He swayed but said nothing else. I drew a deep breath and looked at the hulking house next door. To the outside world, the bricks appeared bright and clean, but I could see stains of darkness climbing up them like choking vines.
I didn’t want to do this.
But I also trusted Gran, and she’d told me this was the way to go. I trusted she was right about this house, and my conversation with Bridgette had only convinced me it was a good hiding place. Darkest of darks and all that. I just had to put on my big girl panties and get it done.
Okay, maybe medium-sized panties. Surely I could squeeze my butt into those by now.
“Maybe a stretchy pair,” I whispered. Yes, I was talking to myself. I was scared.
I mean, really, the Sorrel-Weed house would be an easy place to monitor given it was literally next door.
I wasn’t going to be running all over town again. I wasn’t twenty anymore, thank you very much. We needed a work smarter, not harder plan.
“We can do this,” I whispered, trying to psych myself up.
But my feet slowed as we drew closer.
The Sorrel-Weed house was a tourist attraction extraordinaire. Lots of people went in and out. In theory, that would make it easier for someone to sneak in and out unnoticed. But it sounded like no goblin would step foot in there. Plus, if the council members had tracked the coin to Grimm’s room, they’d failed to sense that it had been moved to the one below—whatever tracking mojo (assuming it had any) it had wasn’t infallible. If it led them here, they’d probably assume it was tucked into Gran’s house.
Ugh. That wasn’t any better. It meant we all had to be out of Gran’s house for the next day and a half. But we could do that. In fact, it was probably a good idea anyway, given we’d already been attacked there once. I’d leave a note for the others in case I missed them.
The square that lay kitty corner to the Sorrel-Weed house and Gran’s place would work for a place to sit and watch. We could run shifts, me and the others, to keep an eye on the two places, and still stay tucked out of sight. I nodded to myself, satisfied with the decision. It would work.
As long as the weather didn’t turn cold and start snowing—highly unlikely—then we’d be fine watching from there.
I looked at Robert, knowing all my stalling was up. “Ready to go on a tour?”
“Friend,” he whispered.
I forced my feet to step onto the property, my knees knocking and my skin clammy. I had to pause a moment and clench my Kegels to keep it all in. You know what I mean.
Shit, none of this was good. I wanted to go back and talk to Gran again, to see if she’d thought of some plan B or C, but I didn’t.
“Robert, we have to be careful,” I whispered, and my voice seemed to pull the attention of everything in the house. The orange stone in the exterior walls darkened wherever those nonexistent vines ran, turning a deeper red until it looked as close to black as I’d ever seen. A black that swallowed the life around it and made the light of day dim.
My teeth clamped together with a pulse of fear that I struggled to swallow. Fear in a place like this would only make me more vulnerable to darkness. Gran had always told me that fear could weaken you as well as warn you.
Suddenly the fatigue that had been chasing me since I’d moved back into Gran’s house made more sense—sure, I’d been working hard and training lots, but this was bigger than that. Getting a good night’s sleep was nearly impossible with a house like this next door.
I paused on the top step. Maybe it wasn’t the goblin intruder who’d hurt Gran. What if she was fading because the Sorrel-Weed house was affecting both of us? In the shadow world, almost anything was possible, and it seemed as likely an explanation as any other.
I closed the distance to the front door before I could turn and run the other way. Knocked once, and the door swung open on its own, with no one behind it. Yeah, I don’t think that happened to everyone who came here either.
Beside me, Robert growled and I kind of wanted to do the same. Instead, I pulled a knife out of my bag, wishing that I’d strapped them over my jeans instead of tucking them away. I didn’t shout out “hello.” I knew better—I knew how the horror movies went.
Because more than likely someone who was not alive would answer me.
If not for Gran’s certainty that this was the best place to hide Grimm’s stuff, and for Bridgette backing her up, I’d already have been out of the house and running the other way.
“Matilda,” I whispered her name, hoping the lady of the house would show herself and help me.
