Night of Demons - 02 Read Online Free PDF Page A

and they lingered several seconds before vanishing.
    He chortled. Oh, this might be even more fun than the special type he usually had. The real question was figuring out how to make this work.
    “What do you do, huh?” he asked the rod.
    He shook it a little harder, letting out a few more sparks. And nothing more than that.
    “I represent the Old Ones, you know. So you’d better reveal your secrets, or they’ll be mad at you.”
    He lashed it back and forth, but that got no reaction whatsoever.
    “Whatever that old fool used you for, I own you now! So do the same for me!”
    He swung it around in a broad circle. What little weight there’d been between his fingers disappeared completely. Cornelius could still see the thing. Except its shape and color were changing.
    As he watched, it ceased to be so very dark. The wand became pale gray. Then its edges started breaking up.
    It turned to smoke before his startled gaze. Cornelius lurched back, trying to let go of the thing. But it would not drop from his grasp.
    Looking down, he could see why. He let out a shriek. It was not simply the wand that was dissolving into vapor. The same was happening to his fingers. They had turned a similar pale gray.
    It spread out right across his hand. There was no pain, but terror overwhelmed him. He shook his wrist furiously, turning around in circles, making small, horrified gibbering noises. Nothing that he did made any difference. His wrist turned to gray smoke—then his upper arm.
    And that was when a new idea occurred to him. Maybe this was supposed to happen. Maybe this was what the wand actually did. Cornelius stopped moving, trying to calm down. It wasn’t easy, but he forced himself. Because…perhaps this was part of his destiny. What the Old Ones had wanted for him all along.
    He watched as his whole arm dissolved. His body broke up the same way.
    He felt his head begin to fade, and peered at his reflection in the dark, surrounding glass. There were only his eyes left. They let out a glint, then vanished too. His entire frame was lost from view, just pale mist by now. He tried to move around, and found that it was easy. He just had to will himself in a direction and he drifted there.
    High in the conservatory, a single panel was propped open. Presumably for ventilation, since it was still warm, despite the rain. Cornelius wafted up toward the opening, spilling out through it into the night air. He swept across the grounds in the direction of the rusted gate. Went by the abandoned Chrysler.
    Floated back to Plymouth Drive, then headed back the way he’d come.
    Lord, so many lights below him. So many dwellings filled with people, drowsy, unaware. And there would be no stopping him in this new form he had assumed.
    Those newspapermen, back in Boston, had been right about him without even knowing it.
    He really was the Shadow Man.

CHAPTER 4
     
     
    “Ross, are you up?”
    I pressed the receiver against my cheek. A thin, pale shaft of moonlight was streaming in between the drapes, casting the bedroom’s furniture into shadowy relief. The full-length mirror. The dim outlines of the dresser. The bowlegged stool in front of it. I seemed to inhabit a world of shadows a lot of the time, these days. More than any sane man would reasonably want. And I could see Alicia sitting there a moment, applying brief touches of makeup. It’s the first thing I remember, every time I wake.
    And then I blink, and she is gone again. The flat, empty normality of my bedroom returns. Her perfume, the smell, faded a long time ago, and I missed that.
    “Well?” Cass asked.
    “I am now.”
    “Then you haven’t heard?”
    I sat up sharply. Hadn’t the Little Girl just warned me something bad was going down?
    “Heard what?”
    “Lucas Tollburn’s been murdered.”
    And Lucas Tollburn was the oldest, most respected adept in the Landing. So I pulled myself together pretty quickly after that.
     
     
    One of the rarest sights on Sycamore Hill is