by Adam Dark
“You know that guy?” Ben asked.
“Let’s just get in the car,” she said, and when Ben unlocked it, she jerked open the back passenger door so the kid with them could get in.
The guy had reached them now and slowed down so he didn’t run right into Ben’s car. “Come on, Arcady,” he whined. “Don’t be like that.”
April closed the door behind the kid once he climbed inside and whirled to face this weirdo. “I don’t know who you are,” she said, slicing him open with her tone. “Stay away from me.”
The man leaned back a little in mock injury. “Aw, come on. That’s not a very nice way to say hello.”
“Hey, man,” Peter said, stepping around the car to stand on the other side of the supremely annoying dude. “Back off.”
The guy looked from Peter to April, and his smile faltered. He caught sight of Ben glaring at him, sniggered, and stepped back. “All right,” he said, raising his hands. “My bad.” He turned back to April and looked like he was about to spit at her. “You guys have a nice night.” Then he turned on his heels and stalked back across the parking lot and the empty street on the other side.
Ben got behind the wheel and waited for April to close the passenger door beside her. Peter got into the back next to the boy. “You okay?” Ben asked her.
She shook her head and glanced at him. “That happens a lot, actually. Gets really annoying.” She seemed to almost freeze up for a minute, then added, “Yeah, I’m okay.”
“Good.” Ben started the car and looked up into the rear-view mirror. “Where do you live, bud?”
“My name’s Kevin,” the boy muttered, staring into his lap.
Ben couldn’t help a smile. “All right, Kevin. I’m Ben. Peter and April.” The kid looked up just long enough to catch each of their gazes, then looked out the window into the yellow-lit parking lot. “Where we headed?”
Kevin nodded out the window. “Turn right out of the parking lot.”
10
It seemed a little weird at first that April suggested they get some dinner after they watched the kid step back through the front door of his apartment. First, Ben didn’t really get how she could actually be hungry after their little demon-tussle. Second, he was usually the one talking about food. Peter had almost immediately agreed, so Ben shrugged and pulled his car away from the curb.
Now, they were sitting in the pleasant warmth of Bert’s Diner, waiting for the burgers they’d just ordered. Ben couldn’t tell if this was an attempt to rally and let out a big ‘Go, team!’ or if they were all just trying to find some comfort in something they knew they could rely on. Eating kept a person going, like it was supposed to. But the mood was just a little dampened between the three of them, because yeah, that had been a little depressing. Plus, it was only slightly weird that April got confused for a girl named Arcady “all the time”, and Ben’s gravel-smacked hand was seriously burning now in the restaurant’s heat.
“Well, two for two, right?” Peter said, apparently trying to lighten what somehow felt like a huge bummer.
“Yep,” Ben said, feeling like a total jerk for not wanting to add to the enthusiasm. “We did it.” They’d left the metal box holding the pinkish demon crystal in Ben’s car, where they could at least pretend to forget about it for a while.
“Did you hurt yourself?” April asked, nodding at the hand Ben kept rubbing over and over.
“Oh. Just hit the ground a little too hard, I think.”
She studied him, that calculating frown darkening her brow for a few seconds. Then she nodded. “Did a spirit tell you what to say to banish this demon, too?”
Man, she’d entirely lost that air of curiosity and now asked her questions as if they were straight-up accusations. April was starting to figure out that he wasn’t telling them the truth about everything. Which was definitely a problem.
“Yeah,” Ben replied, rubbing the blood blisters on his palm. “Same one who told me about the demon at the playground in the first place.” When he looked up, April just pressed her lips together and nodded. Peter had his chin propped in his hand and seemed to be off in his own world somewhere. Why couldn’t they just celebrate the win? Oh, right. Because there was a whole bunch of other weird stuff they had to deal with first. Like who had sent them the awkward wooden cabinet that would allegedly hold up to ten demon stones? Or why had that doofus in the parking lot called April Arcady? Or when was Ben going to tell his friends that the list Chase had given them had actually provided a real demon sighting with enough information to get them successfully there and with another banishment point under their belts?
