A Scandal in Battersea (Elemental Masters #12)(40)

On the other hand, there was no imperious voice ordering him about, so the entity was living up to its word and leaving him alone for now.

That was a very good thing, and he didn’t feel very much like tempting fate by venturing any nearer to it.

He spent most of the time during those three days reading and rereading the book, trying to anticipate what might come next. He didn’t even leave the flat; he sent Alf out for more brandy, and ate whatever Alf cooked or brought him from the pub or the fried fish shop. This scenario of the offering being “inadequate” but also “accepted” just wasn’t in The Book at all. There was no roadmap for him here. So he spent half the time terrified, and half trying to calculate what the entity might want and what he might, possibly, be able to extract from it.

But now . . . now the moment had come. The three days had passed. He was going to have to face whatever lived in that shadow and find out what it wanted from him. Because he had the feeling . . . if he didn’t give it what it wanted, it had no intention of going away, and it might find him to be an “adequate” offering.

Leaving Alf upstairs, he waited until after darkness fell and made his way down the solid wooden staircase, carrying a lantern. There was no other light source but the one he carried in his hand. And it was utterly, utterly silent; in fact, the silence made his ears ring. When he had rented this place, he had hired a carpenter to make sure the steps didn’t creak; now he wished he hadn’t. At least that would have been some sound. He hesitated when he reached the bottom step, then, after a long pause, put one foot on the flagstone floor.

Nothing happened.

Feeling a little less terrified, he made his way to the place he had stood when he had invoked this . . . thing . . . in the first place.

There was still no sign of life from the pool of darkness on the floor.

He hung the lantern on the hook in the beams of the floor above him, and waited.

That was when he realized that it was very, very cold here in the basement. Colder by far than it should have been; unnaturally cold, he would have said. He could see his breath puffing out in clouds, and the silence . . . was unnatural too! It wasn’t just that the basement was silent, he couldn’t hear anything in the house above him. Surely he should have been able to hear something, but . . . there was only silence and the cold, and that unnerving pool of inky black in the middle of the flagstone floor. It seemed to drink in the light. It had no texture, it reflected nothing, and he could not see into it. It might have been just lying on the surface of the stones. Or it might go all the way to the center of the earth.

Or it might go somewhere else, not of this earth.

His chest was tight; the hair on the back of his neck was surely standing straight up. He wanted desperately to run away, and at the same time felt paralyzed, too frightened to move.

He spent a very long, terrified time trying to get the courage to speak, to break that silence. All of the bold plans he had made had flown right out of his head. And all he could really think of was how badly he wanted to bolt right back up those stairs. That, and the growing certainty that if he tried to do any such thing, that black pool would rise and engulf him as the altar stone and the basket had been engulfed. He wavered between wanting to flee and not daring to until he vibrated like a harp string.

Then there was no chance to do anything.

Suddenly, between one second and the next, there was not a pool of blackness on the floor. It was a pillar of blackness, looming over him.

He bit back a yelp of terror, as his flesh shrunk away from that inky blackness. You are here, he heard in his mind as well as his ears.

“Yes,” he squeaked.

You will bring me adequate offerings, the entity said. I will show you what I want.

He felt something, then. Something . . . intruding into his thoughts. Pushing what he was thinking to one side and inserting what it wanted him to see. And into his mind came images of people, a vast crowd of people. There was nothing really alike about them, other than that they fit into a certain age group. No younger than, say, ten or eleven. No older than mid-twenties. The faces were blurry, so it was clear that looks did not matter to this thing. Short, tall, male, female, handsome, hideous, fat, or thin, none of that mattered to the entity. You will bring me two, it ordered. They must be healthy. Unpolluted is preferable.

“Unpolluted? You mean virgin?” he managed to gasp.

He actually felt the thing rummaging in his head to understand what he had asked. Felt more of his thoughts pushed aside, rearranged, picked up and examined, with no regard for how private they were. He felt it going through his memories; felt it stop and examine one where the girl Alf had brought him actually had been a virgin. Felt it consider that.

It was . . . singularly horrid. Like putting one’s hand in one’s underwear drawer and feeling it full of slugs climbing all over and through one’s most intimate things. He gagged a little.

Yes. Virgin. Two. One to strengthen me. The second to serve me in your world. The second, you will put back where it can be cared for.

Dear god, what in hell did that mean? All he could figure was that he’d have to risk snatching someone that had family that would be looking for her, and would care for her when this thing let go of her. That would mean taking someone out of a better neighborhood, one where people who went missing were hunted for. Which meant, conversely, that it was a neighborhood where people would notice if you took someone, and if they were too timid to try and stop you themselves, they’d call the police.