Gathering Black (Devilborn Book 2)

by Jen Rasmussen

  “It attacked him like… like it was a swarm of bees or something,” Arabella went on. “Something with a mind.”

  This house has a mind, all right.

  I suppressed a shiver. Naturally, I was grateful for the help of Number Twelve, and grateful I’d been able to work the magic to connect with this place. But I was disturbed by the power I’d felt behind it. And the anger. I wasn’t quite so sure, anymore, that Wendy was wrong, or that there was no such thing as dark magic.

  “We need to take care of Verity’s leg,” Cooper said, as he cinched a belt around my thigh. “She’s losing more blood than I’d like.”

  “I know my father has a guy,” Arabella said. “Had a guy.”

  “You mean a guy like Dr. Claus?” I asked.

  Arabella forced a smile. “Not quite as delightful as Dr. Claus, but you get the idea. Let me go see if I can find the number in his office.”

  I had a million things I wanted to say to Cooper while she was gone, a million questions I wanted to ask. But I settled for kissing him, clutching him to me, whispering that I loved him, while he did the same.

  It seemed like Arabella came back awfully fast.

  “Get a room, you two.”

  “We’re in a room,” Cooper grumbled.

  Arabella knelt beside me. “Take these.” She handed me a glass of water and three small blue pills. “The doctor says he might be an hour. I’m going to bandage you up a little in the meanwhile.”

  Now that the initial rush of victory, and of being reunited with Cooper, was past, another hour of this pain was a nearly unbearable thought. But considering that Arabella’s father was dead on the floor a few feet away, I thought it might be in poor taste to complain. I thanked her, and swallowed the pills.

  “What happened?” I asked. “To Dalton?”

  Cooper squeezed Arabella’s shoulder and said, “He gave his life for us.”

  “They were trick cuffs, that he put on me.” Arabella was bent over my knee, so I couldn’t see her face, but her voice was steady now, controlled. “I got out of them easily enough, once I realized it. He was just waiting for a chance to get to Cooper.”

  “What do you mean, get to Coop—”

  I was stopped by the memory of Dalton, throwing his arms around Cooper’s chest.

  “He wasn’t restraining you,” I said, looking at Cooper. “He was reviving you.”

  He nodded. “But it weakened him too much. He gave me everything he could. It was almost everything he had. He got shot afterward, in the mess.”

  The mess referred to Cooper and Arabella, now freed and with no hostages to consider, turning on Talon’s guards. Talon, in his arrogance, had even left Arabella armed. Not that it made much difference; the men’s weapons were easy enough to take away. Oblivious to bullets and other wounds, Cooper and Arabella had taken them all down.

  “But your heads…” I said.

  “Only one close call in the whole bunch, at least for me,” Arabella said. “Took a pretty good chunk out of my scalp, but didn’t quite hit the mark.”

  “Luckily, headshots aren’t as easy as they make them look in movies,” said Cooper. “Especially if your target is pumped up on vitality and moving fast. Those guys were fairly well-trained, but—”

  “But I saw you,” I interrupted, squeezing his hand. “You were like a superhero.”

  Cooper and Arabella both snorted at the same time.

  “I think you’re a little woozy from those pills,” Cooper said.

  I looked at Arabella. “I’m sorry. For your loss. And for doubting him.”

  She nodded, and turned away to wipe my blood off her hands.

  “He did the best he could,” I said. “Playing all sides. I don’t envy him, having to choose whether to protect his daughter or his wife.”

  Cooper sighed. “There’s something else. He whispered something to me, when he was giving me all his vitality.”

  “What?” Arabella asked, dread plain on her face.

  “Save Serena.”

  Arabella closed her eyes. “Cillian will kill Serena as soon as he realizes that Talon is dead. She’s beyond saving.”

  “Maybe,” Cooper said. “But maybe not. She’s psychic, right?”

  Arabella nodded. “She’s pretty good at foresight, communicating with the unseen, all that kind of stuff. The sight, as she says.”

  “So, you know how the Wicks are about seers,” Cooper said. “Maybe they’ll keep her alive to use her.”

  “Well. No matter how bad the odds are, we’ll have to try,” said Arabella.

  But I was thinking of something else, though thought was no longer coming quite so easily. The little blue pills really were making me hazy.

  “Foresight… communicating…” I looked at Arabella. “She wouldn’t have had any way to communicate with Dalton, like psychically or something, would she? Astral projection? Anything like that?”

  Arabella frowned. “I doubt it. My father couldn’t do magic. Why?”

  “Just… he made a point of telling us about the Halloween ball they used to have. The night we were here for dinner.”

  “I think I was the one who brought that up,” Arabella said.

  “Were you? I can’t really remember. But still.” I told them how I’d managed to rouse the house, and how it had been due as much to the song as anything I’d done.

  “It’s an odd coincidence, don’t you think, that Talon was so insistent that we do this on Halloween?” I asked when I finished.

