Emily faced me. “You could say that again . . .”
And cue the creepy theme song.
Chapter Five
Ms. Nikolayev directed our attention to the broken lock on the floor. “She insisted on having it when she was living here. I was okay with it at first, knowing the troubled life she had before I took her in. My plan was to slowly get her back to normal and convince her to get rid of the lock.”
I lowered myself and carefully examined the lock. It was shattered, like someone took a fucking hammer to a frozen cube of ice. Somehow, I doubted Ms. Nikolayev in her fragile state had the strength to smash it to gain access to her daughter’s room, let alone make it fragment into so many pieces.
Emily and I entered and split up. Our phones snapped dozens of pictures of her room and its demonic nature. There were faint traces of Umbral energy inside the room, too faint for me to get a decent feel for, but it was there, lingering like the stench of bleach after you used a dash of it on your white laundry.
We both grimaced.
Most of the demons or worshipers I’ve encountered were grown adults. Girls that recently turned eighteen though? That was new, and hella disturbing. The thought of her practicing sex rituals and the like made my gut wrench.
There was a newspaper clipping pinned to the wall, I examined and skimmed the article on it. I hadn’t known my recent actions made it to the news. I remember that night the article talked about like it was yesterday, some lesser demon part of Lucifer’s faction thought he could be a pool hustler as his cover. One of his human buddies suspected his pal had a dramatic shift in personality, like he was possessed, and dropped the dime on him. I believe they’re still rebuilding that bar, it was one hell of a battle. Reading the article was one hell of an eye-opener, Belyana knew about me before vanishing.
“Guess your reputation is growing,” Emily commented, having read over my shoulder.
“Any other deals you could share about your daughter?” I asked with new interest in the case at hand. “Strange habits? Prayers, friends?” Prayer, yeah, we can tick that off the list.
“No, nothing,” Ms. Nikolayev said.
“How about any new talents?” I snickered, it made Emily’s cringing face shift toward me. I shot her a cute smile and dug deeper into the bedroom from hell.
Our magical talents were something we still kept under wraps. Of course, when demons showed up it didn’t give us much of a choice. Whatever. It was crystal clear to me that if the walls in this room could talk, they’d spill out a twisted tale of talents being cast and a demonic spirit or two hanging out, jamming to whatever music played through the clock radio.
“She had no friends but . . .” Ms. Nikolayev’s jittery hands folded together. “But she did have a drug addiction when I first met her; she was on the streets prior to that.”
Drugs . . . this was starting to sound more like a normal missing person’s case than one of the paranormal. If it wasn’t for this occult bedroom, and Lexi’s voice in my head, we would have peaced-the-fuck-out long ago. This woman was lucky I caught wind of those factors.
Emily continued to snoop around as if she was my assistant. Whatever, hopefully her eye for valuables and hidden items turns up some clues. I went back to my poking around in the room, trying my hardest to detect more traces of Umbral energy, and failing in the process. There was an apple on a desk which rested next to a dagger, a dagger with old blood encrusted over its blade. A chain was attached to the hilt of the dagger, decorated with pentagrams, apples, and snakes. The multiple smears on the surface of the desk where the dagger had been placed suggested it had drawn blood a number of times in the past only to come to a rest there.
Blood offerings during a prayer, demons in the Umbral loved that shit, especially incubi and succubi. The real question was who she was trying to commune to? Not Lucifer that’s for damn sure, I saw to it personally nobody would be able to. I doubt lesser demons were powerful enough to react, even the ones part of his faction. This girl was fixated on another demon.
I had a feeling the answer to that was right under my nose. Too bad I couldn’t see it.
“You got to dig deeper than that.” It was Lexi’s voice again. “There’s always something interesting beneath the surface.” I felt like a maniac listening to her voice and following her directions.
To my left was a nightstand, an ominous feeling stroked the fabric of my head as I approached it. Its surface was littered with figures of snakes that wrapped around a skull. “Makes you wonder does it?” There was Lexi’s voice again. “Because it makes me wonder.”
I must really be losing my mind, following hints from voices in my head. But who was I to judge? That voice led us to this room, and now it was leading me to discover something of great value. I pulled on the handle to the drawer, exposing its contents within, there was nothing of interest. The second drawer had the same outcome, so much for that.
“Don’t give up yet,” Lexi said.
“Will you shut the fuck up?”
I heard her laugh in my head. “She speaks.”
“You say something?” Emily bellowed out to me.
Great, now they know I’m talking to myself. “Um no.”
“Go on, you can tell them about me.” Not fucking likely Lexi.
I went to push the last drawer back inside, it abruptly stopped part way through the process, repeated attempts delivered the same results. Something behind it was jamming it. Pulling the drawer out and apart revealed why. I looked inside nightstand sans drawers, a worn-out book was stashed inside. It must have fallen over when I opened the drawers.
I brought the book to my face, that shit was heavy and large, and probably thicker than the Bible. The book, rather, tome had its title cover written with fancy curved letters and sealed shut with two belt-like buckles. I popped them open and flicked through the aged, withered, and tattered pages. My eyes skimmed through the contents of the tome consisting of twisted pictures and writings about the occult, demons with goat heads, diagrams, glyphs, and words written in language I couldn’t make heads or tails of. Many of the pictures had dried droplets of blood over them, while other pages had larger splats of blood, seemingly pressed into it by another source.
