“Yeah.” Her Adam’s apple bobbed. “A voice whispered in my ear.”
We waited for her to elaborate, but she burst into wild laughter.
“You should see your faces.” She cackled. “You totally believe this stuff is real.”
The stuff totally was real, but Linus had no intention of sparking that debate.
“I tripped over my shoelaces.” She tucked her legs under her. “One must have come untied.”
This incident discredited her earlier confessions, and she must have worried we would ask for a refund.
“The other stuff was true, though.” She pushed to her feet, expression earnest. “Promise.”
“Mm-hmm.” Grier shook her head. “You can stay here tonight, but you need to be gone in the morning.”
“You must know the lore,” Linus said, rising. “I doubt we’re the first to mention it.”
“We get morbids in here all the time. Folks pay extra for the rooms with the most activity.”
That might explain the markup on their room, given its proximity to the stairs. Though Mr. Oliphant had given him a discounted rate after he made it clear he wanted the entire inn at their disposal.
Linus raised his eyebrows. “Morbids?”
“Folks who get off on death, the occult, whatever.” She eyed him up and down. “I pegged you for one the second you got out of your fancy rental.” She flicked a glance at Grier, who was arguably the most powerful necromancer of their time. “You seem nice. What are you doing with this guy?”
The expression Grier wore got stuck between amusement and insult and stayed there.
“Are you even married?” Kylie narrowed her eyes on Linus. “Is this really your honeymoon?”
“Yes and yes,” Grier answered for him. “And if you ever want to see another dollar from us, you’ll watch your mouth when you talk to or about my husband.” Grier’s eyes brightened on the word, and her joy was contagious. “Now shoo. Back to your room.”
“Fine.”
Kylie tromped upstairs without another misstep, and they watched her go, just in case.
“We’ve got time before the big day.” Grier stared in the direction the girl had gone. “She ought to be safe here for one night.” She shook her head. “Something tells me that teen is going to be trouble.”
Linking their fingers, they walked into the kitchen together. “Something tells me you’re right.”
Five
As I was wont to do, I snooped more while Linus puttered around in the kitchen. After our run-in with Kylie, he had added a sigil to the door of the second refrigerator to keep any unsuspecting humans out of our groceries. There was blood in there, his, and it would be a teensy bit hard to explain if Kylie got the munchies and rooted through our supplies accidentally on purpose.
Then again, she already thought we were morbids, a term I hadn’t heard in ages, so she might expect us to travel with chicken blood for satanic rituals.
Kids these days.
They had no proper occult education.
The pantry drew my attention time and again until I couldn’t resist the urge to tinker. “Do you mind if I get cracking on this lock?”
“Not at all.” He mashed a button on the blender, adding strawberries from a second carton into my nightly Vitamin L smoothie.
Pen in hand, I skimmed my memory then drew on a complex sigil that would work best. I pushed magic into the design, and it popped the lock with a satisfying snick. Eager as I was to get going, I left it intact until Linus could join me.
“Ready when you are,” I called, wiping off the sigil with a damp cloth in case we had more unexpected visitors. Say, apologetic grandparents or a harried mother searching for our stowaway.
Linus appeared at my shoulder, smoothie in hand, and watched me drink the first course of my breakfast like a good little half-vampire. And no, the need for blood and the truth of my parentage never got any less weird. Neither did the infrequent urge to drink straight from the tap.
Nutella-filled crepes topped with whipped cream and chopped hazelnuts came next, along with a side order of bacon. The dish was one of my favorite indulgences, and he was spoiling me rotten. As usual.
We cleaned up after ourselves and got ready to begin our adventure.
“Hellmouth, here we come.” I rubbed my hands together and drew open the pantry door. “Oh. Hrm.”
The pantry was a perfect cube of floor-to-ceiling shelves with an open door opposite the entrance.
The faintest whiff of sulfur tickled my nose from the yawning dark, and I almost sneezed twice.
