At that moment every streetlamp in a block radius fizzed out, and the shadows came alive. One raced past in the shape of a bear, huffing and grunting and making a wind that made her eyes water. What looked like a tall man with a buffalo head stepped out from behind a nearby tree. The others were not so distinct, just blurred figures that scurried and oozed and gibbered and moaned. Something slithered through the grass. Something rattled a sewer grate. A carnival of shadows.
Tusk was not a man, not anymore. He was a vessel. Something had inhabited him. Something old and powerful and sulfuric. All this time he had been murdering for pleasure but with purpose. He murdered in the name of darkness, and darkness answered. The Rue was a place of summoning, a night-black doorway with a knife as its key and Jeremy Tusk—or whatever his true name was—its gatekeeper.
Sarin should not have come alone, but remained in place until what looked like a two-headed buzzard swung out of the sky and raked at her forehead with its shadow claws. She screamed and the night screamed back. All at once the shadows came for her—knotting around her like a slow cyclone—and she could not run fast enough, slash hard enough, scream loud enough.
Tusk circled behind her, close enough so that she could hear his haggard breathing. She turned but not soon enough. He swung an arm and clubbed the back of her head. The world went black, then came back into haywire color briefly before unconsciousness rushed in for good and she fell flat to the ground.
His car was parked nearby—an old Lincoln as long and formal as a hearse—and he hefted her and dumped her in the trunk. There he bound her wrists and ankles, taped her mouth, before driving away.
Thirty minutes later she woke inside his apartment at the Rue. Her mind felt as tenuous and wounded as a leaf eaten down to the veins by insects. She forced herself to concentrate. Her vision wobbled into focus and the first thing she saw was the great red eye sketched inside a triangle on the wall. Palm prints surrounded it, a five-pointed constellation made of red right hands. Beneath it was a shaker desk that had been converted to an altar crowded with candles black and red. Their flickering light made the eye appear to move, to focus in on her, and she knew it might as well be so. Among the candles were figures built from sticks and bones and hair and ligaments, some in triangular and trapezoidal designs, others tied together in way that appeared almost buggy.
The room was otherwise empty except for black flies dirtying the air and the runic symbols chalked across the hardwood floor. She could hear him coming—the footsteps shaking the very air, as if there were many bodies smashed down and contained within his—and she pretended sleep.
He wore a black silk robe, unbelted and flapping around him like wings. He was otherwise naked. Beneath his considerable belly, a worm of a penis curled. He carried in one hand a long black dagger and in the other a can of Sprite. He sipped from it.
He could scissor off her toes, saw open her belly, hammer her teeth from her mouth, and she could feel the pain, the same as anyone. Just as she could die, the same as anyone. But she was more than a standard sacrifice. To kill someone like Sarin meant a black feast, a midnight Sabbath, a sundering of the balance in favor of the dark.
Some demons made people sick, and some demons made people go mad. Some made forests drop their needles and birds fall dead from the sky. A demon might guide your hand to a rifle’s stock or to a thigh beneath a table or to a rope that will wrap around your neck and tighten when you fling your body from a balcony. You have seen the work they have done. A graveyard is defiled. A man brings a pistol to work; a boy brings a pistol to school. A semi lurches across the meridian to strike a school bus. These are singular episodes, containable maladies.
But every once in a while, one of the old ones will come. A Destroyer. And when the old ones come, the darkness organizes, becomes a widespread contagion. In Germany, where train cars crammed with Jews thundered toward smokestacks belching ash. In Rwanda, where machetes flashed in the night. Even now, in Juárez, where people are kidnapped and their headless bodies stacked up outside shopping malls; and in Iraq and in Syria, where men wrap themselves in shawls like shadows that can survive even the desert’s sun and record videos of heads hacked from shoulders.
Tusk was inhabited by one of the old ones. Tusk had become the puppet of a Destroyer, and he was assembling a court of shadows. And if Sarin died by his hand, he would grow more foul and potent, capable of cracking open a doorway at the Rue that would spill shadows freely from it.
A fly landed on her eye, and she blinked it away. She waited until Tusk passed by and attended his altar, scratching a Lucifer match and lighting a black candle and muttering something under his breath. It was then she attacked.
Her ankles and wrists remained bound, but this did not stop her. She rose from the floor as quietly as she could manage. And then shoved forward. She battered her head into the small of his back. This knocked him into the desk. Immediately she dropped to a crouch. His body reeled back. When it did, she was beneath him, tipping his body at the knees. He bleated like a goat when he fell. The floor silenced him. The dagger clattered away. The Sprite pooled and fizzed.
She aimed first for his groin, and then for his larynx, ulcerating every nerve and paralyzing his breath. This stole her a good ten seconds, during which time she secured the dagger and freed her ankles and then her wrists. He was coming at her now, scrambling up from the floor, a head taller, a hundred pounds heavier, and she held out the dagger just in time for him to accept it. The point jammed into the recess of his belly button, the target that presented itself to her first.
She yanked upward, unzippering him, and he staggered back with his eyes wide and his hand on the hilt that now rose from his sternum. This did not stop him from speaking some incantation, even with blood bubbling from his lips, and she fled that place—the flies battering her—and ran through the shadow-tangled night and did not pause until she was pounding at the front door of The Weary Traveler, where Juniper took her inside and into his arms. She could not stop crying for a long time, and when she did, she could only say, “He’s gone. Thank god it’s over.”
?
Except it wasn’t. He’s back. Tusk—or whatever his true name is, the name of the old one who inhabited him—has returned. Juniper feels it and Sarin does too. This is why they walk side by side through the nighttime streets of Portland, hooded, their boots clomping through puddles, their hands free at their sides, ready to reach for a weapon.