9

MYTHING THE POINT

Something was off. Again. Still.

Simon’s idea of getting something to eat meant leaving the knight facility altogether.

He said that he wanted Sig to check out places where the manifestations had occurred in case the spirits of any of the victims were still hanging around, and that the place we were going to eat at was on the way to the first location, but still, our stopping for anything other than a PowerBar didn’t exactly go with the whole laws-of-our-universe-being-suspended thing. I’d seen Simon in emergency mode before, and this wasn’t it.

It didn’t help that I was actively looking for a catch. If working with Simon didn’t wind up exposing unpleasant surprises at some point, I’d rush out and buy a lottery ticket just in case miracles were contagious.

It also didn’t help that I was physically uncomfortable. I had wound up wearing a spare set of Simon’s clothes, which included a cool wisp of a green pullover thing that was theoretically a shirt. It felt like a big silk handkerchief with sleeves. The ensemble was completed by tannish pants that were like skinny jeans except they weren’t. It felt like someone had Saran-Wrapped my ass.

I wasn’t used to the smell either. Simon’s shirt had more feminine scents pressed indelibly into the sheer fabric than I could easily count, and whatever cologne he used off the clock used patchouli to mask the smell of artificially infused sexual attraction pheromones. Thank God my underwear had stayed reasonably dry. After smelling Simon’s shirt, I wouldn’t have gotten near his briefs unless I was aiming a flamethrower at them.

It didn’t take long before we pulled into the parking lot of what used to be a Chinese restaurant. Now it was just for sale or rent. “Was the food bad?” I asked Simon idly as we got out of our respective vehicles. Not that I was really anywhere near as nonchalant as all that. I’ve always had good posturing.

“The food was supposedly excellent.” Simon removed a briefcase out of the trunk of his car. I hadn’t seen him put it in there. “The ventilation system broke down, and the owners decided it would be cheaper to declare bankruptcy than try to fix it.”

Simon probably knew this because the Knights Templar own a lot of real estate agencies. The loose structure of those kinds of operations makes it an easy way for knights to come and go on their own terms with a legal excuse for income. The practice is useful in other ways, too. It was a good bet that Simon used a lot of buildings whose ownership was in transition as temporary meeting places and drop-off points and safe houses and temporary prisons. If any observers came back and investigated this place in a few months, for example, all they’d find was a legit restaurant being operated by clueless civilians.

“We’re keeping our weapons with us from now on.” Sig was talking to Simon as much as she was telling the others. Me, I was already taking my guitar case out of the back of Choo’s van, so maybe she was being polite. No one seemed to think this was a bad idea, not even Simon.

Kasia, however, made a point out of asking me: “Do you always do what Sig tells you to do?”

“Absolutely,” I said. Sig snorted.

Kasia returned her attention to Sig. “So, you still have that strange power to turn dangerous men into weak, dependent assholes.”

“Stanislav and I were codependent.” Sig smelled angrier than she should have been. “And he wasn’t a man. He was a disease that grew a penis, you half-dead skank.”

“Kasia’s also half-alive,” I told Sig. “Let’s try to focus on the positive.” It was an attempt to lighten the tension, and I might as well have been bailing water out of a sinking lifeboat with a thimble. There was an entire silent conversation going on between Kasia and Sig, and I had no idea what they weren’t saying.

“I am not positive about a lot of things.” Kasia decided that was the last word and followed Simon inside the restaurant.

Choo cleared his throat and nodded at the restaurant. “I’d let it go, if you can, Sig. We got bigger problems. This thing’s as bad as she told John it was.”

“It is,” I admitted. “It’s freaking insane.”

“So, we know we’re going to work with them.” Choo was still talking to Sig. “Let’s just get on with it.”

Sig agreed, if reluctantly. “Pretending to be the grown-up sucks.”

I usually pretend in the other direction. “I’ll take your word for it.”

She gave me a smile. It was a little strained, but it was a smile. “Hush.”

“Okay,” I said. “But only because I’m your sex-addled love slave.”

Sig gave my bottom a little smack. “And don’t you forget it.”

