“M-Michael!” she called out, teeth still chattering.
At once he was next to her, peering down at what she’d uncovered. “This is it,” he said, his voice grim. “This is what’s been calling them here.”
“C-can you get rid of it?”
“Yes,” he replied. “But we’re going to have to pull up the whole floor. If — ”
He didn’t get a chance to finish the sentence, because in the next moment, all hell broke loose, the oversized television flinging itself away from the wall, the Danish modern coffee table and chairs all taking to the air and flying toward them. Audrey screamed, flattening herself against the vomit-green shag carpet, while Michael crouched next to her, doing his best to shield her from the flying furniture. The pressure and the cold in the room increased to the point where she wasn’t sure whether she would have been able to lift herself from the floor even if she’d wanted to.
“Stairs,” he murmured in her ear, which had begun to ring again from all the pressure being exerted on it. “Come on.”
Sobbing in terror, she began to inch her way across the game room to the basement stairs, which now felt about a thousand miles away. Michael followed her, murmuring something she couldn’t quite make out, but which sounded like Latin. Some kind of spell or invocation to keep the furniture at bay? She didn’t know. The only thing she did know was that somehow, miraculously, even though those objects continued to circle the two of them like oversized birds of prey, none of them touched either her or Michael, although she could feel her hair ruffling in the breeze caused by the passage of one of the chairs.
A lifetime later, they reached the bottom stair and began to crawl upward. A few steps further, and walls were safely around them, partially shielding Michael and Audrey from the onslaught of the demonically propelled furniture. However, that didn’t prevent the entities wielding those objects from trying to get in one last lick, as the console TV smashed into the entry to the stairs, glass and wood and its internal components spraying everywhere.
At once, the pressure that had been bearing down on Audrey disappeared. She got to her feet and ran up the rest of the steps until she reached the relative safety of the kitchen hallway. Michael was only a pace or two behind her, and he slammed the door shut as soon as he emerged from the stairwell.
They stared at each other for a few moments, both of them panting from exertion, and then, incongruously, he began to laugh.
“Are you fucking insane?” she demanded, staring at him in disbelief.
“Sorry,” he said. “I just wish I’d gotten that on camera, because I know Colin isn’t going to believe me when I explain it to him.”
She shook her head. “Can we get out of here, please?”
“Of course.”
They hurried into the kitchen, then went out through a door she hadn’t noticed previously, one that led directly into the backyard. Once she was outside, with the sun shining down on her and the sound of a distant fountain helping to cover the traffic noise from Sierra Madre Boulevard, Audrey felt a little better. Not a lot, but some. At least her heart no longer felt as if it was about to pound its way out of her chest.
Michael glanced over at her. “You okay?”
“Define ‘okay.’” She took a deep breath, glad that the air was cool and clean. It helped — if only a little — to scrub away some of the residue of that terrible encounter.
“You’re here, and you’re safe. I’d define that as okay.”
“Then I guess I’m all right.” She straightened her jacket and sent a frightened little glance back at the house, but everything seemed to be quiescent…for the moment. “So, what do we do next?”
He ran a hand through his over-long hair, which glinted dark gold in the sunlight. “I’ll need to do a dispelling ritual, but I’ll have to get permission from the owners to tear up the floor in the basement so I can erase all those summoning sigils.”
“That’s what they were?”
“Yes. Pretty dark stuff.”
“Do you think Whitcomb put it there?”
“Maybe. Probably.” Michael paused and glanced up at the house, at the white-painted exterior that hid such darkness within. “I do know one thing, though.”
“What’s that?”
“I need a drink.”
The town’s one and only wine bar — Glendora Terroir — was located just two doors down from Isabel and Rosemary’s metaphysical bookstore. As Michael and Audrey walked past the storefront of Sisters We, she stole a surreptitious glance at the window, wondering if the two of them were inside, observing hers and Michael’s progress and sharing disapproving looks. However, she only caught a glimpse of an older man perusing one of the bookshelves, with no signs of any of the three owners.
She’d have to remember to ask Michael why Rosemary and Isabel had been so openly hostile toward him. That is, she could guess at some of the reasons why, but she was still curious.
At a little before three on a weekday afternoon, the wine bar wasn’t very busy. A couple who looked like they might be retired sat at the bar, but the tables and the little conversation area with its low sofa and matching chairs were all empty.
Michael sat down on the sofa, probably because it was located at the far end of the space and therefore was least likely to lend itself to eavesdropping. Not that the man and woman at the bar seemed very interested in the newcomers; they cast an incurious gaze in Audrey’s direction, but turned back to their own glasses of wine as soon as Michael and Audrey had settled themselves and picked up a couple of menus to peruse.
After a brief inward struggle, she’d sat next to Michael, mostly because it would have looked strange for her to take a seat in one of the chairs, leaving him alone on that big sofa. It was a little odd to have him so close to her, although Audrey told herself that he’d been this close when he’d been shielding her with his body just a few minutes earlier…or when he’d held her as she was recovering from her faint that morning.
