Chapter Eight
Getting anywhere in the snow was going to be easier said than done. By the time Kathy and Teagan reached his car, it was half buried in a snow drift up to the bumper, and by the time they returned with borrowed shovels from the department, the snow had reached the hood of the car. All the cars in the lot were similarly buried, although the snow was not nearly so high in the empty spaces, nor in the street. It seemed the more they dug, the more tightly the ice clung to the car and the snow blew up to fill in the freed spaces.
Still, it was time spent with Kathy. Teagan had not been afforded many opportunities to be alone with her or to talk about anything unrelated to a case, but in the number of instances where he had, he’d come to find he very much cared for her. She seemed to relax around him, open up a little. He knew Jack had reservations about her bouts of maniacal and almost suicidal dedication to the job and her drinking habits, and Morris, well, he was afraid of her, but Teagan thought they saw what she wanted them to see—the scar, and the walls she’d built up around it. He, on the other hand, caught glittering glimpses of all the things behind that wall. She was beautiful, somehow even more so with the scar, as if what made her physically attractive had a power and shine all its own, unable to be marred. And when they talked, it was easy to see how witty, smart, driven, insightful, and charming she was. He learned more about her, though, in what she said in between the things she said, the words under her words, the whole vulnerable realness of her that he wasn’t sure even she was aware of sharing. And that was what he had fallen in love with.
The current situation, though, had them both on edge. Neither spoke until they were in the car and pulling out onto the road. The silence in the lot—in that whole area of town—was eerie and all-encompassing, and neither was inclined to break it. It was something instinctive, something difficult to put into words—a vague but insistent feeling that the snow itself was watching them, listening, waiting for a chance to swirl up and bury them, too. In the car, they felt a little safer—not much, but enough to speak to each other in furtive, low voices.
They spoke of little things, stretched thin to the point of breaking over the big things just beneath. Then the silence fell there, too, for a time.
“You know,” Teagan said after a while of listening to the windshield wipers, “when I stopped by the bullpen while working the ID of the John Doe yesterday, I saw the oddest thing. Put a Santa hat on it and called it Randal, this.”
“Oh? You saw something weird in the last twenty-four hours?” She winked at him.
He chuckled, poking the Camel between his lips. “Yeah. ‘Tis the thing, I guess. But this . . . this was some shit. See, these two uniforms had picked up an eighty-four—two missing teens, a brother and sister, this was—out at the edge of town. Their mum said they were of a mind to leave Colby, that the snow was only here, and that if they could just make it over the border. . . .” He paused, remembering what Detective Owen Ford, the lad on the case, had told him about the sad state of the kids’ mother. “So these two uniforms go looking for the kids before they catch their deaths out there. Two hours go by, and nothing. No check-in, no kids brought home to their poor, worried mum, nothing. So they send another two lads out to check on the first, and those find the first ones’ patrol car, empty. Door open, snow blowing in. No footprints, no signs of struggle. No officers. And of course, no kids.”
He glanced at Kathy, but her gaze was fixed on the road ahead. There wasn’t much to see; the sun reflecting off the icy patches in the road was blinding.
He continued. “The second pair radios in another eighty-four, then brings the car back to the station. They search it for some sign of what happened to the first lads—the slightest hair or fiber, a print, anything. Know what they find?”
“Nothing,” Kathy said.
“Not quite. They have, what do you call them here? The dashboard cam video. Caught the whole thing.”
Kathy looked at him, startled. “What was on the video?”
Teagan exhaled slowly. “Well, see, that’s the odd thing. First, it shows the two officers riding up on the kids as they were walking. Walking, in snow like this. Had to be gone in the head, them. But our first set of heroes, see, had actually found the kids—so far, so good—and they pull up behind the kids and one gets out. It’s dark and the snow is blowing across the camera, but you can mostly make out what’s going on. That officer—the lads at the station watching the video told me his name was Aleski—approaches the kids. They’re just trudging along in the snow, their backs to the car, and they don’t appear to notice the police cruiser or Aleski at all until he taps one of them, the young lass, on the shoulder. The camera catches their faces when they turn around. The light isn’t great, of course—headlights, scant moonlight, odd shadows—but Kat, I swear it, they look . . . poisoned. Like something . . . something gone wrong had touched them, tainted them, and it’d spread all throughout them. Or maybe like a shadow had passed over them, but . . . underneath their skin. And in the video, Aleski backs away from them, like he knows it.
“Now you could argue that it could have been a trick of light or a quality issue with the video. I thought the same thing, and so did the officers viewing the tape. After all, here are two kids practically half-frozen, probably hungry and tired. That they look off is probably nothing unexpected. But then there was the wall.”
“The wall?”
“Oh, aye, the wall.” He exhaled slowly. “When the kids stop, Aleski says something to them. There’s no sound with those things, so no one knows exactly what he said, but you can imagine it was probably something like, ‘It’s fucking freezing out here! Why the hell aren’t you kids at home?’ Anyway, he’s talking and the other cop—Seeger, his name was—gets out and moves around the front of the car to join him, and as he does, the wind starts blowing and all these ice crystals start knitting together. When he moves out of the shot again, you can see in the video that there’s suddenly a wall behind the kids. Time stamp says elapsed time was three seconds. Three seconds, and this ice wall was just . . . there. So Aleski stops talking and walks past them to examine it. He reaches out and touches it and his hand gets stuck. Freezes right to the wall. And the ice starts forming over his hand, don’t you know, and around his wrist. Starts climbing up his arm. And it looks like he’s screaming, thrashing around, and Seeger goes to help him, and . . .”
Teagan looked away, remembering what he had seen. It had been partially off-screen, but Teagan could see enough—the way the ice took hold and sank into the flesh of the officer’s arm, freezing it, killing it, turning it black, and the soundless, frantic struggling, the desperate attempt of Seeger to pull Aleski free. It took less than a minute for the ice crystals to swarm over both the officers. It happened so, so fast. One minute they were tugging at appendages half-melded with the wall, and in the next, the wall surged out and devoured them.
“Reece?”
“Next thing,” he went on, “the wall swallows up Aleski and Seeger. The ice just . . . washes over them like a wave and pulls them into the wall and they’re gone. And those damned kids . . . they don’t look scared at all. They just stand there . . . watching. Just watching it all happen. They look more curious than anything. Aleski and Seeger, their faces were twisted and they were obviously screaming and trying to pull themselves free. They were even reaching out toward the kids, looking for help. And the two kids just stand there. It’s a fucking awful sight. And when the cops are gone . . . the kids change. They get all wavery for a second, like if you try to look at something through heat waves and smoke. They get all shimmery and then they stretch and their hair falls out and their eyes roll back into their sockets and fer the love of Jaysus, Kat, they were snow, just snow, with just the right light and shadow to create the impression of faces, hair, clothes....
