Demon Leap: an Urban Fantasy (The Specials Book 1)

by Tricia Owens

  “Not yet, but it’s coming and I’ll die before I wear their tag.”

  I regarded him with amusement. “I have to say, Wolfie, you sounded sort of badass just then.”

  I bit my lip to hold back a laugh as the back of his neck reddened.

  “You laugh, Arrow, but the future that the government is constructing will make you long for death.”

  That was a mood killer and a half.

  The backyard of Snelling’s home was enormous, stretching back a half acre or more with a pristine swimming pool in the foreground and manicured lawns and gardens stretching into the distance. I didn’t care about any of that. My current concern was how difficult it would be to break into his home.

  Turned out it wasn’t very. Three-quarters of the back wall of the house was comprised of enormous sliding glass doors. When opened, they created a lanai effect. They were conveniently open now.

  Wolfie and I walked right into the huge open kitchen where Snelling was whistling as he put together a salad. He was my height with thick blond hair pulled into a short ponytail at his nape. He was dressed in a mint green polo shirt and khaki Bermuda shorts with loafers.

  “You seem pretty relaxed for a man out on bail for murder,” I said loudly.

  Snelling yelped and dropped the bottle of olive oil he’d been using, spilling its contents across the counter. He spun and pressed himself against the counter, unmindful of the oil that soaked into the back of his shirt.

  “Who—Who are you?” he gasped.

  “We’re here to ask you some questions about what you did, Mr. Snelling,” I told him as Wolfie moved to block Snelling from bolting into the living room. “Answer them truthfully and we’ll leave.”

  “Oh, my god. Oh, my god. And if I don’t?”

  “My big friend here is a Master level KE specialist,” I lied. Wolfie was certainly powerful enough to perform major KE, but he was untrained. Skill-wise he was the equivalent of a novice. “He might make a hole in you if he thinks you’re lying to me.”

  The blood drained from Snelling’s already pale face, making his freckles stand out so that he looked like he’d been sprayed in the face with dirt.

  “What do you want to know?” he whimpered. “I didn’t do anything! I mean, yes, of course, they say I did—and oh, my god, Bedelia—but I don’t remember a thing! I swear I don’t. I’m innocent!”

  “Bedelia was the name of the woman you killed? Your secretary?”

  “She was the best! The absolute best. Why would I kill her? She was so efficient!” Snelling shook his head wildly. “I’m a mess without her. I don’t know where the key to my mailbox is, my calendar makes no sense to me, I—”

  “Stop. Babbling,” Wolfgang growled, sounding pretty fierce. I was impressed.

  Snelling whimpered and cowered away from him. “I’m sorry! I’m just so—this is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, you have no idea!”

  I didn’t like this man.

  “Calm down,” I snapped at him. “I’m going to ask you some questions. You’re going to answer. Then my scary friend and I are going to leave. Whatever happens to you after that I don’t care about, got it?”

  “Yes. Yes, I’ve got it.”

  “Alright, tell me what you do remember of the day you killed Bedelia.”

  He blinked rapidly several times, as if struggling to recall the memory. “It was a normal Tuesday morning. Around nine. Bedelia was already at the office. She insists on prepping it before I come in.”

  “Prepping?” I asked.

  “Turning on all the lights, adjusting the temperature, opening the blinds—that sort of thing. She thinks—thought,” he corrected himself with a gulp, “that I shouldn’t have to deal with the little stuff. That’s her—that was her job.”

  “What happened next?” Wolfie demanded.

  Snelling started and shot a fearful look at him. “It was around nine-fifteen when Bedelia called me over to a corner of the office. There was…oh, Lord, I don’t know how to describe it. It won’t make any sense and you already don’t believe me...I didn’t even tell the police this.”

  I tried not to sigh with impatience. “Just say it.”

