“Still no luck?”
“Some nibbles,” he said. He would have loved to explain more but was unable. Marlowe was trying to get his attention, jumping up to lick at his face, flipping his hands to be petted. He could see the dog was eager to communicate with him as he always had, but Remy found that he was now deaf and dumb to his best friend’s language.
He looked deeply into Marlowe’s eyes, attempting to reach him on an emotional level, but all he could see was panic in the Labrador’s gaze.
“What are you going to do?” Linda asked, as they sat side by side on the sofa.
“I haven’t a choice, really,” he told her. “I’m going to keep flipping over rocks until I find something.”
He didn’t want to alarm her any more than he already had, so he tried to be casual with his next question. “So, somebody approached you in the Common? I wonder who it could have been.”
“I have no idea, but Marlowe certainly didn’t care for him,” Linda said.
Remy was frustrated that he couldn’t talk with Marlowe, but the fact that his friend didn’t care for the mystery man was very telling.
“He gave me a piece of paper with a phone number on it and said what I told you on the phone.” She stood up. “That he needed to speak with you…that it was an emergency and…”
“That the Watchers were going to do something terrible,” Remy finished.
Linda nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “For something that you did. What the hell does that mean?”
He shrugged, trying not to show any emotion, pretending to be as perplexed as she. “Do you have that piece of paper?”
“Sure,” she said as she headed for her bedroom. “It was in the pocket of my jeans. I took it out before I put them in the wash.”
Marlowe was sitting at Remy’s feet, staring up at him with great intensity in his dark brown eyes.
“I know that you can sense something is wrong with me,” Remy said softly, taking the dog’s blocky head in his hands. “And you’re right. Something has happened to the angelic part of me… Something has made it so that I can’t talk to you… I can’t understand you.”
Marlowe barked and then began to whine, shifting himself closer in a panic. Remy could only guess that his basic message was getting through to the Labrador.
He was still holding the dog’s heavy face in his hands, and Marlowe leaned his snout over to lovingly kiss his wrist.
“We’re going to be okay,” Remy tried to reassure him. “I’m going to get better. All right? We’ll be able to talk to each other again very soon-I promise.”
There was a twinge in his heart then, a feeling that told him that maybe he shouldn’t have made such a promise to the dog. He had no idea if what he was experiencing was only temporary.
The dog jumped up, licking his face with his thick pink tongue.
“You’re a good boy,” Remy told Marlowe, hugging the dog to him. “We’ll be chatting up a storm again in no time.”
Linda returned from her bedroom, reading the piece of scrap paper, before handing it to Remy. He read, with zero recognition, the phone number that had been scrawled there.
“He said it wasn’t my place to understand,” Linda said, as Remy read the number again. “But you would. Do you?”
Remy shook his head slowly, not wanting to lie but having no choice. He and the Watchers-the Grigori-had a long, sometimes violent history, and they couldn’t have picked a worse time to start something new with him. He got up, slipping the paper into the pocket of his slacks.
“Aren’t you going to call?” she asked curiously.
“Not from here,” he answered. “I have to get back out there, follow up on a few things about Ashley.”
Linda nodded, but he could see that she was disappointed. She was better off in the dark. He just couldn’t have anyone else he cared for being dragged into the unusual world he frequently lived in.
“I’ll give you a call the next free minute I get,” he told her, leaning in for a kiss. “You and Marlowe still getting along?”
She pulled him close for another peck on the lips.
“He’s a bed hog, but we’re doing all right,” she said, eyes shifting to the animal who sat before them, tail wagging.
“Talk soon,” he told her, eyes then dropping to Marlowe. He hoped that the statement was true on many levels.
“Hey, Remy,” she called out just before he shut the door.
He stuck his head back in.
“You be careful, all right?”
“Only because you asked,” he told her with a smile that he tried to make reassuring before closing the door and heading on his way.
Deacon felt as though he could change the world. And wasn’t that what he had always wanted?
As a child he had feared the dark-not so much the nighttime environment, but what he feared was lurking there, just beyond his vision.
It was the fear that had fueled his desire to pursue the art of sorcery-that and some gentle urging from a Romanian housekeeper who had looked after him. He had shared his secret with her, how he feared the darkness, and she had shared with him the knowledge that his fears were justified, that there were things out there waiting for the opportunity to claim a life, a soul, a world.
She had shown him real magick, and his world had been changed forever. In the mystical arts he had found a way to beat back the darkness, to protect himself and his loved ones from the sinister forces that lurked in the shadows. He became voracious, using his family’s wealth to pursue his hunger for the arcane, but also using that newly found power to increase his fortune exponentially.
The more he learned, the more knowledge he acquired, the safer he could make the world. When he had first met the cabal, he believed that he had found like-minded individuals, that they all shared responsibility for protecting the world from encroaching supernatural threats-from the things in the dark.
But he had been wrong, and the lesson had been a painful one.
What he had learned as a result of his ill-placed trust was now the distant past to him, the power that coursed through him directing him only toward the future.
Spells and incantations that had been fading from his memory as the years raced past during his banishment here in the shadow realm were now ever present at the forefront of his thoughts.
The divine power of the Seraphim had changed him, making him so much better than he had ever hoped to be. Now he had the power not only to continue his prolonged existence, but to at last return to the world of his birth, where those who had betrayed him would pay the cost for their treachery.
Konrad.
Deacon paused in the hallway of his home, listening. Not hearing it again, he continued on his way, preparing himself and his home for the journey they were about to undertake.
Konrad.
He was sure that he’d heard it now.
“Who’s there?” he called out. “Scrimshaw, is that you?”
Konrad, it’s me, said the voice. And now that he was listening, it seemed so very familiar.
He thought that it might be coming from farther down the hall, and proceeded forward until he reached the dining room, doors still hanging from their hinges.
In here, said the voice.
“Who is it?” Deacon asked, stepping fearlessly inside. For what would dare challenge him now?
The dining room had yet to be cleared. It looked as though a war had been fought there, and in a way it had.
“Hello?” Deacon called out, but found nobody inside.
Deacon, said the voice, and suddenly he knew from where it had come.
“Veronica?” he asked, moving farther into the room. “Is that you?”
Who else would it be? she answered, her voice raspy and dry. You left me…you left me in here alone.