“One of them reaches out toward the wall and both the snow-figures and the wall turn to powder and blow away. The kids, the wall, the officers, they’re all gone. Just . . . gone.” He shook his head. “Not one lad in that room, including me, could say anything. All we could do was stare at the storm of static at the end of that video, just like those kids stared. We just had nothing.”
Teagan stopped. Kathy wasn’t looking at him with disbelief, exactly, but there was something there.
“Why are you telling me this?” she finally asked. It wasn’t an accusation, but rather an earnest question.
He thought about it a moment, then replied, “Because this problem—none of us, except maybe you, have the faintest idea what to do about it. Because underestimating the scope of it is unwise, and communicating as many of their tricks as possible strikes me as a good idea. Because I couldn’t bear keeping it to meself and carrying it around anymore. And because none of us have really talked about the very real possibility that we can’t get out of Colby, and no one from the outside can get in. If, that is, there even is an outside anymore. We don’t know how much area this storm has covered. We don’t know if it’s just Colby, or all of Connecticut, or all of the East Coast, or more. And none of those messages we listened to before mentioned any of that, either. We can’t email, can’t seem to make calls outside of local numbers, and can’t access the Internet. I haven’t gotten mail in almost a week now. It can’t be that no one here has thought to leave, and I find it hard to believe that no one from the outside has tried to make it in here, even if just for deliveries or whatever. So . . . if no one has, maybe it’s because no one can.”
Kathy was quiet a moment, then said, “Jack’s family is just on the edge of town.” She didn’t say more, but she didn’t need to. The full implication of her words hung between them. Jack might not be able to make it as far as his family—if his family was even still there to make it to.
“Does Jack know about that, about the video?”
Teagan nodded. “He’s going after them anyway.”
“Of course he is. Wouldn’t you?”
Teagan looked her in the eye and said, “Aye. Aye, I would.”
They turned into the parking lot of Kathy’s building and parked near the door of the place where she crashed when she was in Colby. It was a rent-controlled apartment complex, and one of three Kathy kept up the rent on, given her almost phobic distaste for hotels. It was the only one that anybody had ever heard Kathy speak of fondly, though she spent no more time there than anywhere else. It suited who she was; there was no place she could love and trust enough to call home.
Teagan pocketed his smoke again, and as he went to get out of the car, Kathy grabbed his arm. She had a second-floor apartment near the end of the unit, and she was staring warily at her illuminated bedroom window.
“What’s the matter, love?” he asked, looking up at the window, too.
“I didn’t leave the light on,” she said.
Both withdrew their weapons and clicked off the safeties as they got out of the car. Kathy tried the front door and found it open. He pointed to her apartment and gave her a nod, then silently followed her up the stairs.
The door to her apartment was slightly ajar, the lights inside all off except for the bedroom. Kathy gestured to Teagan to go in on three, then silently counted off. They slipped into the foyer and started searching the rooms, one by one. Teagan stood to the side of the coat closet door, braced himself, and flung it open, counting off a second or two before swinging around to search it. It was clear—just a few coats, a jumble of shoes, and some cardboard boxes marked DAD’S HOUSE.
Across the apartment, he saw Kathy gesture him over to the den. Her desk, standing in the corner of the room, had been thoroughly rifled through, papers torn and scattered all over its surface and on the floor around it. The chair cushion had been cut and the stuffing pulled out. The lamp by the couch had been knocked over, and the couch cushions had been slashed and tossed off the frame. It was clear of people, though, and anything that might identify who had done the damage.
Kathy gestured that she was going to move on to the kitchen, and Teagan pointed to the open bathroom door. He squeezed her arm and mouthed out the words, Be careful. She mouthed back, You, too. Then they moved off to their respective rooms.
Teagan cautiously approached the bathroom, peering into the mirror from the hall before slipping through the doorway. The shower curtain was drawn back, and the shower was empty. He let go of the tight breath in his chest. He glanced in the mirror, and the face looking back at him was tired, a shade too sallow. He ran a hand through his hair, then moved back out into the hallway.
Kathy jumped when she saw him, and he mouthed, Sorry, then offered her a smile. She winked back at him, a tiny little return smile on her mouth, and gestured toward the bedroom.
The door to the bedroom was closed. They paused, listening. Teagan watched the sliver of light beneath the door for shadows of movement. After a minute or so of no sound or movement from within, Kathy turned the knob slowly and eased open the door.
The bedroom, too, had been trashed, the sheets pulled off the bed and tossed in a careless heap on the floor. The mattress had been upended as well, and had been left half-leaning against the bed frame. The drawer of the night table had been pulled out and thrown across the room, its contents—a notebook, an old issue of Forensics Journal, and assorted odds and ends—spilled across the floor.
Kathy frowned, reholstering her gun. It was the most reaction from her that Teagan had seen since they’d arrived. He supposed it was possible that she had encountered her share of threatening behavior from cultists and other criminals trying to shake her up, throw her off their trail. Maybe she’d even had her apartment broken into before. But there was likely to be something more upsetting about knowing they’d been in the bedroom, her private space, than anywhere else in the apartment.
Teagan moved off and checked her closet. It, too, was clear. “Did they take anything?” he asked, putting his own weapon away.
“No,” Kathy said with a sigh. “No, it doesn’t look like it. I’m guessing the HBS were tipped off by my visit to Charlene Ledders. Now that their precious, delicate ritual of destruction is in motion, they probably don’t want us doing anything to upset it.”
“What about your occult research? I’m guessing they were intending on taking it?”
Kathy went over to the bed frame, pulled it with a grunt of effort away from the wall, and gestured toward a slightly worn patch of plaster. She dug a nail under the upper left corner and a slab came away in her hands. “I hid it,” she told him, “in the event that something like this happened.” She pulled a small notebook-sized laptop from the hole, as well as some papers and a thin book. She dropped them on the bed.
“Before we do anything else,” she said, reaching into the hole again, “let’s lock this place up again, shall we?” She produced two large mason jars that appeared to be filled with powders or tiny grains of something.
“What are those?” Teagan asked, gesturing with the Camel before he put it back in his mouth.
