Faith hadn’t slept much on the flight from San Francisco. Too many questions churned in her head. What the hell was Christabel de Tournefort up to, coming to Rhode Island, of all places? No way could it be a coincidence that Buffy was in the middle of something ugly in Providence and one of the oldest vampires in the world was on her way there.
The flight had been nearly empty, so she’d stretched out across a whole row in the back by the bathrooms—with their lovely aroma—but the extra room hadn’t helped. Faith prided herself on being able to sleep almost anywhere, but she had her demons. Going back to New England troubled her. She wanted to feel excited about returning to her old stomping grounds, but the truth was, Providence was about as close to Boston as she wanted to get.
Too many bad memories there. Oh sure, she’d had some good times. But there had been nightmares, as well. If someone had asked her if she’d rather go back to prison or back to Boston, she’d have to think about it.
Yeah, all in all, Providence was close enough.
After a smooth flight, the pilot blew the landing, the plane bouncing and swaying a little as he tried to get her onto the ground on target. Then they were rolling along the tarmac. Impatient as she was by nature, Faith waited until the seat belt light was off, mainly to spite the jerk-offs who seemed to think that whatever they had to do was more vital than everyone else’s business. When the captain made a point of announcing that you should stay in your damned seat, and you immediately got up and started grabbing your luggage, opening overhead compartments, Faith figured you deserved a suitcase to the skull. So when the grumpy-looking old guy diagonally across the aisle from her got exactly that, she grinned.
The wheels of justice were in motion.
When the light dinged off, she grabbed her duffel bag from the compartment above her head and started off the plane. No checked luggage for her. Faith traveled light.
She slung the bag across her shoulder and left the plane. The terminal seemed empty. Half of the lights were out and the maintenance staff was buffing the floors. Some of the shops where closed, metal grates pulled down in front of them. The whole state of Rhode Island seemed to close up shop by ten p.m.
At a small kiosk, she checked in and picked up the keys to the little Honda she’d arranged for in advance. With a flip of her hair to clear it from her eyes, she left the terminal, following signs for the parking garage where the rental company kept their fleet. Her car should be on the first floor of the parking garage, right next to the terminal.
Her eyes burned and her neck ached. She’d never been so happy to be off a plane. The night sky was cloudy and a light drizzle was falling, but Faith didn’t mind. It was New England. Chances were good that the morning would bring bright sunshine and a ninety-degree day.
She heard the rush and roar of an airplane engine as one last flight took off. No matter how deserted the airport seemed, apparently some airlines were not quite done for the night. A bus chugged by, along with several cabs, but she stayed on the walkway to the parking garage and kept her eyes forward. When an old Ford in need of a paint job and a new exhaust system drove by, shaking and thumping with the rap song playing from its speakers, she bopped a little to the music. Most rap was ridiculous gangster crap, but some of the old-school stuff had musical integrity. She couldn’t have explained musical integrity to anyone, but like so many other things, she knew it when she saw it. Heard it. Whatever.
Faith had the key to the car in her hand and the rental agreement stuffed in the back pocket of her jeans. Somewhere far off a car alarm started wailing. Shifting the weight of her duffel bag, she scanned the numbered parking spaces. The heels of her boots clicked on the floor, echoing off the concrete walls and ceiling of the parking garage. On one of the upper floors, tires squealed with a sound like screaming.
She spotted the car, a blue midsize thing, anonymous as hell. Anonymous was good.
Faith spun the keys on one finger.
The tire squeals died. In the moment after the sound went away, she realized she could no longer hear the distant car alarm, either. Then she frowned and stopped walking. She stared down at the toes of her boots, then took a few more steps.
No clicking of her heels. No echo. With a glance around, she focused on the sounds of the airport, but there weren’t any. She couldn’t hear buses or cars or an airplane taking off.
“What the—,” she began, then cut herself off when she realized she could not hear the sound of her own voice. Even inside her head, the way you always did, she couldn’t hear herself. “Hello?” she said, trying again. “What the hell is this?”
But though her lips moved and air flowed from her lungs, no sound came from her. The garage was completely silent. Impossibly quiet. Faith slipped the keys into her pocket and glanced around, bag swinging against her back as she moved. She tapped the toe of her boot on the concrete but did not make any noise at all.
How could there be no sound?
And just as she had the thought, a hissing static began in her ears. Faith winced and shook her head. She squinted as the static became louder. A rush of noise, it seemed to issue from inside of her and it only increased in volume. Scowling, she swore, and a burst of pain shot through her skull. Whatever noise she’d just made, it had somehow spiked the static’s volume.