  “There was a—an impression of a man in the corner of the room.” He flushed with color and searched my eyes anxiously, desperate for me to believe him. “But there wasn’t a man there. There was nothing there at all. But you know how you enter a room you think is empty and then you feel someone looking at you and you turn around and someone was there, after all? It was like that. I wasn’t crazy. Bedelia noticed it, too. She screamed a little at first, thinking it was his shadow and he was standing elsewhere. But he wasn’t. There was no one there. And then—” Snelling choked up, his hands flying up to cover his face. “And then the next thing I knew I opened my eyes and I was surrounded by smoke and the smell of—the smell of—oh, god, I can’t say it! Bedelia was burned alive right there in my office! Right in front of me!”

  He sobbed for half a minute before slowing into hiccupping breaths. He lowered his hands to clutch at his shoulders, allowing me to search his face for deceit. But if Snelling was lying, it was a lie that he wholeheartedly believed. He was nearly hysterical.

  “How could she be burned?” I asked, keeping my voice low and quiet, trying to keep him tethered. “Was there a nearby source of flame?”

  He cringed and avoided my eyes. “I’m—I might be a novice level Pyrologist,” he mumbled.

  “So you did burn her.”

  “I’m only fire sensitive!” he argued. “I can detect what’s flammable and tell you what temperature is required to ignite it and how long it will burn. I don’t create fire. I’ve only ever done that twice in my life, while I was going through puberty, for god’s sake. Why do you think I sell corporate fire insurance? That’s all I’m good for!”

  “But to enter Pyrology you had to test for a fire talent,” I pointed out. “You couldn’t have entered the program without the ability to summon fire, even if it’s only a tiny flame.”

  He sagged against the counter. “I didn’t burn her,” he murmured. “I don’t know what happened. Someone else must have come in. I must have fainted, or-or they knocked me unconscious. Something. Anything. I would never have done that to her. She was my friend.”

  I believed him, but that wasn’t good because that only complicated matters. A check with Wolfgang showed that he wasn’t skeptical of Snelling’s story, either.

  “Say you didn’t do it,” I hypothesized, inspiring Snelling to stand up straighter. “Why would anyone want to kill your secretary? Did she have enemies? Debts? Troubled relatives?”

  “No! Nothing like that. She was estranged from her family but only because they’re old fashioned. None of them are criminals. Bedelia was as sweet and innocent as they came.” His lower lip trembled. “And now she’s dead.”

  “No one’s perfect. Bedelia had secrets. We all do. I think you know what they are, Mr. Snelling. I think you’d better tell me before my friend grows angrier.”

  He tensed and shot a frightened look at Wolfgang, who played up his part by raising his two fists ominously in front of him as though preparing to use KE to blast Snelling through the wall.

  “If she had secrets I don’t know what they are. I’m telling you the truth!” Snelling slid along the counter, edging away from Wolfgang. Suddenly he spun around and flailed along the countertop, looking for something to grab. He ended up snatching the now-empty bottle of olive oil he had been pouring earlier. “Don’t come closer!”

  “Go ahead,” I said, acting bored. “Throw it. I’m an IMT specialist. Give me a challenge.”

  His expression crumpled. I thought he might cry but he managed to stave off the tears.

  “Bedelia’s family,” I prompted. “You said they didn’t get along with her because they’re old fashioned. What does that mean?”

  He blindly set the empty bottle on the counter and slumped, resigned to continue the interrogation. “Her family is strange. They
tried to force her to school for Astral Projection but she had no interest in it. Her magic was different, blood born. But that was the problem. They’ve been doing everything they can to deny what’s in their blood. They’re purists.”

  I leaned forward, sensing a breakthrough. “What’s in their blood?”

  “It skipped a generation in her family. Bedelia told me that only her grandmother was—”

  The shadow entered the house the same way that Wolfgang and I had—through the opened sliding doors. I felt it before I saw it: a mist that was deathly chill, like the air in a meat locker or in a crypt. When I saw the dark shadow, the same that had stalked me in the alley outside Ozium, I stumbled back, one hand automatically going for the dart gun I’d meddled.

  The shadow reached Snelling first.

  It swarmed over him, partially obscuring him in darkness. Whatever it did to him inspired a blood-curdling scream from the man. He swatted at the shadow and blindly careened around the kitchen, ricocheting off the counter and against the refrigerator. By then I had my dart gun in my hand, but what could I aim at?

