“Guns down, ladies,” he shouted, leveling his weapon at Cynthia and Mariela. The two of them slowly complied, and Claire snatched up their guns, handing one of their rifles to Doug.
“Sarge,” Doug said. “Come on, we’re hunting a chupacabra here. We gotta stick together.”
“Shut up, Dougie,” Casey said with a groan. “We’re going to take these bitches back to the border, hand them off to their rightful owners, and collect a fat payday. You know they say Demi here liked to rip people’s fingernails off, one by one. That was just her warm-up too. Never even asked any questions until she was past that. Heard she was mighty handy with a power drill too—even heard she once castrated a man with a pocket knife while he watched. But the worst part is these weren’t the enemy she was butchering—it was our own people.”
“Is that true?” Pete said, looking down at Demi. “Is any of that…?”
“It’s true enough,” Demi said, slowly pulling herself back up. “I was ordered to interrogate American soldiers and contractors accused of aiding and abetting the enemy. Traitors.”
“Were they guilty?” Pete asked, his face pale. “Were you sure?”
“They all said they were,” Demi said. “By the end, they would say whatever I wanted them to. So no, I’m not sure. The only soldiers I’ve ever met who I was sure were dirty are you.”
“Maybe I don’t give you back to the cartel,” Casey said, glaring at Demi. “Maybe I keep you for myself and rip those fingernails off, one by one. Then I’ll find some interesting things to cut off you. I’ll do to you what you did to our brothers-in-arms.”
“I’d deserve that,” Demi said. “But you aren’t going to be alive that long.”
Claire suddenly let out a little gasp, a knife buried in the back of her neck. Blood dripped from her mouth, and Cynthia stood behind her and pushed Claire to the ground. Casey spun towards the Asian girl, but Demi leapt at him, throwing him down onto his back and straddling him. Her fingernails dug into his neck, drawing blood. He struggled to shove her off, but her fingers crept upwards, and with a surge of effort she drove her thumbs into his eyes. She wished she could say it was the first time she’d felt human eyes pop beneath her fingers, but unfortunately this was far from her first rodeo.
“You want my fingernails, bitch?” Demi growled. Casey screamed as she blinded him, and she rolled off him and stood, unholstering the sidearm she’d taken from him. She shot him twice in the groin, and he screamed in agony, blood streaming from his ruined eyes. She let him squirm for a few seconds before firing a final shot into his face, and he went still.
“Easy,” Doug said. He and Pete raised their hands in surrender. “We don’t want any trouble. We’re just here to kill the chupacabra.”
“Sarge was right,” Pete said, shaking his head. “You’re a monster.”
“Boo,” Demi said, too tired to feel bad about what she’d done.
“Let’s just kill them and get it over with,” Mariela declared. “I don’t want to have to keep watching my back. We’ve got a job to do here.”
“Don’t kill them,” Demi said. “You two go ahead. I’ll keep an eye on them.” Before she could say another word, Pete bolted, sprinting ahead into the desert. Mariela fired several shots after him, and he vanished just past a large rock outcropping.
“See if he’s dead,” Cynthia said to Demi. “We’ll make sure this one stays put.”
“Just relax, Doug,” Demi said before going after Pete. “It’s going to be okay.” She only hoped Cynthia and Mariela weren’t half as trigger-happy as she feared.
She made it to where Pete had fallen, only to find a large, dark opening beneath the outcropping. Pete lay in the dark about ten feet in, bleeding from a wound to his shoulder.
“Why’d you have to run, kid?” Demi asked, hopping down into the tunnel with him. Pete just continued to lie there, completely motionless. She took a step forward, and his body slid into the dark, but not of its own volition. Demi raised her gun and fired at whatever was in the tunnel, emptying her clip into the darkness.
A man stumbled towards her, naked and bleeding from a number of wounds. He was bald, his skin pale and covered in scabs and patches, many of them seeping or boiled. “Who are you?” Demi asked. He only stared at her with wild, vacant eyes, his skin rippling and contorting as he stalked towards her. He leapt into the air, becoming something else entirely, a vast black shape she couldn’t make out. She stumbled backwards, falling onto her back.