And once again she did her best to push that image out of her mind. She didn’t need to waste mental energy on that sort of thing, not when they had so much else to worry about.
“I’m going to have the petit verdot,” Michael said, then set down his menu. “What about you? It looks like I’ll have to go up to the bar to order.”
Since Audrey had been here before, she knew that Candy, the woman who worked at Glendora Terroir most weekdays, would have gotten to them eventually…very eventually. But after what they’d been through, waiting that long for a glass of wine really wasn’t an attractive option.
“The GSM blend,” Audrey told him. Grenache, syrah, mouvedre…a classic-Rhone-style wine. She’d had it before, and liked it.
“GSM.” He nodded and got up from the couch, then went over to the bar, where Candy turned away from the older couple she’d been chatting up, her blue eyes suddenly sparking with interest. He smiled at her and spoke, although Audrey couldn’t hear what he was saying.
She tried to tell herself that the flash of jealousy she’d experienced while watching the bartender was completely foolish. Michael could flirt with anyone he wanted, although Audrey didn’t know where he found the energy, considering he’d been fending off demon-propelled furniture not a half hour earlier.
However, his flirting — if that was even what he’d been doing — seemed to accomplish its goal, because he returned to the sofa, a glass of wine in either hand, in a remarkably short amount of time. After handing Audrey the Rhone-style red blend, he sat back down on the couch and took a sip of his own petit verdot. The wine was so dark it looked nearly black, a fitting drink, considering what they’d uncovered in the basement of the Whitcomb mansion.
“What’s our next step?” she asked, doing her best to sound brisk and businesslike despite their decidedly unbusinesslike surroundings. And then, because she didn’t want to wait any longer, she sipped at her wine, glad of the faint flush of warmth it sent down her midsection as she swallowed. It might have been a warm day
outside, but she hadn’t quite gotten rid of the chill from their foray into the basement game room.
“I’ll call Colin. He’s the liaison with the owners — I haven’t actually spoken to them directly. I don’t think it’ll be too difficult to get their permission to do whatever we want with the basement. They would have ripped all that out eventually anyway.”
True. Audrey doubted that anyone who’d paid three and a half million dollars for their house would willingly hang on to vomit-green shag carpet. She nodded, and Michael continued.
“Once we have the go-ahead to get at the floor beneath the carpet and the wood, then we’ll go back with the crew and film the removal of the demon-summoning glyphs.”
“Are we all going to wear body armor?” Audrey asked, only half joking. She still didn’t know how he’d managed to keep the furniture from hitting either one of them. Wouldn’t it be even more difficult for him if he had to worry about protecting Colin and Chris and Susan, and whatever other crew members might be in the immediate vicinity?
Michael drank some of his petit verdot and offered her a tight smile. “No, I don’t think that’s going to be necessary. I’m not saying the demons won’t try to put up a fight, but they’re going to direct their ire at me, since I’m the one who’ll be removing their express route to this dimension.”
How was she supposed to respond to that? “What do you need me to do?”
“Offer moral support, more than anything.” He shifted on the couch so he faced toward her, rather than the coffee table where he’d just set down his glass of wine. Now it felt even more awkward, being this close, but she did her best to look back at him calmly, with no shift in expression. “Your reactions to the entities in that house have made it pretty clear to me that you must be a sensitive of some sort, even if you don’t believe that about yourself. It’s very likely that you’ll be able to feel an imminent attack and provide some warning.”
He sounded completely confident in her abilities, whereas Audrey was anything but. And she hadn’t exactly put in a good performance down there in the basement. Yes, she’d been able to find the spells of summoning on the subfloor, but she’d screamed like a little girl and had been crying from fright as she dragged herself to the stairs and safety. A warrior against the forces of darkness, she most definitely was not.
The jury was still out on exactly how much of a mind reader Michael Covenant actually was, but he clearly picked up on her doubt, because he said, “You did very well.”
“I did not. I was a mess.”
“You might think that, but you didn’t bolt at the first sign of something wrong down there. You looked, and you found it. A lot of people would have run for the stairs as soon as they felt that cold and pressure. Don’t be so hard on yourself.”
He sounded so reassuring, Audrey wanted to believe him. “How do you do it?”
A lift of his shoulders before he reached for his wine glass. “Because I have to.”
“A real crusader?”
“Something like that.” The corners of his mouth lifted slightly, but his expression remained somber. She wondered then what it was that had sent him down this path. The brief bios she’d read about him were fairly vague — they only said that he’d exhibited psychic abilities from an early age and had grown up somewhere on the East Coast before traveling through Europe and the Americas to train his peculiar talents, but there weren’t any real particulars, any anecdotes that explained why he had ended up here in Southern California. And she didn’t feel as though she knew him well enough to ask.
Not yet, anyway.
Audrey glanced over at the bar. The older couple sitting there now looked as though they were paying off their tab, so in a minute or two, she and Michael would be the only occupants of the wine bar. Well, except for Candy, who kept shooting glances in their direction, as if she couldn’t quite figure out what the two of them were doing there.
Good question.
