Unquiet Souls: Project Demon Hunters: Book One

by Pope, Christine

  It doesn’t have to, she told herself. Just until we’re done at the Whitcomb mansion…and the demons who’ve followed me home are dealt with.

  Well, clearing the demons out might ensure that she wouldn’t suffer any further attacks, but it wouldn’t clean up the mess in her house. That was going to require a lot of manpower and elbow grease. Michael had said he’d make sure the production company would take care of it, and yet even if they paid for everything — along with a hotel for her to stay in until the work was done — she was still looking at an extended period of being denied access to her own home.

  They went into the kitchen. “Iced tea?” Michael asked. “You could probably use something stronger, but….”

  “Tea is fine,” Audrey said firmly. The last thing she wanted was to be driven to day drinking.

  He nodded and retrieved a couple of glasses out of a cupboard, filled them about halfway with ice from the refrigerator door, then got out a big bottle of Tejava iced tea and poured equal measures into each glass. After handing one of the glasses to her, he said, “Do you want to go sit outside? It warmed up pretty well.”

  That sounded like a good idea, especially since the morning was sunny and warm, as if apologizing for the broody, cloudy days she’d experienced earlier that week. “Sure.”

  They headed outside, to the patio table Audrey had spotted from her upstairs window earlier. After they’d both sat down, she sipped at her iced tea. She was glad that Michael seemed to like it the same way she did — plain and black, no froufrou sugar or lemon. After they’d sat there for a moment in silence, drinking in the sunshine along with their tea, he spoke.

  “Again, I have to apologize. I’ve never experienced anything like this, not in any of the investigations I’ve conducted.”

  It was bright enough that Audrey had extracted her sunglasses from her purse after she sat down. She let them slide down her nose slightly and looked at him over the top of the frames. “Have you ever had an investigation like this, though?”

  She thought she saw his jaw tighten slightly, but his tone was neutral as he said, “I’ve investigated other instances of demonic infestation.”

  “In a house this old? A place where they’ve had free rein for so many years?”

  He hesitated, and Audrey wondered if he was going to answer her directly, or whether he was going to come up with some kind of excuse. To her surprise, he replied, “No. Nothing like this. I suppose I figured it wouldn’t be all that different, except maybe by degree.”

  “I guess not.”

  Rubbing at the scruff on his chin in an introspective way, he stared off toward the rosebushes that stood guard along the fence marking the border of the property. They were already starting to show buds, even though it wasn’t even March yet. “While there are documented cases of demons following their victims from place to place, that sort of thing only occurs after the people involved have been suffering demonic oppression or even possession for months or years. You’d never been in the Whitcomb mansion before, had you?”

  “No,” Audrey replied at once. “I’m not sure I’d even heard of it. That is, maybe it was mentioned once or twice, but my interest has always been in paranormal powers of the mind, not ghosts and hauntings, so I never paid all that much attention.”

  “Which makes the way they’ve focused on you that much stranger.”

  She shook her head, then sipped from her glass of iced tea. “Should I be flattered?”

  Audrey had thought he might chuckle, but he only frowned, fingers playing with the condensation on the surface of the glass in front of him. “I don’t think ‘flattered’ is exactly the word I would use.”

  No, probably not. She was quiet for a moment, glad to feel the warmth of the sun on her skin, to see its clear light all around her. In this sunny backyard, it was hard to believe that demons were real, even though she’d seen the terrible evidence of their existence a very short time ago.

  “What happened to the Whitcomb family?” she asked then. “That is, you said Jeffrey Whitcomb’s wife divorced him, and his grown children had him put in a sanitarium, but what happened to the children?”

  “Whitcomb’s son never married, and died without children. My best guess is that he was probably gay, although of course the records back then would never have come right out and stated something like that. Still, the phrase ‘confirmed bachelor’ was thrown around a bit, and that tended to be the euphemism used in those situations back in the day.” Michael drank some more tea before continuing. “The daughter married and moved back east. She had children — two daughters. One of them caught polio and died young. The other one married, but it seemed she got divorced sometime in the mid-’40s, changed her name, and moved out of Connecticut, which was where her mother had settled after they left California.” He shrugged. “I sort of lost the trail after that, although I suppose I could hire a private investigator to look into it if I thought there was enough need.” His eyes met Audrey’s, now looking almost golden in the reflected light from the sun overhead. “Do you think it’s necessary?”

  “Probably not,” she said. “I was just wondering. And the family fortune?”

  “Most of it was lost in the crash of 1929. Alice Whitcomb had gotten quite a lot in the divorce, and she invested it wisely, so she did well enough for herself. However, Jeffrey’s money was pretty much gone, so anything their children inherited, they inherited from their mother.”

  Jeffrey, who apparently had died raving in a sanitarium. Well, if he really was the one who’d drawn all those symbols and attracted the demons here in the first place, then Audrey didn’t have a lot of sympathy for him. “What about the other people who lived in the house?”

  “Most of them seemed to have gotten out before the demons really got their claws in them, so to speak. They sold the house, left the area, and apparently lived normal lives. The only real casualty was Abner Crawford, but his children seemed to be okay.”

  And yet Audrey, who hadn’t even spent an hour in the place in total, had demons coming after her from all sides. She would have said that wasn’t fair, but she’d learned a long time ago that fairness and the universe weren’t exactly on speaking terms.

  Michael’s cell phone rang, and he pulled it out of his pocket and glanced down at the screen. “Colin,” he said shortly, and she nodded. They were probably getting everything firmed up for the late-afternoon shoot. A little chill went through her at the thought of entering that damn house again, although she tried to reassure herself that everything would be done after today, and she’d never have to set foot in the place after they wrapped up shooting tonight.

