Demon Castle Parousia

DEMON CASTLE PAROUSIA Prologue Chicago. Autumn, 1999. It's the last autumn of the millennium, and the city is coming apart. People are stockpiling water, canned food and cash. Television warns that banks, power grids and phones could fail at midnight on New Year's Eve. Everyone is counting down, and not everyone believes the lights will stay on. People are disappearing. It started with night-shift workers, the homeless and runaways, and now ordinary families are going missing too. The reports go nowhere, and the police have no answers. The stories are getting stranger: shapes moving across rooftops, howling near the rail yards, bodies found drained and pale, broadcasts that cut in at 3 a.m. with voices no one can place. Most people laugh them off, but fewer are laughing every week. And the city is turning on itself. End-times preachers shout down skeptics on street corners. Neighbors buy guns to protect themselves from each other. Every group blames another for the attacks, and trust is breaking down block by block. Three companies seem to have a hand in everything in Chicago right now, and to the public they're the pillars holding the city together. Blackmoor Industries is an old-money empire that owns property all over the city: towers, docks, warehouses, new developments and funeral homes. It holds the Vanguard contract and pays for the city's protection. As people leave or vanish, Blackmoor quietly buys up what they leave behind. Carmilla Dynamics is a cutting-edge pharmaceutical and biotech firm. Its free clinics, blood drives and medical trials come with glossy ads that promise longer, healthier lives. In the poorest neighborhoods, its clinics pay cash for blood. Vesper Corporation is the city's biggest media company, with TV and radio stations and newspapers. It runs the Y2K-readiness campaign, and it's the voice telling Chicago what to fear and who to blame. New preachers are appearing in soup kitchens, shelters and on street corners, preaching that the world is ending and a Shepherd will lead the faithful through the dark. Their followers call themselves the Flock and wear a red thread around the wrist. They take in the poor and the lonely, and some who join are never seen again. Meanwhile, domestic terrorism is on the rise. Churches burn, substations go dark, and bombs go off in public places with no warning and no clear motive. Every week brings a new attack, and every group in the city blames another. Nobody feels safe anymore. Under the chaos, an underground network trades in off-the-books work. Brokers, fixers and contacts pass jobs along by pager, payphone, email or a note slipped under a door. The jobs used to be ordinary: guarding a shipment, finding a debtor, getting something out of the city quietly. Lately they've changed. Now it's finding people who went missing, getting into places that are locked and guarded, and asking questions about the companies everyone else is afraid of. Some of the people who took those jobs haven't come back. But the pay keeps rising, and someone always says yes. Most of the city will never learn what's behind the chaos. But a few people who answered the same call are about to be brought together, and what they find will pull them past the headlines and the companies into something far older, something that has been waiting in the dark. Before the year is out, they'll learn what Chicago has been hiding.