the body except the head.
“That explains the blood,” Barb said, pointing her pistol around until she spotted the head. It had apparently rolled into a corner of the cave. “Okay, that’s the professor.”
But search as she might, she couldn’t find the kidnap victim.
“That’s odd,” she muttered, getting down on her knees and shining the light into every crevice.
By dint of much searching she found three openings off of the cave. All of them had signs of being used by the creature but none of them had traces of the victim.
“Ssssh…sugar,” she muttered.
She went back over to the entrance and called down.
“Janea. Found the professor. No sign of the victim. Three exits, all used. At this point, we need to call it.”
“Got it,” Janea said.
“I’m going to try to stuff the professor down the chute,” Barb said. “I’ll roll you his head first.”
Lazarus walked out of the cave and then over to a patch of brush, and started rolling in the leaves as if trying to rub something off his fur.
Barb pulled herself out of the opening, then pulled the body of professor Argyll through. She’d gotten good at that over the last few hours.
“You’d think there’d be somebody waiting for us,” Barb said, shaking her head. “Give me Thane’s hand.”
Getting out of the cave had been nearly as much of a nightmare as fighting the thing in it. Fortunately, every time the two agents got lost, Lazarus had directed them to the right course. The major problem had been maneuvering the stiffening body of the professor and Thane. Thane could and would perform minimal functions- would crawl when they told him to crawl-but getting him through the restrictions had been a special pain. And any time the light started to go away, such as the one time Janea’s helmet-light battery had given out, he would start to howl.
As the student exited the cave he started to mutter, a precursor to a howl. Night had fallen by the time they exited the cave and apparently the light from Barb’s helmet wasn’t enough.
“It’s okay, Thane,” Barb said, pulling him to his feet. The FBI was still clearly investigating the area around the trailer, and there were Klieg lights set up. “Go to the light, Thane. It’s okay, I’ll be with you.”
Randell looked up as a tall figure stumbled into the light and collapsed right on top of an evidence marker.
“Watch where you’re…” he said before recognizing the lost caver. “Holy shit!”
“Watch your language, Special Agent,” Barb said, holstering her pistol as she walked into the light around the trailer. She was dragging the body of the professor by one wrist. His body had stiffened into a slight U, which had actually helped with most of the restrictions. “Area’s cleared but we couldn’t find the girl.”
“Trying to give a cat a bath in the shower is a baaad idea,” Barb said, toweling her hair as she walked out of the bathroom. Lazarus darted past her, yowling.
The agents had wanted to question them immediately but they’d given in to the argument that both needed a shower badly. So the foursome had returned to Barb and Janea’s hotel. Barb and Janea had driven in a different car by mutual agreement with the agents. Their rental car now smelled like rotting skunks.
“Cedar said you were all dead,” Randell said. “At least what we could get out of him. He’s nearly as bad as Thane. All he’d do was scream about blackness and repeat that you were all dead.”
“Which was why there wasn’t a welcoming committee,” Janea said. “O ye of little faith. Actually, that’s exactly what ye are.”
“So what was it?” Graham asked.
“Not sure,” Barb said.
“It wasn’t a Shambler,” Janea said. “Underestimated the threat again. It didn’t respond to the Jagana spell or the Jugu powder, which a Shambler would have. And Shamblers don’t have those eyes. I’m going to have to call a researcher at the Foundation to see if they have a clue. But the good news is, it’s dead. Which, I suppose, explains why you got the Calling. If I’d gone in there expecting a Shambler we all would be dead.”
“The professor is,” Barb said, shaking her head. “I should have listened to Lazarus.”
“No sign of the girl?” Randell asked.
“There were three openings off of the lair,” Barb said, tightly. “All used. We had a dead team member, one who was catatonic, and neither Janea nor I were cave experts. I turned the penetration at that point.”
“In case it sounds like we’re being ungrateful,” Graham said, looking at Randell sharply, “good job on taking out whatever that thing was. And thank you for recovering the professor and Th-” He paused as his phone beeped, looked at it, and flipped it open.
“Agent Graham… Yes, sir. You’re sure. Yes, sir, right away.”
He closed the phone and looked at Barb with a flat expression.
“You’re sure this thing is dead?”
“All are not dead that sleeping lie,” Janea said, her brow furrowing. “But it’s as dead as anything like that can be. Why?”
“We’ve had another attack.”
CHAPTER FIVE
“Your creature has been identified,” Augustus said over the video link.
Janea had sent a report to FLUF before heading to bed, and the next morning she and Barb had headed back to the FBI forward base after a brief stop to drop off the rental car and pick up a new one.
Graham had headed to the site of the new attack, so it was Barb, Janea and Randell receiving the call.
“The creature is a skru-gnon.”
“A child of foulness?” Janea said, her eyes wide. “Oh, no, no, no…”
“And what is a… skru…” Barb asked. “That’s Tibetan again, right?”
“A skru-gnon is an unholy mating of human and Old One,” Germaine said. “It is a way for Old Ones to enter into the world.”
“And more,” Janea said, her eyes closed. “The children of the foul are…” She paused and opened her eyes, slitting them slightly. “The children of the foul are the children of gar gyi dbang phyug ma, the mother of all demons.”
“Tiamat again?” Barb asked, exasperated. “Doesn’t she ever learn?”
“No, gar gyi dbang phyug ma is not Tiamat,” Janea said, shaking her head. “It was assumed at one time that they were the same but they’re not. The Gar is an Old One, not an Old God. It was said that it was banished-or vanished, the translation is tricky-from this plane before the first civilization of man arose. It was the creator of the Shamblers, they were of its essence but separate…” She paused as she saw the looks Randell and Barb were giving her.
“Okay, look, this is pre-science,” she said. “And it’s all legend. Tibetan and Incan and some from Basque, of all places. But this is the best guess on the part of the researchers. The Old Ones do not reproduce sexually. Most of them don’t reproduce, period. The Gar, though, can. It mostly reproduces asexually, fissioning off creatures like Shamblers. But the Shamblers cannot reproduce. All of the remaining Shamblers that haven’t been destroyed were created from the essence of the Gar.”
“So what’s a skru…” Barb asked.
“ Skru-gnon,” Janea said. “A child of foulness. The Gar can, somehow, induce reproduction in human females. Only humans, not animals. Through them it can produce a mixture of Old One and human, an unholy union, as Augustus said. They are much more powerful than Shamblers or any of the other creatures it produces by fission. They may be the souls of Old Ones brought to this plane.”
“So that…thing,” Barb said, closing her eyes.
