That matter settled, she flicked on the lights above the stairway, then shut off everything else on the ground floor. The steps creaked a little as she walked up them, but they always did that; the house was nearly a hundred years old. Lights on in the upstairs hallway, and then she was safely in her bedroom, cheered a bit by the warm yellow paint on the walls and the friendly, lived-in antiques that filled the room. It had always felt like a sanctuary in there, and she knew she needed that reassurance now more than ever.
She got out of her clothes and put them in the hamper, then pulled on the T-shirt and knee-length yoga pants she wore to sleep in. A few minutes to wash her face and brush her teeth, and then she was safely in bed, the white noise generator she kept on the nightstand sending out its familiar ocean waves sounds, her Kindle in her hands.
Her usual practice was to alternate reading something nonfiction and a novel, usually a mystery or a thriller. She’d last been reading her nonfiction selection, a pretty dry tome about best standards and practices for psychologists working as independent contractors rather than as part of a clinic. However, after everything she’d been through that day, she wasn’t ready to go back to the mystery. Although she hadn’t actually seen anyone get murdered at the Whitcomb house, she’d still witnessed enough violence to hold her for a long, long time. With any luck, the standards and practices book would be dull enough to lull her into sleep sooner rather than later, and she could put an end to this seemingly endless day. Not that she was exactly eager to face what waited for her and Michael in the mansion’s basement, but at least once that ordeal was over with, she could call herself a full-fledged demon hunter.
Maybe.
Just as she’d thought, her eyelids began to droop before she’d read five pages. She glanced over at the clock. Eight fifty-three. All right, maybe her thirtieth birthday was only six months off, but she was damned if she was going to fall asleep before nine o’clock like an eighty-year-old after a hard night of watching Jeopardy. That was ridiculous. Never mind that she’d have to be up around five-thirty in order to be ready when Michael came by to pick her up. She still had her standards.
The letters on the electronic page seemed to blur, bleeding into each other. Audrey blinked, then touched the controls to see if enlarging the font might fix the problem. If anything, that made matters worse. Now there were big black blots on the screen, and they seemed to coalesce, smaller blots joining up with bigger blots, until there was a strange, spinning blackness in the center of the non-reflective glass.
That had to be an optical illusion…didn’t it?
The cold struck her body then, washing over her in a wave so icy, it felt as if she’d been dropped into the North Atlantic. Teeth chattering, she stared down at the Kindle, at the apparently bottomless hole that had opened up in the middle of it.
Things were moving in that darkness, ghostly shapes that appeared to be spiraling up out of the abyss. A chorus of thin, screeching wails came with those shapes, growing louder and louder as they got closer and closer. Now Audrey could see skeletal hands reaching out toward her, ghostly fingers somehow pushing their way up past the screen, claws extended toward her face —
She screamed and hurled the Kindle against the wall. The screen shattered on impact, and at once those ghastly voices were gone, along with the apparitions she’d seen. But the destruction of the device wasn’t enough to convince her that she was safe. She pushed herself out of bed, jammed her feet into the pair of flip-flops she always kept next to her bed, and bolted down the stairs, flicking on lights as she went, hoping if it was bright enough in there, she would banish any shadows where those entities might be hiding. The briefest pause to grab her purse from where it still sat on the coffee table in the living room, and then she was out the door. Luckily, the doorknob’s lock was automatic, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to worry about the damn deadbolt.
It was very dark. Her breath coming in sobs, Audrey ran partway down the block until she came to a street lamp. Under its reassuring light, she stopped and pulled her phone out of her purse, and dug back in with shaking fingers, trying to find the business card Rosemary McGuire had given her.
There it was. Audrey brought it out and held it under the light so she could see the numbers clearly. Hands still trembling, she entered the digits and held her breath. Rosemary had to answer. Audrey didn’t know what she’d do if she didn’t.
But the phone only rang twice before she heard the psychic’s voice in my ear. “Hey, it’s Rosemary.”