The tunnel suddenly echoed with gunfire, and the monstrosity collapsed on his belly next to Demi, reduced to his human form again. He breathed heavily a few times and then fell silent.
Cynthia and Mariela appeared at the mouth of the tunnel. “What the hell was that?” Demi asked, scrambling to her feet.
“Looks like a rabid skin-walker to me,” Cynthia said. “A few silver bullets center-mass should be enough to put him down once and for all.”
“Better behead the corpse and burn it,” Mariela said. “To be safe.”
“Yeah,” Demi agreed, staring down at the emaciated corpse. “Better to be safe.”
“Your friend is outside,” Cynthia said. “Alive. Take him and go home. We’ll clean up here.”
“Whoa, whoa,” Demi said. “We just killed a monster together. I want in on that.”
Cynthia and Mariela exchanged glances. “We could help you with that,” Cynthia said at last. “But first, we’ve got a body to burn.”
The Veil
Texas, April 2014
“You’re sure about this?” Doug asked from the backseat. Demi kept her eyes on the road, her vision blurry from driving through the night. It had been twelve hours to Lubbock from Santa Claus, Arizona, where they’d just wrapped up dealing with the ghost of a real estate speculator. Demi and Doug were new to this life, but their partners—a pair of witches that didn’t like to talk about their past—seemed to be seasoned hands.
“You’re ready,” Cynthia said from the passenger seat. Demi didn’t share the Taiwanese witch’s confidence. “Just stick to ghosts and you’ll be fine. Most of the time they can’t even hurt you.”
“Most of the time,” Mariela said. She sat next to Doug in the back seat. The Mexican witch was younger than Cynthia, her skin a pale alabaster, with thick, black hair that fell to her shoulders.
“Can we please not talk about the Victorville haunting?” Doug asked, looking uncomfortably out the window. The thirty-year-old was tall, his pale hair short-cropped, and his face narrow and elongated, giving him an equine look. “It was my first real case. How was I supposed to know the walls could bleed?”
“That’s funny,” Demi said. She reached for her coffee, her eyes still on the road. “I’m pretty sure we were all thinking of the Scottsdale haunting.”
“Oh,” Doug said glumly. “I’ve been trying not to think about that. I thought ghosts just passed through you… nobody ever said anything about all that ectoplasm.”
“You learn the hard way so we don’t have to,” Demi said with a dry chuckle. She was a couple years younger than Doug and just a bit taller than Cynthia, a few inches north of five feet, her tan skin and rounded features a mix of her Mexican and Polish heritage. “I know this was only supposed to be a temporary gig, but are you sure we need to split up?”
“You wanted to be hunters,” Cynthia said. “We can show you how, but American hunters are a simple-minded bunch. They don’t tolerate things they don’t understand.”
“You mean witches?” Demi asked, glancing over at Cynthia. She still wasn’t sure how or why a pair of witches wound up crossing the border into California to hunt monsters, and Cynthia and Mariela weren’t the most talkative pair. They’d taught Demi how to kill some of the more common varieties of monsters—silver, stakes through the heart, beheading, fire—and how to use salt and iron to keep ghosts at bay until the object or remains that tethered them to this existence could be purified or destroyed.
They’d taught her how to forge her own silver
bullets, how to spot the signs that the stranger eyeballing her from across the street was a werewolf or some other warg sniffing for its next meal, and how to determine whether the sounds coming from an old house were a genuine haunting or just the foundations settling.
She got the how—but they’d never stopped to tell her why. She knew why she did it—her life before all this had been a mess, and chasing after monsters was actually less screwed-up and self-destructive than what she would be doing otherwise. But she had no idea why they did the things they did.
“If they found you with us, they’d never trust you,” Cynthia said. “That’s if they didn’t outright label you an enemy and put a target on your backs. It’s safer this way.”
“What about you?” Doug asked. “What if they find you alone?”
“Little old me?” Cynthia asked, batting her eyelashes. “They should be so lucky.”
