Snared

Jack nodded. He drove a hand deep into his pockets and pulled out half a dozen of the strange corner pieces Lindsay first saw framing Mark’s window. She remembered their placement. Mark had said they were meant to keep evil out, but he lied. They were meant to keep evil in, meant to keep Mark trapped in his room. She understood that now. But what difference did it make? Mark was dead. Doug shot him.

“Put her in the coat closet,” Doug said, jabbing his finger at a door on the far side of the foyer. “They won’t protect her from all sides, but it’s all we can do now.”

Jack latched on to Lindsay’s biceps again and dragged her painfully across the foyer to a simple-looking door.

“I want to go home,” Lindsay cried. She wanted to see her parents, wanted to hold them and know they were okay. “Can’t I just go home?”

“There isn’t time,” Jack said. He pulled open the closet door and flung Lindsay inside. She hit the back wall hard, and her legs nearly went out from under her. “If we don’t stop him, he’ll come for you, because you know what he is. He won’t let you or your family live, and he will make you suffer.”

Jack flipped one of the icons into the air and caught it with his right hand. With a powerful thrust, he drove the metal spike into the corner of the doorframe. With a violent twist, he screwed it into position. Another icon flew into the air, and this one also found itself buried in the wood. He knelt down, intending to affix additional metal pieces to the lower corners of the door, but paused.

The floor was marble.

Lindsay watched with mounting panic. She didn’t want to be a captive of the two old men. She lunged forward, but Jack threw a palm toward her, struck her chest, and sent her back against the wall.

“I’m trying to protect you,” he growled.

“Let me go!” she screamed. She didn’t know what they were trying to do, but she didn’t feel safe, and she wanted to leave! Again she charged for the opening.

Jack sprang to his feet, and she hit his chest. It felt harder than the wall at her back. She shrank away. The man returned to his knees.

Seeing no other choice, he drove one of the icons through the grout separating the wooden frame from the marble. He twisted it deep, but it stuck out at an odd angle, not nearly as even as the ones higher up. Jack repeated the action with the last icon.

“Those won’t keep me in here,” Lindsay said.

“They aren’t meant to keep you in,” Jack said, standing up and rolling his shoulders as if trying to break tension out of them. “They’re meant to keep him out.”

“He’s dead,” Lindsay said.

“No,” Jack told her. “He isn’t. He can’t be killed, not by metal or magic or any other weapon of man. He can only be contained. His influence is eternal, from the beginning of time until the sun burns dark.” He looked away toward Doug, who stood over Mark’s body.

The tall man held a round piece of metal like a massive coin in his hand, and bounced it on his palm.

Jack turned back to Lindsay, his face set in an expression of deepest sorrow. “I’m very sorry,” he said. “You’re going to see some terrible things.”

16

Lindsay watched Jack step away from the closet. He closed the front door and threw the locks, fixing the chain with a decisive clack. Then he stomped across the room, waving his hand at Doug Richter.

“Give me the brand,” Jack said. “And shoot him again. He’s playing possum.”

“Now why would you go and tattle like that?” Mark asked from his place on the floor.

Startled, Lindsay leaped. Mark couldn’t be alive. The shotgun blast had hit him in the middle of the back— a back flayed of its skin, ripped away by Mark’s own hands.

She shivered and retreated to the wall. She could still see the whole room. She saw Jack catch the metallic talisman in his hand, saw Doug snatching at the floor for his shotgun. And she saw Mark. Mark who should be dead. Mark who wasn’t human.

He rolled over, pressed himself against the wall, and in a flash was on his feet. A moment later, moving too quickly for Lindsay to track, he stood in front of the window. The smile was gone from Mark’s face. Fury bent his mouth and weighed his brow.

“Welcome to the pain,” he said.

Suddenly the air was alive with movement. Lindsay squinted, trying to understand exactly what she was seeing, but it made no sense. It looked like the film of dust that covered the floor was rising like smoke to fill the room. The thin gray clouds began to tighten and grow dense, forming dozens of long, twisting ropes. As Doug Richter lifted the shotgun to his shoulder, one of the strands of dust whipped out and lashed his face and forearm.

He cried out and dropped the gun just as a second coil struck his neck with a fierce snapping sound. Jack ran across the room, holding the disk he’d called the brand in front of him. A strip of flesh from the gory mound in the corner snaked out and coiled around his ankle, sending him crashing to the hard stone floor. He rolled over, tried to get to his feet, but three more strips of bloody skin shot forward, wrapped around his ankles and wrists, pulled him into a spread eagle, and dragged him high into the air. The brand fell from his hand and clacked on the marble floor.

Doug struggled with the coil at his throat, digging his fingers into his own skin to get under the constricting noose. A rope of twisting dust formed above his head like a slender tornado and dipped down to join the end of the noose. Once the two coils touched, they fused together, and Doug was jerked toward the ceiling.

Both men hung in the air like marionettes. Their bodies dipped and swung as they struggled, but they could not break free of Mark’s bonds.

“Stop it!” Lindsay screamed from her place in the closet. “Mark, you have to stop this.”

He swung his head toward her furiously, like a starving wolf catching her scent. “You think you can tell me what to do? You think you command me? I’ve owned you and controlled you since the moment I saw you.”

“No,” Lindsay said, but her throat was as dry as the dust.

“You were so easy to manipulate,” Mark said. “So desperate to be necessary.”

Lindsay’s fear and misery hardened behind her ribs, turned to anger. She stepped forward, but Jack shouted “Don’t.”

Mark looked into the air at Jack’s bound form.

“He’s trying to lure you out from behind the icons. He can’t hurt you if you stay behind them.”

“That’s not true,” Mark said. “Not true at all.”

He stomped toward the closet, his blue eyes fixed on Lindsay. With a flourish he waved his left arm. Above him, the strips of skin holding Jack rippled. Then they whipped out, sending the burly man through the window. He screamed as the glass shattered into a thousand tiny pieces, and Jack disappeared into the darkness.

“Night Jack,” Mark said, walking faster across the floor. “Night Dougy.”

With another flourish, this time of his right arm, a dozen dirt devils spun across the room. When they reached Doug, they wrapped themselves around his kicking body like pythons. He dropped to the floor with a hard crack.

“Just the two of us,” Mark said, reaching the closet door. He glared at her, his eyes like blue flames. “Just the way you wanted.”

Lindsay hugged the back wall of the closet. “You son of a bitch.”

“More accurate than you know,” Mark said. “Now, about that pain?”