“Rosemary,” Audrey gasped. “It’s Audrey.”
No questions, only a sharp, “It happened again.”
“Yes,” she said. “But worse. Or at least it felt worse.”
“Where are you?”
“I — I ran out of the house. I’m about halfway down the block, standing under a streetlight.”
“Stay there,” Rosemary said quickly. “I’m out the door. I’ll be there in less than five minutes.”
Right then, five minutes sounded like an eternity. But even though Rosemary seemed to be a strong psychic, it wasn’t as though she could wiggle her nose and be here to rescue her instantly. “Okay,” Audrey replied, trying to keep her teeth from chattering. She might have been relatively covered up, but her T-shirt, flip-flops, and knee-length yoga pants weren’t really enough to hold back the night’s damp chill. It felt like the fog was coming in again.
“Just stay in the light. I’m leaving now. And stay on the phone.”
“Sure.” That felt better. Somehow, knowing Rosemary was still there, still listening, made Audrey feel a little less alone.
Through the phone’s speaker, she heard the rattle of keys, then a creaking, metallic sound that she thought was probably the sound of Rosemary’s garage door opening. An engine turning over, and a brief burst of music that was abruptly shut off.
“You still there?” she asked. “I’m coming down Glendora Avenue now.”
“Yes, I’m here.” Audrey paused and glanced around, but her street was empty. It was a quiet neighborhood most of the time, and now, at after nine on a weeknight, there were no signs of any activity. She didn’t know whether that was a good thing or not. On the one hand, she didn’t have to worry about any of her neighbors spotting her standing out there, shivering in the cold. On the other, if something decided to claw its way out of the wreckage of her Kindle and come looking for her….
A pair of headlights raked through the darkness. Just a minute later, Rosemary’s mint-green Fiat was pulling up next to where Audrey stood by the curb. She let out a little sob of relief and ran to the car, one hand on the door handle before the vehicle had even come to a complete stop. And then she was inside, and Rosemary was pulling away from the curb while Audrey fumbled with the seatbelt.
Once they were safely around the block and headed north — presumably going toward her house — Rosemary said, “What happened?”
“I don’t know for sure.” Even though the heat was on in her car, Audrey’s teeth wanted to chatter, and she had to clench her jaw to force the words out. “I was trying to read on my Kindle, and something came up out of it, was reaching toward me — ”
Once again her body was awash in cold. She clung to the seatbelt strap with one hand, the other still clutching the handle of her purse. What would have happened if she hadn’t thrown the Kindle at the wall? What if those things had actually touched her?
“Damn.” Rosemary sounded shaken, but then she said, in slightly too-hearty tones, “Well, you’re safe now. My house has all kinds of protection set up.”
“More than smudging, I hope.” Audrey’s voice felt thin and reedy, not like her own at all. “Because that didn’t seem to work for shit.”
“It’s good general protection. It never promised to be absolutely demon-proof.”
Now she tells me. But Audrey tried to shake off her resentment. After all, she was the one who’d come up with the smudging idea. Rosemary had probably thought it would be enough, since the house sh
ould have been neutral territory.
“I don’t have a guest bedroom, but the living room couch is pretty comfy,” she went on, apparently deciding it was better not to get wrapped up in an argument about the relative demon-proofing of Audrey’s house, or lack thereof. “You’ll be safe, and in the morning, you can figure out what to do next.”
Right then, the morning felt a very long way off. Audrey knew she didn’t want to set foot in her house any time in the near future, and yet she’d have to go back at some point, if only to get some clothes and other necessities.
Worse, she was supposed to be ready in the morning to help Michael dispel the demons in the Whitcomb mansion. She sure as hell didn’t see that happening.
The car turned down onto Rosemary’s street. The houses here weren’t quite as old as Audrey’s, instead were probably built in the 1920s — some with vaguely Spanish architecture, others clapboard cottages, well-preserved and neat. She pulled up into the driveway of what looked to be a small, English cottage–style home and turned off the engine.
