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Chapter 1

THE SKULL GLARED at me out of empty eye sockets Odd runes marked its forehead, carved into the yellowed bone and filled with black ink Its thick botto and sharp like the teeth of a crocodile The skull sat on top of an old Stop sign Soon white and written KEEP OUT across it in large jagged letters A reddish-brown splatter stained the botto suspiciously like dried blood I leaned closer Yep, blood Some hair, too Human hair

Curran frowned at the sign “Do you think he’s trying to tell us so?”

“I don’t know He’s being so subtle about it”

I looked past the sign About a hundred yards back, a large two-story house waited It was clearly built post-Shift, out of solid timber and brown stone laid by hand to ensure it would survive the ular box of s, this house had all the pre-Shift bells and whistles of ahorizontal lines, and a spacious layout Except prairie-style ho flat roofs and little ornamentation, while this place sported pitched roofs with elaborate carved gables, beautiful bargeboards, and ornate wooden s

“It’s like so cabin and a pre-Shift contemporary house, stuck them into a blender, and dumped it over there”

Curran frowned “It’s hisWhat do you call it? Terem”

“A terem is where Russian princesses lived”

“Exactly”

Between us and the house lay a field of black dirt It looked soft and powdery, like potting soil or a freshly plowed field A path of rickety old boards, half rotten and splitting, curved across the field to the front door I didn’t have a good feeling about that dirt

We’d tried to circle the house and ran into a thick, thorn-studded natural fence formed by wild rosebushes, blackberry brambles, and trees The fence elve feet tall and when Curran tried to juh to see over it, the thorny vines snapped out like lassos and made a heroic effort to pull him in After I helped him pick the needles out of his hands, we decided a frontal assault was the better option

“No animal tracks on the dirt,” I said

“No animal scents either,” Curran said “There are scent trails all around us through the woods, but none here”

“That’s why he has giant s and no grates on theet close to the house”

“It’s that, or he doesn’t care Why the hell doesn’t he answer his phone?”

Who knehy the priest of the god of All Evil and Darkness did anything?

I picked up a s No toothy jaws exploded through the soil, nokaboom The rock just sat there

We could coic was down That would be the sensible thing to do However, we had driven ten ia’s suet here, and our deadline was fast approaching One way or another, I was getting into that house

I put ht, but held Step Another step Still holding

I tiptoed across the boards, Curran right behind hts

The dark soil shivered