Chapter Eighteen

 

Delphinium listened to Eric’s description over the phone and then told him with grim certainty that what he’d just encountered sounded like an ogre.

“An ogre?” said Eric. “What, like Shrek?”

“Nothing quite so lovable,” she replied. “It’s not so different from an imp, really. It’s summoned by magic, controlled by the summoner and generally unstoppable in its determination to kill.”

“That last part definitely seemed true.”

“Is everyone all right?”

“We’re fine.”

“This is really bad,” Delphinium said.

“You’re telling me. You didn’t have your hand in its giblets.”

“Conjuring all those imps should have been nearly impossible. Conjuring an ogre…”

“Let me guess: Impossible-er.”

“For lack of a better word, I suppose.”

“What does it mean? Is this ‘magic man’ some kind of super wizard or something?”

“I don’t know. But his powers are astounding.”

“Are they? How do you know so much about imps and ogres, anyway? How do you know they’re so hard to conjure? It doesn’t seem like it can be that hard, considering I just keep running into these things.”

“Grandpa told us,” said Holly, who’d been listening to his side of the conversation from the seat next to him. “He said there used to be very powerful magic users in the world, a long time ago, they could summon these things and use them for their own purposes.”

“Sounds like a fairy tale to me,” said Eric.

“It does,” agreed Delphinium. “And they might be. The history of such things is long lost. What little remains of them might have only survived as fairy tales, legends and myth.”

“Are you sure Grandpa wasn’t just watching too many movies?”

“Grandpa wasn’t crazy!” snapped Holly.

“Relax,” said Cierra. “He didn’t know him.” She didn’t look back at them. She kept her eyes on the road and her hands firmly on the wheel, ready to react in case something large and ugly lurched onto the highway in front of her. “Hell, I’ve wondered about it myself more than once. I mean, where did he get all his information? He never told us very much about who he was before he met Del. We know he was real because we all saw him do things, but we don’t know for certain that everything he told us was absolutely true.”

“That’s right,” said Delphinium. “Even I thought he exaggerated things. Above all, he was a father to us and he had to keep us safe.”

Eric nodded. “I’m just saying, maybe he did exaggerate about how hard it is to conjure these things. Or maybe he just didn’t know any different himself.”

“I loved him very much,” said Delphinium, “but I’m not so blinded by that love that I’m not prepared to accept that he could have been wrong about things.”

“That’s good,” said Eric. “It’s all I was asking.”

“Smartly so,” she told him. “And I’ll admit it, I don’t know. Grandpa told me he couldn’t do it, that it was way beyond his abilities…but there’s always that chance that he simply didn’t have that particular knowledge. Or even that he was lying.”

Eric looked down at his hand again. It was perfectly clean, except under his fingernails where he’d dug his fingers into the earth in a futile attempt to escape the monster’s grip. The ogre’s blood and bile had evaporated into that foul smoke and vanished completely. Yet it still felt soiled. He wasn’t sure he’d ever feel clean again.

Poppy had said back at the shelter that the imps were vanishing from this plane of existence. In death, all of these things apparently ceased to exist here, even the blood they left behind. But did they go somewhere else?

In the past, he’d encountered all sorts of monsters, one of which was a fearsome-looking thing that its creator had referred to as a “projection.” It had turned out to be mostly harmless, since the slightest impact tended to burst it like a water balloon. Instead of smoke, those things broke into a thick, black fluid, resembling used motor oil, which then evaporated completely away within seconds. One could practically miss the whole process just by blinking. These things took much longer to vanish, although still only a few minutes at most. These were apparently conjured by magic. The man who created the projections seemed to create them out of his own mind.

Were they essentially the same?

“Fortunately,” continued Delphinium, “these things seem to be easier to kill than I’d originally thought, too.”

“I don’t know if I’d use the word ‘easy,’” said Eric. “The imps are fast. They’re also a lot stronger than they look. And that ogre almost ripped me in half.”

“Yes, but you can kill them. Holly and Cierra’s spells can injure them.”

