Free Night of Demons - 02 by Tony Richards Page B

shotgun strapped to one side of her bike, and her Heckler & Koch assault carbine on the other. But the fact was, they were always there. We needed them a lot of times that trouble came knocking. The sight of Cassie kitted out this way was such a regular sight around the Landing that it barely drew the slightest comment. So which neighborhood exactly was this woman from?
    Something else struck me, and I glanced over at her little car. There was a sticker in the back window. I’d noticed it when she had first turned up.
    And now I stared at it more closely. It read “New England Aquarium.” Which I’d never heard of. There was no such establishment around here.
    The standoff, though, was still in progress, with the Focus’s owner at the center of it. And I couldn’t tell how it was going to end.
    “Stand down!” Saul was shouting at the woman. “Lower your weapon!”
    But instead of doing as she was told, she came back with another question.
    “And you are?”
    “Detective Lieutenant Saul Hobart.”
    The woman’s expression slackened slightly and she changed her grip on her gun, a Walther. She freed her left hand, and then held it up with the index and middle fingers raised.
    “I’m going to reach inside my coat, okay? With just two fingers.”
    We watched her closely. When her left hand reemerged, there was a plastic wallet in it.
    And when she flipped it open, I could see the flash of a bright golden badge, although it wasn’t in any shape I recognized.
    “Lieutenant Detective Lauren Brennan,” she announced loudly. “Boston Homicide.”

CHAPTER 10
     
     
    “Look, I realize I’m new here,” she was explaining to us a few minutes later, although it felt like a good deal more than that. “But can I be blunt? What kind of community allows anyone to go around in plain view armed like that?”
    She jerked her head toward an angry, scowling Cassie, who was propped against her bike and had no plans to join us.
    “I mean, I thought she was going to go postal.”
    Our weapons had been put away by this stage. Everything had calmed down. Or, at least, to outward appearances anyway. I didn’t know about the others, but my brain was racing, trying to figure all this. An outsider? One who was a normal human being, and who didn’t seem to mean us any harm?
    The three of us were seated around my original table, me and Saul both trying to hide our absolute bewilderment. There was almost a feeling like we were being played by some kind of trick. No one just walked in here in this way. Once again, it was Regan’s Curse, cast by a witch named Regan Farrow.
    A few years after the Salem witches first arrived here, back in the late sixteen hundreds, she’d managed to overstep the mark. Annoyed a lot of people, got herself burned at the stake for it. She’d begged to be released, to no avail. And, as the flames climbed up around her, she had yelled out the words that had altered this town’s destiny right up to the present day.
    “If I cannot leave, then none of you ever shall. And you shall dwell alone here.”
    Which meant not only that we could never leave. It meant the outside world practically never intruded. Supplies came in, and we still managed commerce. How could we survive otherwise? But human visitations were a very fleeting thing. People arrived and quickly left, without so much as a backward glance. The only types who stayed for long periods—Willets apart—were either totally insane or terminally evil. And this Lauren Brennan didn’t seem to fit into either category.
    I stared into her gently colored but attractive face. How the hell had she got past the curse? There was no direct way to ask that question, so we stuck to the subject in hand for the moment.
    “Erm, Cass is…how best to put this?” Saul was mumbling, trying to get his own thoughts in order.
    There were even more people walking past, and some of the stores were beginning to open. None of the café’s staff would come outside to serve