Frantic, she looked around, trying to figure out where the sound was coming from. Even her thoughts felt muffled, all other noise blocked out except for that hissing crackle. A tickle on her upper lip made her bring one hand up, and when she wiped at it and looked down, she discovered that her nose was bleeding.
Angry but not panicked—Faith wasn’t the type—she started toward her rental car again. Maybe once she left the garage, the static would subside. She wondered if it had to do with the flight, if she’d screwed up her hearing somehow. But the moment the thought crossed her mind, she realized how stupid it sounded. Whatever this was, there was nothing natural about it.
Faith picked up her pace, running the last dozen feet toward the car.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw something moving.
She spun and there they were—slipping from between cars, gliding toward her, just a few inches from the ground. They were just as chalky white as Buffy had described them, dark pits for eyes and broad rictus grins that seemed to have been pinned back like dead butterflies. Their hands moved like lunatics conducting some asylum orchestra, and they never stopped floating, never stopped moving, grinning, staring.
The Gentlemen.
They were fairy tale creatures, Buffy had said. They’d come to Sunnydale to steal and eat human hearts. Buffy had managed to destroy them, so this had to be a different group, somehow related to the others.
As Faith backed toward her car, staring at them, she saw other creatures slipping out from beneath cars, emerging as though they were boneless rodents, able to slip into any narrow space. They were lumbering, monstrous things, and she knew they had to be the Gentlemen’s footmen—the ones who gathered victims so that the Gentlemen could harvest their hearts.
“Well, well,” she started to say. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
But she only made it through the first few words, and each one was an excruciating burst of screeching static in her ears. The pain drove Faith to one knee and she felt a dribble of blood begin to seep from her left ear. Swearing silently she shifted the duffel on her shoulder and stood.
The footmen raced toward her, jaws gnashing, capering almost like monkeys. Faith could barely look at them. Her eyes were on the Gentlemen, who glided toward her above the concrete, standing straight up and clad in preacher black. She’d seen the Irish Catholic life in Boston and met her share of priests.
Faith trembled. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been afraid, but some little-girl part of her, deep inside, saw these things and felt frightened.
Their grins never wavered. The sight of them made her want to scream, but she didn’t dare.
Then the footmen attacked. Something snapped in Faith and she was in motion. The first one lunged for her. She caught his wrist, twisted her body, and hurled him at the windshield of the car behind her. The glass shattered without a sound. The Gentlemen came no closer, only grinned. Faith kept her duffel on her shoulder as she spun into a kick that cracked the skull of the next footman. He collided with a third and they both went down. Faith stepped over to the car and snapped off the radio antenna. When the next footman attacked, Faith began to beat the creature about the face and neck. It reached for her and she whipped at its arms until it stopping trying to touch her.
With a single kick, she caved in its chest.
All the while the Gentlemen only watched.
More footmen attacked. Fists and kicks flew. She fought them off, but as she did, she saw that the Gentlemen had begun to glide nearer to her. If anything, their grins seemed to have widened. Soon they would take her heart unless she did something to stop it.
Then it struck her. Moments before she’d thought this impossible. Now she realized that it was. The Gentlemen came to a place and stole away the voices of all the people so nobody could call for help when it came time to harvest their hearts.
They were vulnerable to sound, to the human voice. It didn’t make any sense. How were these things even here, if the whole city hadn’t had their voices stolen away? They weren’t supposed to be able to blot out all ambient sound, only voices. And what had they done to her? None of this matched what Giles and Buffy had told her about the Gentlemen. Unless these things were something else, some variation?
Then she was pretty much screwed.
Which she would be anyway if she didn’t do something.
A footman got a handful of her hair. Faith reached up and snapped his wrist. With his other hand he grabbed on to her duffel bag, but by now she was in motion. Her arm pistoned up and down and she pummeled the footman to the ground.
As the others moved in, she swung the duffel, knocking two of them out of her path. Faith raced for the nearest Gentlemen. His grin remained. He did not flinch or pause or even blink, only kept grinning, and she wanted to scream in fear and frustration and loathing. Her skin prickled with disgust, but she reached up and grabbed his head. She retched when he opened his mouth. His black teeth were hideous, his breath stinking of rotting meat.
She tried to pull him down, but he was too strong. Faith shouted at him, but the scream only increased the static and she staggered back. Several of them surrounded her then, reaching for her, touching her, pulling at her clothes, and panic surged through her.
