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  To Howard, for the feverish cosmic dreams

  AFTER THE FIREWORKS

  Arkham’s Independence Day festivities had drawn thousands of souls to its harbor, including Redemption Orne, who looked for a single soul of peculiar quality. To conserve magic, he’d dropped his customary illusion and walked as the young man who’d escaped mortality centuries before. The candor posed little danger; in Arkham, only two living men knew his true face, and the dead he disregarded.

  He had started hunting at noon. With nightfall, the barges in the harbor began to vent their pyrotechnic cargoes, goading the crowd to an exhilaration that deafened his psychic “hearing.” Redemption retreated from the boardwalk to the comparative peace of Saltonstall Park. Where benches afforded a view of the fireworks, gawkers still clustered. He walked deeper under the trees and leaned against a trunk to regain his bearings. After the show, he could work the throngs milling homeward. Except—

  Except …

  Except he might not have to. Though the din of the fireworks continued, a far subtler vibration rattled the bones of his inner ears. Ambient energy ebbed as someone nearby drew upon it. The person was no magician—they took too little energy for that—but they had the spark Redemption needed.

  He traced the ebb to a clearing where Captain Saltonstall, in bronze, defied King and customs men. Present-day patriots had deserted their Revolutionary hero and left the clearing empty except for a boy not much older than Sean Wyndham, who’d last summer answered Redemption’s ad for an apprentice. The sparse beard he’d managed to raise emphasized rather than disguised his youth. Youthful, too, even childish, was his hunch over the artist’s pad on his knees. To observe unobserved, Redemption paused beyond the glare of the sodium lamps that allowed the boy to draw. On the bench beside him slumped a scarred leather backpack. Equally scuffed were his work boots, and the knees and cuffs of his jeans were frayed. Add to these signs of rough travel a Mohawk lapsing into all-over carrot-red stubble, and the boy hadn’t seen home for some time.

  Nyarlathotep clearly favored Redemption, to send him such a perfect donor.

  Before entering the light, he took out his phone and feigned conversation. His ploy had the desired effect: the boy looked up, wary but unstartled, read him as harmless, and returned to his drawing. As Redemption approached the boy’s bench, he channeled magic into his voice, warming it to a trust-inducing balm. “Okay, I’m off. Tomorrow, lunch. Don’t forget.”

  The boy’s hunched shoulders relaxed. He sat up, blinking.

  Redemption halted in front of the bench. “Hey,” he said. “Somebody else who doesn’t like fireworks?”

  “They’re all right.” The boy flipped his pad shut. “I was going to check them out, but I got distracted.”

  “Drawing?”

  The boy hesitated before nodding.

  “Cool. I draw some. Can I have a look?”

  Another hesitation, but Redemption’s balmed words affected this target strongly. The boy’s spark explained part of that susceptibility. More, though, his simultaneous shrug and grin belied a hunger for contact. “I guess so. If you like scary stuff.”

  “I think I can handle it,” Redemption said. He sat to receive the pad. Handing it over, the boy said, “The base sucks. I blew the perspective.”

  The minor errors in Saltonstall’s statue were unimportant; the strength of the sketch lay in the creature coiled around the monument. Its upper body was human, female, lissome. However, its smile revealed viper fangs, its eyes had slitted pupils, and from the neat waist down, the body turned into a python that constricted Saltonstall’s bronze legs and granite pedestal, then trailed off into the grass. It wasn’t a novel concept, but the execution showed conviction. In some remote country of his soul, the boy knew monsters existed.

  At his age, Redemption’s demons had been the trite ones of woodcuts, easily vanquished by God’s Word. Well, Redemption had learned better, and he’d teach the boy better, too, though with mercy, so he remembered nothing of the monster’s clasp.

  “Hey, come on,” the boy said. “Don’t shit me that you’re really scared.”

  Redemption stilled the hand tremor the boy must have seen. “Not scared. Maybe jealous. This is damn good. You been to art school or what?”

  “High school’s all, so far.”

  The boy’s slight breathlessness signaled that honey, too—praise—would work. “What’s the ‘GL’ here? Your signature?”