“This the place?” Demi asked. The sun crept up over the horizon, painting the world ahead a pale orange. Route 84 was starting to pass through an area with slightly more development than the decrepit fueling stations and tumbleweeds that had been their scenery for much of the drive.
“Turn right in about two miles,” Mariela said, unfolding a map in her lap. “Shouldn’t be much longer now. Sure you don’t want me to take over driving?”
“Yeah, you’re fifteen, so that’s gonna be a no,” Demi said.
“My ID says I’m twenty-two,” Mariela said with a huff. She looked back down at the map.
“Then you can use it to refill my flask while Doug and I handle this little ghost,” Demi said. “I’ve been running on empty for a few days now.”
“That’s not a bad thing,” Cynthia said. “What you’re looking for isn’t at the bottom of a bottle.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Demi said with a frown. She’d done a lot of things in life she wasn’t proud of, things that still left her waking up in the middle of the night drenched in cold sweat. Drinking kept the worst of it at bay, although the last few weeks she’d been sleeping like a baby. Hunting was actually doing her some good.
She pulled off the highway onto County Road 5200. It was little more than a single lane of macadamized pavement, tire treads evident in the dirt shoulder where the locals had devised their own workaround to make two-way traffic flow under the cramped conditions. Oil pumpjacks dotted the barren fields to either side of the road, and soon enough the pavement dissolved entirely into dirt.
“Now we’re really in Texas,” Demi said. “I think I may even wear my big-girl guns for this one.”
“You won’t need them,” Cynthia said quietly. “It’s not that kind of case. This ghost isn’t exactly unfriendly.”
“I don’t get it,” Demi said. “If it’s not a problem, why are we here?”
“It’s not a problem for us,” Cynthia said, turning to face Demi as the car rattled over the uneven road. “But that spirit that’s trapped in the Veil… it was a person once, and people loved it. Some of those people are still around, and they know it’s suffering. We’re coming out here to help them.”
“If it means less chance of getting drenched in ectoplasm again, I’m all for it,” Doug said with a chuckle.
“That’s enough out of you, Seabiscuit,” Demi said sharply. “This has got to be the place,” she said, pulling into a narrow gravel driveway barely wide enough to accommodate their vehicle. A cloud of dust rose up behind them, and the car bumped and rocked at a speed barely faster than Demi could have walked. The only break in the monotonous fields was a small family cemetery made up of a few dozen weathered tombstones, their inscriptions barely legible. Only a single grave appeared well-attended, a polished white marble headstone with a bouquet of brightly colored flowers resting at its base.
After the better part of a mile, they came to a gravel cul-de-sac where two houses faced across from each other in the middle of an empty field. One was a simple two-story structure with a yellow façade and a covered front porch that ran the length of the house, a trio of dormer windows jutting out over the porch.
Across from that house, surrounded by a sea of waist-high dead grass, was a far older structure, vaguely Victorian in design with an L-shaped porch wrapping around two sides of the house, each ending in a square turret jutting out from the corners of the house. Two large dormer windows extended at a ninety-degree angle to each other in the middle of the roof. The wooden porch had faded to gray with age, and the windows that weren’t boarded up stared out like empty black sockets. Demi cocked her head to the side. A young girl looked out from one of the second-story windows, the only one that seemed to still have all its panes intact.
Demi and the others got out of the car, and a man in a pair of faded jean overalls stepped out of the newer dwelling. “Old house has seen better days,” he said. He seemed about sixty, his cheeks bright red. He was piebald with thin edges combed loosely over his exposed skull. A woman with short blonde hair stood at his side, half his age, a pistol on her hip. Demi looked back at the old house, but the window where the girl had stood was empty.
“How y’all doing?” the woman asked in a heavy Texas drawl, coming down from the porch to shake Demi’s hand. “I’m Vera, this here’s my pa. Thanks for coming out here on such short notice.”
“No problem,” Demi said, glancing uncertainly back at the window where she’d seen the girl. “The two of you live out here alone?”
“Actually, I flew down for the occasion,” Vera said, pulling a silver flask from her hip and taking a long swig. “I’m a lawyer, a prosecutor out of New York. But you did an old friend of mine a favor in California a couple weeks back, and she passed your number on to me. Whiskey?” she asked, holding the flask out to Demi.
