She nodded.
A huge key appeared in my hand. I opened the padlock and stepped back. The door exploded off its hinges like a bomb had gone off under it.
Then, nothing. No sound, no movement. We waited. The silence from below felt thick with menace.
I stared at the open doorway until my vision blurred. My breathing all but stopped.
Then, as casually as if he were walking up a staircase, Pryce climbed from my subconscious and stepped into my dreamscape. Mab tensed. I knew he was a dream avatar. Even so, a sword appeared in my hand.
The avatar Pryce didn’t look at us. He raised his arms, and a Harpy rocketed out of the trapdoor. With a horrible shriek, it flew right at me.
I braced myself, holding the sword out in front of me. Given the demon’s speed and angle of attack, it would skewer itself on the blade, making itself into a Harpy kebab.
But the Harpy didn’t strike. Right before it hit my sword, it vanished. So did Pryce.
Mab exhaled loudly, like she’d been holding her breath, too. “He sent a Harpy to kill you?”
I nodded. “It found me at Tina’s school. I was giving a Career Night presentation.” I remembered my promise to Tina. “She helped me kill it.”
Mab’s lips moved in what might have been a tiny smile. “Don’t underestimate that young lady,” she said.
That almost sounded like praise. Tina would be thrilled to hear it.
A scream howled up from my subconscious. It was the same scream I’d heard in Phyllis’s dream. A Drude leapt out from the trapdoor and sprinted across my dreamscape. Pryce was right behind it. He tackled the fleeing demon, knocking it flat. As the Drude struggled, yowling with fear and fury, he pinned it down. It was the same scene I’d witnessed in Phyllis’s dream, but closer and from a different angle. The demon went rigid. It lay still, moaning, its yellow eyes glazed over. Pryce stood and began gesturing. Although I could see his lips move, I couldn’t tell what he was saying. I glanced over at Mab. Her eyes stayed riveted on the scene.
The demon floated upward and hovered in the air. Its moans intensified to shrieks again as its body started to shrink. Pryce gestured faster. His hands became a blur as the demon shrank to the size of a child’s doll. With a shout of triumph, Pryce picked up the miniaturized demon and dropped it into his sack. The sack bulged and squirmed, as though it was already full of struggling demons.
Pryce tied the neck shut and slung the sack over his shoulder, then strode away from us. I turned to Mab, wanting to discuss what we’d just seen, but she pressed a finger to her lips. She pointed back to Pryce.
As he walked, carrying his bag, a landscape formed around him. He made his way along the floor of a narrow, rocky chasm, granite walls stretching fifty feet or more above him on both sides. At the mouth of a cave, he stopped. A cauldron squatted crookedly on a horizontal slab of rock. The Devil’s Coffin; I recognized it from the images I’d seen online. Pryce untied the sack and upended it. Miniature demons—about two dozen of them—tumbled out and landed in the cauldron. Some leapt up, trying to escape. Pryce pushed them back inside. His hands made a flat, smoothing motion over the rim. A glow surrounded the cauldron. Pryce stepped back, his narrowed eyes staring at the vessel. The glow sat on top of the cauldron like a lid. He threw his head back and laughed, looking way too much like the movie version of an evil genius. The image grew transparent. The whole thing—Pryce, rocky chasm, and cauldron—sank through the floor of my dreamscape, back into the basement of my subconscious.
Mab started to say something, but the show still wasn’t over. A book with a pale leather cover rose through the door. As The Book of Utter Darkness entered my dreamscape, it grew. It loomed over us, blocking everything else, until it was the size of a house. Slowly, its cover swung open.
When I saw the moving picture that stretched across two pages, I cried out. I couldn’t help it. I’d never imagined such complete devastation.
We gazed at some sort of urban battleground. A huge, bombed-out building poured out smoke from the fires raging inside. Bodies lay everywhere, whole or in pieces. Several hung from streetlights, twisting and swaying. A woman lay half on a bench, her head and shoulders on the ground, bloody glass shards glinting from her shredded business suit. Unrecognizable lumps of twisted metal littered the area. Blood and ash covered everything.
Wait. I knew this place. Absurdly intact in the middle of all that destruction were yard-high bronze sculptures of a tortoise and a hare, installed to mark the finish line of the Boston Marathon. I was looking at Copley Square. The smoking ruin was Trinity Church, or what was left of it. The central tower with its red roof was gone, the walls collapsed into piles of rubble. Beside it, the Hancock building was an empty frame, its mirrorlike windows all shattered. A crater gaped where the Boston Public Library had stood.