“Why lock the pantry but not the basement?” I entered the small room. “Why leave this ajar?”
“Doors that open and shut on their own are a prerequisite for a haunted house,” he murmured, leaning around me for a clearer view. “You’re not getting spooked, are you?”
“Are you serious?” Grinning, I held up my arm to show off my goose bumps. “This is freaky as heck.”
Demons, the type from Christian hell, didn’t exist as far as I knew. That didn’t mean the lore didn’t come from somewhere. There were creatures aplenty in the world we shared with humans, and that didn’t take fae into consideration. They came in as many and as varied forms as anything born of Earth.
The possibilities were literally endless.
“As long as you’re enjoying yourself,” he said, planting a kiss on my temple.
“This is going to be epic.” I took out my phone and flicked on the flashlight. “It’s also going to be dark.” I shined the beam across the walls to either side of the rickety stairs. “I don’t see a light switch, do you?”
“Look up.”
“Well shoot.”
A single bulb had once hung above the top step, the simple kind of light you clicked on and off with a tug on a beaded chain. All that remained was a handful of wires where someone had yanked it out of the ceiling.
“Good thing we’ve got the advantage.” I tested the top step. “We should be okay.”
Necromancers came standard with excellent night vision. The light from our phones would be plenty to allow our eyes to adjust to the gloom once we got down there. And if we needed more, that could be arranged too.
“The blueprints indicate the basement itself is average.” Linus slid past me, slick as spit, then reached back for my hand. “Things don’t get peculiar until you reach the first subbasement.”
After he switched his phone’s flashlight on, he led us down. The space looked about how you might expect, except for its old wooden floors. I had never seen those in a basement. Only dirt or concrete. Then again, I had never been in a house built on top of a maze leading to the theoretical underworld.
“Do you smell that?” I wrinkled my nose but kept following the scent. “It’s coming from over here.”
The exterior walls were made from old brick, but the straight lines were broken in one corner where the neat rows deviated into an arch. A door appeared to be half buried, stuck between floors. No hardware was visible, and I wondered if it opened. There was only one way to find out.
“Do you see those marks?” Linus indicated rows of deep scratches across the planks nearest the door.
“They resemble the ones on your back.” I took a quick picture to add to our file. “Hard to tell if they were made by multiple creatures or the same one making repeated trips.”
“There are at least two,” Linus reminded me. “There could be more.”
Bending over, I pressed two fingers against the door, and it swung wide. “Well, hello.”
“There’s enough room for an adult to squeeze through, but barely.” Linus eyed the resulting hole with distrust. “Are you sure you want to go down?”
“Are you serious?” I snort-laughed. “I’ll flip a coin to see who goes first.”
“Cletus.” He waited for the wraith to manifest. “Search the area beyond the door. Make sure it’s safe.”
If you asked me, Cletus was throwing off smug vibes. The kind that said
I knew you would be lost without me. That sense of self was unheard of in a wraith, but I wasn’t complaining. Maud had been an opinionated woman. He was continuing the family tradition.
The wraith returned minutes later and gestured toward the opening with a long limb.
“Go on.” Linus angled his light for me. “Just be careful. Please.”
I planted a quick smooch on him then lowered onto my stomach and shimmied backward into the hole. Not gonna lie. I never would have done it without Cletus watching my back. Awkward as it might be honeymooning with three, it had its benefits too.
Once my feet hit another wooden floor, I stood back to give Linus room to join me.
The walls were coated in splotchy plaster that had crumbled onto the floors, leaving behind a chalky residue pocked with foot—and paw—prints. Linus read the spirits as feline, and he was seldom wrong. That meant we were dealing with catlike beasts who weren’t afraid of humans, or else they wouldn’t have ventured upstairs. And someone or something else. The fabled demon? Or perhaps the Oliphants?
Linus’s feet hit the planks beside me, and he dusted off his tailored shirt with a frown for its stains. Or the stink. It was hard to tell. They were both equally offensive.