Glancing around for an exit, she saw the thing standing in the shadows between two cars. The static shrieked in her ears and Faith staggered, tasting her blood on her lips. But she had spotted it. The thing between the cars was some kind of demon with tiny legs and arms and a huge head that had been laid open like peeled fruit. A gaping hole existed at the center of its head, and Faith felt sure the static in her mind was coming from there.
Magick. The Gentlemen had stolen away sound, or this demon thing leeched the sound from around her, including her screams. All the cumulative noise of the parking garage seemed to funnel right into her ears.
Faith sneered and lunged for the demon. One of the footmen caught her ankle. Three Gentlemen grabbed hold of her arms. Together they began to drag her down.
She drove her fingers into the eyes of the nearest Gentleman. They popped with a disgusting sucking noise. Even with the gore from its ruined eyes running down its chin, the Gentleman continued to grin. The others reached for Faith, but she’d had enough. No way would this end well. There were too many of them—footmen and gentlemen and that disgusting split-faced demon.
Fury roiled in her gut.
If there was one thing Faith didn’t do well—something she hated more than anything—it was running away. But she’d grown up hard and fast and had been in worse scrapes than this, and she’d survived by knowing when to get the hell out.
Now, for instance.
She swung her duffel, knocked down another Gentleman, then set off running toward the nearest row of cars. One of them was her rental, but there’d be no time to unlock the door, never mind get behind the wheel and start it up. As though dancing, she swept her right foot up into a kick that took the nearest footman under the jaw and then kept going.
Faith leaped up onto the trunk of a Cadillac, had time for two steps across the roof, and then dove through the space between the concrete barrier and the ceiling. She landed on the narrow strip of grass that surrounded the parking garage, dropped, and rolled into a somersault, trying to use her momentum.
The duffel’s strap tangled around one leg, but she shook it loose and then sprinted across the street, bolting for the taxi stand in front of the airport terminal. A few cars were speeding along that pickup lane, headlights bright in the dark. The pavement was slick with the drizzling rain but she kept her footing.
She risked a single glance back and saw the footmen giving chase. In the opening of the parking garage’s first level, in the deeper darkness there, she saw the marble-white grinning faces of the Gentlemen looking back.
The footmen scampered after her, hell-bent on delivering her to their masters. But the static had diminished almost to nothing and she could hear that distant car alarm still wailing. An engine roared somewhere close by. Tires hissed as they rolled across the damp pavement, kicking up a spray.
Faith reached the sidewalk. A single taxi waited at the stand, the driver standing outside the cab with a cigarette in his hand, looking bored.
“Drive!” she snapped at him.
He smiled, gave her a thumbs-up, and flicked the cigarette away.
Faith reached the cab, whipped open the door, and glanced up to see the first two footmen darting across the road toward her. She swore as she tossed her duffel into the taxi and knew she had just bought the driver the worst night of his life.
A bus whipped by, rattling like a subway train. It struck the footmen with a moist crack of bone and flesh. In the mist and drizzle and dark, and with the speed of the footmen, the driver hadn’t noticed them in time. The rear lights came on and the brakes started to squeal.
Faith slipped into the cab and slammed the door.
“Where to?” the cabbie asked, checking her out in the rearview mirror. Guys were all the same. Faith knew she must look like a drowned rat, but all he wanted was a look at her wet T-shirt.
“Just drive,” she said, unzipping her duffel and searching around inside. “Get out of here, and I’ll find you the address.”
“Will do,” the driver said, already pulling away.
Faith turned around just once to see more footmen trying to keep pace with the taxi in the drizzling rain, and faltering.
She’d be all right—for now. Time to have a little chat with Buffy, figure out what was really going on around here. She’d have to come back in the morning for her rental car. Faith found the name of the hotel scribbled on a piece of paper in her bag and read it off to the driver. Then she slumped back against the seat, missing San Francisco.
So much for her trip back to New England. She felt just as welcome as she had when she’d left.
* * *
Xander drove along Blackstone Boulevard, searching for a place to park that would allow the car to go unnoticed for a while. It turned out to be more difficult than he’d imagined. Blackstone Boulevard was about two miles long, a separated road with a long strip of grass in the middle. During the day, he figured it was a nice place for a stroll, the sort of spot that might bring out dog walkers and such. At night it looked like a decent place to get mugged.
