“Good-bye, O’olish Amaneh,” she replied. She started away, then turned back. “I’ll see you later.”
He did not respond. He simply walked into the thickly falling snow and disappeared.
-=O=-***-=O=-
From the concealing shelter of a thick stand of spruce, Findo Gask watched Nest Freemark converse with the big Indian. He watched them through the steadily deepening curtain of new snow until Nest began walking back toward the park, and then he turned to an impatient Penny Dreadful.
“Let’s go get her,” Penny suggested eagerly.
Findo Gask thought a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t think so. Not just yet.”
Penny looked at him as if he were newly arrived from Mars. Her red hair corkscrewed out from her head in a fresh gust of wind. “Gramps, are you going soft on me? Don’t you want to hurt her after the way she talked to you?”
He smiled indulgently. “I want to hurt her so badly she will never be well again. But the direct approach isn’t necessarily the best way to accomplish this.”
She made a face. “I’m sick and tired of playing around with Little Miss Olympics, you know that? I don’t get the point of these mind games you love so much. If you want to play games, let’s try a few that involve cutting off body parts. That’s the way to hurt someone so they won’t forget.”
Findo Cask watched Nest Freemark begin to fade into the white haze of falling snow. “If we kill her now, John Ross will take the morph and go to ground, and we might not find him again. He is the more dangerous of the two. But he relies on her. She has something he needs. I want to know what it is.”
He signaled into the trees behind him where Twitch and the ur’droch were waiting. Then he began walking, Penny right on his heels.
“We’re going after the Indian instead,” he told her.
She quickened her pace to get close to him. “The Indian? Really?” She looked excited.
He slid through the spruce, shadowy in his dark clothing, his eyes scanning the snow-flecked land ahead. He had heard stories of an Indian who was connected in some way to the Word, either as a messenger or prophet, a powerful presence in the Word’s pantheon of magics. He would be the most powerful of Nest Freemark’s allies, so it made sense to eliminate him first. It was his plan to strip away Nest Freemark’s friends one by one. He wasn’t doing this just to weaken her and thereby gain possession of the morph. He wasn’t even doing it because he was afraid that killing her outright would scare off John Ross. He was doing it because there was something about her that disturbed him. He couldn’t identify it, but it had revealed itself in the way she stood up to him, so confident, so determined. She knew he was dangerous, but she didn’t seem to care. Before he killed her, he wanted to find out why. He wanted to break down her defenses, strip away her confidence and determination, and have a close look at what lay beneath.
He would have the morph, of course. It didn’t matter what Nest Freemark or John Ross tried to do to stop him. He would have the morph, and their names in his book, before the week was out.
And in the process, he would have their souls as well.
The big Indian was already out of sight, disappeared into the white curtain of blowing snow. But Findo Gask did not need to see the Indian to find him. There were other senses he could call upon besides his sight. There were other ways to find what was hidden.
He glanced left and right, catching just a glimpse of Twitch and the ur’droch to either side. Penny stalked next to him, eyes darting this way and that, pale face intense. She was whispering, “Here, Tonto. Here, big fella. Come to Penny.”
Wind gusted and died away, snow swirled and drifted, and Riverside Cemetery was a surreal jungle of dark trunks and ice-capped markers. They were closing on the bluffs overlooking the bayou, where the cemetery ended at a chain-link fence set just back from the cliffs. There was still no sign of the Indian, but Findo Gask could sense him, not far ahead, still moving, but seemingly in no great hurry. The demon’s mind was working swiftly. He might lose one or two of his allies in this effort, but demons were replaceable.