“Your friends have been through here.” I flashed my light across the marks. “This place reeks, but it’s not the rotten-egg smell from the pantry.”
Ghosts didn’t poop, though poltergeists had been known to fling it, so our suspect pool was growing shallower.
“Whatever they are, they’ve been denning down here for a long time.” He pointed out piles of shredded fabric, what might be old nests made out of curtains or sheets from fifty or sixty years ago based on the design and the state of decay. “How are they accessing the inn?”
Using my modified pen, I drew a sigil for light on my palm and gave my phone a rest. I didn’t need a new light source so much as I worried about the battery. If we got stuck down here, in this rickety wooden construct, I wanted every ounce of juice I could squeeze out of it to dial 911.
“The basement door was open,” I reminded him. “Either they can go incorporeal, or someone is letting them in and out.”
The figure in the library parking lot came to mind. That person had been able to perceive Cletus, so the shadow cats ought to be visible to them too. But we hadn’t stumbled across anyone but Kylie in the inn. As much as she enjoyed mocking visiting ghost hunters, she struck me as a devout nonbeliever.
“The latter would mean we’re dealing with two distinct creatures.”
“Maybe the Oliphants are involved.” It was worth throwing out there. “That would give us a classic creature/human combo.”
“There are traces of magic,” Linus said, dusting off his hands, “but the Oliphants are human.”
“How sure are we?” I had been too busy wrapping my head around our plot-twist honeymoon to pay much attention to our hosts. “There are charms and spells that can alter a person, or creature, enough to pass for someone or something else.”
Thanks to my former best friend, Amelie, I knew that for a certainty. So did Linus, who had aided in her transformation.
“We can perform a simple test if we find them in the house.”
“Works for me.” I ventured deeper into the hallway. “We should add Kylie to that list while we’re at it.”
“I agree.” He pocketed his phone and held out his palm. “Would you mind?”
Linus was more than capable of activating a simple light sigil, but it warmed me from tip to toe that he preferred I do the honors.
“You’re getting spoiled.” I clucked my tongue. “There was a time when you worried a light sigil from me would set you on fire.”
“There was a time when I thought sweater vests were the height of fashion.”
Smothering a snort of laughter, I drew the design, and illumination burst from his palm. “There you go.”
The sigils provided more than enough light for our vision to adjust, but the deeper we traveled, the more peculiar and precarious the landscape grew. The wood was in decent shape despite its age, but the floors were buckled, and the brittle planks groaned to accept an ounce more weight.
How did the Oliphants sleep at night knowing their guests perched on the edge of this yawning abyss?
Lost in contemplation about the potential for lawsuits, I tripped and almost face-planted into a wall.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” I kicked a pile of extension cords snaking in every direction. “What are these doing down here?”
“Let’s find out, shall we?” Linus lifted one of the orange strands and followed it to where it plugged into a cracked outlet protruding from the wall. “I didn’t expect that.”
“Who puts an outlet in a maze?” I crouched to examine it. “See this?” I pointed out the dueling cartoon monsters plated in heavy battle armor on the outlet cover. “I remember when this cartoon released. It was a favorite of mine when I was a kid. That means this cover was added in the last fifteen years or so.”
“The wiring could be older.” Linus pulled a multipurpose tool from his pocket, which had replaced the knife I had stolen, and used its screwdriver attachment to remove the plate and get a peek at its guts. “Aluminum wiring. That dates it from the sixties to the seventies.”
“Aluminum wiring is bad, right?”
“Yes.” He replaced the cover. “Whoever has been using this outlet recently has been overloading it.” He pointed out scorch marks on the wall. “It’s a miracle they haven’t burned the house down around them.”
“It’s a pile of kindling,” I agreed. “I’m amazed there’s no water damage.”
Basements were notorious for flooding and moisture problems in our neck of the woods. Maybe this far north it wasn’t as big of an issue. Even with the brick perimeter shoring up the house’s foundation, I figured there would be more rot or mold, but this level was in decent condition. The next…who knew?