“This one,” she said, holding up the jar in her left hand with orange-ish powder in it, “is mostly turmeric. It is usually more powerful if ingested, but it’ll do for now as a means of warding off whatever watchdogs the cult may have left behind to keep an eye on us. There’s also some sea salt in here, a little powdered chalk, and, if you can believe it, some pulverized black tourmaline that I got as a thank-you gift from a client on one of my cases. This jar’s kind of like a combination of a security system, barbed wire, and an electromagnetic field. This other one”—she held up the purplish one in her right hand—“is mostly sage. We can burn that. I’ve found it helpful in clearing out whatever’s in the air that entities of various types can latch on to.”
Teagan’s expression must have betrayed his skepticism because she smiled sheepishly at him, putting the sage down on the night table to unscrew the cap on the other mixture. “You’ll just have to trust me that it works, Reece.” She handed him a scoop of the mixture, which smelled kind of funny, though not unpleasantly so.
“Oh, I trust you, Kat, regarding those particular things that go bump in the night, but what about keeping the human intruders out? Assuming they were the ones who broke in here, how are you going to keep them from coming back?”
She patted her .45. “I’m a light sleeper. Besides, past behavior of the Hand suggests they won’t be back tonight. Leaving aside that they have the next phase of the ritual to plan for, it would be too risky now for any one of them to return here. They’re like lightning, like that. Now let’s get to work.”
Teagan helped her sprinkle the powders around all the doorways, windows, vents, and every other conceivable opening in the bedroom, and then likewise, throughout the apartment. When they were finished, she set out a glass candleholder in each room, sprinkled the sage from the other jar in each, and, with a long-necked kitchen lighter, she set each on fire. The sage smoldered, creating a fragrant smoke that overran the smell of the other stuff she had used. Nevertheless, Kathy opened a few of the windows in the apartment just enough to let the smoke out to prevent it from becoming cloying or setting off the smoke alarm in the hall. When they were done, Kathy closed the windows, then scooped up the laptop, papers, and book from her bed.
“Ready?” she asked him.
“Lead the way into the realm of darkness, my lovely,” he said, grinning, and was pleased to see it elicited a grin back.
Teagan followed her and her research into the den. She righted her chair, dropped the papers and book on the desk with a thump, and then flipped open the cover of the laptop and turned it on.
“I keep everything in an encrypted file on here. I have it saved to one of those password-protected cloud things, too.”
“Smart, that,” he said, impressed. She’d often professed to be an utter Luddite when it came to computers, but it didn’t really surprise him that she’d downplayed the extent of her technical skills. She was a little bit like Columbo like that, letting people believe whatever preconceived limitations they formed, and occasionally encouraging those notions so that she would be underestimated. Teagan thought she took a certain pleasure in swooping in on a case with a victory that stunned those who had judged her.
After what felt like several long minutes of clicking and typing, clicking and typing, a PDF popped up on screen.
“Here we go,” she said, sinking into the chair.
“What is it?” he asked, leaning in over her shoulder. This close to her, he could smell her perfume—something light and floral—and it pleased him immensely.
Some of the document was in other languages. Teagan recognized Latin, Greek, Japanese, German, and Egyptian hieroglyphics, but there were portions in a language he had never seen before. It looked like a cross between complex pictographs and cuneiform. Interspersed between these sections and wrapping around diagrams and other graphics was the English text.
“Well, not a counter-spell, per se, but a pretty good idea of where to find it. See, these passages here”—she pointed to the language he didn’t recognize—“are in a special sort of secret language of traders—people in, uh, my line of work, I guess—who need to exchange information from forbidden or banned grimoires. It looks like nonsense, a made-up language, right? It’s not. It’s designed so that sensitive information isn’t accidentally accessed by the uninitiated, and so it can pass without trouble under the noses of most gatekeepers. There is an underground compilation series of books in this language—I have a copy of every volume except the most recent—that contains accumulated knowledge from all of the most important books, scrolls, and documents on the occult in the world—The Munich Manual, Codex Seraphinianus, The Voynich Manuscript, the Heptameron, The Book of Doors, the Libro Novem Saecula, The Picatrix, the Oera Linda Book, oh, and The Red Dragon Grand Grimoire, of course . . .”
Seeing Teagan’s polite but confused nodding, she moved on. “Anyway, if there is a spell to counteract the one used by the Hand of the Black Stars, one of these PDFs will have it, or tell us where to find it.”
“Right then. Ah, anything I can do to help? Other than try to read that?”
“Pour me a drink?” She winked at him, then turned back to the computer. “Glasses are in the kitchen cabinet all the way to the right. Bottom shelf. Vodka . . . that should be on the counter by the sink.”
Teagan headed toward the kitchen. The occult aspects of the case were, frankly, beyond him. He’d grown up in a strictly, stiflingly Roman Catholic family, and he had shirked most aspects of religion, anyone’s religion, a long time ago. While his upbringing had given him some understanding of a worldview on supernatural evil, what Kathy was talking about was different. It was science and science fiction and magic and religion and physics and mathematics all sort of rolled into one. That somehow made it more terrifying. It wasn’t just a matter of simple faith, but also of invasive and immutable truths that belief systems of pure faith and no proof sought to bury under layers of condemnation.
He found the glasses and poured out two vodkas, and was set to carry them back into the den when his cell phone rang. The sound was jarring. It had been days since he’d gotten so much as a text message, and the ringtone seemed almost unearthly and out of place in that little kitchen. He put the glasses down and took the cell out of his back pocket. It was Morris.
“Hey there, mate,” he answered the phone.
“Teagan! It works! The cell, I mean. I had my doubts I’d be able to get through. I couldn’t reach Jack at all.”
“Aye, I was a bit surprised meself to hear the mobile ring,” Teagan admitted. “How’re you holding up out there in the snow?”
“It’s . . . quiet. It’s kind of how I imagined a nuclear winter might be.”
“Spend much time imagining such things, do you?”
“In this line of work,” Morris said, “I imagine a lot of ways the human race will ultimately fuck itself over.”
Teagan smiled thinly. “Not much left to the imagination these last few days.”
“Tell me about it. How are you and Kathy?”
“Fine. We’re at her apartment. She’s looking for the counter-spell to the one that caused this mess.”
“I hope she finds it,” Morris said. He didn’t sound all that confident.
“So what’s going on?”
“Well, I found out about that figure you and Jack described,” Morris said.
“Really?”
“Yeah. Took some leg work, by the way. Not the kind of thing you can just Google, even if the Internet were working right now.”
“You’re a prince among men.”
“No kidding. Just left the home of a local college professor to ask about it. Their theology expert, Trina Majoram. She’s a recognized authority—right here in town, no less—on obscure ancient religious symbolism. The rituals, mythologies, gods and goddesses, all that sort of thing. I guess you could say she bridges the gap between the church of my Sunday school days and the cults of Kathy’s, uh, devil worshippers.”
