“Good plan.”
Darien chuckled, a wisp of Silas’s hair ticking his nose. “Am I making any sense?”
“Not much. Sleep now, sweetheart. Think tomorrow.”
Darien suspected that wasn’t the perfect slogan it seemed at the moment. But his fuzzy brain was happy with repeating it two or three times— including the sweetheart part— before he lost track completely and let sleep find him, there, safe in his own bed, wrapped in his necromancer’s arms.
Epilogue – Grim
“Not those two feet, the opposite sides, front and back.” Grim nodded to Pip, who demonstrated a trotting gait across the kitchen floor again.
“Right.” Xsing pushed up on his four raccoon legs, took a deep breath, and managed three steps before he tried to revert to a tripod swing and slid onto his stomach.
“Getting better.” Grim kept his tone free of judgment. In all his many years, he’d never imagined tutoring Professor Xsing of Transitional Dynamics in the finer points of a quadruped gait. “If you can just unfocus for a bit, the original form knows how to walk and run. Stop over-managing it and let the instincts help you out.”
“I am not enamored of this form’s instincts,” Xsing said. “It would very much like to eat that bit of fragrant— I mean smelly— spoiled food under the counter.”
Perhaps it was too soon for Xsing to embrace his new identity. Grim got to his feet. “I suggest you stay here and practice, while Pip and I do a patrol of the house.”
“I’d really like to see the location of the gate and the associated destruction,” Xsing said.
“That’s up and down a bunch of stairs. Trust me when I say you’re not ready for that. The humans will bring you with them in the morning.”
“I suppose that will have to do. I will work on locomotion while you patrol.” Xsing slid one tentative paw forward on the tiles.
Grim turned to Pip. “Come along, puppy.”
He kept his senses alert as they headed down the hall and into the cellar with the demon map. The magic which normally covered the floor at the bottom of the stairs in a glowing array of chalked arcs and runes, now lay flat and dusty and lifeless. There was none of Silas’s green in it.
Apparently, leaving Earth had cut its ties to Silas’s power. The house felt dead and muffled too, without the protective wards that normally animated it. “Ghosts,” Grim muttered to himself.
“In the map?” Pip’s wide eyes reflected the overhead bulb.
“Hardly.” Grim descended the last few steps and stared at the map remnants. Silas would half-kill himself trying to repower it now. Tomorrow’s soon enough. “Food. For Silas’s power. I have a list of places that have ghosts no one’s bothered to lay. He’s going to need to stock up.”
“Is that a Foresight?”
“It’s common sense, puppy.” He stared down at Silas’s runework. He knew every stroke well, but his own power was limited to a single talent, like most of his kind. He could draw this or that symbol with chalk, recreate that lock, but it took the magical powers of humans or Yyygrdiil or a rune-worker like Xsing to bring a complex spell to life. His Foresight was a gift beyond price, of course, but a little basic power would’ve been nice. “Well, even if the map was working, our men wouldn’t have the strength do anything about a new demon tonight.”
“Ferngold said they saw no new demons in the past day. That’s good, right? That means cutting the portals helped?”
“Probably.” Grim would take Xsing’s word on that over Ferngold’s, and Xsing had also said the world-links to the hells were gone. No doubt the dark sorcerers involved were hard at work rebuilding them, but hopefully they’d get a quiet night or two. “Come on, time to check out the rest.”
He led Pip on a thorough circuit of the entire mansion at ground level. In the west wing, over the room that had held the gate, he blocked Pip from entering the room and jumped to hit the light switch. The crack they’d seen in the stone ran through the interior plaster too, about five feet up the outer wall. The floor looked solid. “Stay put. You don’t fall as safely as I do.”
“Yes, Grim.” The puppy sat obediently. Good. Might make something of him yet.
Grim crossed the room carefully, testing the wooden floor as he placed his feet. Right up near the wall, a board creaked loudly. He jumped back— gracefully, not hurriedly— and tested it with a heavy paw. There wasn’t a lot of give. Might just be the elderly boards warping. A faint smell of plaster dust and magic lingered, dry and sharp like long-dead bones.
He returned to Pip, who was waiting with those ridiculous ears pricked acutely. “It’s stable enough. Not about to cave in, anyway.”
“Good. And Darien doesn’t use this room.” Pip stood up and shook himself. “It smells odd.”
“Lingering portal residue,” he said firmly, despite that being just a hypothesis. “But no one’s going to sneak into the house this way, which was the main question.” He jumped and snagged the light switch with one paw, plunging the room back into dimness. Judging by the moon outside, they were moving into the small hours of the night. Hopefully Silas was asleep, trusting Grim and not fretting about his wards. “Come on. Downstairs.”
He stopped in the utility room, pawing open a drawer to scoop out a flashlight. A pity magelight wasn’t one of his talents. Even his excellent feline night vision couldn’t penetrate the windowless blackness of the most distant cellars, where the original builder and subsequent remodelers had neglected to hang bulbs. The limited guidance of whiskers and ears and Othersense wouldn’t be enough tonight.
He pinned the flashlight to the floor and managed to slide on the stiff switch with his teeth.
“Oh good,” Pip said, dancing in the beam of the light. “It works.”
“And you’re going to carry it, pup.” Pip might be half Grim’s size, but his mouth was bigger. And occupying it with a flashlight meant far fewer inane comments. “Grab it now.”
Pip barked, “Fetch!” The light flew to him and he caught it in his teeth, his tail wagging into a blur, eyes dancing.
Foolish puppy. Wasting power just for fun. Grim smothered his inclination to laugh and said, “Hmph. All right, follow me.”
Pip would’ve headed right for the west wing, but Grim made him do a thorough sweep, not missing any of the odd staircases and tucked away corners. He hadn’t realized how comforting Silas’s wards were until they were absent. In one spot, Pip set the flashlight down and sniffed hard at the floor. “Fresh rats. They’re still here.”
“Hardly a surprise. But maybe now we can finally make a dent in their numbers.”
“Tonight?”
Where do you get all that energy? Despite not having the pup’s metabolism, he couldn’t deny a flash of desire to go hunting and kill something. Several somethings. The predatory skills of this body resonated very satisfyingly with remnants of his ancestral instincts. His people hadn’t always lived safe in cities, and they’d eventually topped the food chain.
Biting something’s head off would be satisfying. He and Silas and the rest had solved the puzzle of the tide of demons, and perhaps saved the world, but they hadn’t managed to destroy the actual culprits. Unless the backlash did. He hoped so. He suddenly wanted to see the gate room, and judge how likely it was they’d smote a blow against the enemy. “We’ll hunt when we have the leisure. They’ll keep. Let’s go check that gate.”