by Krista Walsh
He hesitated a moment longer, then shook his head. “Last time I was here was a week ago. The screams were so loud I couldn’t sleep. I left and didn’t come back.”
“Then why are you here tonight?”
He dropped his gaze to the ground. “I heard about Jack and wanted to see for myself. At least see where it happened.”
“How did you hear about the murder?” she asked. “The police didn’t release his name because of his age.”
“As if that stops the rumor mill from spinning,” Emmett replied. “I knew Jack was coming here last night, so it didn’t take much to put two and two together when I heard some street kid had died here.”
He snorted and raised his gaze to the ceiling. In the darkness, Daphne couldn’t make out what emotion shone through his large eyes. “In the end I couldn’t bring myself to go past the second floor. Stopped for a smoke to work up my courage. Next thing I know, I’m drowning.”
His speech ended with such dryness that Daphne couldn’t help but chuckle. She took the few extra steps to the end of the hall. The door to the crime scene had been taped off, but she ducked beneath it, hoping she might find more evidence of what had happened to Jack now that she wouldn’t be distracted by his body.
She stayed close to the wall where she wouldn’t disturb anything and moved to the window with slow steps.
Back when the building was a hospital, this room wouldn’t have been large enough to house more than a twin-size bed and a nightstand.
The crack of a narrow door beside the entrance revealed a new space: a small closet that Daphne had missed before, too caught up in the wide-eyed corpse. In the darkness, the door appeared to move, but when she looked again it remained still.
Closing her eyes, she extended her mind across the small space. With alarming quickness, her stomach twisted and churned, and a burning bile rose up the back of her throat. Magic swirled around her — not her own golden warmth but a sour green-hued magic — and with it came a bitter aftertaste, like rotten food. Then the taste was overwhelmed by the smell of something putrid burning.
Daphne struggled to open to her eyes, but the magic held her firm. She sensed terror, the dry-mouthed, desperate terror of someone who had no idea what was happening but knew there was no escape.
“Hey!”
The jerk of her arm jolted Daphne out of her exploration, and when she opened her eyes, she found Emmett staring at her. His eyes were full of fear, and his fingers trembled where they rested on her arm.
“What the hell was that? You want to signal the cops that we’re in here? You started sounding like that voice I heard the other day. The one screaming.”
Daphne’s heart battered against her ribs. She couldn’t remember making any noise, but the dryness in her mouth persisted.
She felt like she’d been on the brink of a discovery, of finding the answer to what had infected this hospital. But she was relieved Emmett had stopped her when he had. Her chest ached, and her legs trembled when she took a step toward the door.
“Sorry. I guess I’m just…not used to crime scenes.”
The excuse fell flat on her own ears, and by his expression, Emmett didn’t believe her either.
“Any more questions for me, or can I go and bum another cigarette from someone?” he asked, casting her a glance.
“Go on,” she said, waving him away. “But a word of friendly advice — you might want to stay away from here for a while. I don’t think it’s the safest place to be right now.”
“No shit,” he said, and turned sharply toward the stairs. Daphne took another deep breath before she followed, giving one last look over her shoulder at the empty room.
With Emmett leaving, she could have the place to herself and see if the ghosts were up to chatting. Whatever had taken her over in that room had sapped her energy, and her eyelids were weighed down with fatigue, but time was short and she had to take the chance of trying again.
Ducking under the tape, she left the room and headed down the corridor to make sure Emmett made it off the estate before she made her attempt.
The creak of rusted hinges behind her made her stop. Ahead, Emmett kept walking. Dread crept through Daphne’s bones, but before she had a chance to tell him to run, a heavy weight slammed into her back. She was knocked to the floor, her breath bursting from her lungs. Deep claws slashed through her shirt into her skin, and a dark shape launched itself at Emmett.
The two shapes disappeared into the shadows, and all Daphne heard were screams.
7
Daphne jumped to her feet and hissed through her teeth at the sharp pains shooting out from the gouges in her back.
She raced down the hallway toward the stairs and sprinted downward, stumbling over the bottom step as she reached the second-floor landing. Two dark shapes grappled nearby on the floor. In the glow of the streetlight, she saw Emmett trapped on the bottom, his gangly arms showing an unexpected strength in his efforts to push the other shape off him.
Daphne gathered the air around her into a tight ball between her palms and projected it at the creature. The strike hit with enough force to send the beast careening across the floor.
Emmett lay unmoving, but Daphne couldn’t go to him and risk giving the creature time to recover.
Through the searing heat of her injuries, she grabbed her magic and stirred up the dust and grime in the hallway. The particles created a whirlwind around the creature, pressing the air and earth closer to its face. It shrieked and beat its arms against the mini-tornado, but couldn’t break free of the pressure containing it.
In the brief moment of reprieve, Daphne assessed their attacker. Wisps of stringy black hair hung loosely over its bony skull and its skin was shriveled and black — the complexion of a charred corpse. Glowing green eyes leered at her with ravenous desire. Drool slavered down its chin, but no teeth were visible in its hole of a mouth. It reached for her with claws as long as its fingers, its bony arms straining forward from a hunched-over spine that suggested it was accustomed to moving on all fours.