  “Stands for Garth Lynx.” Who cleared his throat and confessed, “Not my real name. It’s what I’m gonna go by, drawing comics.”

  “That’s what you want to do?”

  “Yeah. I got this series idea, too. Apocalypse, but not with zombies. Zombies been run into the ground.”

  Redemption tapped the sketch. “So, with lamiae instead?”

  And with that remark, he had set the hook. Garth said, “You know what lamiae are?”

  He didn’t laugh—irony would have introduced an errant note into his vocal snare. “Vampires or succubi. Snaky, like yours.”

  “Snakes rock. I had two before I ditched my mom’s place, a reticulated and an albino Burmese. Had to give them to my friend.”

  “Why’d you ditch your mom’s?”

  Garth’s eyelids sank to half-mast. “Her boyfriend’s a dick. He burned one of my sketchpads. Said drawing’s gay, get a real job. I’m, what, mowing lawns like you? Big fucking man. He busted me for that.” Garth pulled back his upper lip to display a broken incisor. “So I busted the headlights on his truck. I had to leave then, but I wanted out anyway.”

  The duller the man, the more he wanted to stamp out any spark of magic he encountered. Redemption might use this boy’s spark—he would use it, now that it was practically in his hand—but he wouldn’t destroy it. Into the balm and honey of his voice, he trickled molten iron, compulsion: “You were right to get out of that, Garth.”

  “Tony,” not-really-Garth murmured.

  “No, Garth, because that’s the name you’ve picked for your work. It’ll be good work. You’ll do all right.”

  “How d’you know?”

  Redemption flipped through the sketchpad. “I’m looking at these, that’s how. But you’re tired.”

  “Kind of.”

  “Tired right through.”

  Garth’s eyes finished closing. Redemption reached for his backpack. He slipped the pad inside. “You need sleep. I’ll take care of you until you wake up. Then you can go wherever you need to.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Maybe you’ll dream the answer.”

  Garth smiled. His eyes opened, unfocused.

  “Stand up.”

  Garth stood, and Redemption
eased the backpack onto his shoulders. “Follow,” he said.

  On the main path through the park, they joined revelers pressing toward the parking lots. The fireworks were spent, and only the smell of gunpowder remained, a scorched phantom that would haunt Redemption and his prize all the way home.

  * * *

  Number Five Lich Street was a modest Gothic Revival facing Arkham’s oldest cemetery. The boneyard was full of ghosts Redemption had known in the flesh, but the hubbub of celebration must have driven them underground, for not even good Pastor Brattle poked out his spectral head to murmur about lambs bound for unholy sacrifice.

  Inside the house, Redemption ordered Garth to shower, put on a hospital gown, and walk to the basement. The boy obeyed magical instruction until he reached the subcellar stairs. The balk was understandable, given his sensitivity to the uncanny. She who lay below gave off no odor save the attar of rose with which Redemption tried to sweeten her dreams. Usually the attar failed, and the spiritual fetor of nightmare, exquisite and (by her) exquisitely enjoyed, thickened the subcellar air.

  Words of adamantine sternness brought Garth down the last steps and onto the waiting gurney. Restraints dangled from it, but Redemption relied instead on Geldman’s Powder of Lethe, a bottle of which stood on the cart beside the gurney. He poured fine white dust onto his palm and gently blew it into Garth’s nostrils. The boy’s face contorted for a sneeze, then slackened again. Self-awareness flared in his eyes, then faded. His lids drooped closed. “Sleep,” Redemption said, so his words would drift with Garth into the deep waters. “I’ll watch out for you, no worries.”

  Garth sank beyond reach. Except for the slow heave of his chest, he lay motionless. For the next two months his dreams would be the kind one yearned to live in forever. Geldman guaranteed it.

  Geldman had also helped devise a procedure to make one donor do the job of dozens. A rare occurrence, they’d agreed on the morality of the project, for who could argue with less hunting, no killing, even no lasting harm? Geldman’s Resanguinary Tonic would accelerate donor blood production, if one could keep the donor hydrated and fed. Redemption had tried IV lines, but they needed frequent replacement and monitoring beyond his scope. Less troublesome were Geldman’s “reverse leeches,” larvae of the between-spaces he’d long been molding to sustain unconscious patients.