I made some excuse about needing to go find the little werewolf’s room and checked the restaurant for potential exits, defensible areas, weapons, killer clowns, crazed ninja hordes, the other giant eye that went with the first one we’d shot up … that kind of thing. I still eventually wound up in a large back room with Chinese tourist porn painted all over the walls in loud, bright, warm colors. The paintings portrayed lots of dragons and bamboo houses and bridges and people with white-painted faces. Sculptures made out of bronze-tinted papier-mâché were everywhere too. The long rectangular table had a small spread on it. There was orange, apple, and pomegranate juice to drink, and apple slices and bananas and grapes to nibble on if the gazpacho soup and crepes weren’t filling enough.

I raised an eyebrow at Simon. “No coffee or meat?”

“Some of us remember our knight training.” Which was petty. I was trained in the 1940s and ’50s, and even if I wasn’t, my body heals damage faster than any pizza slice can cause it. Simon poured some water into Kasia’s glass from a pitcher, and she nodded as if she expected no less. “There is no why in coffee.”

It took me a moment: why as in the letter Y, because coffee is spelled with two Es, and why as in no reason why anyone should drink it. “No, but there’s an organ in organic,” I replied. “And I’m pretty sure I know which one.”

“Hey,” Molly objected mildly. She’s a vegetarian.

Sig gave my thigh a squeeze. “If I can work with Kasia, you can work with Simon.”

She was right, and Simon laid his briefcase on the table and took out a bunch of books that looked like graphic novels or workbooks. I could see one clearly while Simon held it up and flipped through it. The glossy cover had a picture of some kind of yellow-skinned demonic-looking creature in a baldric and thong. It was distinctly male, overly muscled and veiny to the point of parody. The creature was also holding up a big sign that said THE MALE WHO DREW ME HAS ISSUES ABOUT THE SIZE OF HIS PENIS. Well, actually, it was holding up a ridiculously oversized sword that had lots of impractical chains dangling from it, two metal balls hanging at the end of the links. The title was A Guide to Monsters and Mayhem for the Nightcrawlers’ Guild. The bottom of the cover mentioned something about a “dice twenty system.”

When Simon found what he was looking for, he spread the book out and laid it on the table. On page twenty-three was a big floating eyeball. The heading said that it was called an “Eye Witness.” And I thought I’d just been making a bad pun.

“Eye Witness?” Sig packed a lot into that simple repetition: Disbelief. Mild pain at the sheer cheesiness. White-knuckled what-the-hell-is-going-on-here tension.

“Just read it,” Simon said, and Molly pulled the book closer and read the words out loud for the people in the cheap seats. According to the book, Eye Witnesses were thought to be the eyes of mysterious cosmic voyeurs taking an interest in mortal affairs for reasons known only to them. The eyes were the only parts visible as these beings peeked into our dimension from their own plane. Mostly passive, the eyes could harness great telekinetic powers if anyone attempted to interfere with their viewing pleasure.

“That’s kind of clever,” I said as Molly slid the book back toward Simon. “And creepy. And a complete crock.”

“That mist you saw was also created for this game,” Simon said. “It’s called an Acist.”

“As in acid mist?” Molly asked.

Simon looked like he wanted to pat her head and give her a biscuit. Instead, he proceeded to flip through the books he’d pulled out and showed us illustrations that resembled all of the creatures we’d seen back at Asshaven. Some of them were completely made up, and some were variations of the myths inspired by actual creatures.

I was having a hard time processing. “What is this Nightcrawlers’ Guild?”

Simon snapped the book shut. “You’ve all heard of Dungeons & Dragons, right?”

I’d never checked that stuff out, either from a lack of friends or because imagining I’m hunting monsters isn’t really my idea of escapism. But we all nodded, and Molly said, “I played it while I was at Sweet Briar College.”

“The Nightcrawlers’ Guild was basically one of many Dungeons & Dragons–inspired companies making products that were interchangeable with other game-playing systems.”

“So, this eyeball thing came to life from a game,” Choo repeated. Maybe he thought it would make sense if he kept saying it. “We’re dealing with monsters who came to life from a game.”

“Is anybody else thinking of that scene from the original Ghostbusters?” Molly asked.

“I am now,” I said. One of the pleasures of knowing Molly is that she will watch any movie that catches her fancy an indeterminate number of times, even a bad one if it’s the right kind of bad, and she has spent a lot of time catching me up on movies that I missed while I was traveling outside the United States. Now we speak our own movie language. “The big fight at the end?”