“The lower levels will tell.” He mirrored my thoughts. “Do you want to go deeper?”
“Do you think it’s safe?” The wiring worried me more than the creatures. “How accurate are the blueprints you found?”
“I believe we’ll be safe to go down another floor, maybe two. Beyond that, we’ll have to ask Cletus to scout for us.” He patted the pocket over his phone. “We can’t trust the blueprints beyond that point. They’ve been online for too long. Anyone could have seeded fakes. The first three levels down are the only ones that match up across all the records I dug up on the house.”
“Let’s go then.” I wished, just for a second, that Lethe were here. Her nose would have come in handy. So would her prey drive if these shadow cats proved to be tangible creatures rather than noncorporeal ones. “Lead the way.”
We walked another fifteen minutes before Linus indicated a warped hatch in the floor with a frown.
“There are more cords here.” He lifted the square of wood covered in nicks and shone his light down into the opening. “There’s a ladder.” He glanced up as the wraith appeared, no doubt summoned by his thoughts. “Well?”
Cletus drifted into the opening and performed his recon while Linus and I wondered at the modern touches to what he had been led to believe was a sealed relic from the inn’s past.
A low moan drifted from the darkness, and Linus beat me to the ladder. I’m sure he would say he went first because he stood closer, but I saw the bounce in his steps as he tested each rung along the way. He could be so adorable at times.
“You’re not going to believe this,” he called up to me. “Someone has been living down here.”
“You’re right.” I got down to his level. “I don’t believe it.”
Yet the evidence was scattered all around us. An inflatable mattress covered with rumpled modern sheets. A small flat screen TV fed into what appeared to be a Wi-Fi hub. A mini fridge stuffed with snacks and energy drinks. Clothes mounded in the corner, a rainbow of tees, jeans, hoodies, and sneakers in coordinating colors.
“This explains the open pantry door.” I rubbed my forehead. “Kylie didn’t say she stayed in a room at the inn. We made the assumption.” Aided by her fall down the stairs. “She said she comes here to hang out when there are no guests, but she never told us where.”
“Technically, she didn’t lie.” He picked up the drift of my thoughts. “She just didn’t tell us the truth.”
“She had to come up the stairs to fall down them,” I pointed out. “If she wasn’t staying in a room, she might have been spying on us.”
Nodding, he thinned his lips. “She might be working with our arsonist friend.”
“Heck.” The cat burglar getup meant we hadn’t seen their face. “She might be our arsonist friend.”
A weighty sigh moved through his chest. “What must her home life be like if she finds this preferable?”
Kylie and her grandfather had appeared to be on good terms at check-in, but appearances could be deceiving. Sure, he slipped up on the pronoun, but he was quick to apologize, and Kylie had laughed it off. Still, there might be tension we didn’t pick up on given the briefness of our interaction with them.
“A better question is how did these shadow cats get past her without her noticing?”
They would have made noise scrabbling through that door, the fact they roused Linus was proof of that. With the opening yards from her pillow, I couldn’t see her sleeping through the racket. Each time she touched the trapdoor to open it, her fingers would have found the grooves left from their claws too.
“The family has never gone on record as being harmed.” Linus didn’t touch Kylie’s things, but he examined them closely. “Perhaps the creatures are bound not to hurt her.” He glanced back at me. “Human perception of the paranormal is thin. She might not be able to see the shadow cats. It would make sense if she blamed any noises on mice.”
“It would clear her name as the arsonist too.” I rubbed my arms. “If she can’t see the cats, then she can’t have seen Cletus.”
“It appears as though you have chosen our method of testing the Oliphants.”
Assuming they were human, they wouldn’t be scarred for life by a visit from Cletus since he could drift right up to them and plant a kiss on their cheek without them noticing. Magic in the blood was required for that. However thin, however distant, it had to be there.
How to Survive an Undead Honeymoon (The Beginner's Guide to Necromancy Book 8) Page 4