  Flames filled the air in front of Snelling’s palms.

  “No, Snelling, don’t!” I shouted.

  Too late. The fire he’d conjured caught on the olive oil slicking his hands and forearms. It raced up his body. Once there, it made the quick leap to his oil-soaked shirt. Smoke billowed around him a second before the shirt went up in blazing flames. Snelling’s horrific screams stabbed into my ears.

  A barbed dart would be nothing compared to being burned alive so I aimed the dart gun and fired. As I’d feared, the dart passed harmlessly through the shadow and lodged in Snelling’s right shoulder. The awful tenor of his wailing didn’t change at all. He existed in a place of pain and horror that nothing could pierce.

  The shadow abruptly reared, rising up off Snelling’s flame-covered body. It curled against the ceiling before tunneling down straight at me. With a shout, I dove to the side, tumbling behind the rolling butcher block island. In the spot where I had stood just moments ago, the shadow roiled like a swarm of bees struggling to regroup and change direction.

  Behind it, I glimpsed Wolfgang running toward Snelling with an outstretched throw blanket that he must have found in the living room. I would have cheered him on but the shadow had reoriented itself and rushed straight at me.

  I still held the dart gun so I swiftly meddled it into a powerful wind turbine. I hadn’t fully expected it to work, so when the shadow tumbled back in rolling curls of darkness I let out a shout of triumph.

  But I celebrated too early.

  The shadow suddenly split and rushed around the turbine and straight back at me. I didn’t have time to put up a defense. I gasped in terror—and breathed the thing inside me.

  It felt like an invisible hand had punched its way up through the top of my mouth and into my brain. The violence in the act was terrifying, but there was more. Worse. A terrible violation that made my breath stutter in my lungs and trapped a scream in my throat. The shadow smashed my consciousness down as though crushing an empty soda can. I felt my memories, my thoughts and dreams, my fears and desires—everything that made me Arrow St. Marx—compressed beneath unrelenting pressure. Then, once the song of me was flattened, thrust into a distant space inside me, something tried to step into me.

  Impressions battered me: a clawed foot, a legion of eyes, too many limbs to provide any sort of advantage and it seemed to know this and resent it. Fury and malice and a hate so sharp it could slice came with it, aimed at me and at all humans. Sorrow and grief and unrelenting pleasure in all of it.

  A primitive part of my brain howled in horror and outrage, cracking my mental prison. A single memory burst free: my father proudly handing me a postage stamp which bore the likeness of my grandmother’s face.

  This time the fury was mine. My conscience smashed against the force pushing me down and then I was roaring and clawing past it, tearing away darkness and sickness and emerging into the light, into me. I gasped and found myself sprawled on the floor of a kitchen, drenched in sweat and drooling, my head aching as though I’d been struck by a frying pan. The shadow was gone, but the foul memory of the mental invader continued to echo in my head like a bell tolling my death. Taunting me. Haunting me.

  A tear slipped out of the corner of my eye. Then another. I angrily dashed them away with the back of my hand, refusing to give in to weakness when I couldn’t be sure that the enemy had gone.

  I scrambled to my knees and then to my feet. But the shadow had indeed left. The darkness that lingered in the kitchen was the result not of a supernatural being, but of smoke.

  I covered my mouth and backed away from Snelling’s blackened body. It lay smoking on the floor beneath the singed blanket that Wolfgang had used. I thought I might throw up, but I didn’t get the chance. Wolfgang grabbed me by one arm and dragged me out of there. I stumbled after him, seizing a huge lungful of clean air once we were outside and rushing back to the wall.

  “Wolfie,” I whimpered, before coughing smoke out of my lungs.

  “I know,” he snapped harshly. “I was there. I saw it. He was murdered in front of our eyes. Someone doesn’t want us learning what he knew. It’s a conspiracy!”

  Wolfgang sounded angry but partially elated. I realized he hadn’t seen the shadow attacking me or noticed that I had been sprawled uselessly on the floor while he fought to extinguish Snelling’s body.