Plus there was the cemetery. People didn’t like to hang around cemeteries after dark, even people who claimed they didn’t believe in the supernatural. Skeptics were only one real fright away from running in terror most of the time. Xander didn’t have skepticism as an excuse. He just didn’t want to get killed and eaten.
Rules to live by.
Eventually he decided that the house under construction across the street from Swan Point Cemetery was as good a spot as any to risk getting towed. Not that he was worried about the car. The little Honda was a rental and it was on Buffy’s credit card. If it got towed away, at worst it would be an inconvenience and an unexpected expense—for her. For him, though, coming out of the cemetery to find the car gone could lead to far more unpleasant circumstances—like being killed and eaten.
Hence, his rules.
Unfortunately it appeared he had little choice. After all of the weird they had seen the night before just wandering around Providence—demons outside a sports bar, drinking beer and laughing like a bunch of drunken baseball fans; a trio of freaky bat-men perched like gargoyles on the roof of the train station; and a small gaggle of goblins pouring out of the Providence Mall burdened with tons of shopping bags—all they really wanted were answers. Every time they’d tried to confront one of the demons or other monstrosities, they’d been left in the dust, scratching their heads, wondering what was going on. Nobody in Providence seemed to notice that the things that walked among them were not human.
Too strange. So tonight they had changed their tactics, and so far they had not been attacked. Xander thought maybe Buffy’s reputation had preceded her. If he had horns or fangs, he’d damn sure run away if he saw her coming. But Buffy had disputed that suggestion, and had decided they were going to split up tonight. She had gone back up to the street where they’d nearly been killed by that freak sandstorm.
And Xander?
“Xander gets to go to the cemetery!” he said unhappily, voice low.
He popped the trunk on the rented Honda and glanced around at the house under construction. The place had its windows in, but no siding yet—just plywood walls. A big Dumpster sat on the property as well. When it was finished, the place would be a mansion. For now, it was just a ghost. Xander figured whoever was building the ghost would have asked the cops to keep an eye on the place just in case local kids tried to break in and use it as a party spot. If the cops found the car there, the tow truck wouldn’t be far behind.
He’d just have to be quick.
In the light of the trunk he pulled out a map of the cemetery and studied it, searching for one grave in particular. From the trunk he removed a small penlight, which he stuck into his pocket, and a tire iron, just in case.
Watching for traffic, he raced across Blackstone Boulevard to the cemetery and then walked along the tall iron gate for about half a mile. When he stopped, he double-checked the map again, then clicked off the penlight. A car drove by without slowing down. As soon as it was out of sight, Xander started to climb.
Once upon a time going over that fence would have been impossible for him. Much as he would deny it, however, the years since he’d met Buffy had changed him. Losing his eye had only given a physical aspect to the changes that had taken place within him. Xander Harris had never had a lot of purpose or determination before he met Buffy Summers.
Yeah, you had both eyes back then, though.
With a smirk, he ignored the voice of the jester that never seemed to go completely quiet in his head, and kept climbing. Yeah, once upon a time he never would have made it over that fence—never even would have considered it possible. But he’d gotten good at a lot of things since those days, and the thing he was best at was not giving up.
He slipped twice. Banged his knee once and his forehead the second time. Pulled a muscle in his back. To anyone watching, he would have looked like a buffoon.
But he got over the fence.
Dropping down on the other side, he ran to take cover in the midst of a copse of trees. Swan Point Cemetery was a hilly expanse of land traced through with narrow roads and dotted with stands of pine and oak and maple. Xander pulled out the penlight again and studied the map. He glanced around, finding his bearings based on two large tombs that were clearly marked on the page, and then he clicked it off and started moving through the darkness again.
A low mist rolled across the wet grass. It had rained lightly for most of the day and into the evening, but now the rain had ceased and only the mist and the damp remained. His sneakers and the cuffs of his jeans got wet quickly. The smell of wet grass filled his nose. It would’ve been almost pleasant if he weren’t in the middle of the cemetery.
“Splitting up is stupid,” he whispered as he hurried between tombstones. “Splitting up is always stupid.”
He started up a rise, keeping to the shadows of trees and gravestones whenever he could.
Glass shattered up ahead. He heard someone laughing, a keening sort of giggle. There was a mental hospital not far away, he knew from reading up on the place, and he wondered if some escaped nutcase was wandering around the cemetery. Then the cemetery echoed with the loudest burp he’d ever heard, and Xander’s face twisted in disgust. He had nothing against burps in general, but this one was revolting.