The floorboards creaked under my feet, and I wrinkled my nose in self-disgust. I mean, I didn’t know the house well enough to avoid its creaking patterns, but still—I absolutely did not want to attract that dark creature’s attention if I could avoid it.
I let my feet go where they wanted, following some instinct that I wasn’t sure I wanted to acknowledge. Robert slid one hand into mine and I clamped down on his skeletal fingers, never more grateful for him than I was then.
Voices circled up to us from an open doorway. I found myself letting us into another room to stay hidden. Which turned out to be small but with a writing desk in it, a single chair, and a handful of fake coins piled in the center of the desk.
The sounds of running feet snapped my eyes back to the doorway I’d left open just a crack. A moment later, a group of tourists burst out of the door across from the main entrance. Stumbling over one another in their haste to leave, more than one of them had wide eyes, pale skin, and a sweat-covered face. I’d love to say it was from the heat, but I doubted it very much, which made own sweat glands turn on the faucet.
Fear had never looked so real, and it had never looked me so straight in the face.
The tour guide lifted her hands above her head, her dark skin pale with what could only be the same shock the others clearly felt. “Please, everyone be calm. Let’s make sure we’re all here.”
The group huddled together as the tour guide counted, nodding as she got to the end. “Okay, I think that’s enough for today. There are times that the ghosts of the Sorrel-Weed house are more . . . active than others, and it looks like it was your lucky day.”
“Lucky?” An oversized man with a bright shiny head ringed with brown hair stepped toward the tour guide. “That thing down there attacked us!”
The tour guide swallowed hard. “As I said, some days are better than others in terms of—”
“I want my money back,” he snapped and his hands clenched into fists.
For a moment, I saw them not as they were, but as the house saw them, and its perception fed into a story older than any of the living people who were there.
The large, overbearing white master, his clothing expensive and his attitude beyond shitty, beyond inhuman. Cruel. Unjust. And the diminutive black enslaved girl unsure if she should run or stay, trying to figure out the best way to protect herself since no one else ever had.
How many times had the house seen this moment played out in slightly different variations? Too many, far too many.
My eyes pricked with angry tears as I stepped out of hiding and entered the foyer. I found myself stomping on the floorboards with the heel of my boot without even thinking. Three times, drawing all the attention to me despite what I suspected it would mean. That the entity here would know I was inside.
Those three strikes reverberated through the room and, from there, through the house. Everyone in the group turned to look at me. I don’t know what they saw besides a forty-one-year-old woman with a knife in her hand, but that alone seemed to make enough of an impression.
“Everyone get the duck out.” I snapped the words and they seemed to lash at the tourists, driving them into action. They scrambled out the door in a pushing, shoving flash. Fat boy was at the front, shoving two women out of his way.
The tour guide was the last to leave. “Who are you?”
“A neighbor who specializes in stuff like this.” I waved my hand to
encompass the house. Because I wasn’t sure how else to describe what I did for a living and why I was there uninvited. “What happened?”
Her eyes closed and then opened wide. “Don’t go into the basement. Certainly not today. The demon down there is . . . he is wide awake today and angry. He cut a few of them, and he cut me too.” She held out her arms to show me long scratches running from the crook of her elbows to her wrists. Three strikes on each arm, six total.
“Demon?” It was my turn for wide eyes. Sure, I’d killed demons before, but I’d never set out to fight one. The first two had been accidental. “Did you say demon?”
She frowned and shuddered, rubbing her arms. “Yeah, I did. But you specialize in this, so you’re like a demon hunter then?”
I stared at her, horror flickering through me, shrugged and then nodded. “Yeah, sure, why not.”
“Be careful then,” she whispered.
And she left me there, alone in the house with a gawd-in-heaven, lawdy Jaysus demon.