“Here we are,” she said. “Let’s get inside.”
That sounded like a very good idea. Audrey got out of the car and followed Rosemary into the house, which smelled faintly of incense and had her same sort of cluttery, boho style — a purple velvet couch with embroidered pillows, furniture that looked like a mishmash of stuff she’d gotten at garage sales and at Cost Plus or Pier One. But even though it appeared very different from her own place, Audrey felt safe here, as if somewhere deep inside she could sense the wards Rosemary had put on her home.
“There’s the couch,” she said, quite unnecessarily, since the purple sofa was sort of the centerpiece of the living room. “I’ll go get some blankets and a pillow.”
“Okay.” Since Audrey’s knees were still feeling a bit rubbery, she went over to the couch and sat down, then hugged her purse to herself. Thank God she’d had enough presence of mind to bring it with her. She might have run out of the house with only the clothes on her back, but at least she had her phone and wallet, which meant she still had her I.D. and some cash. It could have been worse.
Then again, it could have been a lot better, too.
From inside her purse, Audrey’s phone rang. She startled and almost dropped the bag, then got hold of herself enough to pull out the phone and look at the screen. The number displayed there looked vaguely familiar, although she couldn’t quite place it. Still, if someone was calling her at after nine o’clock at night, it must be important.
“Hello?”
“Audrey, it’s Michael.”
Had he found out about the attack somehow? She couldn’t think of how that was possible, but when you were dealing with people who had extrasensory talents, all bets were pretty much off. Before she could say anything, however, he’d continued.
“We’re going to have to push back the shoot by a day. Chris walked out.”
“He…what?” she responded, some of her current worry replaced by surprise…and a very large amount of relief. At least she wouldn’t have to show up at the Whitcomb place tomorrow and face the horrors there. She had enough horrors of her own to deal with.
Michael said, “What he saw this morning really freaked him out. He was holding it together while we were all still there on location, but once he got home and really began to process things, he realized he couldn’t go back in that house.”
“Hasn’t he worked on shoots like this before?”
“Not exactly like this. That is, he’s done other shows that Colin has produced, but they never caught anything on camera similar to what we all witnessed this morning.”
Audrey could believe that. While she wasn’t familiar with everything in Colin Turner’s oeuvre, she’d seen enough of the shows he’d produced to know that they relied on jump scares and a good deal of fudging to make it seem as if something supernatural was going on, even though closer examination made it pretty obvious that there wasn’t much substance to what was being presented.
What had happened this morning, though…that had been real. And frightening. It hadn’t been a projection of her mind. It had been something other, something malevolent.
But as terrifying — and as real — as it had been, it was still far, far less troubling than the incident that had just occurred.
Rosemary came back into the living room, holding a folded blanket with a pillow sitting on top. “I’ll just put these here,” she said, setting them down on an arm of the couch.
“Who was that?” Michael asked, his tone sharpening slightly.
Audrey supposed she could have lied, but the truth would have come out eventually. Besides, she was just too drained right then to hide what had happened to her. “Rosemary McGuire. I’m at her place because there was an attack at my house.”
His voice grew even more taut. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. I got out in time.” Audrey paused there, wondering whether she should provide any more details, then deciding against it. For some reason, it didn’t feel right to go into that much detail over the phone. “But obviously I wasn’t going to stay there. She gave me a place to crash.”
“Let me come get you,” he said, the words tight, urgent.
While the offer surprised her, Audrey didn’t have any intention of taking him up on it. “You don’t have to do that. I’m fine. Rosemary has this house warded.”
“Maybe so, but I can guarantee you that the protections she has set up won’t be enough. Not against this kind of adversary.”
A cold finger of doubt trailed its way down her spine. What if Michael was right? What if Rosemary’s wards fell apart the moment a demon came anywhere near her house?