Probably now was the best time to get rolling with that last one, and it seemed like the absolute worst time. But Ben was a pro at digging himself into really deep holes; if he didn’t bring this up now, he’d have one more secret to regret keeping.
‘Nice,’ Ian put in. ‘Glad to know you regret this little arrangement of ours.’
I should have told them.
‘Yup. Take out the list.’
Sighing, Ben reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the mostly redacted list Chase had given him. He’d folded it about a thousand times, so it took a minute to get the paper back into something that looked like a piece of paper. And apparently, he’d caught his friends’ attention, too.
“Okay,” he started. “I think we should probably talk about this, too.”
“What is it?” April asked, not even glancing at the paper in lieu of glaring right into Ben’s eyes.
He cleared his throat. “So, I did actually have a spirit’s help with this last demon.”
‘Nice bending the truth.’
Shut up.
“With the words I had to say at the end and with finding it in the first place. But then… I mean, you guys, I couldn’t help myself. There was a small chance that Chase wasn’t actually just running us around in circles—”
“What?” Peter asked, blinking now and finally returning to their present conversation from wherever he’d been.
“Come on, Ben.” April nearly groaned it, tilting her head in that way only she and his mother had of making him feel like he’d just ruined Christmas for everybody for the next five years.
“I know,” he said, hoping they’d give him a chance. “I know you guys didn’t want to have anything to do with it. I know you hate the guy.”
“Hate’s a bit of an understatement,” Peter quipped.
“But if there was a chance that he could help us, I couldn’t just ignore it. So I did actually read what he gave us.”
“And you kept it.” April still hadn’t looked at the paper at all.
“Yeah. Because I wanted to show you guys what I found. Okay, so the rest of it is pretty much useless.” Ben smoothed the paper out on the table and flipped it around so both Peter and April could take a look. April didn’t even try. Peter glanced at it and rolled his eyes. “I know, he went a little overboard with the black marks. But look at the first line.” Both his friends just glared up at him instead. “Come on, guys. Please.”
Finally, April accepted the paper’s presence and slid it toward her across the table. She lifted it in front of her face and read the very short, very vague first line. Then she snorted and handed it over to Peter.
When he took all of the necessary five seconds to see what Chase had “given them”, his eyes widened just a little before he tossed the paper back onto the table. “You think the jerk’s got spirits telling him this stuff, too?”
Ben blinked at him. “I mean, it’s just as possible as it is for me to be talking to spirits,” he said, lowering his voice even more in the restaurant. “But I don’t think that’s what’s going on with him.”
“I’m guessing you already have an idea,” April added.
Wow, they really weren’t giving him any breaks with this, were they? He didn’t like Chase’s potential involvement in their work any more than they did, but they could seriously use the extra information the guy gave them. Espe
cially since Ben had only found the demon at the playground from Chase’s stupidly annoying list. Otherwise, the thing would probably have kept eating away at Kevin the way it intended for who knew how long.
Ben chose to ignore his friends’ snide remarks and hesitation. “Just on this first line. Well, what we can read of it.” He pointed to the paper. “These are dates and times of reported sightings. At least, I’m pretty sure that’s what these are. I’m willing to bet these ‘witnesses’ are all different people. Not necessarily telling Chase directly about what they see, but maybe posting it up somewhere we’ve never heard of.”
“Somewhere only he would know how to access,” Peter added.
Ben wanted to leap from his chair and shout a big Hip, Hip, Hooray. He wasn’t just talking to himself, here.
“I think so,” he said. “And I think that’s what he was trying to say by making up this stupid list to begin with. That he knows where to find more, and he’ll help us get to them if we, like… let him in.”
“You actually want to talk to him about this?” April asked, glancing back up at him from the list on the table.