A man stumbled out of the smoke, coughing. Immediately, a robed, hooded figure appeared and lifted the man from his feet. The hood fell back, revealing a yellow, skull-like face with huge fangs. An Old One. The ancient vampire bent his head to the struggling man’s throat. A half-scream, wracked by coughs, rose and then was cut off. The man’s body went limp. In moments it was a mere husk, drained of all its blood. The Old One flung the body aside and disappeared again in the smoke.The sound of tiny sobs brought my attention back to the tortoise and hare sculptures. A small girl, no older than three, clung to the tortoise’s neck. She hugged the statue with her chubby arms, pressing her face against it as though it could save her, as though it could carry her away from this terrible place.
The ground shook as something dropped from the sky and landed behind her. A huge demon, fifteen feet tall, cast a shadow over the girl. She screamed and tried to scramble beneath the sculpture. The demon encircled her waist with one scaly hand and tugged. Her screams grew frantic as she lost her grip on the tortoise. She kicked and flailed as she was pulled away. The demon kicked the sculpture and didn’t even seem to feel the bronze. The tortoise flew into the air and landed upside down, rocking back and forth on its shell.
The demon shook the child, and her screams stopped. She hung like a rag doll from its hand as it flapped its wings. As the demon rose into the air, the picture’s perspective changed and widened. We saw Copley Square from above, then all of Boston. The city was in flames. The South Shore, the North Shore—they burned as well. The entire eastern seaboard was an inferno, the Atlantic red with blood.
The book snapped shut with a blast of wind that blew ashes into my eyes and filled my nostrils with smells of smoke and death. It shrank back to book size, then fell into my subconscious.
Enough. Whatever else might be lurking down there, I didn’t want to see it. My hands shaking, I picked up the trapdoor and fitted it back on its frame. I locked it again. Then I conjured three more padlocks, one for each side, and locked those, too. Finally, when I thought maybe I could speak without screaming, I turned to Mab. She was standing, her hands clenched into fists, her gaze fixed on the trapdoor.
“I hate that book,” I said. I didn’t have to ask for her interpretation of what we’d seen. It was obvious. If Pryce succeeded in whatever he was trying to do with his captured demons and the cauldron, the result would be a war unlike any in history. Demons and the Old Ones would attack. And humanity would fall.
10
“HOW CAN WE STOP PRYCE?” I ASKED MAB. WHAT I REALLY wanted to know was how we could stop that vision of utter devastation from becoming real.
“One step at a time, child.” She sat down heavily and fingered her bloodstone pendant. “Let’s start at the beginning. You said Pryce has tried twice in as many days to kill you. One attack was by Harpy. I didn’t see the other.”
“I’m not opening that door again.”
“No need, child.” I could have been wrong, but I thought I saw a slight shudder pass over Mab. “Tell me what happened.”
“It was in my client’s dreamscape.” I described the black door that opened to empty air, and how I’d been pushed through it, only to be hauled back inside by a demon. “When I found the second dream portal, Pryce started to come through it—with a rifle. I got out of there.”
“As well you should have.” She tapped her chin, thinking. “So,” she said, “Pryce wants you not merely out of the way, but dead. Interesting.”
Of all the words to describe that situation—alarming, scary, terrifying, disturbing—“interesting” wasn’t even near the top of my list.
“Pryce is collecting demons and trapping them in that cauldron,” she continued. “But how on earth did he get hold of it? I thought it was in Cardiff.”
“The cauldron?” I shook my head. “It was in Boston. Well, in Cambridge. The Peabody Museum—it’s part of Harvard—had it on loan from the Welsh National Museum as part of an exhibit of Celtic artifacts from the Bronze Age. It was stolen over a week ago.”
“Presumably at the same time your clients began canceling their engagements.”
“Yes, that’s right.” I’d made the same connection. After Pryce had nabbed the cauldron, he’d wasted no time filling it with demons.
“What do you recall,” Mab asked, “of the poem ‘The Spoils of Annwn’?”
Usually Mab’s pop quizzes caught me off guard, and this one would have, too, if I hadn’t just reread the poem online. “King Arthur led a raid on the Darklands and stole some sort of magic cauldron. The poem says the cauldron wouldn’t cook a coward’s food.”
Mab looked pleased. “It’s an odd, obscure poem,” she said. “And of course poetry always dresses things up. The part about a coward’s food is nonsense, of course. A tale made up to inspire men to acts of bravery during brutal times.” I could see that: Hey, look, the cauldron cooked my food! I must be a hero! Mab continued: “Outside the Darklands, the cauldron is merely an ordinary vessel. In its proper place, though, it is the cauldron of transformation.”
“What’s that?” I’d never heard of the cauldron of transformation.