Well, aside from the most obvious. After that nightmarish encounter, they’d both needed a drink, and getting one at a public place like this seemed a lot less fraught than going back to her house. Audrey realized then that she didn’t have any idea where Michael lived; his biographies all said he lived in Los Angeles, but L.A. was a big place. His house could be anywhere from Pacific Palisades to the funky hillside residences in Mount Washington, east of downtown.
“So….” she said, drawing out the syllable, since the couple at the bar was now on the move, headed toward the front door. She waited until they were gone to say, “You get rid of the demons, I provide moral support, and the owners can move back into their house. All’s well that ends well.”
“That’s the plan.” He smiled, a genuine-looking one this time. “Then we’ll move on to the next location.”
“Which is?”
His gaze shifted away from hers. “We’re working on two possibilities at the moment. Colin should have one of them locked down by midweek.”
Audrey realized then that it was still Monday. Hard to believe that only about eight hours had passed since Michael picked her up at her house in the dark fog of an early morning. “Local?”
“One of them is in Santa Barbara. The other is in Tucson.”
Both of those locations didn’t seem as though they would be likely possibilities for a demon infestation, but then again, you could say the same for sleepy little Glendora. Darkness lurked wherever it wanted, it seemed.
Inwardly, Audrey hoped they’d end up in Santa Barbara. The seaside town might be a three-hour drive away, but at least it was still technically in Southern California. And yes, Tucson was probably just about twice that distance, and yet going there felt like a much bigger commitment.
She didn’t really want to think about how she’d just mentally committed herself to doing that show. Of course, she was under contract to appear, but it was almost as though knowing she had abilities that might be of some use had only cemented her resolve to continue.
Since she didn’t feel like voicing those sentiments out loud, she settled for a noncommittal, “Got it,” and sipped at her wine. It was starting to feel a little sour in her stomach, probably because she hadn’t eaten anything since her skimpy breakfast. The wine bar offered small plates, but she didn’t think ordering food was a good idea. That would make this meeting feel uncomfortably like a date.
However, Michael didn’t seem to share those reservations, because he picked up the menu card again and turned it over, looking on the reverse side at the bill of fare. “Should we get a cheese plate or something? We’re both almost finished with our glasses of wine, and if we’re going to have more, we should probably eat something.”
A second glass of wine seemed like an even worse idea than ordering food. “No, that’s all right,” Audrey said hastily. “One glass is about my limit on a weekday, especially if we’re going to have an early call again tomorrow.”
Disappointment flared in his eyes, but then he shrugged. “You have a point. Besides, I need to call Colin. Once I have that squared away, I’ll know better what the schedule is going to be.”
“Sounds good,” she said, and picked up her wine so she could swallow the last mouthful. “Thanks for the drink, Michael.”
“Of course.” An automatic response, one offered without him really meeting her eyes. “I’ll pay the bill, and then I’ll drive you home.”
“Oh, no need for that,” she told him. “I’m only a couple of blocks away from here.”
For a second he appeared puzzled, as if he was trying to figure out why she would turn down an offer of a ride. But then he seemed to brush his concerns aside, saying, “Okay. I’ll be in touch as soon as Colin has everything worked out with the owners.”
“Sounds like a plan.” Because it felt as though she should say something else, she said again, “Thank you for the wine.”
And then she was giving him a smile in farewell, moving toward the exit so he couldn’t try to offer another ride home. As she pushed the door ope
n, she glanced back to see him already at the bar, wallet in hand, as Candy beamed at him and looked far too happy about the way Audrey was leaving the bar without him.
Good luck with that, she thought. You might not find him so attractive once you find out what he does for a living.
Then again, maybe Candy would find the whole demon-hunting thing appealing, if for no other reason than the low-level celebrity it afforded him.
For herself, Audrey was glad of the chance to walk outside in the sun, to allow herself to be surrounded by Glendora’s relentlessly normal main street, from the small shops and boutiques to the stationery store/cum post office. When she walked past the building where her office was located, she experienced a pang of guilt, just because it felt wrong to be out here enjoying the sunshine when she normally would have been seeing clients.
For about the thousandth time, she reminded herself that feeling guilt about something she had no control over wasn’t a good use of her mental energies. The clients had been rescheduled, and she’d just experienced something fairly traumatic. There was nothing wrong with allowing herself a little time to relax and mentally prepare for the next stage in the process.
The scent of sage still lingered in the house. After going inside, Audrey set her purse down on the coffee table and stood in the middle of the living room for a moment, doing her best to reach out and try to sense whether anything felt wrong about the place.
No, everything was calm, as far as she could tell. Even so, she picked up the white candle and lit it, then got the smudge going. Holding it and the abalone bowl, she walked from room to room, thinking of the bright golden warmth of the sun and doing her best to bring that light in here with her.
She had no idea whether she was doing any real good, though.
At last, she returned to the living room and flicked on the television. Having it on in the background helped make her feel a little less alone, but she still startled at every creak of the house, every whisper of the wind in the trees outside. Was this state of permanent unease what she had to look forward to now that she was working with Michael Covenant?
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