Linda Welch - A conspiracy of Demons Read online

  The Gate and Way which lead to Bel-Athaer are inside the empty shotgun-style building on the east side. It has been empty for as long as I have lived here.

  The entrance is a plain, worn wood door which lets into a small, square, concrete-lined room. Inside, a regular door leads to the building’s abandoned innards, but another apparently normal door is actually the Gate. I am fairly sure the street door opens only to a select few - imagine what would happen if Joe off the street found the entrance to another world? At one time I automatically thought the Gate and Way were barred to me, but they were open if only I had tried to access them. Yep, I am one of the privileged few, though I wish I were not.

  I have been whisked along the Way in Royal’s arms, walked it and ridden along it on a Harley Shovelhead. This time, I tucked my face in Royal’s neck, clung to his shoulders and kept my eyes closed as we moved in a blur.

  Royal slowed to a normal walking pace and a corridor of pale, glowing tiles came into focus. What appeared to be a tiled wall faced us. Royal let me down, put his palms to the wall and pushed it open, and we stepped through to another plane of existence. Bel-Athaer, home of the Gelpha, Royal’s people, whom I sometimes still called demons.

  I am Gelpha, but I struggle with the fact they are my people. My interactions with them thus far involved deceit, betrayal and threats to my life.

  We stood with a brown brick wall against our backs. A wide avenue hemmed by brick buildings of various sizes and colors meandered away from us down a hill. The avenue led straight through town until it dwindled to a narrow ribbon in the distance and wound to the foothills of a mountain range.

  I thought I had stepped into an American city the first time I came here, until I noticed the vehicles were different in small ways and the people either bustling along or strolling were demons. Now, standing here with Royal, I remembered crossing this avenue and taking a bus to the High House as if navigating an alternate sphere did not blow my mind.

  I followed Royal to the sidewalk and stood with him. My muscles wanted to clench. The people thought I was a Seer when I last came here. They were deferential. But Royal and I revealed the Seers for the despicable bastards they truly are. If these people mistook me for a genuine Seer, how would they react?

  He squeezed my hand. “Do not worry. We will not be here long.”

  I grimaced. “That obvious, huh?”

  “I feel your tension as if it is mine.”

  Traffic roared along both lanes. A man and woman who held the hands of two small children chattered outside a store on our left. A young woman with long opaline hair flowing over her shoulders like a silk stole tapped along the sidewalk toward us on four-inch heels. Her dark-blue and cream striped jacket and matching miniskirt hugged a figure I envied. She eyed Royal and a small smile lifted generous lips as glimmering eyes assessed him. Her gaze swept over me. Her smile did not falter, but pearly lashes dipped over her eyes before she looked away. She went on by.

  Royal threw up his free hand and a huge, gleaming black sedan with chrome trim edged from the traffic flow and stopped beside us.

  “Come on. This will take us to the next Gate,” he said.

  I threw him a look. “How did you manage this? I know you didn’t make a phone call.”

  He chuckled. “It’s a taxi. I hailed it.”

  Oh.

  He opened the passenger door and stood aside. I crawled in and shifted along the seat so he could join me. He pulled the door shut and the car peeled away. I checked my wristwatch: nine minutes.

  I could get used to Gelpha autos with their comfortable leather seats, smooth ride and ample room for tall people. The bus I took to the High House amplified every imperfection in the road, but this felt as if the wheels skimmed above the surface.

  A smoked—glass panel separated us from the driver, effectively obscuring him or her. Royal leaned over his knees to speak into a square box fastened to the back of the driver’s seat. “West Juno.”

  He relaxed back.

  “What was that? An address?”

  He dipped his chin. “We are going to another Gate. With luck, it will take us to San Jose. We will have to hoof it from there.”

  I grinned at the idea of Royal hoofing anywhere. The way he moves is so graceful. “So there are two Gates?”

  “Ambrose is what you call a capital city. It developed here because there are eight Gates.”

  “Eight? How many in all of Bel-Athaer?”

