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Piddington, Buckinghamshire, UK
3nd of January, 12:10 p.m. (GMT)
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“I think it’s down that road,” Martinez pointed to an unpaved road Wilson had just passed.
“Let’s check on the next one and see if there’s a sign before we double back. You’d think we were in Italy, given the shortage of signs around here,” Wilson groused.
They had been driving in the deep countryside of Buckinghamshire for half an hour and still couldn’t find the coroner’s residence. When they’d entered the address into their GPS, it led them to the wrong location. Unfortunately, they could hardly stop and ask for directions if they wanted to keep this visit under the radar.
They’d decided upon a cover as business journalists—The Economist was going to do a long biography on the amazing successes and sudden death of Carlmon Grollo, and they wanted background information from the people who had been there in the beginning. They believed it would be enough to garner an audience, given Mr. Grollo’s recent passing.
The next road did have a sign, and it proved Martinez correct—they had missed their turn. Wilson begrudgingly backtracked and took the unmarked gravel road through some woods. They traveled the gravel road for a good hundred yards before the driveway circled in front of a large updated farmhouse. Originally built in the late nineteenth century, the old barn had been turned into a four-car garage with loft rooms, and the house proper expanded by an addition that doubled its square footage.
“There’s movement in the front window,” Martinez noted as they drove up.
“Good. It took us long enough to find the place,” Wilson responded. “I have the salt in my breast pocket. I may need to you make a distraction if an opportunity doesn’t present itself naturally.”
They parked the car, and Martinez rang the doorbell. They’d only waited for a second when the door opened, and the smell hit them like a brick through a glass window.
Wilson immediately drew his Glock, but before he could bring his arms up, a hand lashed out of the shadows behind the door—a hand that was no longer human. Wilson flew off the porch, landing hard against the door of their rental car, denting it with the force of the impact.
Martinez drew and fired twice through the door, uncertain of what was behind it but confident it wasn’t human. She, too, was picked up by an invisible force and thrown like a doll, landing on the gravel driveway twenty feet back. As she fell on the rocks, Wilson, back against the rental car’s door, fired twice into the sliver of space between the door and the jamb. An inhuman scream wailed from the threshold and then went silent.
“You okay?” Wilson called out.
“I will be. You?” she responded, quickly scrambling the few feet she needed to retrieve the firearm knocked from her grip by the fall.
“Been better. I think we’ve found our bad guy,” he said, raising himself off the ground with a grunt. His weapon never wavered from the door.
Martinez gained her footing and copied Wilson’s prudence as they approached the door. “Do you think anyone heard?” she asked.
“Maybe. But we’re a long way from the road, and the next house has got to be half a mile away. Four shots in a rural community shouldn’t draw any attention,” he answered, kicking the door in and dropping to a knee.
The smell was horrific, and the body of something that was once human lay sprawled in the entryway. It had five goat-like legs spread out spider-like around a bloated pink torso. Four reptilian arms branched out from every side, and the head...the head made Martinez retch.
“Don’t!” Wilson ordered. “Don’t leave any evidence behind!” She turned away and stepped back to the gravel drive to calm her stomach. Once the...thing...was out of sight, she immediately felt better, but the feeling returned once she should see it again.
“It’s aethermorphic feedback, like Furfur,” Wilson explained as she tried to fight down her urge to vomit. “It will take you time to get used to it. Until you are, just close your eyes when you feel it coming on. That usually clears it, like a reset button that lets you go until you have to close your eyes again.” He left the house and walked to the car, beckoning Martinez to follow. “Whoever that used to be—I’m assuming it’s Hicks—it’s alone. It wouldn’t allow anything else near itself.” He pulled out four shower caps and four zip ties. “Place these over your shoes. They will hide any accidental footprints you may leave.”
“Was that a devil?” Martinez questioned as she secured her footwear.
“Demon. A human possessed by a devil doesn’t change like that. Devils within humans can choose to look horrible, but they always remain very human. Demons are different. The human body can’t contain their chaos, forcing changes,” he told her as he rummaged through his luggage. He unearthed a circular piece of granite about the size of a quarter with a hole through it. “Here hold this,” he instructed her before putting on his booties.
“What’s—”
“It’s a real hag stone, although it doesn’t look like the ones they sell to tourists. If you look through it, you can see things that you normally can’t, provided something’s there to see, of course.”
She refrained from exercising her curiosity and returned it to him when he was finished with his shoes.
“Now, let’s go see what’s there.” They returned to the hallway, and Martinez, using Wilson’s advice, managed to avoid puking as he poked around on the corpse. It was wearing shredded clothing, but nothing of interest. The stench was another matter; there was something quite dead in the house, and it overpowered the stink of all the dried feces spread on the walls, and even that of the demon itself.
Wilson blew some salt over the twisted corpse and waited until a pattern formed. It was similar to what they’d seen at Hindon House and at Roberts’s, but there were other elements as well. “There’s more than one magic here,” Wilson interpreted the salt. “This part looks familiar, but this patch is different. I suspect we’ve found our magician, but the demon’s innate magic is causing interference. We’ll keep looking. Prepare yourself for the worst.”
The fetor deepened as they walked into the great dining room in the back of the house. Hanging from repurposed electrical wires were two corpses, one of a middle-aged woman and the other of a young man. Their bodies, both in advanced stages of decomposition, were broken and reassembled with strings attached to their limbs that led to a pair of cross boards above their heads—they’d been turned into life-sized marionettes with fully articulated joints moving in directions for which they were never intended. Wilson took one look and stepped back outside onto the driveway to gather himself, Martinez only a step behind. “Holy hell,” she swore in the rare bright English sunlight, fighting against the rising tide of nausea and horror.