Teagan balanced the cell between his ear and shoulder and brought the glasses of vodka into the den. He handed Kathy hers, and she nodded a thanks, then mouthed out Who? and gestured at the phone. Teagan switched the phone to his free hand and responded with Morris. To Morris, he said, “Did she recognize the description of the figure? I’m putting you on speaker so Kathy can hear.”
“Yeah.” Morris’s voice came through a little tinny on the speaker setting, but he was audible. “She confirmed that such descriptions historically have been found in relation to ritualistic torture-sacrifices offered to gods of other worlds. Almost exclusively, those rituals were attempted by that Hand of the Black Stars cult Kathy mentioned. She said there isn’t much written about them, but she did know they were a bad, bad group of people. They’re into some pretty freaky stuff. Cannibalism, piquerism, necrophilia, cryptozoophilia—hell, some of this stuff I don’t know the meaning of, and I don’t want to know. But they’ve been doing these things a long time. There’s evidence of them at least as far back as the Nineteenth Dynasty of ancient Egypt. Old-school, pissed-off, violent group of psychos, as if we didn’t know that by now.”
“Aye, that’s what our Kathy says about them. What about the figure? How does it relate to this ritual?” He took a healthy swig of the vodka. It burned a little in his throat—Teagan was more of a whiskey man, himself—but it warmed his chest.
Morris cleared his throat. “Well, Majoram told me—” There was a sound like papers being shuffled on Morris’s end. “Geez, it’s complicated. Okay, so according to Majoram, they’re scouts of sorts, I guess. They’re mentioned as demons in other religions, but she recognized them all right. If evidence points to these Black Stars nut jobs finding a door to a dangerous alternate dimension, like Kathy said, a portal between worlds, then they must have found the keyhole, too. Fashioned a key and unlocked the door—you know, in a metaphysical, supernatural sense, I guess. When it opened—the door, I mean—the snow and everything in it came through. And those figures, the scout-demons or whatever, control it all—the snow and ice, the monsters, probably even the cultists at this point. Majoram called them the Blue People.”
“The Blue People? Charlene mentioned them,” Kathy said, then turned to the PDF to check for the phrase.
“Yup. They’re . . . cleaners, I guess you could say. Interdimensional fixers. They and the monsters and the snow are meant to wipe out everything. All life, anything that might complicate the arrival of... others. Apparently, the cultists think that once the Blue People are done making Colby an empty, frozen wasteland, the conditions will be right for these ‘others’ to come through that door and take over.”
“Sounds like that’s bang on with what that header told Kat.”
“That’s what I thought, too. And why go to all this trouble destroying Colby, you ask?”
“I did wonder,” Teagan replied with a small smile to Kathy.
“Because in exchange for preparing the way, these cultists will get their rocks off on being the new favorite pets of whatever ‘others’ come through that door. Those ‘others’ would, and I quote, ‘provide knowledge of the universe, of other universes, and of the forces which create and destroy, cure and kill, forces which bend time and fold space. Bodies would be changed to withstand the powers unlocked in the mind. ’ ”
“So wait—” Kathy began.
“There’s more.” Morris flipped through papers again on the other end. “These ancient beings were ‘formed in and of the pure dark of starless space from which all of creation and destruction springs forth.’ Sound like those Greater Gods Kathy’s nut job mentioned?”
“Aye.” The smile slipped from Teagan’s face.
“I think we might be fucked here, guys.”
It was a difficult point of view to argue with just then. Teagan could see the grim consideration of what Morris had told them in Kathy’s expression as she scrolled through her document. The light from the screen reflected in her eyes seemed to magnify her determination. But it was a lot for Teagan to swallow. He managed with great effort to shake his head. “Nah. We’ll stop it. You’ll see. We’ll stop it.”
“I wish I had your confidence,” Morris said quietly, then, “but I’m up for a fight, at any rate. Gotta jump off. Snow’s getting bad up here, and—”
A pause followed by a high-pitched scream caused both Teagan and Kathy to exchange alarmed looks.
“Morris? Hello? Morris?”
“I’m okay,” Morris said. “I’m fine. But I gotta go. I’ll call you back.”
The phone disconnected, and for a few seconds, the two detectives just stared at it. Finally Teagan put it in his back pocket and took another swig of vodka.
“I’m sure he’s fine,” he said.
“Sure,” Kathy agreed, taking a healthy gulp of her own drink. “It’s Morris.”
“Aye, it’s Morris,” Teagan said. But the knot of worry in his gut was reflected in Kathy’s eyes. “Any luck finding anything?”
“A reference to the Blue People in the Libro Novem Saecula—that is, the Book of Nine Worlds. I happen to have a copy of that one on here, but it’s an abridged version. Let’s hope we have enough.”
* * *
Morris hung up the cell and slipped it into his pocket, drawing out his gun. It seemed like he was doing a lot of discovery and rescue these last two days. His newest distress call was coming from a tan SUV across from his parked car. The driver-side door was open and a middle-aged man was half sprawled across a snow drift that had risen up to meet the tops of the tires. His legs appeared to still be in the vehicle, while his arm was draped over his down-turned face. A little blond girl of about eight was screaming and pounding on a back window with tiny mittened hands.
Remembering the beastly thing he’d seen when he’d come upon Dan Murphy stranded the night before, he opened his car door, grunting against the efforts of the wind to push it closed again, and cautiously got out. The wind bit into his cheeks and sailed beneath his clothes, making him shiver as he scanned the immediate area for signs of monsters, human or otherwise. The abandoned car appeared to be alone, collecting snow and losing heat by the minute.
Morris flashed his badge to the girl so she would know he was a police officer, and that seemed to calm her a little. She stopped screaming and her pounding on the window faded to muted little thumps, but Morris could see that she was shaking badly, probably from both the cold and from fright. Whatever she had seen was likely something no little kid should ever have to see.
He reached the open door of the SUV, and crouched by the man’s head. Enough snow had blown in under the car that there was no space beneath for anything to hide, but no way for the tires to move. From the color of the skin on the man’s neck, he could tell the man was dead. He touched a shoulder and found it stiff. When he tried turning over the body, he saw that the blood that had spilled from the man’s head had frozen into crimson ice and adhered to the snow beneath. It took some tugging, but Morris got the man free and turned him over. Then he cried out and fell backward into the snow. The man’s face was missing. Instead, a blood-soaked mess of fleshy frozen shreds of butchered meat and white protruding skull bones had replaced anything even vaguely resembling facial features.