15
“Here’s the thing,” I whispered to Robert as we crept upstairs onto the second level of the Sorrel-Weed house. “We need to hide this stuff here because Gran said it would be safe. And I gotta agree—if goblins are afraid of the dark, this place is the damn darkest.”
The plan was as simple as could be. Stash the stuff from Grimm in the desk in the room across from Gran’s. So, perfect, simple.
That was if I could make it all the way to the second floor without peeing my pants. Now that my anger was gone, fear ate at me like worms burrowing in deeply under my skin. I kept one hand on Robert, unable to let him go. He swayed along next to me, quiet as he’d ever been.
The tour guide’s words were still banging away in my head, which was my main problem.
She’d said there was a demon in the house.
I’d faced two demons before, killed them both. So you would’ve thought I’d be good with whatever I might’ve run into.
The thing was, I’d read up on demons after my encounters last week. The demons I’d faced were lower level, barely conscious balls of negative energy created for a single purpose and without any real thought behind them. As bad as they were—and they were bad, don’t get me wrong—they weren’t the worst of the bunch.
There were three levels of demons, it turned out, and each level had different subcategories of strength.
Initiate—the kind I’d faced and managed to kill. Even if I hadn’t killed them, they would have faded as the power used to bring them forward ran out.
Medial—temporary demons on this plane of existence. Stronger than the initiates and born of powerful magic that could keep them around for weeks, and even months.
Blood-born—the worst kind of demons to possibly deal with. Why, you ask? Because they weren’t created; they weren’t called forward; they were born. Born of a witch and given life so they could torture and kill, so they could drive fear and darkness into the world. They had a mind like any creature, but they could be solid or they could be incorporeal, which made them deadly as all get-out.
The only good thing was that the blood-born demons tended to be tied to a single place. Tethered like junkyard dogs. The demon in the Hanging Tree downtown was one of them; it couldn’t leave.
And I was pretty sure the same was true of the demon in the Sorrel-Weed house—which meant it was a blood-born demon too. It could bark at us and be as angry as it pleased, but it was stuck. And unless someone was dumb enough to go into his space, they were good.
Yet here I was, dumb as could be.
“Duck, duck, duck,” I whispered under my breath and Robert’s hand tightened on mine. My energy spiked, and I unintentionally pushed it into Robert. He groaned and tugged me sideways.
“Friend,” he said, and clacked his teeth together. The energy pulsed around and between us, suddenly darker than before, and it was as if I were drowning in water that was deep and cold. I didn’t let go of Robert, just gasped his name, and he tugged me upward out of the cold and into his arms.
Arms. Not bones.
I blinked up at him to see those icy blue eyes staring down at me. “Hey, Robert.”
“What are you doing wasting your energy to make me solid for a few minutes?” He helped me stand, his long dark hair pulled back from his face which allowed me to see the lines of his jaw and the concern in his eyes. I didn’t know why he’d suddenly become solid—as in, not just a skeleton—but the wild guess that wanted to come to the front of my mind was not one I liked. So I pushed it away.
“Well, I thought we could go on a tour, you know, like a date.” I grinned, knowing the grin was giddy with fear. “What a lovely house, don’t you think?”
Robert’s eyes slid past me to take the space in. “The house is lovely, but you need to work on your destination dates. This is terrible.”
I laughed, and the laugh was eaten up by the house, the positive energy sucked up like chocolate milk, but I didn’t care. “I just need to tuck this stuff”—I tapped my hand on my bag—“somewhere up in that room across from Gran’s.”
Robert blew out a breath and tugged me forward. “Quick then, in and out. Let’s go.”
We hurried upward—Robert doing as much pushing and pulling as I was doing walking—trying doors until we found the right one. The one that Matilda liked to stand in and mock Gran.
I half expected Matilda to be there, but she wasn’t. The room was empty. A small writing table was pressed against the wall, just to the side of the window, like Gran had said. Only . . . it wasn’t visible from Gran’s window. How had she known it was there? That thought caught me off guard, there and gone in a flash.