Definitely not your Sunday morning church reading material.
“Good girl.” It was Lexi again, whispering into my head.
“Shut up.”
My outburst grabbed Emily’s attention once again. “What?”
“Uh, I said suit up.” I covered that one up pretty well, eh? Standing up, I revealed my discovery to her and Ms. Nikolayev. “Found a tome here dealing with the occult.” I showed it to Ms. Nikolayev. “Have you seen this?”
She took three steps away from me and the tome in my hands. “This whole room is new to me; I had no idea what she did when she locked herself in here.”
“Mind if we keep this for a bit?”
“Please, if it helps you, do it.”
There wasn’t much else for us to do for the time being, Emily and I collected the tome and dagger as evidence. I stopped suddenly as I looked at the dagger closer. I flipped open the tome one last time and compared some of the blood marks with the size of the dagger’s blade, it was a perfect match. The blood on the dagger made those marks, the dagger wasn’t just to make blood sacrifices, it was also a bookmark.
We made our way back outside into the sunny and sweltering weather. My sunglasses came right the fuck back onto my face as we approached our car and drove off.
Chapter Six
Hell’s Kitchen, it felt good to be back in familiar territory. I couldn’t bring myself to reveal to Emily about the voices, not yet at least. I wanted to see how things would turn out as we progressed further with our investigation into Belyana’s disappearance. I was tempted to seek Gabe’s assistance, but the risk of exposing Belyana and her mother, if they were indeed illegal immigrants, was too great. Her mother was offering good cash for my service as well, if I wanted to get paid, I needed them to
not be deported.
Then there was Lexi’s voice. I kept telling myself I just didn’t get a goodnight’s rest, and that it will go away once I did. If not, then I was clearly going nuts. Emily even said so herself, I should have recovered by now. I didn’t come up with a game plan for that scenario, me going nuts. It was a path I really didn’t want to accept and go down, it would be like getting shot and forced to venture into a dark dank basement full of tarantulas in order to get to the hospital. Fuck that noise, I’d take my chances not going.
Emily and I entered an old warehouse turned paranormal crime lab, commandeered by the NYPD for the paranormal taskforce to do their thing. Inside were NYPD personnel, members of the paranormal taskforce, though most of them did desk work. Deeper inside was a lab decorated from wall to wall with computers, medical equipment, and Wicca objects. It was literally a fusion of forensic science and weird magic stuff, all belonging to the solo lab tech working there, Charles.
Charles sat at one of the computer workstations wearing a white lab coat. His fingers keyed words into the keyboard before him and his thick glasses reflected the light his screen emitted. He was an interesting guy, nerdy as fuck, and good with computers. He used to be a tech with the NYPD, until he learned of the formation of the paranormal division, and then dropped the bombshell on his superiors that he was a Wiccan, and always had been. It got him the job as he flooded their databases on the supernatural, databases that helped them immensely during investigations. And from time to time, me, with my PI cases. Being in with the cops had its advantages, such as the one we were taking.
“Miss Araya,” Charles said, spinning his chair to face us. “I heard you and your friend had a preposterous day.”
I approached him with our evidence found in the girl’s room. “It’s a day I’m looking forward to its end.”
“So you can do it all over again tomorrow!” Charles said, stroking back his long unkempt brown hair. “What can I do for you two today?”
I handed the evidence off to him as I leaned against the wall with my arms crossed. Charles slipped his hands into a pair of gloves and closely examined our findings. “A tattered book.” He tossed that onto a nearby table. “And a bloody dagger, Araya seriously?”
“We pulled that from the girl’s room I called you about.”
“Reika . . .” Charles dropped his ass back into his chair, pushed off the edge of the table, sending the chair rolling back to his computer. “Of all the things you could have brought back to me.”
“Let me know if you find anything useful,” I said. “A dagger with blood usually means blood sacrifices, right?”
“Or.” Charles returned to typing. “She killed someone to offer as a sacrifice.”
“That dagger was also used as a bookmark, and there’s blood on the pages. I doubt it was used as a weapon.”
“I’ll see what I can do and work my magic . . . Get it? Magic?”
And that’s why I remembered why I hated coming to this place. Charles was awkward as fuck. I’m surprised he hasn’t asked me to hang out with him and watch anime at his place, like he has with Emily, over and over and over. “Are we done here?” I groaned from my secluded darkened corner.
Charles twirled in his chair facing me, great, here it comes. “Reika, one day I’m going to make you laugh.” I growled, maybe that will get the message across. “Or smile . . .” I flipped him the bird. “Okay, do what you need to do; I’ll be awhile with this. I need to finish this email to Vadoma.”
Vadoma . . . I’m surprised she was still receiving paychecks from the NYPD. Vadoma was an exorcist hired to dispose of the demons we brought into custody. It was puzzling since according to the email I read from the demon hunter Brianna, exorcism didn’t work on demons. According to Lucifer, possession overwrites the mind of the host effectively killing the human mind in the process. If you ask me, it’s easier and cheaper to put captured demons down with enchanted weapons, rather than calling in an exorcist to take them away. It’s not like the bodies taken by the demons are ever seen again.
