skin.
She tore her gaze away and moved to another of the covered corpses. 'I am your lady no longer, Arthur Conan Doyle. As to the hand behind this tragedy, that is a tale almost too sad to tell.' She drew down another sheet of silk to reveal the dead beneath. The countenance of this corpse was even more disturbing than the first. 'This evil of which you speak has touched our world as well.'
'Who is it? Whose hand has done this?'
Ceridwen glanced up from her ministrations, her dark, soulful eyes again touching his. 'It was one of our own,' she said, a tremble in her voice, and his heart nearly broke as he watched tears like liquid crystal run down her cheeks, to land upon the upturned face of a dead Fey warrior.
'Two hundred and fifty channels and not a damn thing on,' Squire muttered as he aimed the remote control at a thirty-five inch television monitor in a hard wood cabinet. The goblin flipped past countless images, each of them dishearteningly similar — another apocalyptic vision of the northeast United States, or static. Whatever the hell was going on outside was interfering with the digital cable signals.
He reached a stubby hand into the bag of greasy potato chips and brought a handful to his mouth. Squire lived for junk food: candy and chips, burgers and fries, cookies and donuts. Especially donuts. He loved food of all kinds, in fact. It was his greatest pleasure. But the sweetest and saltiest were his favorites.
Stopping at one of the all-news channels, the goblin watched a live feed from Virginia Beach, where the ocean had begun to boil and the fish were leaping up out of the water in a frantic attempt to escape death. Somewhere off-camera people had begun to scream.
'That'll help,' he said, taking a swig from his bottle of beer to wash down his snack. 'Nothing like a good shriek to calm everybody's nerves.' Squire belched mightily, flecks of unchewed potato chip speckling his shirt and pants. Bored with watching fish die, he changed the station. Maybe a nice game show, he thought, flipping past channel after channel of the world in turmoil. He tried not to think about what was happening outside. Conan Doyle's agents were in the field, and it was only a matter of time before things were wrestled back under control. That was how it always was. If there was anything Squire had learned in his many years working for Mr. Doyle, it wasn't over until the fat lady shit in the woods.
On a pay station that hadn't gone to static, he finally found a movie. A large grin spread across his face. A nice piece of Hollywood escapist fluff was exactly what he needed. His smile quickly turned to a frown when he realized the station was showing the abysmal Keanu science fiction flick that the actor had done before The Matrix.
As if Keanu wasn't torture enough, Squire thought, continuing his search for something to amuse him.
He had clicked all the way to the end and was about to start over again when something on one of the local stations caught his eye. He leaned forward on the sofa, crumbs of potato chip raining to the floor. The handheld footage was shaky and made his eyes hurt, but he recognized the area. The camera was pointed toward a bunker- like structure in the midst of a sea of orange brick. It was the exit from the Government Center subway station, not too far away, and there were things not usually associated with public transit pouring from the underground and spilling onto the plaza.
'Corca-fuckin-Duibhne,' he growled, turning up the volume. There had to be hundreds of the coppery-skinned bastards. It was like watching a swarm of bugs emerging from their nest. Whoever was manning the camera was hiding behind a newspaper kiosk, peeking out from time to time for the disturbing footage. For some reason there was no audio, and Squire imagined that it was probably for the best.
Slowly, he brought a potato chip to his mouth, eyes riveted to the television. One of the Night People had seen the cameraman, its mouth opening incredibly wide in a silent roar. The gnarled, twisted, leathery thing sprang across the brick as though in a dance, needle teeth bared for attack. The picture turned to static, and an anchorwoman who usually looked too damn cool for the room came on as the broadcast returned to the studio. Her face was pasty, and she was sweating to beat the band.
'How long ago was that?' Squire asked the set, listening to the woman's trembling voice. The goblin rose from his chair and went to the window. The red, billowing fog seemed to have grown thicker in the square below, practically hiding the park from view. There was a kind of glow about it now that reminded him of weird creatures that lived so far below the ocean's surface that they had developed their own luminescence.
'No more than a fifteen minute walk from Government Center to here,' the hobgoblin grumbled, though his words trailed off as he noticed dark things moving in the blood red mist. 'Shit!' Squire pressed his face against the glass for a better look. Corca Duibhne darted about the unearthly fog with an uncanny swiftness, converging upon the townhouse.
Conan Doyle's valet stepped away from the window. There was no way that the Night People could get inside the townhouse. Conan Doyle had set up all kinds of magickal wards and barriers so that nothing that didn't belong could find its way into the place. The image on the television screen again caught his attention. The anchorwoman was crying now, mascara running down her face in oily streaks. She was in the process of confessing her sins to the camera.
'I've got my own problems, sweetheart,' he said, reaching for the remote and clicking off the set.
A thunderous clamor came to him from the first floor, as if something were pounding on the door to get in, but of course Squire knew that was impossible. Isn't it? Son of a bitch, it had better be.
He jumped feet first into a square of shadow thrown by the entertainment center, becoming immersed in a world of perpetual darkness.
The goblin scrambled through the shadowpaths toward an exit that would take him closest to the front door. Again came the pounding, the violent sound muffled within the realm of shadow. Squire drew himself out of a patch of black behind the refrigerator in the kitchen, the hot coils at the back of the unit pressing against his face as he hauled his body from the shadow, and squeezed out from behind the appliance.
Two Corca Duibhne scouts crouched in the center of the kitchen. He knew they were scouts because the symbol of their rank was carved into the dark flesh of their faces. No stars or stripes on lapels for these guys. Heads tilted back, eyes closed, their noses twitched as they sniffed the air in search of potential danger.
It wasn't an instant before they got a nose full of him.
I knew I should have showered this week, the hobgoblin thought, scrambling across the tile floor to pull open one of the counter drawers.
The scouts began to shriek, a high-pitched, ululating sound that warned others of their stinking kind that there was trouble present.
Squire spun around, glinting metal cleaver in hand, meeting the first of his attackers with relish. It had been a long time since he had killed a Corca Duibhne, and as he buried the blade in the skull of his adversary he realized he was long overdue.
'Look at that, a perfect fit,' Squire growled, as the creature continued to fight. 'What's that? You'd like seconds?' He drove a stubby knee savagely up into the Corca Duibhne's midsection, yanked the cleaver from its head, and brought it down again. 'What a greedy little piggy.'
The scout went rigid as the metal blade again shattered its skull, sinking deep. Finally hitting the tiny piece of fruit these shitbags call a brain.
The second of the scouts was across the room. It had been jockeying around, looking for space to attack. Now it pulled back its leathery lips in a ferocious snarl that revealed nasty black gums and needle sharp teeth. 'He was my brother,' the creature snarled, its oily eyes shifting from the corpse of its sibling back to Squire.
'Sorry,' the hobgoblin apologized, bracing the heel of his foot against the corpse's shoulder, and pulling the cleaver from its head with a slight grunt of exertion. 'Did you like 'im much?'
The Corca Duibhne shrugged, its long clawed fingers messaging the air. 'Not especially,' it hissed. 'But blood is the strongest bond. I will take your life in exchange for his.'
'Is that so?' Squire asked, hefting his weapon, stained with stinking black blood. 'I guess it's good to have goals, even if they are fucking ridiculous.'
How is this possible? the goblin wondered. Conan Doyle's magick was some serious mojo, but these bastards had breached the house's supposedly unbreakable defenses. Not good. Not good at all.
The scout began to move and Squire prepared to counter its attack, but it lunged away from him and bolted through the doorway with a hiss, fleeing the kitchen. The goblin swore beneath his breath. Night People. Buncha pussies, he thought, hopping over the body of the dead scout in pursuit.