“Well, yeah. I mean, it couldn’t hurt, right?”
“Maybe not you,” Peter said, gently prodding his cheekbone; most of the dark bruising had gone away, leaving only a dirty, brownish-yellow behind that really didn’t look awesome against his pasty skin.
“I know, Pete,” Ben said. “When we meet with him, we’ll just make sure it’s somewhere public. Like Speedy Joe’s again. So he can’t pull any more stupid stunts like the first time.”
“I can’t believe this,” April said. “You’re really considering letting him do this with us? Because his list happened to show where the next demon was going to be? That could’ve just been pure coincidence. Or maybe he found out where we were going tonight and just made it look like he had the same idea. Like finding us at the coffee shop.”
Ben took a deep breath. “He gave us this list before I knew about the playground demon.”
“Which is kinda weird too, don’t you think?” April tilted her head again and stared at him. “Then you were conveniently contacted by a spirit Peter and I can’t ever see?”
‘If you guys were standing in a round room, she’d still argue you into a corner.’
Still not helpful, Ian. And true.
Trying as hard as he could not to blink, Ben just said, “I promise, April, I did actually get information about the playground from a spirit. It just happened to be the same one on Chase’s list.” She really didn’t look like she was buying even this white lie; she’d gotten way closer to the truth than Ben wanted to admit.
“I think we should talk to him,” Peter said.
“Thank you.” Ben let out a long breath.
“For real?” April turned her super-judgmental gaze on Peter this time, but the guy seemed a lot less affected by it than Ben was. Which made sense, seeing as he hadn’t almost started some kind of relationship with her before she’d kissed Ian’s spirit in his body instead of him.
“Yeah, for real,” Peter replied. “I mean, spirits coming to have random talks with Ben and asking for his help is cool and all. But that’s not really something we can rely on all the time. Maybe Chase actually does have a system for finding the things out there that shouldn’t be out there, and if he does, we could use the help.” He scowled and took a long drink of water. “Man, just saying that makes me want to brush my teeth.”
“Wow. Okay.” April sat back in her chair and glanced back and forth between Peter and Ben. “I’m obviously out-voted, here. So if you have to talk to him, I guess, do it. Then let me know how it goes.”
“You’re not gonna talk to him with us?” Ben asked.
April raised an eyebrow at him. “No. I’ve said no from the very beginning, Ben. You guys do what you have to do, and I’m still in as far as hunting and banishing goes. But this guy’s a serious pain in the ass, and I don’t want to waste my time just proving that again.”
Hey, look at that. Perfect timing. Their server came back to the table with three plates of burgers and fries, smiling and asking if they needed anything else. They thanked the guy and sent him away, and Ben was even less interested in eating now than he’d been when they got here.
Peter shrugged and dipped a fry in ketchup. “Okay. We’ll let you know what happens.”
“Okay,” April said, then crammed a massive bite of burger into her mouth.
So just like that, huh? Ben was really starting to feel like the odd man out here, and it wasn’t like Peter and April were best friends or anything.
‘They might be soon,’ Ian so conveniently observed.
I thought I told you to shut up.
11
After their strained dinner and April’s not-so-subtle volatility, Ben had driven them pretty much in complete silence back to Peter’s apartment. April had just told them good night and got into her car right there in the parking lot. As forward-thinking as Peter was, he’d packed up all his stuff from Ben’s apartment that morning and stashed it in Ben’s car before they went to the library, which felt like days ago instead of less than twelve hours. So when they both went back up to Peter’s apartment—which they told themselves was to check if Peter’s thermostat issue had been fixed but was really to make sure the demon stone hadn’t jumped and jived its angry little way out of the wooden cabinet—they found things in a much better state than when they’d left it the night before and especially just a few hours ago.
