But he needed these flea-bitten, witless humans. Alastor’s powers were growing back to their full strength, but if the wrong creature were to find him even a day too soon…well, it was simply not an option.
Alastor moved across the room, darting from shadow to shadow. The humans were breathing low and steady, fixed fast into sleep. The changeling’s ears twitched at the sound of his faint steps, but its eyes did not snap open—Alastor waited, and nearly crowed in triumph when the creature merely turned over onto its side and began to snore loudly.
There was a reason changelings were hardly better than rodents to be exterminated in his realm. He’d heard that witches in the human realm had taken to them for their unshakable loyalty. Changelings imprinted upon the first being they saw as infants, binding themselves to their caretaker. More than that, they did, he could admit, make fair guards, as they possessed all of the excellent hearing and vision of their betters. That is, if they weren’t sleeping.
More importantly, changelings could alter their appearance into anything, including malefactors and other superior fiends. That simply would not do. Every fiend Downstairs had a rightful place in the order of things. Anything that disrupted it, whether it be a changeling or a hag, had to be brought in line or permanently dealt with.
Still, Alastor felt a strange curiosity about the witch. Something tickled and nagged at the back of his memory when the boy glanced at her—an unlikely resemblance. He not resist the opportunity to examine her now.
He leaned in closer, inhaling the next soft breath she released. Yes, Alastor thought, this girl would surely fetch a high price Downstairs at the soul market. Such salty courage, tinged with bitter sadness. An irresistible mixture.
But it was her face that struck him now, being so similar to the servant girl he had been trapped inside. The one who had cried and begged as the fire was at her feet.
Like a wart grown back on his heart, stubbornly resisting his efforts now to cut it off, Alastor could not shake the image of the girl. He thought that it was a terrible thing, to not know her name, but to remember that her fear tasted metallic, like blood, and her pain, like ash.
He was a fiend of logic, and no part of him was willing to deny that the girl’s death had, in turn, saved his own life. Without her fear and agony, there would not have been enough power in him to escape to the Inbetween, sleeping, biding his time until the witch’s bloodline no longer walked the earth and he could return.
Dreaming all the while of what he would do to the Redding descendants.
Alastor cast a look around the room. He did not mean to go far, only to assess his new surroundings. The glimpses he had caught of this world on the drive in the horseless wagon (car, he corrected himself, when he remembered what the little witch had called it) had rattled him. He remembered Salem from his last life; he had visited it once with Honor Redding.
Honor Redding. It had been nearly four hundred years, and yet…it only felt like days since they had last met. Perhaps it was because the boy himself bore such a strong likeness to the young man Honor had been. Surely, the resemblance would not stop there. His sister, it seemed, had been born with a faulty heart, but the boy’s weak heart was inherited, passed down from coward to coward. Alastor knew it would only be a matter of time before the boy agreed to a contract, much like Honor had.
Honor Redding had not been a friend. He had not even been a partner. Humans were the lowest form of life, tolerated only for the service their shades could provide. This boy was Honor’s legacy—if he could just get the boy to agree to a contract, the energy formed from the new bond would feed him, and provide the last push of power needed to escape the child early, before the little witch and her father could bind him to another life-form and kill him.
Alastor was a reasonable sort. He could sacrifice owning those four souls, the boy’s immediate family, if it meant hundreds more from the Redding family were at his disposal. He could summon the long-dead ones from the shade realm, and finally put them to use building a new palace for himself Downstairs.
The boy’s arm, cut neat and quick by the cursed iron blade, hung useless at his side as he passed through the door into the hallway. He poked at the bats hanging from the ceiling, wondering how they could sleep so deeply—and in the company of humans, no less.
The rest of the house was enchanted—ghosts moved between the floors, mostly unseen. The magic here bloomed against the boy’s skin like deadly nightshade, its wild wickedness both tainted and tamed by the pure hearts of the witches who defended this realm. Alastor reached the window in no time, but took a moment to sniff at the skeleton hanging there. It had a strange smell. Not the earthy reek of most humans, but a sort of hollow…burned something, perhaps. One he had never scented before. Why would a human keep such ruined bones?
Well, humans were strange, and stranger now than ever before. He turned back to the window, and thrust it open with the boy’s one good arm. Ah. Yes. There was a long black ladder attached to the ledge. It was tricky business slithering out through it—business that was clearly below a being such as himself—but he continued wiggling and worming until he was balanced at the very top of the ladder.
“Egads.” He gasped, feeling the freezing metal rock. With a loud creak, the ladder shot to the ground. The malefactor cursed in every language he knew, and several he didn’t. The feet of the metal beast struck the wet earth and threw him off.
“A pox upon this house!” he hissed, raising a fist and shaking it.
Then Alastor, First Prince of the Realm, Master Collector of Souls and Commander of the First Battalion of Fiends, took in one deep breath of midnight air, and was off, running.
There was something very peculiar about this Salem.
His memories of his time here were dusty, but Alastor could not recall quite so many human houses, their lanterns blazing. Fiends had clearly failed in their duty of human population control, but it looked as though they had decorated the town themselves, adorning it with enormous spiderwebs, skeletons, and gravestones. If only the buildings were built from bone as well as stone, and spiraled up into the moonless sky like the towering homes Downstairs. Then Alastor might feel truly at ease. These humans and their square homes and slanted roofs. Honestly.
The boy’s breath fanned out white against the cool night air, each exhalation escaping like a tiny, glowing shade. As he walked, weaving and bobbing between the houses, grass and brick gave way to a strange gray material, one that was as cracked and stained as an old tree elf’s behind. Mindful of the tall humans watching him from across the street, Alastor forced the boy’s body down into a squat and took in a deep breath of the hard substance. Satisfied with the chalky smell, he poked it with a single finger. Solid. Good. Above him, great poles held black boxes that flashed green, yellow, and red, over and over.