With a quick glance at the girl in the back seat, who now sat quietly, apparently numb with shock, Morris hastily turned the body back over into the snow. The rest of it slid out from the car, and Morris gagged a little as the tattered stumps where the man‘s legs had been thudded against the door frame. He rose with some difficulty; it felt like the snow had been trying to bury him under, just in the few minutes during which he’d been on his ass in it. He brushed it off as best he could, instinctively repulsed by the hard clumps of ice which clung to his coat and gloves. He unlocked all the doors from the panel on the driver-side door and went back to the girl.
When he opened her door, he was surprised to find that although she was bloody and a little bruised, she was not seriously injured. She was a tiny wisp of a thing, doll-like in her features. Her long blond hair had clumpy streaks of crimson in it, just under her wool hat, and a small cut on her cheek had trickled a tear of blood that had almost made it to her jaw before drying. Her mittens had dark brown smudges on them. Similarly colored stains on her light blue parka looked unnervingly like smeared handprints.
“Hi,” he said in what he hoped was a soothing voice. “I’m Oliver. What’s your name?”
“Jill. My family calls me Jilly.”
“Hi, Jilly,” he said.
She looked up at him with round, haunted hazel eyes and in a monotone, replied, “You’re not my family.”
“Uh, yeah, of course. You’re right. I’m a police officer, and I want to help you, Jill. I want to get you out of here.”
“It took my mom,” she whispered. Then, a little above a whisper, she added, “My brother, too. Kenny. And my dad—it killed him, didn’t it?”
“Was that your dad that was driving?”
She nodded, tears forming in her eyes.
“I’m so sorry, honey,” he said, and then fell silent as she bent her head and cried softly. It broke his heart to see her crying, this little blond angel, an innocent little child, over a loss too big for words. But indeed, no words came out; nothing seemed to do justice to that kind of pain, that kind of horror. Nothing would adequately explain the terrible wrongness, the impossible strangeness of having her mother and brother taken away from her and her father torn apart by the very monsters she had spent the first few years of her young life being convinced were not real. He just let her cry, because sometimes tears were stronger, safer, more powerful, more honorable than words could ever be. And when her crying had reduced to sniffles, he squeezed her shoulder.
“We should go, Jill,” he told her. “It’s not safe here.”
“I know,” she said, and exhaled a shuddery breath.
“Do you have someplace I can take you? Some family, or a family friend?”
She looked up at him with big hazel eyes still shining with tears. “Ms. Harper. My mom always told me that if anything bad happened and she and my dad couldn’t get to me”—fresh tears spilled down her cheeks—”that I should go to Ms. Harper’s.”
“Okay,” Morris said, helping her out of her seat belt (she was still dutifully buckled in) and out of the SUV. “Do you think you can guide me there from here?”
Jilly nodded. She felt like such a small thing, so fragile, as he steered her by the shoulders to his car. She went around and got in the passenger seat, buckling the seat belt again. The gesture made him smile softly as he got behind the wheel and buckled his own seat belt.
“Okay, Jill, lead the way.”
She directed him back toward the center of town and down a few side streets to a dead-end cul-de-sac of large houses and landscaped lawns. She pointed at a brown cedar-shingled three-story Dutch Colonial house numbered six, and he pulled into the driveway.
Morris put the car into park. “Come on. I’ll walk you up to the house and explain everything to Ms. Harper,” he said gently.
The little girl nodded, allowing him to lead her to the house.
Morris listened to the surrounding stillness as they walked up the driveway. It was unnerving, how quiet it was. Even the sound of snow, which should have crunched beneath their feet and blown dustily about in the wind, was muted. There was something about snow, especially that much snow, that deadened everything, darkened it even in the day. It created a perception of being isolated, alone in a world of feathered white crystal. It was a dangerous thought in its all-encompassing pervasiveness, the kind of thought that made a person sit amid all the silence, let it surround him, deafen and silence him, weigh down his limbs, lull him to cold, shadowed sleep....
He shook his head. Deep down, the beginning waves of unease were washing back and forth inside Morris, but he kept walking. It was far more likely that whatever was wrong was out here with them instead of inside that house, but to be sure, Morris kept a hand on the butt of his gun.
When they reached the front door, he knocked heavily. There was no mail in the mailbox, he noted. It was just another little jolt of reality, of the disconnect between Colby and the rest of the world. It made him shiver.
“I don’t hear Hunter,” Jilly said.
“Sorry?”
“Ms. Harper’s dog. Usually, he barks like crazy when someone knocks on the door.”
Morris frowned. He didn’t say anything, but those waves of unease were beginning to crest.
He knocked on the door again. From within came sounds of movement, and a soft and somewhat elderly-sounding voice said, “I’m coming.”
The door opened a crack and the muzzle of a shotgun peered out. Immediately, Morris shoved Jilly behind him. Grasping the stock and trigger in a death grip were two bony white hands with neatly manicured and pink-painted nails. The sliver of face visible in the doorway was equally as bony and white, with one sharply intelligent brown eye and the corner of a firmly set and delicately thin-lipped mouth.
“Uh, Ms. Harper?”
“Who’s asking?” The barrels of the shotgun didn’t waver.
“Detective Oliver Morris. I have someone here I think you know.” He gestured for Jilly to come around, and when she did, Ms. Harper immediately lowered the shotgun and opened the door. She leaned the weapon against the door frame and swept Jilly up in a hug. The little girl started to cry again.
“Oh, Jilly, my baby, my baby,” she cooed into the girl’s hair, stroking her back. Over her head, she asked, “Her parents? Kenny?”
Morris shook his head, and the old woman’s face fell. She smoothed an errant strand of silver-white hair back toward the bun from which it had escaped and sighed.
“It was the men with the glowing mouths,” Jilly said in a small, flat voice. “They came out of the woods. Out of the snow.” A sudden thought seemed to seize her, and she turned to Morris, as if really aware of his presence for the first time. “The snow brought them. Or they brought the snow. I don’t know which. But they had monsters, and the monsters hurt my dad.” The girl sniffled, and Ms. Harper took her by the shoulders and said, “Jilly, honey, do you want to lie down?”
“No,” the little girl replied in that same small, flat tone.
“Okay. Why don’t you help yourself to some milk and a snack from the fridge, okay? I have to talk to the policeman.”
The girl gave them both a hesitant glance but headed off down the hall. Ms. Harper watched until she was out of sight and then turned back to Morris.
“My apologies about the shotgun,” she said, extending her hand. “What with everything going on, I couldn’t be too careful. Julianne Harper. I’ve been a friend of Jilly’s family for years.”
“Not a problem, Ms. Harper,” Morris answered, shaking her hand. “Frankly, I’m relieved to be able to bring the girl to someone I can feel confident will protect her.”