  He’d lent Redemption the one that lolled in a tank on the lower shelf of the gurney. It looked like a jaundiced maggot swollen to watermelon size. Its sole feature was a ropy proboscis that stretched like rubber as Redemption pulled it from the tank and looped it around Garth’s left wrist. Its tip nuzzled the boy’s inner arm, then flattened into a suction cup and gripped tight. Redemption didn’t see it thrust a hollow harpoon into the vein it had selected, but its slow throb told him the leech had begun to pump water and nutrients into Garth’s undernourished body. It had absorbed them from the clear broth of its bath, Geldman-calculated to sustain both leech and man. With a precision Redemption couldn’t approach, the leech would also administer the Lethe and Resanguinary Tonic he’d periodically mix into the bath.

  Efficient. Elegant. Geldman.

  Redemption next rolled Garth to an alcove curtained off from the rest of the subcellar and set a stool between alcove and gurney. Light-headed, he sank onto it. Ensorcelling Garth had drained him, and it was a month since he’d taken time to feed himself. It was unlucky Patience’s reawakening coincided with Sean’s arrival, but Redemption couldn’t let her luxuriate in trance until fall. She’d been walking the dream realms for two years; any longer, and she’d wake in a fury of starvation, uncontrollable.

  From the inner pocket of his sport coat, he withdrew an implement Garth would have admired. The handle of the ladle was merely beautiful, silver chased with dimensional efts. The shallow bowl, with half the rim ground to a razor edge, was both beautiful and practical. Redemption probed Garth’s right wrist. He ran the razor edge over a shallow vein and tapped a ladleful of blood, which he set aside while he pressed the cut with his thumb and muttered a stanching spell he’d heard first when Patience was alive. In those days healers would bleed the sick for their supposed good, while she had done it for her secret sustenance. He withdrew his thumb from a scar already paling, and then he drank off his ladle.

  Astonishing, how rich the least magical spark made a person’s blood. He swallowed the full two ounces the ladle held but refrained from licking the bowl. The last drops he’d need for her.

  Redemption reached through the alcove curtains and drew out first a padded bench and second Patience’s left arm. He rested her forearm on the bench, then arranged Garth’s right forearm beside it. Two velvet ribbons sufficed to bind the limbs, the tanned to the bleached, the warm to the marble cold. Patience’s hand lay palm up, fingers furled, nails a steely blue. Despite the proximity of prey, not a finger twitched. Though magic might detect the dream-flicker in her brain, she remained dead to any medical test. With careful management, she would wake gradually, breaking from trance only when he permitted it. Just prenourished enough to prevent hunger-rage, she’d remain weak and docile. He would even love her again, until lamb reverted to lioness. Then? He’d love her still, but hate himself all the more for it.

  As always at this point, Redemption hesitated. As always, he unfurled her fingers, poured the last of the ladle onto her palm, chafed the blood into her skin. Slowly the skin budded; slowly the buds bloomed into five fleshy tubular petals, sea anemone feelers. When they’d grown a foot long, he guided them to Garth’s forearm, where they opened lamprey mouths and battened onto the boy. In seconds, the translucent ivory tentacles turned pale pink, then rosy, then a pulsing scarlet.

  On one side the reverse leech, giving. On the other side Patience, taking away. In the middle Redemption, balancing gift with sacrifice.

  He looked down at his watch and let the proper number of minutes pass.

  * * *

  After separating Patience and Garth, Redemption climbed to his attic study and looked through Garth’s backpack. There wasn’t much: briefs and T-shirts and socks; charcoal pencils and worn erasers; a wallet guarding a driver’s license, seven dollars, and one photograph of a girl in a prom dress. The girl appeared again in Garth’s sketchpad, naked but with crossed legs and arms that rendered her touchingly modest. The caption named her “Stace,” and though a frequent subject, she never appeared as one of the lamiae that dominated Garth’s bestiary.