  “So you think Serena somehow predicted that this day would be important, communicated that to Dalton, and he suggested the date?” Cooper asked. “That seems kind of…”

  “Far-fetched, when you put it like that,” I agreed with a sigh.

  But Arabella looked pensive, and I, too, was wondering. It still seemed a bit too convenient, that we happened to have this confrontation on the best possible day for waking the house.

  “Just mark my words, more went on here today than we’ll probably ever know,” I said.

  “I don’t doubt that,” said Cooper, standing up. “I need to go and get some cash. For the doctor.”

  “I need you to get some other things while you’re out,” I said. “Some Halloween decorations. And some candy.”

  As you might expect, they both stared at me like I’d gone soft in the head.

  “You want to… celebrate Halloween?” Arabella asked.

  “The house does,” I said. “And that spell I just cast was a sort of promise.”

  One I’m afraid to break.

  “But that’s ridiculous,” Arabella said. “We’re not just going to sit in this house and hand out candy with my father’s dead body—”

  “We have to,” I said. “Or at least, I do. You can go, if you need to. But I… I can’t double-cross this house.”

  “We should all go,” Arabella said, shaking her head. “As soon as your knee is patched up and we can get out of here. We’ll take my father’s body. Let the cops find the rest when they start to smell, and sort it out from there.”

  “No!” I said, too loud.

  Cooper crouched beside me again and squeezed my hand, looking a bit worried that I was having a nervous breakdown. “Maybe you should just rest until the doctor gets here.”

  “You don’t understand.” I gave him a pleading look, willing him to accept what I was saying no matter how crazy he thought it sounded.

  “Okay,” Cooper said. “Explain it to me, then.”

  “Abandoning this place, leaving it alone and dark, today of all days, is the worst possible thing I can do,” I said. “I have to give it this holiday. Call it a token of appreciation. An offering.”

  “Why? What’s it going to do if you piss it off?” Arabella asked. “Chase you down? It’s a house.”

  Her antagonism while under its roof was making me decidedly uneasy. “You don’t have to stay,” I said. “But I do.”

  “Okay,” Cooper said again. “Then we stay. I’ll get the stuff on yo
ur list.”

  I thought I’d never loved him more than I did in that moment, trusting me without question.

  He stood back up, and looked at Arabella. “Can you at least stay with her until I get back?”

  Arabella sighed. “I’m not leaving you guys now. If you want a Halloween party, we’ll have a Halloween party.”

  The house. It’s what the house wants.

  Dr. Smith, as he asked to be addressed, arrived not long afterward. He was a stern-looking man with none of Dr. Claus’s pleasantness, but he numbed my leg and treated me efficiently enough.

  “You got banged up pretty good, young lady,” he scolded, as if I’d been careless on the playground. “If I was a regular human doctor, you’d probably need surgery, and even then you might not ever walk right again.”

  “You’re not human?” I asked.

  He smiled—a tight, cool smile—and said, “I may not look like Santa, but I know a few of his tricks.”

  Whatever he spread on my wound before he closed and bandaged it certainly felt like magic. By the time he was ready to collect his payment, I almost felt like I could walk.

  “I’m leaving you some crutches,” Dr. Smith said, making me wonder whether he could also read minds. “See to it that you use them for at least a week.”

  He handed Cooper two bottles of pills. “One for pain, the other to ward off infection. Instructions are on the label. Make sure she follows them. Now…” He glanced at the corpses strewn around the parlor, his expression never changing. “It doesn’t look like I can help any of these others.”

  Once the doctor was gone, Cooper and Arabella moved the dead bodies—all but Dalton’s—into the laundry room.

  “What are you going to do with them?” I asked.

  “My father has another guy for that,” said Arabella. “But the clean-up man won’t be working on a holiday. They’ll keep well enough until tomorrow.”

  “Balls, you guys really are like the mob,” I said.

  But Arabella wasn’t listening. She was looking down at Dalton. I limped over to her on my crutches and touched her shoulder. “Did you want to say a prayer, or something?”

  I half expected her to laugh at me, but she just shook her head. “It’s not our way. Tomorrow, when the streets are more clear, I’ll take his body out of here and burn it. But for now, I’m just going to put him in his bed.”

  “I’ll help you,” Cooper said.

  Before they went, I crouched—awkwardly, with my bandaged leg—beside Dalton to say my own goodbye, and to thank him for coming through, at the end.

  Rest now. Don’t worry. We’ll rescue Serena, if we possibly can.

  I promised Number Twelve I would.

  I did say a prayer then. Two prayers, actually: one for the soul of Dalton Blackwood, and one for those of us he left behind.

  Arabella stayed upstairs for a long time. In the meanwhile, Cooper and I set about putting up the decorations he’d bought.

  “You sure you’re okay to be moving around like this?” he asked.

  “Oddly enough, yeah. This actually feels even better than the one Dr. Claus fixed.” I frowned over my comparison. “That’s two gunshot wounds since I started dating you. I may need to rethink this.”