Ms. Harper gave him a small smile, then slid gracefully around him to relock the front door. “Those . . . things out there, whatever they are, got my dog this morning. I couldn’t . . . I just couldn’t get back to him fast enough with the gun.” The woman’s eyes glistened with tears that she seemed determined not to shed. “And Jill’s parents. . . her poor dear brother . . . I take it those same things got to them as well?”
“Looks that way,” Morris said. “I found Jill there in the back of the family SUV. Her mother and brother were gone. Her father, what was left of him, had, if you’ll pardon my language, spilled out into the snow.”
Ms. Harper shook her head. She was a fit, attractive woman for a late sixty-something, and moved with a kind of grace and elegance that Morris immediately admired. She gestured for him to sit on a plump easy chair in the sitting room. Behind them, Morris could hear Jilly clanging around in the kitchen.
“Those poor people. Evan and Bernadette were good parents. They loved their children so much. She was a radiology nurse, you know, and he did something with computers for a non-profit organization. Genuinely good people.” She sighed raggedly. “And Kenny. Good God. He was only eleven. I can’t . . . I just can’t imagine what Jilly’s been through this morning.”
“She’s a brave little girl,” Morris said. After a pause, he continued. “Ms. Harper, I know this is an unconventional request, but . . . well lately, we’ve found ourselves in an inarguably unconventional situation, so . . . I was wondering if Jill could stay with you? I don’t know for how long, but I’d wager we’d all feel much better having her stay here with you than in some foster system. Truth be told, there aren’t many systems in Colby that haven’t broken down anyway, as you may have noticed.”
“I have,” she answered. “And Jilly can stay here for as long as she likes. She’s always welcome. I love her like my own. I’ll keep her safe.”
Morris patted her arm. “I know you will.”
“Oh, forgive my manners, Detective. May I offer you something warm to drink? Something to eat, perhaps?”
“Thank you, but no. I have some business to attend to.”
“I understand completely.”
“If it’s okay, though, I’d like to come back and check on her when things settle?”
“Please do,” she said, offering him the first genuinely warm smile since he and Jilly had arrived.
They both rose, and she showed him to the front door. That was when they heard a wailing like a harsh wind, followed by the heavy thud of footfalls on the porch.
Jilly came running in from the kitchen and clung to Ms. Harper. “What was that?” The panic in her voice was heartbreaking.
“Stay here, ladies,” Morris said. He went to one of the front windows by the door and positioned himself so that his body was next to the glass rather than in front of it. He drew his weapon and peered out the window. Outside, mere inches from the front door, three of those things like the one that had attacked Daniel Murphy were pacing the front porch. Occasionally they stopped in front of the door, swinging those massive heads back and forth, those needle-lined jaws gaping, as if they sensed the humans on the other side but didn’t know how to find them. Often, they flickered or turned in such a way that they all but disappeared from view. In the next second, they would reappear several inches away. To Morris, it was perhaps one of their most unnerving qualities.
Morris gestured to Ms. Harper and Jilly to be quiet, and then he turned back to the window.
The creatures growled, nipping at each other and occasionally swiping at the front door. Behind him, he heard Jilly whimpering every time one of those large, taloned paws pounded on the relatively thin boundary between them.
He considered opening the windows a crack and firing at them from the house, but he feared it would make too much noise. They were close—very close—and he suspected the key to killing them, if gunshots would even work, would be to have the upper hand, the element of surprise. Drawing their attention before he was ready would be an extraordinarily bad idea.
“Ms. Harper,” he said in a low voice, “do you have any other weapons in the house?”
“You mean like more guns? No, I—I don’t. Just the one shotgun. I have kitchen knives, I guess. A baseball bat that used to belong to my husband.”
“Okay, okay good. Knives can be . . . messy, but the bat is good. What about, like, blow torches? Battery-powered tools?”
Ms. Harper looked flustered. Her mouth opened to answer, but closed again. She shook her head.
“Okay, no problem. How about nail polish remover?”
“Oh, that I have! But why?”
He turned back to the window. “I’m betting we can burn them.”
Ms. Harper and Jilly exchanged worried looks, but the woman said, “Whatever you think will kill the bastards.”
“Okay,” he said, keeping a wary eye on those things pacing outside. “We’ll need the nail polish remover, some rags—whatever you have that we can tear up, uh, corks if you have them, a lighter, and . . . glass bottles. Beer bottles, Coke, whatever.”
“Gotcha. Come on, Jilly. You go through Frank’s closet and get whatever T-shirts are in there. I’ll get the polish remover.”
As the two climbed the stairs, Morris grimaced at the window.
Fire. It could work. He hoped to God it would work.
* * *
One of the things that Jack noticed about the snow as he drove out toward the west edge of town was its unnerving capacity to take the shape of forms and faces, even in broad daylight. Many of the roads to and from the outer parts of town were surrounded on either side by woods, and the way the wind swirled the snow between the tree trunks gave Jack the impression of being watched by pale faces with hollow eyes and crooked, slashed mouths. Tricks of light and shadow, maybe, but it was unsettling to Jack, who was already grappling with a growing certainty that the Hand of the Black Stars cult was a far more organized and well-informed organization than he had thought. He suspected they had eyes, human and otherwise, everywhere.
Or, to be more accurate, he supposed, they were now functioning as the eyes for something else, something that could, by unnatural means, root him out wherever he was and wherever he went. These things were, after all, here to level Colby to the ground, and they were just the grunts. Whatever was coming through to this world (if Jack and his team couldn’t stop them) would be much worse. The devastation in Colby would spread, if it hadn’t already. The whole state. The East Coast. The country, and beyond....
What was one little planet to beings who destroyed whole universes?
There was something so infuriatingly horrific about that idea: not just everything Jack was and had ever done, but everything the human race had ever been or accomplished since the beginning of civilization, would be gone. Not just humans but humanity itself would be erased, relegated to an old folk tale, a lost chapter in an endless book of tragedies.
And in that moment, as his car sped over patches of ice and cracked street pavement, Jack felt sick in his heart for his children. He couldn’t bear the thought of their being afraid at the end, or worse, of them watching a world they had only a tentative grasp of so far just slip away from them before they found a good reason to fight for it. Children, in Jack’s mind, were so newly minted from that pure place where beautiful little souls originally came from that they had less trouble letting go of life and physicality in this world. He had, unfortunately, seen it time and time again in his line of work. He’d seen it in the last seconds of Gracie Anderson’s life when her little hand let go of his, just before the cold and blood loss made her blue eyes glaze over. It wasn’t that children gave up life willingly; no, Jack thought, it was simply that children instinctively knew that there was some place to go after this world because they could still, on some subconscious level, remember that there had been a place from which they’d come before. It didn’t make him any less enraged when children’s lives were taken, but it allowed him to put that rage on a kind of mental shelf and do his job to catch their killers.
