An hour later found me seated at the restaurant where this all began, in the front part this time. Carmine Gorman was there with me, a fruit and bread plate between us, as Vito Mercotti brought a huge carafe or urn or whatever you call a humongous pot of coffee and three mugs out of the kitchen and joined us.
Vito opened the discussion: “So, since Dad fell on the sword to protect his kids, I spent the morning with a lawyer. Carol gets everything but the house which I will sell, give her half the money, and use the other half to move as far away from here as I can.”
“Sounds like a plan, Vito,” I replied, nodding approval.
“So, I was not there, but Vito was for Linda’s death,” Carmine added.
“Yeah, Morgan decided we had to act early and that neither Carmine nor Lawrence would support killing Carmine’s baby girl,” Vito began. “So, we came in when she was alone, Morgan set up some kind of warding system, while we rendered her unconscious and tied her up. We did not do a very good job at either, though, as she somehow got free and beaned Danny Perone with a serving tray. Hit him just right to force his nose into his brain, killing him instantly. Most of the body should be at the old quarry a mile south of town.”
Carmine suddenly laughed and we both looked at him as if he had grown a second head. Which, for all I knew, could happen these days.
“You taught her that,” he said to me. “The rope escape. You were trying to impress her sister and taught her some of your uncle’s tricks!”
Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle - I had forgotten all about that. “So I did,” I admitted.
Vito resumed his story: “With his death, we no longer had seven to cast the spell and a gray light shot out from nowhere. It tried to get outside, but the wards held and apparently it took over Domenic instead. When one of those things, for lack of a better word, let's call them ‘demons,’ enters our world they immediately seek to get away from the ‘breach point’ and find a host. If the intended host has a very strong will, it may be sent back or have to seek a new one. If they have a weak will, like poor Dominic, the demon destroys their essence and takes over their body, wearing it as a disguise for several years before it just burns out and the demon returns home.”
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Carmine jumped in here: “there is a third, far less common outcome - the demon finds the potential host so much like itself that they fuse into one being. That happened about eight years ago when Morgan Price first tried to use the Daemonorium - he merged with a thing that calls itself ‘Morgalis’.”
“So that was the second voice I heard when he talked, the one that sounded kind of like it was gargling?” I asked, intrigued.
“Exactly.”
“Hmm - and now seven more of these things are out there?” I commented, my mood taking a dive.
Carmine sighed: “I only saw three but yeah, it seems like it. Can you describe what you saw? I might recognize some as I did a little research after Morgan showed me what he could do.”
I closed my eyes and tried to remember the seven “lights” - “The first one looked like a ball of fire. The second, a snowball. One was like a lance of pure darkness. The fourth one was like a spiky stone. Number five looked like ball lightning. The sixth looked like a black arrow with a red glow around it, and the last one looked like a shard of bone.”
When I said this last one, Carmine looked horrified. “I - I recognize three of those and have met one. Shargaas the ice demon was the thing Morgan called to prove his power to me - it’s a nasty piece of work but also one of the most easily controlled of all demons; that was the second one you described. The first one sounds like Conflar, the fire demon but I’m not completely sure. The last one, though, that one terrifies me more than anything else - it is definitely Alzol, the Death Demon, the source of the Grim Reaper myths, and the strongest of Morgalis’s allies.”
“Sounds like I have my work cut out for me,” I said.
“What do you mean?” Vito asked.
“Those things are free because of me. I need to send them back where they came from,” I declared, even though I had no real idea how I would go about this.
“You can count on my support,” Gorman said. “I have a few old tomes and might be able to convince Morgan that I’m feeding you bad information to stay out of jail, at least for a while.”
“Well, I’m out of here. I’m done with all this magic stuff,” Vito said. “I wish you luck and success and ask you to take good care of Carol - I really do love her, but I have always loved power more. Maybe now with nothing left, I’ll be able to turn over a new leaf, be the man I should have been. Or maybe it's too late, but either way, I’m out of here.”
To illustrate this point, he got up, bid us both farewell, and left. Carmine and I talked for a bit longer but really had nothing left to discuss so I decided to go break the news to Carol.