“Michael, I — ”
He broke in, cutting off her protests. “Audrey, you have to trust me on this. Let me come get you.”
She hesitated. Rosemary, having deposited the blanket and pillow on the couch, was standing off to one side, hands on her hips and her expression somehow both suspicious and resigned. As much as Audrey would have preferred to stay at Rosemary’s place, Michael had planted a seed of doubt in her mind. What if the demons actually did follow her here? Could Rosemary really manage to fend off one of their attacks? At the same time, Audrey felt strange about giving Michael Rosemary’s address, especially since she’d made it fairly clear that he was not on her list of favorite people.
But Rosemary shrugged. “If the Great White Knight wants to swoop in and rescue you, far be it from me to stop him. The address here is 1750 Laurel Avenue.”
For a second, Audrey hesitated. After all, it would be awkward beyond words to have to crash at Michael Covenant’s house. Then again, the last thing she wanted was for any harm to come to Rosemary — or to her sisters, who apparently lived close by. They had something she’d lost — a loving, close-knit family — and they’d already helped her enough. She didn’t want to be responsible for bringing disaster to their doorstep.
That seemed to decide things, and Audrey repeated the address to Michael, adding, “Where are you coming from?”
“Pasadena,” he replied promptly. “I should be there in about twenty minutes. Hang tight.”
“I will. See you soon.”
She ended the call then, and slowly slipped her phone back into her purse. “I’m sorry,” she said, the words coming automatically to her lips as she looked back up at Rosemary. “I really appreciate you trying to give me someplace safe to stay. But if this thing keeps following me, the last thing I want is for it to come here and try to hurt you. Michael is an expert at handling demons, so….”
Rosemary nodded, although her expression was still grim. “I get it. And I hope he can keep you safe.”
“But…?”
The faintest lift of her shoulders. “I’m not sure. It’s just that he says he’s an expert, but has he really come up against anything like this before? Are you sure he really knows what he’s doing?”
Audrey didn’t have an answer to either of those questions.
She had to hope Michael would.
Chapter 8
Michael showed up as promised, almost twenty minutes to the second after Audrey had ended their call. Clearly, he hadn’t been anywhere close to getting ready for bed, since he was still wearing the same clothes he’d had on earlier that day.
As Rosemary opened the door for him, she said, “Hi, Michael.”
“Hi, Rosemary,” he returned, expression neutral. He looked past her to where Audrey stood, purse clutched in one hand. At least Rosemary had loaned her a sweater while they were waiting for Michael to show up, but it still felt strange and horribly awkward to be facing him in basically her pajamas. “Thanks for taking Audrey in until I could get here.”
“Not a problem.” Rosemary touched Audrey’s arm briefly, a simple, reassuring gesture. “Call me if you need anything, okay?”
“I will,” she promised, then went ahead and moved past her so she could meet Michael on the porch. “Thank you for the rescue.”
Rosemary grinned. “Hey, we psychics have to stick together, right?”
Audrey nodded, doing her best to smile back at her, and Michael raised a hand in farewell as the two of them walked down the porch steps. His Land Cruiser was waiting at the curb, and he opened the passenger door for her, then waited until she was safely inside before he walked around the front of the SUV to get into his own seat. After he’d started the engine and pulled away from the curb, he said, “I think we should stop by your house.”
“Excuse me?” Audrey looked over at him, aghast, but his expression was so neutral, she couldn’t get a read on what he might be thinking. Was he joking? Maybe she just hadn’t heard him correctly. He couldn’t really be suggesting they go back to the place where demons had almost escaped from her Kindle, could he?
“I know it seems risky, but I want to try to get a feel for what happened there, and you probably want to get a few things, don’t you?” His gaze traveled toward her for a moment before returning to the road; he didn’t say anything else, but it was clear that he could tell she had run out of the house with nothing except her purse.
Unquiet Souls: Project Demon Hunters: Book One Page 11