It was strong.
Strong enough that before Daphne had time to reach for another spell, it broke through its pressurized prison and tore toward them.
Emmett had regained consciousness enough to cry out and press himself against the far wall. Daphne refocused her intentions and threw a spike of pure magic in the beast’s direction. The power forked like golden lightning, the flash of it lighting up the room.
The spell hit the creature in the chest as it launched itself at her, but the damned beast didn’t even slow down. The magic fizzled over its skin like tiny electric shocks as the creature landed on her.
The weight of it knocked Daphne off her feet once more, but she’d been braced for the attack and managed to flip the beast onto its back with a twist of her hips. She straddled it and pressed one hand against its throat. The charred skin crinkled under her fingers, and Daphne clenched her teeth to stop herself from gagging.
She drew her magic together and used the weight of the air to keep the creature’s limbs pinned to the floor. It twitched under the pressure, the dark mouth opening and closing.
“What are you?” she demanded.
A sharp and gritty shriek emitted from the creature’s mouth, and Daphne turned her face away from it, cringing as the sound delved into her ears. A dark red tongue shot out from the center of the gaping mouth and caught her cheek. Hardly a tap, and yet it threw her to the floor. Pain blossomed under her skin and her blood boiled, every inch of her screaming for escape from the heat.
Through tear-blurred eyes, Daphne watched the creature leap away from her. Emmett shouted as it raced toward him. He crouched down and buried his head under his arms, but the black figure darted down the stairs without acknowledging him and disappeared.
Daphne groaned and rolled onto her back. The agony of the gouges between her shoulder blades burst through her wooziness, and she saw shapes forming in the cracks on the ceiling. The hallway spun in quick circles,
upside down and sideways. One moment she was on the ceiling, the next she teetered on the wall.
Emmett’s face appeared over hers. He shook her, and his cold touch on her hand drew her mind back to the room. His mouth moved, repeating the same shapes over and again, but it took a minute for Daphne’s brain to translate the string of curses falling from his lips.
“You speak to the gods with that mouth?” she slurred, and pushed herself onto her elbows.
The room swayed again and her stomach lurched, but then everything settled as her magic flooded through her in reaction to her body’s stress. Her back went numb, and the only lingering effect she could feel from the creature was a faint warmth in her blood from the scratch on her cheek. She knew the magical block wouldn’t last long, though. She dug beneath the hidden pain to the source of her magic and drew some of the power toward the gouges in her back, relying on it to heal her enough to get outside.
She had no idea how she would get herself home.
“What the hell are you?” Emmett asked.
“The answer is very long and complicated,” Daphne replied, and the words came out only slightly clearer than before. “My recommendation is to go to the nearest liquor store, drink yourself into a stupor, and forget you ever saw any of this.”
It occurred to her that he was probably well under the legal age limit, but extreme circumstances called for extreme alcoholic measures.
Her thoughts settled and she eased herself to her feet, grunting as the muscles in her back pulled. The returning pain already tingled on the edges of her torn skin, and she wondered if she could make it to her car without throwing up. Or without going into a ditch. She let out a sigh at the thought of how driving would only be the start of her troubles. Her hoodie and shirt were for the trash, and she didn’t want to think of her mother’s reaction when she got home.
Mom.
Dinner.
Shit.
She checked her watch and released another groan. Ten o’clock. The chances of making it in time for oven-warm ziti were gone, but if she was lucky her mother hadn’t thrown the leftovers in the trash out of spite.
She tried to head for the stairs, but dizziness and pain stole her breath, and she sagged against the wall. The temptation to draw on her magic to heal herself called to her from the depths of her consciousness, which had begun to turn spotty on the edges of her vision. She swallowed the desire down and clenched her hands at her sides to control the trembling in her fingers. Repairing the damage the creature had done would take too much power, and she was afraid of pulling too much, of going too deep.
She pushed through the light-headedness and took a step, but another bout of dizziness stopped her.
Emmett stepped in her way and wrapped his fingers around her arm. “You just beat the shit out of that monster by shooting light out of your hands. Not something I’m just going to forget. I want to know. What are you?”
Daphne eyed him, saw the earnest fascination in his eyes, and knew she couldn’t trust him to keep his mouth shut. The last thing she needed was a kid on the street spreading rumors about her.
Then again, the way he kept fidgeting made her wonder if he was usually too high to be taken seriously.
“I think whatever you’re hopped up on is messing with your perceptions, my friend.”
Emmett released her as though she’d burned him, his awed expression morphing into fury. “You think because I spend my nights in some old hospital that I’m shooting up or something?” He tugged up his sleeves to display his forearms, but in the poor light Daphne couldn’t tell what the gesture proved. “When you’ve seen what I’ve seen — my brother OD’d, all right? I don’t touch the stuff. I saw what I saw because it happened. If you don’t want me to go downstairs to the cops and tell them you’ve been snooping around, how about you tell me what that thing was?”
Daphne grunted and called his bluff. “If you tell the police, you’ll be in just as much trouble as I will.”