  “I’ll try to come up with better dates,” Cooper said solemnly, and kissed me hard.

  An hour later, I laughed as I surveyed our masterpiece of plastic and paper and cheap twinkling lights, wishing we at least had a real pumpkin to carve.

  It’s a far cry from your former glory, Number Twelve, but it was the best I could do on short notice. Call it a show of good faith.

  “Don’t put on the party hats quite yet,” Arabella said behind me.

  I turned, chagrined that I’d been smiling while she was grieving, but her face was composed. “There’s something we need to do first,” she said. “I’m pretty sure I can crack some of the combinations my father might use, if we can just find the safe.”

  In fact, we found no fewer than twenty-three safes, of all sizes and weights, hidden in various locations around Number Twelve Fenwick Street. It took us hours.

  But eventually we found what we were looking for, in an iron lockbox (which I made sure not to touch) buried beneath the hearth: a chunk of amber, with what looked like a blue acorn suspended inside.

  The true North Seed.

  “I told you,” Arabella said.

  “And you were right,” I agreed.

  After that, all that remained was to give Number Twelve its Halloween. We left the front door open and sat on the steps, handing out candy and doing our best to enjoy—or at least pretend to enjoy—the chaos and revelry that consumed Beacon Hill.

  I was watching a woman dressed as a hag, carrying a basket of apples, dancing among the children and alternately delighting and terrifying them, when out of nowhere I felt a stab of homesickness (soulsickness) more painful than my bullet wound.

  What were they doing, back in Bristol? Was Lance handing out candy at the Mount Phearson? Had Agatha already finished judging the pumpkin carving contest? This was my first Halloween as owner of the hotel, the first Halloween since I’d come back. And yet I was gone.

  We had the North Seed now, to put beside the West. Not to mention that Talon Wick was dead, and we were alive. We’d won an important battle. I wanted nothing more than some well-earned rest at home.

  And I meant to get it—at least for a few days, until my leg healed a bit. But I wouldn’t wait any longer than that to try to find Serena. I’d made a promise.

  Besides, that wasn’t the only unfinished business we had to attend to.

  “You know, as long as we’re going after Serena anyway,” I said, when we hit a lull in the trick-or-treat traffic, “the Wicks do have the South and East Seeds.”

  “Yep,” Cooper agreed. “Plenty of reasons to pay them a call.”

  “Both of us?” I asked.

  “All three of us,” Arabella corrected.

  Cooper gave me a squeeze. “Did I mention what an asset you were today?”

  “I do believe that slipped your mind.”

  He kissed me. “Thank you.”

  “You’re very welcome,” I said. “And now that we’ve got that settled, I’d say it’s about time you got your wish. It’s time for us to go on the offensive.”

  As if she’d heard me, the woman in the hag costume spun toward us, and dropped her apples. She came over to the front steps of Number Twelve with such speed, such exaggerated intensity, that I didn’t know whether to laugh at her theatrics, or be afraid.

  Was that really a costume at all? It was textbook, clichéd witch garb, right down to the wart on her long, crooked nose. But it looked so real. She looked so real.

  I really was a little afraid then, but it was Arabella she addressed first.

  “Serena is pleased,” the old woman said. Even her voice sounded like a fairy-tale witch’s.

  “I beg your pardon?” Arabella asked. “Serena is away in Paris. Are you a friend of hers?”

  “Serena is pleased that her house could assist you.”

  Arabella stiffened. “Do you know where she is?”

  The woman turned away from Arabella with another dramatic, jerky movement, and fixed her reptilian eyes on me. “Pleased, but she’ll want to be paid.”

  Cooper put his arm around me. “You’re scaring the kids away, lady,” he said.

  She’s scaring me.

  “She’ll want to be paid,” the hag repeated. “She expects you to keep your promise.”

  “I will,” I said. “We are. We were just talking ab—”

  Her hand darted out from beneath her black robes, and locked my wrist in a bony grip.

  “Ow!”

  “Okay, that’s enough.” Cooper stood and took the woman’s arm. She let go of me, and allowed him to lead her away easily enough.

  But the inside of my wrist was mottled with a bruise I knew would not fade.

  “Cooper, wait!” I grabbed my crutches and limped to
catch up with them. He was asking her where Serena was being kept, but the woman didn’t seem to have any practical information to share.

  “What did you just do to me?” I asked.

  The old woman turned to me and smiled, a crooked, brown-toothed smile. “You’re bound to her.” She moved closer. Her breath smelled sweet, like apples and candy.

  “The witch calls you,” the hag said. “Answer, or die.”

  Thank you for reading Gathering Black. I hope you enjoyed it!

  Want to know when the next Devilborn book is available? Click here or visit jenrasmussen.com to sign up for new release announcements.

  Your honest ratings and reviews help other readers choose books. I hope you’ll consider giving your opinion at Amazon or on social media.