Nest shook her head at Ross as they paused beneath a massive old hickory. “Larry Spence.” She spoke his name with disgust and frustration. “He just can’t manage to keep out of this.”
Ross nodded, eyes fixed on the house. “We can’t do anything about him now. We have to go in anyway.”
She took a deep breath, thinking of all the chances she’d had to put Larry out of the picture, to scare him so badly he wouldn’t dream of involving himself further. It might have spared them what they were about to go through. It might have changed everything. She sighed. That was the trouble with hindsight, of course. Always perfect. She hadn’t even considered doing harm to Larry. She had always thought he would lose interest and drop out of the picture on his own. But maybe that was never an option. Maybe the demons had gained too tight a hold over him for that to be possible.
She glanced at the cruiser one final time and dismissed the matter. She would never know now.
They worked their way along the edge of a hedgerow separating the old Victorian from an English manor knockoff that was dark and crumbling. They drew even with the front entry and paused, kneeling in the snow, staying low to the ground and the shadows.
If I’m wrong about this, Nest kept thinking, unable to finish the thought, but unable to stop repeating herself either.
She didn’t see where Pick came from. He just appeared, dropping out of nowhere to land on her shoulder, giving her such a fright that she gasped aloud.
“Criminy, settle down!” the other snapped irritably, grasping her collar to keep from being shaken off. His mossy beard was thick with snowflakes, and his wooden body was damp and slick. “Took your time getting here, didn’t you?”
“Well, navigating these streets isn’t like sailing along on the open air!” she snapped back, irritated herself. She exhaled a cloud of breath at him. “What did you find?”
He sniffed. “What do you think I found? There’s traps and trip lines formed of demon magic all over. The place stinks of them. But those are demons in there, not sylvans, so they tend to be more than a little careless. No pride of workmanship at all. There are holes in that netting large enough to fly an owl through—which is exactly what I did. Then I slipped through a tear in the screen on the back porch, which they forgot about as well, and got inside through the back door. They’ve got the children down in the basement in a big playroom. You can get to them easy.”
He scrunched up his face. “The bad news is that something’s down there with them. I don’t know what it is. Might be a demon, might be something else. I couldn’t see it, but I could sure as heck smell it!”
Nest nodded. She knew what it was. She glanced at Ross, then back at Pick. “Could you tell exactly where it was? I mean, where in the room?”
“Of course I could!” he snapped. “You could tell, too, if you had my nose!”
“Which is my point,” she went on quickly. “Will you go back inside with me and show me exactly where it’s hiding?”
There was a long silence as he considered the matter, rubbing at his beard and muttering to himself furiously. Don’t say anything about Wraith, she begged him silently, knowing he would be thinking about doing exactly that.
He surprised her by merely shrugging and saying instead, “Well, you probably can’t do it by yourself. Let’s get on with it.”
They conversed in low tones for a few moments more, she and the sylvan and John Ross, setting up their plan of attack. It was agreed that Nest would slip in through the back door with Pick, then hide while Pick checked out the basement once more, located whatever was down there, and gave Nest whatever chance he could to reach the children first. Twenty minutes would be allotted. At the end of that time, Ross would come in through the front door and attack the demons, distracting them long enough for Nest and the children to escape out the back.