  In the RV, as he drove us away, I excused myself to use the bathroom. Once there, I cried like I hadn’t cried since I’d learned my parents were dead. If they’d hoped their legacy would be a strong, powerful woman, they would be disappointed to see me now. Never mind being a hero or some mythical anti-hero of my own creation. I was nothing but a girl powered by conspiracies and mistrust, locked in a small, paranoid world. The only reason I’d been able to throw off the shadow creature was because I’d found strength in a memory of a genuine hero. Not because anything powerful or courageous existed within me.

  Chapter 9

  “Hey, pretty boy.”

  Elliott tensed. “Hey, um, Calia. What’re you doing up here?”

  “Oh, you know, just thought I’d catch some sun and pay a visit to my favorite boy.”

  He knew she was lying. Though the conservatory was Elliott’s favorite space in the Sinistera, he was aware that he was alone in his love for it. Calia Uroskova, as far as he knew, had never stepped foot in the rooftop greenhouse before now.

  It was a shame, because the place was beautiful in Elliott’s opinion. The ornate metal posts comprising the structure were plated in copper that had mellowed to a dreamy, milky green patina. The tall sheets of glass between the posts were pristine thanks to a perpetual cleaning spell applied weekly by a member of Housekeeping. The clear panes allowed a brilliant view of Victory City below, which was truly stunning at night.

  “This place is full of man-eating plants,” Elliott warned her. “Also, some pollen will cause hallucinations. It might be safer if you returned inside, Calia.”

  She laughed. “Are you kidding? Sounds like a perfect place for a picnic with enemies.”

  Of course that would be her reaction. He hadn’t been exaggerating when he’d warned Arrow not to cross paths with Calia or go anywhere with her alone. It had been advice given to him by Sheridan when he’d first joined the staff and it had served him well. Too bad he hadn’t been able to heed it today.

  There were around fifty employees of the Sinistera in total. Most of those employees he’d never run across due to him working the night shift or because those staff members worked in parts of the hotel that he didn’t have reason to visit—the basement, for example. Since a statuary guard was already in place there, he had no reason to visit except out of personal curiosity and Elliott was not, by nature, curious.

  A handful of the employees that he did know were ones he wished he didn’t. It wasn’t so much personality conflicts that were the problem as it was the simple fact that those empl
oyees were dangerous.

  Several deaths had occurred among the staff while on Sinistera property. Like most everyone else, he didn’t question how they occurred or whether someone could be blamed for them. He simply kept his head down and crossed his fingers that he wouldn’t be next.

  But as he’d told Arrow last night, he wasn’t deaf. Of course he heard things in the hotel. They were usually things he wished he hadn’t, because admitting to having heard them could mean very bad things.

  The rumors he’d heard about Calia fell into this category.

  She was young-looking and some people called her pixie-like, but Elliott didn’t think that description was accurate at all. If Calia was a pixie then she was the demented twin of one. A pixie dusted with anthrax or armed with needles, perhaps. He wouldn’t say that she was evil, only that she was fanatically self-serving, and if there was a difference, well, sometimes he couldn’t tell.

  Despite not having slept, she was strikingly beautiful. Even he could say that, though her beauty didn’t interest him. As usual, she’d lined her eyes heavily with kohl and her lips were sheened with dark purple lipstick. Her cheekbones looked even sharper thanks to artfully applied contouring. The dramatic makeup suited her. He thought if he ever saw her in pink lipstick he would find it silly on her. Almost…deceitful.

  “Spill,” she goaded him. Her breath smelled sweet like the pink bubble gum she periodically cracked with her teeth. “You’re the boy with all the toys. Share them.”

  “If you’re talking about my new boss I don’t have anything to tell you.” He carefully closed the door of the aviary-like cage that he’d come to visit, but he didn’t latch it. “Come on, Calia. Don’t give me a hard time.”

  “Maybe I should ask someone with sharper teeth to do it, eh?” Her smile was sly and knowing and it made him blush. It also made him angry, because no one was supposed to know. How did she know?

  She laughed as if reading his aggravation. “Tell me about her before I get mean, Elliott.”