And he’d take one or two if he could. Unfortunately, masterpieces like that? You couldn’t unload them for more than pennies on the dollar. Too much provenance, too much attention—and that was the thing about being a thief. It was all about the exit strategy, and not just in terms of getting safely away with somebody else’s shit. You had to be able to liquidate—or you were just a felonious hoarder.
Down on the second floor, he pivoted toward the view and took a deep, calming breath—
The sound was quiet in the utter silence of the triplex, the kind of thing that, later, he would wonder how he’d heard.
It was a tap. Like on a window. But not quite.
Frowning, he pivoted and looked in the direction he thought it came from. That was when he heard it again.
Tap. Tap.
Like something was trapped and trying to get out.
Weird. In all his research on the Mr. and Mrs., he hadn’t come across any pets. For one thing, the pair had the kind of travel schedule where you could hardly keep a houseplant alive, much less something that required food, water, and walks. For another? The Mr. was a nasty neat. Cat hair? Dog hair? He’d have a fucking coronary.
Well, whatever it was, there was no reason to—
Of their own volition, Balz’s feet started walking, his body carried like inanimate luggage as they headed off in a direction, on a mission, that was utterly unconnected to his will: He wanted to leave. He wanted to head back with the watches to his room at the Brotherhood’s mansion. He wanted to make a call to his black market guy to monetize the Mr.’s happy little collection of wrist-bound tick tocks.
Instead, Balz was passing through the collection rooms . . . back with the meteorites, the surgical instruments, the bats.
A new room now. Totally dark with no lights or windows.
As he entered, a ceiling fixture was motion-activated and a low-level, hushed illumination bled down from above.
Books. Everywhere. But not lined up on shelves, spine to spine. These were set in glass cases that ran up the walls, the tomes reclining on tilted stands like they were at a spa. In the glow of the soft light, gold lettering gleamed on covers as well as the edges of some of the pages. When Balz breathed in, he smelled dust—
And something else.
Tap. Tap. Tap—
His head slowly swiveled to the far corner. Set aside from all the others, in a floor display cabinet that was hip-high and spotlit, a tome separate from the rest had been given an exalted distinction from the others in the collection.
Tap.
Balz walked over, called by the sound. By the presence of the special book. By . . .
In the back of his mind, he recognized that he was powerless to turn away. But he was so captivated by what was before him that he neither took note of his thrall nor had any thought to change his destination. And as he came up to the encasement, he caught his breath.
“I’m here,” he whispered as he put the watches aside on the glass top. “Are you okay?”
Like the thing was a child who’d been forgotten. Who needed rescuing. By him.
The priceless artifact was bound in some kind of dark, mottled leather that made his nape tingle in warning. Old. The single volume was very, very old. No title was embossed on the surface of the cover, and the pages seemed thick as parchment—
Something smelled bad.
Like death.
As a wave of nausea surged in his gut, Balz covered his mouth with his palm and bent forward to retch—
The sound of his cell phone ringing was an absolute electric shock, his body launching itself off the floor. What the fuck? He’d silenced the—
Weak and disorientated, he fumbled with the thing. “Hello? Hello . . . ?”
“Time to come home, Balz. Right now.”
At first, he didn’t recognize the voice. It certainly wasn’t someone who hit him up very often.
“Lassiter?”
Why was the fallen angel calling him—
His eyes returned to the book on its stand and he jumped again. It had opened itself, the front cover thrown back, its pages flipping in a rush, the flurry of activity making no sense—
“Now,” Lassiter barked over the connection. “Get your ass home right fucking now—”
Balz snapped to attention. Something in the angel’s syllables broke whatever spell had overtaken him, and with a shot of clarity, he knew if he did not dematerialize away at this very instant, he was never going to be free.
Whatever that meant.
Just as he was closing his eyes, the book settled to an open folio, and he realized that it actually wasn’t spotlit; in fact, it glowed all by itself. And he had to read what had been served up for him, and him alone—
All at once, his physical form aerosoled into an invisible cloud of himself, and he spirited away through the collection rooms to the lineup of windows that faced the Hudson River. Slipping in between the molecules of one of the glass panes, he traveled northward in a scatter, the cold, bracing air registering even though he wasn’t corporeal.
Unless maybe that was just how he felt?
The call to return to downtown, to go back to the Commodore, to reenter the triplex and read what had been provided for him, and him alone, was nearly irresistible. Yet he knew, without a doubt, that there was an infection there, something that would enter him and eat away at his mind and marrow, a disease of the soul that might well be communicable.
Such that he could give it to those he loved most.
He had been narrowly saved just now.
And people didn’t get that lucky twice, especially not in the same fucking night.
What the hell just happened? he thought.
Moments later, the Black Dagger Brotherhood’s mountain loomed on his horizon, high-shouldered and dome-topped, its pine-covered contours establishing one flank of a valley. Protected by mhis, thanks to the Brother Vishous, the acreage was the kind of location that showed up on Google Maps, but, unless you knew what you were doing and where you were going on it, you couldn’t find your way as soon as you set foot on the property.
Everything was blurry. Confusing. Disorientating.
