Hellforged

My pulse sped up. This was a message from Juliet. She was playing her Shakespeare game, like she always did at Creature Comforts. Somewhere on these two pages was a clue about what was going on.



I’d never read Antony and Cleopatra, not in school and not with Mab. I didn’t much feel like reading it now, but I skimmed the pages that lay open. Nothing made sense; the archaic language and twisted sentences were hard to follow. It was a scene from Act III, well past the middle of the play. Cleopatra was getting some sort of message from Caesar and Marc Antony was having somebody whipped—no clue why. Maybe the guy was just kinky. Even if I could make sense of the language, trying to read the play was like walking into a movie after you’d missed the first hour.



I sighed with frustration. With Pryce on the loose in Boston—and a critical mass of Morfran that might be big enough and strong enough to attack without me—I didn’t have time to play Juliet’s game. I’d have to puzzle it out later. I checked my pockets for a slip of paper, found my boarding pass stub, and lay it on the page to mark the place.



As I was closing the book, a couple of lines jumped out at me:’Tis better playing with a lion’s whelp



Than with an old one dying.



An old one dying. Something in that phrase rang a bell. A whole bunch of bells—my head was clanging like a hundred trolleys on a collision course. The Old Ones. Juliet said something once about the Old Ones—what was it?



I thought back. An image arose of Juliet, sitting at the bar, stirring a Bloody Mary. It was at Creature Comforts, before that vampire junkie pointed Norden and Sykes her way.



The Old Ones—the really ancient ones, I mean—prefer to keep the old ways.



At the time, I wondered who might be so old that Juliet would consider them ancient. Now I wondered if the creatures Kane and I had seen—cold, skeletal, looking and smelling like old, old death—could be these Old Ones.



Somehow, Juliet was mixed up with them. When I’d heard her chanting in the living room, she’d sounded like a robot. Clyde said that Piotr, the strange vampire who’d come looking for Juliet, acted like a robot, too. The thought made me queasy. What if these Old Ones were somehow controlling her?



If they were, maybe she was involved in their plot to frame Kane.



But if the Old Ones sent someone to ask about Juliet, that meant they didn’t know where she was. Juliet had left me a message—a warning?—about the Old Ones through the Shakespeare book. Maybe she was resisting them; maybe Juliet wasn’t so easy to control.



But I still didn’t know where she was or how to start looking for her.



I CALLED KANE, GOT HIS VOICE MAIL, AND LEFT A MESSAGE I was home. I was about to get undressed for a shower when the phone rang. Expecting Kane, I picked up. The voice spluttering on the other end turned out to be Clyde’s.



“That … that Tina person is on her way up,” he said, once he’d calmed down enough to form actual words. “She wouldn’t wait, she just ran across—”



Pounding erupted on the door.



“It’s okay, Clyde. I’ll yell at her for you.”



He spluttered some more and hung up. Meanwhile, the door threatened to jump off its hinges. “C’mon, Vicky, let me in! I know you’re home. Come on. It’s important!”



I yanked the door open and almost got my face knocked on; Tina’s knuckles stopped an inch short. She squeezed past me, a dry cleaner’s bag slung over her shoulder.



“Why didn’t you tell me you were back? I’ve been waiting forever to show you this.”



“I wasn’t gone forever. I’ve been home all of ten minutes. How did you know I was home, anyway?”



“Jenna saw you in a taxi at the checkpoint. She texted me. I was picking this up”—she draped the bag over the back of the sofa—“and I came right over.”



“You upset Clyde.”



“Why, ’cause I didn’t stop? He knows who I am, and I only ever come here to see you. He’s smart enough to figure it out. Anyway, celebrities get certain privileges.” She flipped her hair behind her shoulders.



“So you’re a celebrity now? That was fast. Even if it’s true, it doesn’t give you a right to be rude to my doorman.” I did not have the energy for this right now. Any of it.



“Okay, I’ll say sorry or whatever on the way out. But I wanted—” She cut herself off and stared at me openmouthed. “What did you do to your hair?”



“Nothing. That’s Glitch spit. There was a Glitch on the plane.”



“That’s a relief. I thought you’d gone punk or something. That look would be, like, so wrong for you.”



“Actually, I was about to take a shower. You know how important it is to wash this stuff out.”



“I’m glad you didn’t. I mean, I’m glad you weren’t in the shower when I came over, because then you wouldn’t have answered the door and I would’ve thought you were mad at me or something.”