“Yes!” Molly looked at the others. “You know, the scene where if they think of something, a demon will take their thought and make it real? So they wind up fighting a giant Stay Puft Marshmallow Man?”

I turned toward Simon and tried to channel Molly’s comment a little. “Is it possible that this Nightcrawlers’ Guild is actually a cult? Could they have built in some kind of ritual so that every time a certain number of people play one of their games, it becomes a kind of summoning ceremony for tulpas?”

Simon sighed. If he wasn’t careful, he was going to turn into a real boy. “It’s something we’re looking into, but not all of the transformed people turned into something out of these books. Let me walk you through it.”

He began to methodically display a series of beige folders. Maybe reading from an actual folder sounds quaint, but knights don’t like to make information Internet-accessible. The papers and photos Simon was removing had sigils watermarked beneath the writing. The symbols didn’t channel a lot of magic, but anybody who tried to take a picture of the papers would find the image blurred. Anyone who tried to copy them would wind up causing copier breakdowns.

Simon went on to briefly describe the people who had transformed into monsters that were half make-believe and half familiar. Jenny Starkey was a shut-in with a basement apartment who changed into a troglodyte. Not a real troglodyte—a caveman urban legend dating back to a time when Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals still coexisted—this one had scaly skin and a rank smell.

Andrew Martin was a low-level drug dealer who mostly sold drugs on the side to supplement his income as a groundskeeper for several hotels. He became a made-up monster called a Sleech. Basically, a normal man except there were pale membranous tentacles coming out of his torso, and they could inject a narcotic agent into bloodstreams that made the victims listless and cattlelike.

Don Sheridan was a construction worker who had become the overly muscled slag of a humanoid I’d seen chained up in the complex beneath the corporate building. As far as anybody could guess, he’d become some kind of ogre.

Mitzi Unger had become a siren, and she was a bit of a puzzler. The original Mitzi didn’t look anything like the almost-too-beautiful woman I’d seen in the cell, the one whose throat had been operated on. She was a short, stout woman with a dour expression on her face, and her attitude didn’t seem particularly sensual. The picture showed a tired woman who hadn’t spent a lot of time primping, and according to Simon, Mitzi had spent most of her time trying to keep the pizza place her husband owned from going under while raising their two sons almost single-handedly.

Mitzi’s first official act as a siren had been to use her hypnotic song to have her two teenaged sons beat her husband to death.

Choo found Mitzi particularly disturbing. He had recently had a chunk of ear torn out by a real siren and undergone several sessions of otoplasty. Now both of his ears are smaller as part of the fix, and the injured one still isn’t working at peak efficiency. “That ain’t a siren. Sirens have bird legs.”

Simon gave Choo a bored get-with-the-program look. “Again, it’s a combination of the real thing and the popular version presented in video and table games.”

“Give us a little slack, Simon,” I said. “We’re used to fighting the real monsters that inspired media versions. We’re not used to fighting the media versions inspired by real monsters.”

Simon’s lip curl was a reluctant form of agreement.

“Was this Mitzi Unger seductive in real life?” Molly asked.

“Not as far as we’ve been able to tell, but who knows what her inner life was like.” Simon went on with his presentation. The next picture showed the egghead that had tried to greet me with a little too much tongue. Gus Gordon was an accountant, even if his official job title said something different. According to Simon, he had become a jobombi, a type of zombie made from the kind of person who is anonymous and always fading into the background. Jobombies get absorbed into some soul-crushing job until their individual identity is consumed. The jobombi then goes through the routines of its former existence on autopilot until someone notices it and challenges it, at which point it reacts violently.

“Why did someone notice it so soon?” I wondered. “Why didn’t the Pax kick in and make people ignore it?”

Simon glared at me as if the answer was my fault. “That’s the worst part. It might be that with all of the cosplayers and attention-seekers and publicity stunts in New York City, people didn’t realize that there was actually something supernatural going on, even subconsciously, so the Pax didn’t kick in. Or it might be that this increase in magic incidents has severely weakened the Pax in this area, and it’s not operating as effectively now that we need it the most.”

Peachy.