For starters, it didn’t feel like Peter lived in a meat locker anymore. They walked through the door, definitely expecting it to be as freezing as it was outside, but the perpetual seventy-two degrees of Peter’s apartment had returned. It could have actually been that the thermostat had been fixed or fixed itself, or it could have been that dumping their first demon-trapping crystal into the anonymously sent cabinet had neutralized what Ben had really started to believe was the crystal’s effects on Peter’s place—freezing temperatures, moody Peter, all of it. Either way, it made a noticeable difference now, though he and Peter just looked at each other and Peter shrugged. When he finally dumped his huge backpack and the duffel he’d packed for literally one night at Ben’s, Peter returned to the kitchen counter, where he’d set the metal box with a new ticking-demon-bomb crystal inside.
“We should probably move the cabinet,” he said, eyeing the oddly crafted thing still lying on its back on the counter. “Like, so it doesn’t fall off or something.”
“Sure.” What he really meant, Ben knew, was that neither one of them wanted another preventable accident ruining what might have become their only way of keeping these demon-filled stones safely tucked away. At least until they racked up ten of them and had to come up with some other clever plan for what to do then. Hopefully, they’d have enough time between now and then to figure that part out.
Ben grabbed the wooden cabinet from the counter and followed Peter across the living room where, ironically, Peter indicated the floor right below the window. Yeah, the same place they’d found the last demon stone after it had moved by itself in the metal box. Good call. He felt the weight of the crystal sliding around a little inside the cabinet and reminded himself how badly this might go if he dropped something.
Together, they knelt on the carpet, and Ben set the cabinet down on its back again. Peter unzipped his jacket and nearly ripped it off, then picked up the metal box again and stared at it. “You think these things are anything like betta fish?”
“What?” Ben almost laughed.
“You know… territorial. You ever put two betta fish in separate fishbowls right next to each other? They go nuts.”
“Uh… pretty sure I’ve never tried to make fish fight, Pete.”
Peter glared at him for a minute. “I only tried it once. Come on, it was right after my mom told me not to. I was like… eight.”
“Okay…” An image of this newest pink-tinged crystal and the black-green one in the cabinet bashing against eac
h other all night entered Ben’s head, but he brushed it aside. “If April was right about that cabinet, I’m pretty sure we’re not setting up a demon-stone fight ring. The note said it could hold ten.”
“Yeah, if the note was actually for us.” Peter shook his head. “I’m still not convinced that package wasn’t supposed to go to a different Peter Cameron.”
Right, because surely there were at least three more of them living in the same apartment complex.
“Looks like it’s working so far,” Ben said instead. “Maybe April was right.”
“Yeah, about April.” Peter set the metal box down in his lap to look at Ben for a second. “What’s going on with her, anyway?”
“You noticed.”
“Yeah, kinda hard not to. She seems really pissed.”
“I have no clue,” Ben said.
“It’s weird that she’s so against talking to Chase again. I mean, yeah, he’s a douche. But he didn’t do anything to her.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“You think he really has something that might help us? Like, finding more demons and stuff. He can’t be much good for anything else.”
“Not unless he’s gonna try to convince them he’s got a gun in his pocket.” Ben chuckled; he couldn’t help it. Peter just glared at him. “Okay, sorry. But yeah, I think he might be able to help us.” And he still couldn’t even tell his best friend why—that the first item on Chase’s list had turned out to be good information they actually used to bag another demon and at least try to help that kid Kevin. They both just stared at the metal box again for a few seconds, then Ben took a deep breath. “So… we gonna try to stick that one in the cabinet, too, or what?”
Peter almost jumped where he sat. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess it’s all we got.” He turned the box over like April had and pressed the top panel until it clicked open, holding the other sides in place. Thankfully, they hadn’t been holding the pink stone in there long enough for it to move on its own; if it had at that moment, Ben thought Peter would have sent the whole thing flying across the room. Ben poised his hand over the tiny knob on the cabinet’s door and counted to three. The minute he pulled open the door, Peter slid open the box’s panel just enough for the stone inside to fall out. But it didn’t.