I pointed at the desk. “There, we can move that under the window.” It was my turn to drag Robert across the room, and he helped me lift the simple desk and position it just under the windowsill.
I dug around in my bag and pulled out the yellow envelope holding the pages written in Goblinese and the silver coin. Folding it in half, I tucked it into the desk drawer. “There. Nice and safe. Just another day and a half and—”
“Breena,” Robert said my name softly, “you need to turn around.”
As I gazed out the window, the skin on my back prickled as if I’d been touched with electricity. The glass reflected something behind me in the doorway of the room that should not have been possible. I mean, obviously it was because it was there, but I didn’t like it. “Maybe I don’t want to.”
“I don’t much want to look either, but here I am, looking,” he said.
I forced myself to glance over my shoulder. A mass of darkness filled the doorway, moving like smoke, only thicker. Way thicker than smoke.
“Oh, no, I don’t like that,” I said.
Robert backed up so that we were side by side, still holding hands. “I never much liked demons either.”
The darkness let out a low rumbling laugh that sounded less human and more animal. “Fools to come to me.”
I nodded, so beyond fear that my mouth took over when I probably shouldn’t let it. “Fools, yes, for sure. We should just go now. Robert, what do you think?”
“Going would be good.” He cleared his throat. “I mean, unless you want to stay for tea and biscuits?”
I looked at him, and I think I might have managed a single eyebrow quirk. Maybe it took bowel-twisting fear to give me that ability. “Tea and biscuits.”
“With honey?” He shrugged. “I mean, if we’re staying, we might as well be comfortable.”
“You will not stay. I will devour you!”
Oh, I got what Robert was doing. I winked at him. “You know, that bedroom on the first floor would be perfect for my office. I could put a giant Jesus picture right in the middle of the wall. Maybe throw in a few statues of Saint Michael.”
The demon hissed and spread out in front of us. “Insolent.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it even though my legs were jelly and I was pretty sure I’d never been so afraid in my life. “Not the first time I’v
e heard that.”
“No, it’s really not. I was there,” Robert confirmed. He grinned at me, laughing, and those icy blue eyes glittered with humor. “It’s a family trait, I think.”
The room went from bright and airy with sunlight spilling through the window to a darkness so complete, I couldn’t see in front of me.
“Oh shit.” I stumbled, barely able to keep my feet under me. All around me was darkness, death, despair. It crawled into me and reminded me of my lack of worth.
I was past my best before date.
I hadn’t even been able to conceive a child.
I was out of my league with Crash. Corb was using me.
This job wasn’t meant for me. I was going to get my friends killed.
No good.
Too old.
Out of shape.
Useless. Beneath notice. A joke.
Scared.
I was so scared that everything around me was a lie. That everything I was, or thought I was, was some fantasy I’d built on a stack of beliefs that weren’t even real. My heart slowed as tendrils of darkness wrapped around it and squeezed. Tears leaked from my eyes.
One less of your kind.
Sadness crushed me, and I bowed under the weight of the darkness and the truths it spoke to my heart. Truths I’d been trying to ignore, trying to re-write.
Glass shattered behind me, and a warm breath of spring air spooled in around me, cutting through the black weight that had taken hold of me. An arm wrapped around my waist, and then I was falling through the air, floating. Maybe I was dying. You saw a bright light when you died, from what I understood, and bright light burned my eyes . . . except I’d almost died just a week ago, and I’d seen nothing of the sort then.
This light . . . it encompassed everything. I couldn’t see anything outside of it, but I sure as hell felt the ground as I landed flat on my back, all the air rushing out of me, showing me that I was indeed still alive. At least for the moment.
I lay there, waiting for my lungs to kick back in, knowing they would but not sure how long it would take. To my left, Robert swayed, his long hair hanging forward over his face once more, his skeletal body rattling with what could only be fear.
Midlife Demon Hunter: The Forty Proof Series, Book 3 Page 13