Eric nodded. “That’s definitely true. More so on the imps, though. They aren’t so tough.” He recalled the one he strangled to death in the motel parking lot and how it had actually appeared to be afraid after Holly cut down its friend.

“Grandpa said the ogre is all blind rage. Once it begins attacking, it doesn’t stop no matter how much abuse it takes. Not until it’s dead.”

“He seemed to be right about that.”

“Seems so,” agreed Delphinium.

“Okay, so we’ve got imps by the dozen and now we’ve got ogres. We’re in serious trouble if those start coming in packs.”

“It’s concerning,” she agreed.

“But at least I know what we’re up against. What concerns me is what else we’re likely to see. What other horrors did Grandpa describe to you? Goblins? Pixies? Gargoyles? Tell me what to expect so I’m at least a little more prepared next time.”

“Grandpa told us a lot of stories about a lot of amazing things, but as far as things that can be conjured… I’m not sure. I think those are the only ones. But there were other things he sometimes talked about, things that were out there, hidden. He talked about spirits occasionally.”

There was something that didn’t surprise him. Eric had run into a few of those himself.

“He mentioned gnomes a time or two.”

“Those stupid little statues people like to put in their gardens?”

“Again, nothing so charming. What else…?”

“Not clowns, I hope. Because if this guy starts summoning clowns, I’m going home.”

“I love clowns,” said Holly.

“They’re creepy,” insisted Eric.

“Seconded,” said Cierra.

Holly shook her head as if they were both being ridiculous.

“No clowns,” promised Delphinium. “The only other creature I remember him ever mentioning is…well…dragons.”

Eric felt stunned. “Dragons? Seriously?”

Cierra looked back over her shoulder at Holly, her eyes wide with surprise. “Did he just say ‘dragons?’”

“He might not have been serious,” Delphinium quickly added. “He also tried to convince me once that he’d trapped an incubus in one of the kitchen cabinets. He just wanted me to stay out of his snack cakes.”

“Sounds reasonable.”

“He did love his Fudge Rounds.”

“Who doesn’t?”

“I think you should just be prepared for anything. For all we know, these things aren’t imps and ogres at all. They could just be some kind of physical manifestation that happen to resemble their mythical counterpart.”

“A more resilient kind of projection, maybe,” agreed Eric, returning to his train of thought from a moment ago.

“A what?”

“Nothing. Long story. We’ll be careful. And we’ll be there as soon as we can.”

“Good. We’ll be waiting.”

Eric disconnected the phone, but didn’t put it back in his pocket. He stared at the screen instead.

Isabelle texted him an answer to his question without waiting for him to speak it, as he knew she would.

IT WAS JUST LIKE THE IMPS. AS FAR AS I COULD TELL, IT WASN’T EVEN THERE

“I definitely wasn’t imagining it.”

I KNOW. I ALSO CAN’T FEEL REGULAR PEOPLE WHEN THEY’RE AROUND, BUT I KNOW YOU’RE NOT IMAGINING THEM

‘That’s good.”

I JUST CAN’T GET ANY KIND OF READ OFF THEM

“And the magic man? Did you feel him back there?”

I DIDN’T. HE MUST BE ABLE TO SEND HIS GOONS AHEAD OF HIM WHEN HE CAN’T MAKE IT THERE ON TIME

“Maybe,” agreed Eric. “There also wasn’t a fire this time.”

YOU’RE RIGHT

But he couldn’t stop thinking about how the magic man had stood there in the second floor window of the Wordsley House as they drove away, just watching them go.

YOU THINK HE’S LETTING YOU GO INTENTIONALLY?

“I don’t know. Something just doesn’t make sense.”

“Who are you talking to?” asked Cierra, eyeing him in the rearview.

“He’s talking to Isabelle,” Holly told her.

“Who the hell is Isabelle?”

“She’s the little girl inside Eric’s head.”

Cierra stared at her for a second, then returned her eyes to the road again. “Oh. The little girl inside his head. Because that’s not fucking crazy or anything…”

HI CIERRA

“Isabelle says hi,” Eric told her.

“Oh good. Now she’s talking to me, too.”