
He rolled over and scrabbled to his feet, and then muttered, “The fuck?”
“What’s wrong?”
“Dunno.” He leaned down, groped at his leg a sec. “No big,” he said, waving his hand at me like I could see for a damn by the faint light filtering through the plastic sheeting from outside. “Just got tangled in some wire, is all.”
“Gio, don’t move.”
But it was too late. From somewhere in the darkness, I heard a tinkle of shattered glass. And then, the room began to shake.
“Gio,” Theresa whispered, “what the hell did you do?”
I grabbed the wire from his hands and followed it. It terminated in the center of the room, its end tied around the jagged neck of a wine bottle, which had until recently been perched precariously atop a folding chair. But it hadn’t contained wine. The black stain that spread across the floor beneath the chair smelled of iron. Of death. Of blood.
I noticed something else, then, too. A pattern on the floor, encircling the chair and the growing stain. It glowed a sickly green, intensifying as the blood soaked into the concrete. At first, my mind could make no sense of its elaborate symbology, but as the glow intensified, it resolved itself before me. It was less a language than a sort of stylized image, one that conveyed greed, temptation, seduction, absorption —followed by a hollow eternity of oneness, of torment, of relentless hunger.
I might not’ve recognized the language in which it had been written, but I realized at once what these symbols said.
Abyzou.
“Guys,” I shouted, all pretense of stealth abandoned, “we need to move!”
I ran back the way I came. From behind me came a horrible rending sound, as if the very fabric of reality had torn apart.
And then a sickly wet slithering of tentacles against concrete.
And then the chitinous clicking of the demon’s beak.
