“Let’s go downstairs and make cocoa,” Nick said. “We need some cocoa.”
“Nicholas, it’s late and Kelsey’s tired.”
Kelsey threw her arms around her mother’s waist. “Mommy, yes!”
“Just one cup, then, and we have to make it quick. Because my girl needs her beauty sleep.” She picked Kelsey up, and her little girl snuggled into her arms.
As they trooped downstairs, Nick asked Wylie, “Are we going hunting in the morning?”
“Hunting,” his mother said, “on a school day?”
“Not for middle school,” Nick replied smoothly. “Teacher’s Day.”
Wylie understood exactly what his son was doing. He could not communicate openly, not if somebody was in here and they couldn’t see him and they were listening. “We could go for pheasant,” he said quickly. “Maybe we’ll put a bird on the table. The guns are ready, so we can get an early start.”
“Let’s pull ’em out, then,” Nick said.
Wylie could feel the presence in the house just as clearly as Nick apparently could. An invisible something, and it was close, it was right on top of them.
He unlocked the gun cabinet and pulled out one of their birders and tossed it to Nick, then got himself a 12- gauge. “Get behind us,” he said to Brooke.
“Excuse me?”
“Mom, get behind us!”
Wylie saw movement, very clear, not ten inches from his face. An eye, part of a face. And he knew something about who was here: it was a man, and he was horribly scarred. Al North was back for a second try.
Then there was a hand around his wrist. He looked down at it, felt the steel of the grip. “It’s on Daddy,” Kelsey screamed, and this time Brooke saw it and she screamed, too, and not just screamed, she howled.
Nick fired into the seemingly empty space where the figure had to be, and there were a series of purple flashes in the general shape of a man, but the buckshot passed through him and smacked the far wall of the family room, shattering the big front window and leaving a trench in the top of the couch.
The hand had gone.
Nick grunted and he was up against the wall, he was being throttled, and where the body of the intruder touched his, you could see edges of a black, tattered uniform. Wylie was not a huge man, not as big as Al North, but he waded in. From behind, he put his arms around North’s neck and pulled his head back, gouging into his face, and as he did that, the face and head appeared, the stretched neck, arteries pulsing hard, and the eyes, surrounded by scar tissue and dripping blood.
Seeing this, Brooke went into the gun cabinet and brought out the big silver magnum she’d fussed and fretted for years about him even having. She waved it, not having any idea how to use it.
WHAM! WHAM! WHAM!
Amid a showering mass of sparks, the figure flew across the room, slamming against the TV with a huge crash. It lay there, the left half of the head and face visible down to the left shoulder. Both hands and most of the left arm could be seen, also, until the hand moved across where the stomach would be, slipping into an envelope of invisibility, then coming out again with blood on the fingers.
The one visible eye was gray, glaring ferociously out of a blood-ringed socket. The surgery was crude and cruel. Until now Wylie had not realized just how poor their doctor had been.
The hand shot toward him again, like the head of a snake, and there was a knife in it, and the knife sailed at him, spinning, flashing metal, and clanged against the wall. There was a spitting, sparking sound and a burst of blue electric fire, and where it hit, reality seemed to peel back.
Where there had been a blank wall, there was now a door with a blue-shimmering frame, and beyond it a kitchen with a twisted, melted countertop, a toaster that looked like melted wax, a Sub-Zero fridge that had been clawed and melted and was hanging open.
There were people there, and one of them looked in this direction. Wylie knew what he was seeing, and it was even more terrible than he had imagined when he was writing about these humanoid reptiles, because it was so sleek, so beautiful with its shimmering pale skin, and so terrible with its empty, hard eyes, quick eyes that focused fast on this room, then came alive with a glitter that could only reflect eager delight.
Seraph, they called themselves, but we had names for them, from every culture in the world, from every time in history, but all these names amounted to the same thing, the one word that described something so exquisite and yet so ugly: he was looking straight into the eyes of what mankind in both human universes had identified as a demon.
Kelsey ran—toward it. She ran with a child’s blindness and raw, instinctive hunger to find safety. No doubt, she didn’t realize what she was seeing. Maybe she saw a policeman—black uniform, silver buttons, red collar patches—or maybe some other form of deliverance, but she ran to the thing, right through the opening and into the other universe. The dying universe. The place where they tore souls out of bodies and made wanderers of little girls.
Wylie tossed Nick the twelve-gauge. “Blast it,” he yelled, “it’s getting up.”
“KELSEY,” Brooke screamed, running after her, leaping, trying and failing to grab her flying nightgown before she went through the door—which made a faint, wet sound, a sort of gulping, as she passed through. She stood shimmering with bright violet light, as if she’d been trapped in some kind of laser show.
The creature waiting for her went down and opened its arms, but the smile revealed rows of teeth like narrow spikes, and the golden eyes were not eyes of joy, they had in them the look of a famished wolf.
Wylie dove in behind his daughter, feeling a hammering electrical pulsation over his whole body, followed by gagging nausea as he landed beside her. She was icy cold, her skin gray, and he had the horrifying thought that her soul was already gone.
The demon had white hair, thin and soft, waving around its head like a halo. “Hi,” it said, “I’m Jennifer Mazle. It’s good to meet you, Wylie.”
The words were like blows delivered with a silk—clad hammer, so soft were they, so vicious the tone.
He turned—and faced a blank wall. The door was no longer visible.
“You’ll need to come with me,” the demon snapped, “you’re here to stay.”
But Wylie remembered the wisdom that has come down from one human age to the next, the whispered knowledge, and knew that she could only lie, and therefore threw himself and his daughter at the wall anyway.
Behind him he heard a cry, “Shit!” and then he was home again, Nick was blasting the shotgun into the assassin, and Brooke was rushing to them, now grabbing her baby, now throwing both of them down behind the couch.
“Stay behind me, Dad,” Nick said.
“Use the magnum for Chrissakes!”
“No bullets!”
Another blast of the 12-gauge rocked the world. Behind them there was a crackle and a hiss of rage, and the demon stepped through into the room. As it did so, it became human. “You’re under arrest, Wylie,” Jennifer Mazle said softly.
What the hell universe did she think she was in? “Not here, sweetheart,” Wylie snarled. He’d picked up the empty magnum, and now hurled it at her head. There was a flash of white-purple energy when it struck her. She turned away, her skin spurting red smoke. She gasped, gasped again, put a long hand up to her jaw, then straightened up and produced a weapon of her own. It was blacker than night, this thing that was in her hand, with an ugly, blunt snout.
Somehow he knew that he mustn’t allow her to fire it, that it wouldn’t tear them apart, not physically, that what it would do would be to splash out that light of theirs, and rip the souls out of the whole family, and hurl them into the control of the soul catchers, and make this little family of his the first wanderers in this universe.
He threw himself at her, and as Nick kept Al North back with blasts from the 12-gauge, he waded into her, his fists hammering, delivering blow after blow to what turned out to be a body hard with some sort of armor. Somewhere in there, he knew there would be something soft and vulnerable, a lizard’s delicate meat, and he hit where seams might be, at the waist where she had to bend, and then the face, he hit the face, and it was just as hard, like steel, this structure of scales.
She was like a thing made of garnet or steel, not a living creature at all.