“What do I care?” he said. “Roof over my head for the night.”
They glared at each other in the darkness. After a minute, Daphne dropped her arms and resigned herself to another night of fast food. She’d have to hit the gym soon if she didn’t start taking better care of herself.
“Come on, help me get out of here.”
She latched on to his arm and leaned her weight on him to get down the stairs and out the back door. She checked to make sure the uniformed officers weren’t sweeping the backyard, then headed through the knee-high grass toward the side of the house.
She hated what she needed to do next. More questions would be asked, and she would have to decide how to answer them. She’d designed her life never to wind up in the situation of non-supernatural folk finding out what she was, yet it was about to find her anyway.
Keeping her weight on Emmett’s arm and her attention on high alert for the police, she guided them toward the street.
***
For the second night in a row, Daphne knocked on Denise’s front door, hoping Denise would answer instead of Bob. Bob had a bad habit of sticking his nose into other people’s business, and the fewer people asking questions about what happened, the better.
Fortunately, the luck that had abandoned her twice at Peony House had now returned. Daphne spied a surprised Denise staring out at her through the window beside the door. A moment later, the door opened, and Denise stepped forward to appraise Daphne with a clinical eye.
“What the hell, Daphne? What happened to you?” she asked.
“A whole lot,” Daphne said, stepping forward on wobbling legs into the house. “But I promise I’ll explain.”
Denise snorted as she trailed after her down the hallway. “That’d be a first. Have you called an ambulance?”
“No,” said Daphne, and then grabbed her friend’s arm when she moved toward the phone on the wall outside the kitchen. “Trust me, there’s no point. I just need some help cleaning it out, and I’ll be fine.”
Denise glanced at Emmett, who shrugged and shook his head. Denise rolled her eyes, then ignored him as she guided Daphne to the ratty couch in the living room and helped her ease down on her stomach.
“Stay still,” Denise said, and she disappeared into the bathroom. She returned with a red first aid kit and two large towels. She dropped herself on the edge of the sofa and clucked her tongue. “For God’s sake, Daph. What did this?”
Daphne cringed as her friend nudged the shreds of her hoodie out of the way to get a better look at the damage underneath.
“I’d also like to know that,” said Emmett, “considering it almost killed me, too. So far, the lady’s not much with the answers.”
“And who are you?” Denise asked him.
“No one,” he replied, refusing to look her in the face.
Daphne guessed his sideways glance was something he’d picked up on the streets to avoid getting his ass kicked.
“His name is Emmett,” she answered for him through clenched teeth. “I found him at Peony House. Emmett, this is Nurse Denise. Now if we could move past the introductions…”
Denise continued her gentle examination of Daphne’s back. “This happened to you at the old hospital? How? No one’s allowed near there now except the cops.”
“You think that’d stop me?”
Denise grimaced. “It should have. But no, I was referring to whatever attacked you. These look like animal claws. I’ll need to get these layers off you to have a better look. Emmett?”
Emmett made a sound of protest, but cut himself off, no doubt having received of one of Denise’s no-nonsense nurse glares. Daphne released a sigh of resignation. She wasn’t too thrilled about the idea of a teenager she’d just met catching her in her underwear. She had no desire to become spank bank fodder.
As they worked to remove first the hoodie and then the button-down shirt, sweat trickled down Daphne’s face and her stomach did flip-flops that threatened to bring up the morning’s bagel. The fabric clung to the
dried blood and the threads tugged at her as they snaked out of the deep gouges. She bit down on the afghan as she balanced on the edge of consciousness.
When she finally lay only in her bra, Denise’s exclamation of horror and Emmett’s curses gave away the extent of the damage.
“I’d feel much more comfortable if you went to the hospital for this.”
“I would just ask for you anyway.”
Denise groaned. “Take her hand,” she said to Emmett, who hovered on the edge of the couch, as if ready to bolt. “I need to clean this out, and it’s going to hurt like a son of a bitch.”
Emmet groaned, but didn’t argue. He shifted across the carpet to sit next to Daphne’s head and took her hand.
Denise tucked the towels on either side of Daphne to protect her couch, then rested her hand on the small of Daphne’s back.
“I’m sorry in advance. Scream if you need to.”
Daphne was just about to express her preference not to disrupt the entire house when Denise poured the alcohol over the gouges. She buried her face in the couch cushion instead as her skin, the space under her skin, and even her blood caught fire. She wished she could pass out. Her magic enveloped her, cradling her psyche to keep it protected against the chemicals pumping through her system. She fought against it, not wanting to rely on her magic to see her through the pain, but her body sagged with exhaustion, and she didn’t have the strength to push the energy back down. Her power flooded the gaps torn open by the creature’s claws, and the fire dulled into a cotton-batting numbness.
The pain eased, and as the black spots receded from the edges of her vision, she realized she’d tightened her grip on Emmett’s hand during the process. His cheeks had gone pale and his gaze was glued to her back. She squeezed his fingers to bring his attention back into the room, then let him go and tucked her arm under her head.
“I hope I didn’t wake up the kids,” she said, her voice coming out as a croak.