“Reika, can we get out of here?” Emily asked as her uninterested body winced at me.
“Yeah, I think we’re done here.”
Charles spun in his chair again, his beady eyes locking onto my figure. “Well, hold on,” he said as his tone of voice lowered, gesturing me to come closer to him, great. I came to sit cross-legged and armed on the side of his desk. My back may or may not have obscured the view of the screen, and I had no intention of moving. “So . . . this tome and dagger, it’s from your PI stuff, right?”
“Yeah.”
“As in this case is not being run by Gabe’s team? Because you know I’m not supposed to be helping you if that’s the case and—”
I went for my wallet and searched for the hush-hush payment. I was only allowed to use the labs services if I was helping Gabe with a paranormal case. My PI work was off-limits, not that it stopped me from coming in and slipping Charles some greens to help me out regardless. I was no saint, demonic powers kind of disqualified me from that.
Charles pushed my wallet away from him. My head tilted. “What?”
“Don’t worry about it, there’s something else I’d rather have.” he said. “I’ve been meaning to ask you, what’s it like? You know, to be what you are?”
“I don’t feel any different.” I stowed my wallet away and my arms uncrossed as my hands formed into a cup shape, one that had an orb of ice form inside of it. You have no idea how hard it was for me not to smash it across his head. “Except for this shit, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it.”
He looked at my ice ball, rapidly jamming both his index fingers at it. “Ah, that’s new!” He examined my body which had become enveloped with a coat of ice water. “You’re branching out into different elements I see.”
“It was bound to happen sooner or later.”
“You have demonic magic, yet still remain your true human self. We Wiccan envy you so much right now.”
“And I envy you all . . .”
“Oh, come on, I’d give anything to be like you, it’s what we all strive for.”
I looked at the tome resting on the nearby table and moved over to it. “So that’s it? You’d rather ask me those questions than take the usual reward?”
Charles returned to his computer typing. “I get to update my notes about you and your magical development. That’s a better reward.”
“You are weird,” Emily snorted.
“And you are a Bakeneko,” Charles said, cocking a finger at her. “I haven’t forgotten about you, I’d like to ask you some questions for my notes as well.”
Emily’s ears grew limp. “Reika, please kill me when that happens.”
“We could go on a date if you prefer, make things less weird,” Charles said.
“With who?”
Charles changed his voice to sound super suave. “Any of you two lovely ladies, honestly. I’m not picky.”
Ignoring them both, I held the tome and flipped through the pages, looking to see if there was anything else I might have missed, though it didn’t look like it—
“Careful,” Charles said, darting toward me from behind, snatching the tome out from my hands. “I didn’t get a chance to test it for residual Umbral energy.”
My eyes rolled. “Whatever.”
“Reika, if someone used magic on or next to this, there might be traces of it. You being a magic user might taint that evidence!”
I left the tome with him and looked at Emily who shot me that I-don’t-want-to-fucking-be-here look, the feeling was mutual. On our way out, my phone chimed, a text message from Jim came in, meanwhile, Wayne, our weapons dealer still didn’t reply. Jim wanted to meet up for lunch tomorrow afternoon.
I winced at the situation.
Something was up. Jim was never one to hang out, and Wayne was never one to ignore the chance to make a sale.
Chapter Seven
I never understood the appeal for places like the New
York Aquarium, nor did I understand why Jim chose this place to meet up with his new client. We were surrounded by the sounds of children running up to the windows with aquatic life beyond them, their parents yelling at them to stay close to them, as the azure blue light of the waters shined upon them. Was I the only one that wondered what would happen if the glass shattered?
Perhaps that’s why I never enjoyed myself in places like this, was too busy thinking of bad things, rather than fun. Whatever, it kept my mind off the dry-as-fuck burger we had for lunch. It’s aftertaste still lingering in my mouth.
Jim stopped ahead of one of the wide windows, glancing at it with his face covered with his sunglasses and the board of his New York Yankees baseball cap pulled lower. It was the sign of a man that didn’t want to be easily identified.
I stood next him, looking at the floundering school of fish swim past ahead of colorful slabs of coral. “So, is there a reason why I’m here, Jim?”
Jim shrugged, keeping his gaze on the fish. “Paranoia hasn’t left my system.”
“That shit back at the hospital last fall still got you all on edge, huh? Or was it the phone call in the washroom?” I chuckled. “Ah, you poor baby.”
“I’ve been in my fair share of dangerous situations, part of the job, you know?”
“Yet you’re paranoid.”
“Hospitals are supposed to be a safe place; you know where you go to get healed? If you die in one, it’s because you entered in a bad state to start with. Nothing is sacred anymore.”
“So, the mighty fixer has turned into a little pussy, want me to hold your hand?” We certainly were standing close enough to do it.
He snorted. “Fuck off.”
“If anyone asks, we can say we’re on a date, I won’t let them know your secret.”
Wrath of the Demon Girl Page 4