“Don’t mind if I do,” Demi said, reaching for the flask. Cynthia appeared at her side, pushing her hand down.
“Not just now,” Cynthia said. “We’re working.”
“Later,” Demi mouthed silently to Vera, tilting her fingers back in front of her mouth like a bottle. “So, your friend tells you we deal with ghosts, and you just get on the phone, no questions asked?” Demi said, eyeing the blonde attorney. “None of this seems weird to you?”
“Oh, honey,” Vera said, taking another swig of her flask. “We’ve got messed-up stuff in the big city same as everywhere else. This ain’t my first run in with this kind of stuff, so my eyes are wide open. I’m just not exactly equipped to handle it myself. But I can learn. That’s why I called the experts to show me what’s what.”
“Why don’t you tell us what the problem is, and we’ll go from there,” Doug said, glancing around at the handful of barns and sheds clustered around the two houses. Aside from those decrepit structures, there was nothing on the horizon in any direction, just miles of empty fields as far as the eye could see. Demi doubted she’d ever been closer to the middle of nowhere than right here.
“The old house there was where my Susie grew up,” Pa said, clutching his heart. “Been in her family six generations, plus three hundred acres. Not much to look at, but it was a place to call our own, a place to run free. I took on a summer job working in the fields when I was just fifteen. I’d seen her around before then at church or down at the feed store, but she was homeschooled so no one knew much about her. She was a couple years younger than me, but there was always something older about her, around the eyes—like she’d seen more than the rest of us. I used to see her up there,” he said, pointing to the window Demi had been staring at. “She’d be up there, looking down at the world.”
“Her pappy kept her locked up tight,” Vera added. “She was only allowed out of the house on Sundays to go into town for church and groceries.”
“Ah, but that never stopped her,” Pa said with a chuckle. “Aside from my angel here, I never did see anyone more beautiful than my Susie. I stayed on as a farmhand for quite a few seasons, and when I saw her staring out from up there, sometimes I’d stare back too, and eventually she noticed me noticing her. Nothing came of it for a
long time, but one day—must’ve been about seventeen at the time—I was asked to go up and clean the gutters. I was up there on the roof, and I hear the window slide open, just a crack, and I hear this thin, small voice call out like a whisper. ‘Meet me behind the barn at midnight,’ she said, and she shut the window without another word. That was enough for me. I met her like she asked, and the rest is history.”
“I think you may have left out a few things, Pa,” Vera said. “They still don’t know why they’re here.”
“Sorry, sorry,” the old man said, wiping sweat from his forehead with an old handkerchief. “Got lost in the memories. Anyway, when Susie turned eighteen, we ran off to Amarillo to get married. Got ourselves jobs at Bomb City—Susie answered phones and I mopped the floors, while the eggheads built atomic bombs down the hall. We didn’t have much except each other. I wanted nothing better than to move back down to the farm, but Susie said we couldn’t—her folks never forgave her for running off and getting hitched without their blessing. Her mother passed that first spring, then her father a few years later. I couldn’t convince her to go back for the funerals, but after she got pregnant, I finally convinced her to move back to the farm—although she insisted I build her a new house. ‘Built with love,’ she used to say. I wanted to keep the old house maintained, use it for guests and such, but Susie wouldn’t have it. ‘Let the devil take it,’ she said, and it went to seed.”
“It was built back in the 1820s,” Vera explained. “Our ancestors were homesteaders when this was still Mexico. To hear Ma tell it, the last time anyone renovated that house was when Texas was at war with Lincoln.”
“Now, darlin’, that’s not quite true,” Pa said. “Susie’s grandpappy put in electricity after he came back from the war.”
“Maybe,” Vera said, crossing her hands over her chest. “But he didn’t get around to the indoor plumbing.”
“That’s true,” Pa said, rubbing his neck. “Almost forgot about the old outhouse round back. But we built the new house state-of-the-art… for 1977 anyway. And it’s held up fine. It was a home to Susie and me and our girls for thirty-plus years.”
Demi Mondaine: Volume One Page 4