A burst of laughter followed, not from one person but from several. There came another pop—glass shattering. Then he understood: A bunch of teenagers, likely kids who on another night would be partying in the half-built house where he’d parked the Honda, were drinking in the cemetery. A few guys trying to ply girls with liquor. Or vice versa. Girls could take the initiative, manipulating the foolish male of the species with the ease and expertise of the black widow spider, and . . .
His social life had been appalling just recently.
Xander moved more slowly. Frowning, he tried to look at the map in what little moonlight came through the clouds, not daring to take out the penlight. He glanced around, again trying to get his bearings. If he was right, it seemed like the kids were partying almost exactly at his destination. For all he knew, they might be partying right on top of the grave itself.
He sighed. He’d come all this way just to have a look at the grave of H. P. Lovecraft, and now he was supposed to just hang out here and wait for a bunch of drunk-ass high school kids to wander off, when his rental car—Buffy’s rental car—could be towed at any moment?
Beautiful.
Frustrated, he tried to think of some way to get the kids away from the grave. It occurred to him that he could get closer, find a spot out of sight, and start speaking in a spooky voice, trying to convince them he was the ghost of Lovecraft and was righteously pissed off. Somehow, though, he felt sure that kind of thing only worked in the movies.
Coming up here had seemed like such a good idea. The sandstorm had taken place on the street where the ghost of Edgar Allan Poe was reputed to wander with some frequency. True or not, some serious supernatural mojo had gone down there with whatever demon or monster had created that storm. It took a hell of a lot of power to break windows and scrape the paint off houses and cars.
And if Poe had drawn some supernatural attention, it only stood to reason that Lovecraft would as well. Buffy and Xander had both done a little local research. Lovecraft—by far a freakier individual than Poe—had been born on Angel Street, just a few blocks from the cemetery, and had lived there for years. Both of his parents had been patients at Butler Hospital, stuck in an asylum right down the street from his house. No wonder the guy had been such a lunatic.
Not that he was actually crazy. More than once they had gone up against things that seemed very similar to some of the old gods and demonic things from the mythology Lovecraft had written about. Giles had always said he figured the writer was only half mad, and that like so many people whose perceptions are out of the ordinary, he’d been able to tap into an awareness of the forces of darkness. In Lovecraft’s case, though, he’d somehow tuned in to things more ancient and, to Xander’s way of thinking, far more disturbing than mediums who talked to ghosts or exorcists who saw demons in people’s souls.
These kids were partying at Lovecraft’s grave.
Xander kept low to the ground and ran to a massive old oak tree, trying not to slip on the wet grass. He pressed his back against it, still wondering what to do about the high schoolers. He could smell something in the air, sweet and rich, but it wasn’t pot. At least, he didn’t think so. They were smoking something, though.
A high voice said something he couldn’t make out and then more laughter followed. He rolled his eyes, but then froze. Something about the laughter bothered him. One of the voices was a kind of chuffing noise, like a horse sneezing, and another seemed too throaty, full of phlegm like some hacking smoker’s cough.
Oh, crap, he thought, and he glanced around the edge of the tree.
He could only see the back of the tombstone and it was still fifty yards away, so he had to take for granted that it was Lovecraft’s grave. But truly there was no doubt.
The revelers who were partying on Lovecraft’s grave—drinking beer and whiskey and smoking something that hung heavy in the humid air—were demons. Several lingered at the edge of the crowd, a couple of Vahralls and a tall, stalklike thing that looked like some kind of plant. It had feelers that coiled like snakes in the air. He spotted a Fraxis demon and a couple of huge-bellied swamp demons covered in moss and mucus that might have been Matabiri, but he couldn’t be sure as he’d never seen one outside the pages of a book.
Three hideous things stood up close to the grave, taller and broader than a man but otherwise humanoid except for the bulbous eyes and nests of tentacles that made up their faces. One of them thrust a bottle of beer into the midst of its twisting tentacle face and tilted its head back—tentacles gripping the bottle as it sucked down the beer. One of the tentacles hurled the empty bottle at Lovecraft’s grave, and it shattered there.
A few hairy little demons with long tails darted over to the grave and started to eat the glass. One of them turned and began to urinate in a long stream onto the grave, and at last Xander understood.
Here was the final resting place of an ordinary man who had known what they were, who had seen the truth of the horrors that lay in wait for humanity just beyond the edges of their vision, and no one had believed him. Lovecraft had been the son of mental patients and people had thought he had a madman’s imagination. No one had believed a word.