  “I do not know for sure.” He rubbed his nape beneath his hair. “They access points all over Earth, so there could be hundreds.”

  We drove past stores and office buildings, which bore signs in Gelpha script in materials ranging from neon to wood. Cars, pickups and buses surrounded us. Gelpha crowded the sidewalks and waited at crosswalks. It looked so normal if I pretended the people did not have gleaming, satiny hair and glimmering eyes.

  So we were heading for another Way. The Ways between our worlds were a mystery. They seemed to have wills of their own, as if they were entities, not passageways. The Gates, or entrances, never moved, but the Ways could switch to other Gates. The Way from Clarion to Bel-Athaer led to an area near the High House the first few times I used it, but had switched to this city, Ambrose, when I came here to find Royal.

  “Not knowing when a Way is going to shift direction must cause heartburn for those who use them.”

  Royal drew his gaze from the street. “It can be awkward, yes. But not everyone uses them. Only Lords and Ladies, and those to whom they give permission.”

  “So that’s why Earth doesn’t teem with Gelpha sightseers.”

  “Indeed.”

  We took a side street off the avenue and drove between tall, pale-gray buildings with rows of tiny windows on their three floors. A narrow alley separated each from the next, and steep stone staircases led from the sidewalk up to the roof with small landings at each floor. Another left turn, and the cab pulled to the curb outside a small, one-story gray building which squatted between taller companions. Gateways here were as nondescript as in my world.

  Fourteen minutes.

  We climbed from the cab. Royal went to the driver’s side to pay the fare. Funny, I’d never seen him with Gelpha money, but he must carry it in his wallet.

  He came back to me. “Ready?”

  “Yeah, like I’m ready to stand in front of stampeding elephants.”

  That brought a smile. I punched his shoulder. “Let’s go.”

  He pushed open a gray door and we entered another passageway, this one lined floor, ceiling and walls in pale-green, shimmering tiles. Looking at the passage stretching ahead, I got the familiar feeling of being inside a house of mirrors. Not that it looked like a house of mirrors, but produced the same sort of disorientation.

  Royal clasped me to him and we moved too fast to see the tiles.

  We came out in the San Jose suburb of Mountain View. Not that I’d have known where we were if not for the sign outside the Mountain View’s Premium Used Cars lot. As the door shut behind us, I looked across a narrow street at the car lot and an ancient café with a blue neon sign which blinked haphazardly.

  Twenty-three minutes.

  Acid burned my throat. More than five minutes at demon speed is barely tolerable and these longer runs took their toll.

  Royal’s warm hand on my upper arm turned me toward him. “We can take a car from here, if you would rather.”

  “How long to drive?”

  “A fraction over an hour.”

  I exhaled a puff of air. “Too long. Let’s do it your way.”

  His hands cupped my cheek. “This will be hard on you, Tiff.”

  He once demoned me from Clarion to Salt Lake City. Once. The drive usually takes a little over an hour. We did it in sixteen minutes. As if moving too fast to see the surroundings and in which direction we sped was not bad enough, we had to stop a few times when obstacles got in our way, such as an interstate roaring with traffic. Stop, start, blur, stop, start, blur. I had to s
it on a bench for half an hour, trying my damndest to keep my breakfast where it belonged.

  I rubbed his side. “Okay, let’s go. I’ll be fine. I have to be.”

  Clarion to Seaside via Bel-Athaer took a total forty-two minutes. I didn’t have Lynn’s address, but I remembered the location. When Royal got us to Seaside, I gave him a description of the house and pointed him in the right direction.

  I tried to calculate the time required to reach Lynn’s house using conventional travel. We would have gone to Salt Lake International Airport - a one hour fifteen—minute drive - and got a two-hour flight to the Monterey Peninsula Airport. Then rented a car for the drive to Seaside, probably another fifteen minutes. All this based on the assumption an airline out of Salt Lake provided a direct service to Monterey and we were lucky enough to get an early flight today. I supposed I could let Royal demon me to Salt Lake, and from Monterey to Seaside.