You know, kind of like how he was feeling right now.
As he re-formed, nausea dogged him and he breathed through his nose to get his stomach to calm down—
“What the . . . fuck?”
Instead of being in front of the great gray mansion, he was around the back of the old stone manse, staring up at a set of second-floor windows.
This was not where he had sent himself. Why was he—
The mournful sound of an owl hooting broke through the silence of the night, and he had a sudden urge to get the fuck inside . . . as if there was someone—or, worse, something—coming after him—
From out of nowhere, memories barged into his brain. Between one blink and the next, it was no longer early spring, with the snow mostly gone from the gardens and the winterized pool. Abruptly, it was the dead of winter, everything blanketed in white, the frigid air slapping at his face and ruffling through his hair. He was not standing on the ground anymore. He was up on the side of the house, freestyle-glued to the mortar joints with his climbing shoes and his finger-grips, working on the second floor’s daylight protection shutters. Several of the panels had failed in that blizzard, and he and some of the others had been doing what they could to get the steel safeguards down into place as the storm raged. Yeah, except he was no Tim the Tool Man Taylor with the Mr. Fix-It shit. The electrocution from the motorized gears had been a shock—literally and figuratively—and he’d had no memory of getting thrown off the sill into thin air.
He’d been dead as he’d fallen to the snowpack. Z and Blay had done CPR on him to save his life, and he’d been told it had been touch and go.
To thank them, he’d brought them back a message from the Other Side.
The demon is back.
Those were the words he’d spoken when he’d finally come around, though he had no memory of saying them—and no memory of dying, either. He only knew what had come out of his mouth because he’d overheard a couple of Brothers talking about it, and he was only aware of having briefly been a corpse because of what was in his medical record.
People didn’t get like that if you had a paper cut—
The demon is back.
As he heard his own voice repeat the phrase in his head, sweat broke out under his clothes and he wiped his brow with a hand that trembled—
“You did the right thing.”
As Lassiter’s voice registered from a distance, he looked at the phone in his hand. Bringing the unit to his ear, he said, “I did?”
“I’m over here.”
Balz looked to the right. The angel was way down at the corner of the house, standing in one of the French doors.
“Come here,” Lassiter said as he held out his palm.
“Where did I go when I died?” Balz stared at the ground and tried to imagine what his body had looked like in the snow. Had he been on his back? Had to have been, if he’d been thrown off the house. “I know I didn’t go to the Fade. I didn’t see a door. You’re supposed to see a door, right—”
“Don’t worry about that. Come inside—”
He glanced down the mansion’s flank at the angel. “How did you know to call me just now?”
Tap.
Lassiter wasn’t looking at him anymore. He was focused on something up above and to the left, in the sky. “I need you to come inside. Right now.”
Tap. Tap.
“Well, I need you to tell me what’s going on—”
“Balthazar, trust me. You have to get inside—”
Tap, tap, tap, tap, taptap—
All at once, there was sound from everywhere overhead and Balz instinctively ducked and covered his head as he went into a crouch.
Birds. Taking flight in a rush.
Against the backdrop of stars, hundreds of not-nocturnal birds flushed from the forest, the desperate, fleeing wings of the sparrows, blue jays, and cardinals carrying them off in all kinds of directions, their delicate little bodies blocking the distant haze of galaxies in a discordant, flickering pattern.
For a split second, Balz thought of the bat skeletons.
And then all he knew was pure terror.
Giving in to the sudden burst of fear, he broke into a run—and somehow, he knew not to try any of the other doors of the house. Somehow, he knew that Lassiter was at the only portal he could use, the fallen angel his only hope, his salvation from a fate worse than death.
Although he knew not who or what his pursuer was.
Balz’s lungs screamed for oxygen and his legs pumped faster than they ever had in his whole life. And as he closed in on where the angel was leaning out of the mansion, Lassiter started yelling at him to move, move, move—
The second Balz was in range, the angel reached out and dragged him inside, slamming the door and bracing his body against it as Balz tripped and yard-saled across the library’s Persian rug.
Taptaptaptaptap—
As a barrage of that sound radiated through the room, through the whole mansion, Balz flipped over onto his back and crab-walked even farther away from the noise. The something that had wanted to claim him was hitting the glass of that French door, the noise a magnification of that which had called him to that room at the triplex, to the book.
Only louder. More demanding.
Petulant, as if it resented being denied.
“What the fuck is going on here,” Balz demanded.
But the angel didn’t seem to hear him. Lassiter had closed his oddly colored eyes and was straining against the closed door, his huge body braced and vibrating with power, his blond-and-black hair falling down over his flexed chest and arms.
Like he was the only thing keeping whatever it was out of the mansion.
“She’s back,” Balz heard himself whisper with defeat.
As the sun began to rise over Caldwell, the demon Devina turned off her Viking stove and moved the All-Clad frying pan aside to the counter. The plate she’d decided to use was square and white, and the two meat pieces she put on it with a pair of stainless steel tongs were cooked to perfection: Just a little salt and pepper. A splash of extra virgin olive oil to coat the pan and help with the crisping.