I took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. Patience. “Tina, I woke up in Wales this morning—yesterday morning now. My plane almost crashed, and Juliet is missing. I’m really, really tired. And besides all that, I’m kind of busy right now.” Trying to stop a demi-demon from unleashing the Morfran on Boston.



She shot me a withering look. “It’s always about you, isn’t it?” Her scowl changed to a grin as she pulled a heap of sparkles out of the dry cleaner’s bag. “Look at this! Isn’t this, like, the most amazing thing you ever saw?” She held up two pieces against her: a push-up bra and a pair of boy shorts—emphasis on short—made of sparkly silver material.



“Why are you showing me your underwear?”



“Ha, ha. It’s my costume. You know, for the concert.”



Suddenly, it hit me how vulnerable Tina would be, up there on a stage when the Morfran attacked. “Tina, you can’t go onstage—”



“Wearing this? Oh, please. Stop sounding like my mother. Or, you know, how my mother would sound if she gave a damn about me.”



“No, you don’t understand. You can’t go onstage at all. You’ve got to tell Monster Paul to cancel the concert.” It was so simple, I almost laughed. To stop Pryce, all we had to do was mess up the prophecy. No dancing dead, no chance for the Brenin wannabe to make his move.



Tina stared at me. “Did you get Glitch spit in your brain or something? This concert is my big chance. We’re gonna be on TV and everything. Plus we’ve been rehearsing for, like, a whole week.”



I gripped her arm, trying to convey how important this was. “If the concert goes ahead, there’ll be an attack to make what happened at the Halloween parade look like a Sunday picnic.”



“A demon attack—is that all?” She shook me off and waved her hand dismissively. “You can handle that. I’ll have Paul put you on security. Just bring, you know, some extra weapons. If you need help, I’ll jump in.” Her eyes widened. “Ooh, bring that big sword, the one I borrowed at Halloween. That was awesome.”



She was talking about the Sword of Saint Michael, and stole was a more accurate word than borrowed, but I didn’t argue the point. I needed to figure out how to prevent the concert. That would give me time to find Pryce, kill him, and put the Morfran back into its slate prison. If I could handle the ritual.



“It’s almost sunrise,” I said. Tina wasn’t bundled up in protective clothing. “Shouldn’t you go home before it gets light?”



“Yikes, you’re right. This would be, like, the worst time ever to get a sunburn.” She pulled the plastic over her costume. “Come see me before the concert. I’ll put you on the guest list so you can get backstage. The show starts at seven, but I’ll be in my dressing room by sunset.”



After Tina left, I got busy making phone calls. I tried Kane first—if anyone would know who to call and what to say, it would be Kane. But I got his voice mail again. My message explained the situation and asked him to call whoever he could think of with authority to cancel the concert.



Sunrise was the wrong time of day to call anyone—too late for Deadtown’s zombies and too early for Boston’s norms. I tried Monster Paul’s recording studio. I tried all the talent agents in the Yellow Pages to see if I could reach him that way. But all I got was one voice mail system after another. I left the same message: “Tell Monster Paul he has to cancel tonight’s concert. If he’ll call me back, I’ll explain why,” giving my name and phone number. By the third time I’d said it, I realized how much I sounded like a complete crackpot, even to myself.



What about Mayor Milliken? Maybe I could get the concert’s permit revoked. But City Hall wouldn’t open for hours, and Kane actually knew the guy—he’d have better luck than I could hope for. I tried the police department instead. A man with a tired-sounding voice answered the phone.



“My name is Vicky Vaughn. You’ve got to revoke the permit for tonight’s Monster Paul concert …” I began.



“Thank you for your call, ma’am.” He sounded like he was reading from a script. “Many concerned citizens such as yourself have made the same request. But the mayor’s office approved the permit, and there’s nothing the police department can do.”



Apparently I wasn’t the only crackpot in Boston. “You don’t understand. If that concert goes ahead, something terrible will happen.”



Mr. Sleepy Voice woke up. “Ma’am, are you making a threat against tonight’s event?”



For a minute, I even considered it. I could turn this call into a bomb threat. But the cops would check the area—and when they didn’t find a bomb, on with the show. Besides, I’d told him my name. “No, nothing like that. There’s a demi-demon in town; his name’s Pryce Maddox. He’s planning to launch a demon attack on the concert.”



“Ma’am”—the weariness was back in his voice—“the place is going to be full of zombies, werewolves, vampires, and who knows what else. What difference can a few demons make?”