“Yeah. Demonic handiwork will do that to you. It gets easier, but that’s relative. They leave a stain behind on what they do; they can’t help it.”
After a minute of silence filled with deep, steadying breaths, they returned and Wilson again blew salt, this time under the corpses. A pattern appeared, but not the one they were looking for. “That’s probably the demon’s pure signature. See how these lines are different from what we saw at Grollo’s?”
Martinez nodded. “So the demon-possessed body that answered the door is associated with Dionysus but these victims are not, even though there is little doubt they were killed by the same demon-possessed person. Just not in the same manner as Grollo and Roberts?”
“Right. We move on. Let’s sweep the house, but start with the basement and attic. No one summons demons in their bedrooms if there is another space available.” Wilson blew salt in every room, but they were all clean. Martinez was surprised to find him accepting such a debt, but at this point, there was little else to do. She offered to blow some, but he declined. “We just banished a freed demon—we’ve got karma to burn right now. You should save yours for your studies.”
They systematically went through the house, but found nothing. “It’s got to be in the garage,” Martinez surmised after they cleared the last room.
“If not there, then probably somewhere in the woods,” he concluded with a hint of exasperation. “Grab the keychains hanging in the kitchen and we’ll check it out.”
Keys in hand, they walked up the external stairs that led to the garage loft. They tried several keys in the solid metal door before finding the right one. The room within was the size of the entire garage below. Rows of glass cases demarcated one part of the room while the other contained a summoning circle. A single wooden stool stood at the end of one of the rows of cases.
“Bingo,” Wilson announced with a grin, homing in on the circle. Passing the cases, he noted they were filled with rare coins and other small valuables.
“Look at that.” He nodded to the summoning ring. “What do you see?”
Martinez examined the circle, sifting through her memory of Chloe’s and Dot’s work. “It’s the circle from the Lesser Key of Solomon.”
“Correct. And the target? Who was the target?”
She looked again, reading the inscriptions, searching for the target sigil. “Buer.”
Wilson grinned. “Correct again! We banished one hell of a powerful demon.”
The longer she gazed at the circle, the more she was bothered. Wilson waited until she figured it out. “It’s broken!” she exclaimed. “This ascender isn’t touching,” she pointed at one of the letters in the circle.
He nodded. “Even the lettering must be perfect. There are no second chances in our art.”
“How did a lawyer in the English countryside become a practitioner?” she inquired, somewhat baffled.
“When we get a full background, it’ll make sense. Everything makes sense in hindsight,” he responded, blowing another round of salt opposite the circle, resolving into the same mixed pattern—half Dionysius, half demon. He cast the salt once more, this time among the glass cases; the grains shimmied across the floor into the same signature found in Grollo’s calligraphy drawer and by Roberts’s hospital bed.
“Time for the hag stone,” he declared. “This is a very powerful magical item, and you should always minimize the duration of your viewing. Looking through the stone can attract the attention of the fae, and that’s the last thing we need to be dealing with now. England’s crawling with them, so I’m going to keep this brief.”
He quickly put the stone to his eye and ran down each row of glass cases, stopping about halfway through, next to the lone stool. He removed the hag stone from his eye. “Found it.”
Martinez joined him. Under the glass was half of an old gold coin next to a small steel file and a white cloth covered with a pile of gold dust. “What is it?”
Wilson eyed it from all angles while it was safely under glass. “If I’m not mistaken, something that was stolen from the Mine long ago.”
“Stolen?” Martinez marveled.
“Yeah. Before we had the systems we do now, things would occasionally go missing. The things we hold want to be free, and they’re remarkably good at escaping. That’s one of them. That’s the Midas Coin.” Wilson righted himself. “Now everything makes sense.”
“Midas, as in everything-he-touches-turns-to-gold Midas?” she asked incredulously, dredging up her ancient mythology.
“The same. This is one of six remaining that were minted with his face. Why this one has power and the others don’t is a mystery. The possessor of this coin has their desires amplified to the extent that they cannot do anything else.”
“So the paintings, the gold eating—”
“All of it. All of them were infected by the Midas coin through shavings ingested in the dessert. That part is new, but that’s demonic creativity for you.”
“So how do we get this back to the Mine without being cursed?” Martinez puzzled.
“Salt. We’ll gather it, the shavings, and the file, pack them into salt, and be done with it.”
“And then what? What about the crime scene?” Martinez wasn’t sure how the police would explain what had happened when someone eventually wondered where Hicks, his wife, or their son was.
“We’re going to have to scrub it with fire.”
“Arson?!” she blurted out in shock.
“We’ve got to burn it all down. We don’t want demonic residue hanging around—it’s quite dangerous in and of itself. But before we do that”—he paused with the first roguish smile she’d seen from him—“it’s time to loot.”
“Loot?”
“Yeah, grab anything you like. We’re going to burn it all down anyway. It’s one way to supplement our income, and believe you me, you will want all those extra resources once you start getting into the difficult magics. Our accoutrements are not cheap.”
Martinez hesitated. “Is Leader fine with this?”
“She’s the one who suggested it. She keeps ten percent of whatever we take to fund the Mine. So grab the best stuff you can and remember—our covert space is limited.”