The next photos were of the goat man I’d seen. Alex Holden had played a flute in his high school band. Ten years later, he’d become a waiter making over a hundred thousand dollars a year. Alex seemed to get a lot of gifts from older women that he met during his job. He had been in a motel with a married woman who wasn’t his wife when he changed into a satyr and started playing a magical flute that drove women insane. Apparently, he was trying to start a supernatural orgy.

“How did you contain that?” Sig asked curiously.

“We didn’t, not entirely. Fortunately, everyone who heard the music forgot what happened shortly after we put a stop to it. Hopefully, that includes the people who got away.”

“Yeah,” Choo said. “But …”

“If you hear a story about some unknown person dosing water with LSD, freezing it, and putting it in the ice machine of a motel, you’ll know why.”

“And you really think that will fly?” Sig asked skeptically.

“We drugged the survivors with LSD,” Simon told her. “We really dosed water with LSD too, and froze it and put it in the ice machine. The police are already doing the rest.”

The last pictures were of Randy Prutko, the shelf stocker who had become some kind of black knight. He was supposed to be a violent moron, but hardly a dark prince of power.

“My people are still putting together files on the last two manifestations.” Simon closed Randy’s folder. “The person who became that floating eye was a woman named Bailey Semones. She was the one who called the police when Mitzi Unger became a siren and had her sons kill their father.”

“There must have been more to her than that,” I argued. “Why did you take her into custody?”

“Because we could,” Simon said. “Bailey is old and lives alone and seems to spend most of her time spying on her neighbors. The knight who questioned her realized that Bailey had no friends and spent a lot of time watching the Ungers, so he thought she might be a good information source.”

“And that makes …” I paused to tally it up. Black knight. Satyr. Faceless thing. Big Honking Eyeball. The death worms that were apparently still a cover-up in progress. “Five incidents in the last twenty-four hours. The frequency really is increasing.”

Simon gave me a tired thanks-for-rubbing-it-in glare. “I have two plans for putting an end to this fast. One of them involves Sig talking to any spirits left behind by these manifestations. They might tell us how the School of Night is doing this and who we have to kill to make it stop.”

Sig ignored that for the moment. “The School of Night? You think those nutcases are behind this?”

“I do.” Simon looked at Molly and Choo. “Have John and Sig told you about them?”

The answer was no. Simon looked pleasantly surprised. Choo and Molly did not. “The School of Night is a secret occult society. No one knows much about it, but the few known references to the group begin in England around the Elizabethan era. Some of its founding members were John Dee, Walter Raleigh, and Christopher Marlowe. We thought we killed them out a long time ago, but recently the organization popped up again.”

“The same John Dee who claimed to talk to angels?” Molly’s voice noticeably tensed.

“Yes. Most people think Marlowe’s play, Doctor Faustus, was based on John Dee.”

“That’s the play about the guy who makes a deal with the devil, right?” Choo said.

“Right. A bookish scholar makes a bargain for power and doesn’t realize that he’s being manipulated and used by evil forces way beyond his control.”

Choo looked around the table. “Is it too late to change my mind about getting involved with this?”

Simon’s smile wasn’t. “Yes.”

I tamped down an I told you so until it lodged somewhere in my upper chest muscles. Instead, I asked, “But why do you think the School of Night is involved?”

“Because like people from every age, the original School of Night was convinced that the world was on the brink of destruction. What made them different was that John Dee wanted to guide the process. He wanted to help bring about the end of the world so that he could fashion a new one in its place.”

“Sort of like a controlled burn,” I said.

“That’s not a bad comparison.”

It might have been a compliment if it weren’t for the amount of surprise that Simon had managed to pack into the statement. Choo didn’t care about any of that. “What kind of new world did this dude want to start?”

Simon’s expression went flat. “Dee wanted to bring about a new age of magic. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that uncontrolled magical incidents are breaking out at the same time that the School of Night has been exposed and we’re trying to hunt down every last one of their members. I think we’ve forced them to speed up their timetable.”

“Fine, I’m sold,” Sig said. “Where would these ghosts I’m supposed to look for most likely be hanging out?”

Simon was still formulating a response when his cell phone vibrated. He took it out, listened, then announced, “I’m going to have to take a break and make some calls while I still can. The attackers are here.”

Let me just repeat that. He said the attackers were there. Casually. It was the first time he’d mentioned it.

It looked like I wouldn’t be buying any lottery tickets anytime soon.