  It would still take too long. The local cops would be at Lynn’s place before we arrived, besides which Provo would discover Royal and I flew to California if they decided to keep an eye on us.

  A jarring halt snapped me out of my mathematical musing. At least it had kept my mind diverted. “Not so bad,” I declared as Royal steadied me.

  My stomach flipped the instant the words left my mouth. Gulping down what surged up my throat, I dashed behind a rhododendron and let it all out.

  Embarrassed, I didn’t look at Royal as I stalked past him. “You will not get near my mouth till I’ve brushed my teeth and gargled a pint of mouthwash.”

  Lynn owned a small, older white clapboard home surrounded by lawn and wind-beaten trees, fifty feet from the cliff’s edge on the Monterey coast not far from Seaside.

  The tide crashed over huge jumbled rocks and boom shushed as it pounded in shoreline caves then receded. A stiff wind heavy with the smell of salt water and seaweed whipped Royal’s long copper and gold hair as he squatted at Lynn’s door. “Is there a security system?”

  I pushed my braid back over my shoulder. “Not when I came here, but it was years ago.”

  “If she does and I cannot silence it, we will have perhaps three to four minutes until the agency notifies the police.” He removed lock picks and thin neoprene gloves from his pocket. After snapping on the gloves, he inserted his lock picks in the keyhole. “What are we looking for?”

  “No idea.”

  The lock clunked. Royal passed another pair of gloves to me. I pulled them on as we stepped inside a hall with white paneled walls and polished pine floor. A large display of dried yellow flowers fanned over one wall and a small table opposite held a few pieces of mail. Mail also lay in a pile on the floor.

  An odd scrabbling noise came from a door on our left. Jowls flapping, spittle flying, an ominous rumble in its throat, an enormous Rottweiler erupted out and almost filled the narrow hall as it charged.

  I scuttled behind Royal. “Yep, she has a security system!”

  A blur of motion, a surprised yelp, and Royal stood at the far end of the hall as he closed a door beneath the stairs.

  “A closet?”

  “The basement.”

  Barking, snarling and the sound of splintering wood deafened me.

  “Let’s hope we don’t have to go down there.” I looked in the doorway from which the dog had emerged, which led to a small living room. “She wouldn’t leave it here alone when she left town. Someone has to come in and see to it. We’d better make this fast.”

  A large bay window provided a spectacular view of the slope down to the cliff and churning sea beyond. Lynn didn’t have many pieces of furniture, a mock-Victorian couch and chair, two occasional tables and a bow-fronted bureau. Plants in a variety of containers on the floor took up most of the room. I rifled through the bureau as Royal checked the dining room on the opposite side of the hall.

  “Look for calendars or an appointment book,” I called.

  He already stood in the doorway with hands braced on the frame. “I do not see anything.”

  “Here neither.” I straightened up. “Let’s check upstairs.”

  We went up the staircase to a small landing which gave access to two bedrooms and a bathroom with a white claw-foot tub. Lilac faintly perfumed the gleaming, white—tiled bathroom. Like the downstairs rooms, it was neat to the point of anality and so were the bedrooms. One must be a guest room, with lightweight oak furniture, the paneling painted white and shades of pale yellow.

  Like me, Lynn used a corner of her bedroom as an office.

  I went to the antique pine desk. Unlike mine, clutter did not cover it. A laptop, printer, ream of printing paper, stapler and tape dispenser were neatly positioned. Miscellaneous pens, pencils and a ruler stuck from a ceramic jug.

  Royal went through one set of desk drawers as I searched the other.

  Nothing.

  “We’ll take the laptop,” I announced. “I bet everything’s on here since she doesn’t seem to have an appointment or address book.”

  “She could have had it with her and her killer took it.”

  I nodded. “If she did, I hope she also kept a record on the laptop. Wonder if she has backups?” I popped open the keyboard shelf.

  Bingo. I pocketed two USB drives.