Whatever the demons and monsters were gathering in Providence for, some of them had taken a side trip tonight for a little revelry that served no purpose except to mock the ghost of a writer who had once tried to warn the world what lay waiting in the darkness. They’d come to taunt Lovecraft, to rub it in.
Xander wanted to step out from hiding, to run them off, maybe knock some of them around. But there were far too many of them, and others in the shadows, mere silhouettes he hadn’t even tried to categorize. A small horde of demons, and what was he? Just one guy who knew too much for his own good, who wished he could warn the world but had learned hard truths that Lovecraft never had.
But the world didn’t want to know what waited for it in the dark. People just wanted to close their eyes and pray that someone else would fight the monsters. That’s why there were Slayers in the world. Xander might not be able to warn the world, but he could help keep it safe. Trying to bust up a party like this one wouldn’t do anyone any good, except the demons, who might decide to have a little one-eyed-California-boy barbecue.
Which brought him right back to his number one rule: Do not get killed and eaten.
Carefully, he slipped away. He had no idea what to make of this scene, or how it fit in with any of the bizarreness they’d encountered over the past few days, and he had a feeling Buffy would be just as puzzled. His only hope was that she’d found something out tonight that could help them.
Since he’d met her, Xander had learned to hate mysteries.
Whatever had brought all of these demons together—and whatever was keeping them from tearing one another, and all of Providence, apart—it couldn’t last forever. Even a fool could see that.
This thing would end in blood. Xander just hoped it wasn’t his own.
* * *
Witchfinder Bors stood in the street and watched the dress shop burn, flames licking up into the darkness of the predawn sky. People began to emerge from apartments atop neighboring shops. Sirens wailed in the distance. He heard the worried Catalan chatter of the spectators, a language close enough to Spanish that he could make out some of what they were saying, but different enough that he had only gotten dirty looks when he tried talking to anyone in the city of Barcelona.
That was all right. He was leaving today. He’d finished his work here. Beautiful city, Barcelona, what with all the upscale shopping and the gorgeous old hotels, and the food and performers and masque shops on Las Ramblas. But he didn’t like anyone looking down on him.
The weird thing about Barcelona was that the locals seemed indifferent to his size—Bors was only four feet four inches tall, but sturdily built. No, it was his inability to speak their language that seemed to irk them.
So he stood in the growing crowd that gathered in front of the burning dress boutique, and he watched the glow of the fire reflected in their eyes. And he smiled, and he fantasized about locking each and every one of them in there with the blackening, melting mannequins.
Just as he’d trapped the witch.
When Bors had first left the shop, the fire already starting to blaze inside, the witch had been screaming. He had used herbal oils, salt, and a bit of charred bone to mark lines in front of the doors and windows, muttering the incantation that would trap the witch inside.
Now, though, the screams had stopped. The fire roared, beginning to spread to the buildings on either side of the dress shop. Bors grinned as he watched the flames and listened to the cracking of beams and the shattering of glass blown out by the heat. One of the women on the street screamed and that made him grin wider.
If he’d done the job earlier in the evening, there would have been many more bystanders to watch in fascination. People loved fire. They loved to watch things burn, even though most of them would never admit it. Bors never hid his passion for the flames.
The sky continued to lighten. Dawn would arrive soon.
Sirens grew louder and then cut off sharply, and he could hear the roar of the engines of the emergency vehicles. Firefighters would put the blaze out soon, but by now the witch would have melted just like one of the boutique’s mannequins. Bors wished he could go into the shop and have a look, but not this time.
He slipped the charred bone from his pocket and dropped it, crushing it underfoot. If the police stopped him now, all they would find was oil and salt, and he would claim they were for a meal he planned to cook today. The bone would go unnoticed until long after he had departed Barcelona.
Letting his head loll back, he enjoyed the warmth of the fire. A woman sniffed at him and moved away, shooting him an ugly look. Bors ignored her.
A hand touched his arm. Irked, he turned to see Malik standing beside him. The black-clad warrior had begun to grow a beard. Bors approved. Malik had always been too handsome and the stubble on his cheeks made him look properly grim.
“Come away now, Bors,” Malik said. “We’ve work to be done.”
Bors frowned. “The fire—”
“There will be others. Always others.”
Bors took a deep breath, then nodded and reluctantly allowed himself to be led away. If Malik said there was work to be done, Bors knew it would be the sort that gave him pleasure. Witches were his preferred prey, but other creatures of magick burned just as well, screamed just as loudly.
Even darkness could burn.