It wouldn’t be possible for him to do that where his children were concerned. He wondered how easy it would be (or had been? Oh no, no no, he wasn’t going to think like that, not now) for his children to give this world up.
And as for doing his job and hunting the killers in Colby? He frowned to himself. The worst murderers he had ever encountered in the course of his career had committed some pretty monstrous acts, but they were still human. Many people seemed to forget that—wanted to forget it, as if the thought of these killers being human somehow tainted others’ humanity. People didn’t like to believe that they could share any traits with child-killers and molesters, cannibals, necrophiliacs, rapists, serial murderers, and the like, because it meant that, deep down, they would have to acknowledge that anyone could be that kind of monster, even a loved one. Even oneself. To Jack, however, the fact that the worst criminals he had ever come across until now were still just human beings with human weaknesses and flaws was somewhat reassuring. He didn’t want to chase phantom boogeymen. He wanted to catch bad human beings doing bad things and lock them up in a cage using irrefutable but utterly human forensic proof.
With this case, Jack wasn’t sure anymore that even the cultists were human. Lord knew nothing else out there in the snow was.
He wondered where his children were right now. Were they in the house they had grown up in, the one Katie had gotten in the divorce? Had they gone over to Katie’s on-again, off-again boyfriend’s house? Jack didn’t believe that guy was any great shakes as a protector. In fact, if he’d have allowed himself such an uncharitable thought, he would have hoped one of those spider things had already eaten the guy.
The kids wouldn’t be at school, so he could eliminate searching there. Classes at the grammar, middle, and high schools had been canceled the last few days, and there was talk of cutting the year short and adding the missing time to the beginning of the next school year. That there was no promise that things would be righted by then had not been publicly discussed.
Around him, the faces in the snow looked like they were laughing. Fixed? Not at all, sir! Oh, we have big plans for Colby—big plans! Come September, this little fleck of human loss will be an iceberg, and there won’t be a school to go back to, or any children to attend it.
Jack shook his head to clear those thoughts from it. They didn’t feel like his thoughts. It sounded crazy, even in the confines of his own head, but they felt like the snow’s thoughts. Or maybe they were the projected ideas of the things in the snow. Still, he couldn’t help feeling that the snow itself somehow had a mind of its own, that it was a thinking, calculating thing waiting to exploit the weaknesses of those who made the foolish attempt to trudge through it.
He was almost to Katie’s house, and the tightness in his chest suddenly felt crushing. He was afraid, frankly and starkly afraid, of what he’d find there.
As quickly as he was passing them, the snow faces disassembled and reassembled between the next two trees, and the next, and the next . . . the snow was, indeed, following him, tracking him.
As he reached the town border, he slowed to a stop. No one else was on the road. The drifts of snow had formed an odd snow-fort kind of wall across the length of road just a few hundred feet beyond the town limit. It would have been, under normal circumstances, a fairly easy thing to plow, but Jack had doubts about making any attempts to drive over or through it. He thought briefly of the dashboard cam video of Aleski and Seeger that Teagan had told him about earlier. That hill of snow probably ran around the entire perimeter of the town, through the woods and everything. He could see beyond it now, and although the snow appeared to continue out toward the next town, Jack couldn’t be sure if that was an illusion.
The left turn onto Maple, which ultimately led to Katie’s street, was on his side of the border. He thought some of the subsequent roads might cross the town limits proper, but he had to try to navigate it. His kids needed him.
He tried Katie again on the cell, but was met with the same frustrating busy signal he’d been getting since yesterday afternoon. This close to the outside world, the snow was wreaking havoc with cell reception. He tried to text her for the third time that morning, and again, the text bounced as undeliverable.
“Dammit,” he muttered. He glared at the border. A gust of wind dusted up some of the snow and the faces were immediately there in bas-relief along the border. Indents the size of fists formed eyes, mounds formed sharply jutting facial features, and small, sharp icicles hung from sunken mouth areas in various sardonic smiles. Winter had always bothered Jack, but in that moment, he hated it with a renewed and seething passion. He was tempted to take his snow brush and beat those faces down to disfigured, half-melted lumps.
Instead, he stayed behind the wheel, feeling the feeble heat from the dashboard vents and listening to the idling engine growl low, like a threatened dog.
“You are not going to get in my way,” he told the faces in a steady, even voice. “You are not going to stop me.”
The aspect of the faces changed. Maybe clouds had shifted to cover the sun or the wind had shifted the shape of the bas-relief, but instead of wicked amusement, the expressions were now soaked in hatred. The carved, almost chiseled animosity was far clearer than just an impression. There were faces in the snow now, and they were snarling at him, baring those icicle fangs. Beneath the faces were the beginnings of ice—taloned paws, as well.
Jack eased the car forward toward the turn, eyeing them warily. Could they move? Could they form bodies as well and pull free of that ice wall? And if so, how fast could they bear down on his car?
The faces watched but made no move to stop him. He gunned the engine, his tires kicking up an albescent spray, and peeled into the turn. In his rearview, the faces at the border and the claws beneath seemed to be reaching out of the bank toward the car, a chilling ice-and-wind effect of motion caught and frozen mid-reach.
He focused on the road ahead and pushed down on the gas pedal even harder, until he had put enough distance between him and that wall of snow that he couldn’t see it anymore. He turned right onto Cloverlane Road and then made a left onto Piedmont. If he wavered back and forth over the town border, nothing hindered his progress, but those snow faces followed between fence posts, against tree trunks in backyards, or wedged between parked cars.
They were watching, but waiting.
Finally he reached the right turn for Katie’s street, Shillham Drive. His body tensed as he rolled down the road toward the house. It was on the left, a white bi-level, and Katie’s car was there.
The car doors were open, the interior silent and still.
Jack felt his chest tighten. He put the car in park, pocketed his keys, and took his gun from the glove compartment. As he got out of the car, the wind picked up, slicing across his face and biting his ears. In it, he thought he heard the whispering of many voices on the verge of forming discernible words. It felt invasive, having those voices so close to his ear, furtively pushing the suggestion, if not the statement, of mockery at him. He shook his head and strode purposefully toward his ex-wife’s car.
He braced himself for blood. His heart pounded so hard he could hear the silent rush of his own blood in his head, even over the wind. He took a deep breath and looked inside the car.