  Mindful of approaching sirens or pet-sitters, we began a more thorough search. I looked under the mattress, behind the mirror, then opened Lynn’s free-standing clothes closet and went through her coat and pants pockets. Royal checked the undersides of tables, dresser and bathroom fixtures, and peeled back throw rugs. He felt along the top of doorframes, and paced, listening and feeling for suspiciously loose floorboards.

  I didn’t know what we were looking for, but it pays to be thorough.

  My cell-phone rang as we came down the stairs. I checked caller ID and let the call go to Voice Mail.

  I raised my voice above the deafening racket made by the dog. “That was Mike.”

  Royal exaggerated a wince.

  We went through the downstairs rooms again, then met in the hall. I eyed the basement door.

  “I’ll go,” Royal said. “I saw a leash in the kitchen.”

  He got the leash, jerked open the basement door and went in there. Another yelp, and the barking went on, but not as loudly. Royal must have taken the animal down to the basement and tied it up.

  He whizzed through the door a few minutes later and slammed it behind him. The leash dangled from his fingers. “I did not find anything of interest. The basement is all but empty.”

  “Except for a honking great dog.”

  A thump on the door, and the Rottweiler vocalized its rage. Royal took the leash in the kitchen. “Go on out and I will release the dog.”

  “Fine by me.” Toting the laptop, I went through the front door and shut it behind me. The police would know Lynn had a computer; I hoped they’d think she took it with her.

  The front door opened and closed so fast and hard, I’m surprised it didn’t shatter. And the mutt was right there, snarling and tearing at it on the other side.

  We leaned on the door, until Royal straightened, opened his arms and said, “Ready?”

  My shoulders slumped. I didn’t look forward to the return trip.

  My insides felt much better as I sat in the office munching potato chips.

  Royal had gone to retrieve his truck from where he left it on the side of Interstate 15 when I phoned him.

  I would have been a lot happier if I didn’t have Mike on the phone. “Three hours, Tiff!” he bellowed.

  I swallowed a chip and held the phone angled to get the earpiece farther from my ear. “Sorry, Mike.”

  “Is there a reason you ignored my calls?”

  “I didn’t hear the phone ring. I was upstairs digging for the number, then I had a minor catastrophe to deal with. I had to run to the supermarket for supplies to … uh … clean up the mess. Time got away from me.”

  “I was about to send someone to your place. Tell me about this catastrophe?”

  “I had lunc
h in the oven and - ”

  “That’s a lame excuse, even for you,” he said in a level tone worse than his customary bellowing. It meant he was really, really angry. “What have you been up to? If you did anything to jeopardize the investigation… .”

  Mike knew me too well. I couldn’t tell him what Royal and I did, so I said nothing.

  “If I or Provo PD discovers you’re investigating this homicide, I’ll issue a C and D.”

  The infamous Cease and Desist. As if he hadn’t threatened me with it before now.

  “I found the number, Mike.” I rattled off Lynn’s phone number.

  “We already have the number, Tiff.”

  I expected that. Doubtless they found it in one of their databases.

  After a silence, he said, “Tiff, you and people like you are the reason my desk drawer is stocked with antacids.”

  “Maybe you should see a doctor.”

  Another heavy silence, till I broke it. “Mike, what can you tell me about Lynn’s death?”

  A snort, followed by, “Don’t ask, it’s out of my jurisdiction.”

  “Not a teensy—weensy clue?” I wheedled.

  “I’m sorry you were acquainted with the victim, but you have to let this one go.”

  I could not stifle the rising anger. “Yeah, well remember that next time you come to me for help.” And I cut the call.

  I absent-mindedly groped in the bag for another barbecue-flavor potato chip as I stared at the menu of Lynn’s files, willing them to pop out something interesting. Provo PD would get to see Lynn’s financial and phone records, which could tell them a lot. I had this laptop, which told me nothing.

  The door clicked open and a white paper bag swung around the frame. I inhaled a familiar aroma.

  “Using my incredible powers of deduction, I’d say that bag contains … Royal, you brought bratwurst!”

  Royal’s grinning face joined the white bag. “I thought you would be over your nausea and hungry.”