  Redemption repacked all but the sketchbook. It wasn’t likely that the authorities would trace Garth to this house or, indeed, that anyone had reported him missing, but he put the pack into a cubbyhole behind a bookcase. Garth’s other clothes he’d already fed to the furnace. He’d supply the boy with a new wardrobe when he woke him.

  The most telling evidence, the sketchbook, he’d hide later. For now, he flipped to the naked Stace and hovered his fingertips above the page. The energy lingering in charcoal and paper was faint. Even when Kate Wyndham had been as unschooled as Garth, her magic was much stronger. He looked at the painting above his desk. Though he’d hung it within hand’s reach, he didn’t need to touch the canvas to feel its energy—that was like sunlight arrowing through breeze-stirred leaves, only not intermittently, irregularly, but with the steadiness of a healthy pulse, warmth and then warmth and then warmth again. Sunlight itself was the subject of the piece: sunlight on sea and sand and Sean—Kate’s son, four or five, who crouched at the tide line with dunes behind him. In Kate’s pigments and brushstrokes, everything lived more vividly than in life, and Sean’s chubby hands were miracles of arrested transience as they pressed shells into his sand castle and fortified its ramparts with the spiny tails of horseshoe crabs.

  While Redemption still gazed at painted Sean, Raphael returned from his surveillance of the original. The aether-newt melted through the skylight and corkscrewed to his shoulder. He put his ear to its feathery antennae. Is the boy ready to come, nothing’s gone wrong?

  His things in the car. His things, many t
hings, and his father’s gone away.

  Go back and let him see you, then. Let him know I’m still watching.

  Raphael departed as it had come. Soon Sean would be in Arkham for two full months, and every day, whatever Patience’s situation, Redemption would see him. And perhaps, one way or another, they would meet. Finally, knowingly.

  Face-to-face.

  1

  Sean and Eddy had hoisted their kayaks onto the roof of the Civic. They’d stuffed suitcases into the trunk, strapped bikes to the trunk rack, crammed the backseat with paddles and life vests, bike helmets and beach umbrellas. Now Eddy had gone home to pack books. She’d promised to limit herself to a single backpack, but even that was like shipping Coke to the Coke factory. She’d be working in the Miskatonic University Library, plus the Arkwright House had its own library, plus Horrocke’s Bookstore was five minutes from campus. Good thing the Civic could handle her fear of getting stranded on a bookless desert island between Providence and Arkham—Dad had made sure the car was in top shape before he handed Sean the keys.

  Sean had expected to drive the Civic more after Dad got his new Accord, but for Dad to give it to him? That was the (forest green) cherry on top of a whole summer studying magic, another gift he hadn’t dared take for granted, even with Helen Arkwright and Professor Marvell arguing for it. The Servitor incident was a year behind them. Things had returned to normal, pretty much. So why would Dad risk Sean plunging them in another magical shit-storm?

  Reason One: Dad would be in England all summer on a big restoration job, while Aunt Cel and Uncle Gus would be in Italy from mid-July on. Better Sean go to Arkham than poke around home alone. And Reason Two: Whether Sean pursued magic or not, the shit-storm that was Redemption Orne still rumbled over Sean’s head.

  At Marvell’s request, an Order magician had come to Rhode Island to determine whether Orne still watched Sean. Right off, Afua Benetutti had felt brushes of too-sentient air, fluctuations in ambient energy, and with a puff of the dust that gloved her brown hands in sparkling silver, she’d revealed an invisible spy: a sinuous wisp of legs and feelers that cavorted around Sean, flicking its longest tail as if to chuck them an ethereal bird. Though the aether-newt had shaken off the dust and vanished from sight, Benetutti had continued to sense its energetic signature. Dad had exploded: Orne promised he’d leave Sean alone! Zap the thing! But Benetutti had said dispelling the newt would be wasted effort; Orne could simply resummon it. Better to ward the places where Sean spent the most time, his own house and his aunt’s. The newt couldn’t pass through the wards, so inside their perimeter, Sean would be safe from Orne’s observation.