The interior was empty. No ex-wife, no kids, no blood. He exhaled with relief. His attention turned to the front door of the house. It was shut, and looked undamaged—both good signs . . . provided that Katie and the kids had made it inside.
He had a key to Katie’s house on his key ring, and as he approached the door, he took it out of his pocket. Behind him, the wind blew snow at his back. The scratching of the tiny pieces of ice against the fabric of his coat felt like fingers clawing at him, trying to divert his attention.
Jack tried the knob first, turning it easily and swinging the door inward. The foyer ahead was dark. He stepped inside, closing and locking the door behind him.
“Guess I didn’t need these,” he mumbled to himself, putting his keys down on the small wooden table by the door. He dropped his gloves next to them and then made his way through the hall to the kitchen at the back of the house, peering into the empty den and dining room to the left and the even emptier bathroom and sitting room to the right. The kids’ overnight backpacks, he noticed, were leaning up against the couch in the den. Odder still, their winter coats and snow boots had been tossed carelessly by the back door. It didn’t add up. The house was swathed in empty stillness; he hadn’t checked upstairs yet, but his gut told him they weren’t there. Still, for all Katie’s flaws, she was a good mother, and she never would have let them out in the snow without coats and snow boots.
Jack frowned. Where the hell were they?
He opened his mouth to call out, then closed it. If they were in the house, he’d find them. But if anyone else—or anything—was in the house, he didn’t want it to find him.
Instead, he went back down the hall toward the front door and climbed the stairs. His hand rested on his gun as the steps creaked beneath his weight.
He caught a whiff of Katie’s perfume when he reached the second floor. It seemed to be coming from Carly’s room, so he looked in there first. Her favorite little stuffed white unicorn sat on the bed. He picked it up, turning it in his hands, looking at the innocent blue eyes, the rainbow yarn hair and tail that he’d learned how to braid just for her, the smudge of blackberry juice that subsequent trips through the washing machine had only reduced to a faint purple patch. He inhaled the smell of his daughter‘s shampoo, the scent of her soap, in the fur of the little guy. Just thinking about her formed a lump in his throat.
He put the unicorn back down on the bed and moved on to his son’s room across the hall. Jack Jr.’s PS3 was on. Jack frowned. He picked up the controller. It was warm; if they had left the house, they’d done it very recently.
He shut off the PS3 and the TV and made his way toward Katie’s bedroom. It had been his bedroom once, too, but he felt nothing of nostalgia stepping through the doorway. The room, the house, the woman who ran it—they were not his anymore, and that was okay. Very little of it even looked the same, but more than that, it didn’t feel the same.
What hadn’t changed was how he felt about his kids. He had to find them.
Suddenly seized with desperation, he searched the room in a flurry—under the bed, in the closets, in the adjoining bathroom, calling out to them, monsters be damned.
“Jack! Carly!”
He went back to the kids’ room and searched the closets and under their beds, too. He looked in the kids’ bathroom tub, on the off chance they thought it might be safer to hide inside it. He ran down the stairs, rechecking behind the couch, in the coat closet, any place he could think of where people could hide.
They were gone.
Jack returned to the back door in the kitchen and looked out at the yard. The aluminum swing set he’d put in for them when Carly was three stood like a pale silver and blue monument to their childhood, their little ghosts haunting the curve of the swing seats and the worn-shiny spots on the slide. Both the swings and slide were piled high with small mountains of snow, weighing them down, and they creaked when the wind blew. He could hear it somehow, even in the house with everything closed up to seal out the cold. It was as if the weight of whatever had happened to the children was an unbearable burden it needed to share with him.
He remembered the message from the woman who’d claimed snowmen had eaten her children and shuddered.
On the back porch, the barren sticks of an old raspberry bush Katie had started that spring poked up through the snow gathered in the clay terracotta pot. A diminutive patio set consisting of a metal-framed pair of chairs and a small alfresco-style table practically blended into the drifts around it. There were no footprints, but he didn’t really expect there to be. Whatever drove the faces to form in the snow also swallowed up any trace of humanity that was left out there. It would not be imprinted; it only assimilated. The returning idea of the snow as a sentient, absorbing kind of creature in and of itself made sense, a lot of terrifying sense, and did nothing to soothe his fears for his family.
Where could they have gone? He pulled out his cell again and tried Katie’s and cursed as her voicemail picked up for the umpteenth time. He’d done some information gathering on Katie’s new boyfriend when he first learned of the guy’s existence, which he justified to himself as due diligence on a man who would be spending time with his children; as a result, he had the boyfriend’s address, but there was no cell or landline phone number associated with him, so he couldn’t call. How a person functioned in this day and age with no way to be reached was beyond him, and seemed unwise given that he may, at some point, have Jack’s children at his house. And no criminal record and essentially positive employment performance reviews didn’t mean the guy was smart or financially responsible. He’d just have to go over there then, he thought as he turned away from the back door. It was a ten-minute drive to the guy’s house, and—
Then Jack saw the note.
“What the—?” It was a small white envelope whose bottom corner was frozen in a jagged line of ice that ran along the counter. He would have sworn it hadn’t been there before, but there it was, with his name written in Katie’s graceful, looping handwriting. A fine fuzz of frost ran the length of the flap.
With a little finagling, he managed to wriggle the envelope out of the ice. The whole thing was cool to the touch and it made him uncomfortable. It was as if something perpetually arctic had held it, had wrapped its fingers or tendrils or whatever around it and imparted its unceasing frigidity into the fibers of the paper itself. He had this semi-irrational thought that maybe the cold would pass into his fingers, through his hands, and leave some part of him permanently frostbitten.
He opened the envelope and took out a piece of white paper the size of a note card. On it, four words were printed in a block-letter handwriting he vaguely recognized but, frustratingly, couldn’t call to mind. Not Katie’s, and not the boyfriend’s, but . . . dammit, he couldn’t place it. Still, the words most certainly had a freezing effect on his heart:
His stomach bottomed out, and for a moment, he thought he might get sick right there on the kitchen floor. He had to pull it together, though. He had to find his kids.
He took several deep breaths, forcing down the upheaval inside him, blinking the world back into focus. He slipped the envelope and note into a paper bag. His fingerprints were on the note, but he hoped forensics could find other prints as well.
Kathy had mentioned once that the identities of Hand of the Black Stars members were a very closely guarded secret. Well, fuck that—he’d get names, addresses, their fucking pants sizes. He would find his family, and the cultists who took them. They had to be alive, just had to be, because the need to find them would be one of the surest ways to manipulate Jack and his team. So be it, if it got him closer to them. He would find them, one way or another.
And if those crazy sons of bitches got between him and his family, he’d kill them.