  But then Michael sat up a little straighter in his chair and said, “What?” in tones so surprised and yet angry at the same time, Audrey took off her sunglasses and sent him an alarmed look.

  “What is it?” she mouthed, and he shook his head, as if trying to let her know that he didn’t have time to answer right then.

  “Are you serious? But we had an agree — ” He stopped there, clearly having been cut off by Colin. From the way Michael was angrily drumming the fingers of his free hand on the tabletop, the news couldn’t be good. After a long pause, he said, “Okay. Right. No, she’s here with me. There was an…incident. No, we’re both fine. Right. See you tomorrow.”

  He put the phone down on the table, then picked up his tea and took a large swallow, all the while looking as though he really wished there was something else in that glass besides plain black tea.

  “What’s wrong?” Audrey asked.

  “The new cameraman — you know, the charming individual who insisted on hazard pay?”

  “Yes,” she said cautiously.

  “Well, apparently regular hazard pay wasn’t enough for him. He wanted another two hundred dollars a day as a bonus, after which Colin told him he could kiss his English ass and fired him.”

  Great. Yet another delay. Yes, there were probably plenty of qualified camera people in L.A. who could take on the job.
But with rumors flying this way and that, would any of them be desperate enough to want to do it? “So we have to wait for Colin to find someone else?”

  “No,” Michael said. Some of the anger was fading from his expression, although he still looked annoyed. “Colin’s going to shoot the show himself.”

  “He can do that?”

  “Yes. He actually got started shooting his own productions because he couldn’t afford to hire anyone. After a while, he realized he was better at the wheeling and dealing side of things, so he went into producing. But he can do it, although he said he needed some time to refamiliarize himself with the equipment.”

  “Which means we’re not shooting tonight.”

  “No. Everything’s getting pushed back twenty-four hours.” He looked at her, sympathy clear in his face. “I’m sorry about that, Audrey. I know it’s probably not what you wanted to hear.”

  No, it wasn’t, but she told herself she could handle the delay. It was just one more day, after all. She’d packed enough clothing and toiletries to keep her going for a day after that, but if it turned out they needed to shoot until the very end of the week, she’d either have to venture back into her house — and hope the demons hadn’t destroyed her clothing along with the furniture — or she’d have to bite the bullet and go buy a few things to tide her over. Neither prospect was very appealing, and she fervently hoped they’d finally be able to put this thing to bed after they were done shooting the next day.

  “It’s all right,” Audrey said, and thought she actually sounded halfway convincing.

  “Which means we have a day to kill,” Michael went on. “Is there any chance you could see some of your clients today?”

  Immediately, she shook her head. “No, I’ve already rescheduled them once…I don’t want to drag them in on such short notice. I can find a book to read or something.”

  One eyebrow went up at an ironic angle. “Oh, come on,” he said. “I think we can find something more interesting to do than that.”

  * * *

  Audrey sat at the small table in Michael’s library and shot him a dubious glance. “You know I’ve done this test before,” she said. “Multiple times.” She didn’t bother to add that those tests had been done mostly for fun, since the Zener card test for psychic ability had long since been disavowed as a valid measurement of clairvoyant talents. Michael probably knew that as well as she did, but the cards still held a certain allure as a quick and dirty way to see if someone measured above the mean in terms of psychic powers.

  “True,” he replied, “but psychic talent can mature as a person gets older. There are many instances of those powers growing stronger after someone has suffered a traumatic event. I’d say the events of the past few days more than qualify.”

  Possibly, but if all it took was a traumatic event to set someone off, then Audrey thought she should have been exploding with psychic power right after she lost her parents. It hadn’t worked that way, though.

  However, she didn’t mention that detail to Michael, mostly because she didn’t want to see pity in his face again. She’d come to terms with her loss, and she didn’t see any reason to keep rehashing it.

  “Maybe,” she said. “Just don’t get your hopes up.”

  That remark made him flash a smile at her, one that probably shouldn’t have sent a pleasant little thrill dancing along her nerve endings. It was a little too cozy, the two of them sitting there only a few feet apart, a mild breeze fluttering the silky drapes at the window, the only perceptible sound the ticking of a clock that hung over one of the bookcases.

  “I am going to be entirely neutral,” he said. “Now, put on your blindfold.”

  Audrey hesitated, then picked up the blindfold — really, just one of those satin sleeping masks you could get at Bed, Bath, and Beyond — and fastened it around her head. A small amount of light seeped through, but she definitely couldn’t see Michael or his expression, which was the important thing. Early tests of this kind had been tainted by the subject maintaining eye contact with the test-giver, and many of the positive results had really been due to nothing more than the sorts of nonverbal tells that magicians and fortune tellers had been relying on for centuries.

  “Ready,” she told him.

  A soft rustle seemed to indicate he was shuffling the cards again. Then she heard his voice — really, a nice voice, not particularly deep, but smooth and rounded and rich, the kind of voice that would have done well on radio.

  Maybe she just hadn’t paid much attention to it before now because she was too busy looking at his face.

  “All right,” he said. “I’m holding a card. What’s on it?”

  An image formed in Audrey’s mind — not one of the simple outlines drawn on the back of the Zener cards, but of the glowing star that used to sit on top of her family’s Christmas tree. It had always been her job to place that star — first by being held up by her father to reach the top of the tree, then later with the help of a footstool. At least, it had been, until the year she lost her parents. Even though her aunt Deb had made sure to decorate the house, Audrey told her she didn’t want to use the star anymore, and her aunt had found an angel instead, one with dark hair like her niece’s. A little ache went through Audrey; she wasn’t sure she even knew where the star was located anymore, although she guessed it was probably packed away in one of the boxes stored in the rafters of the garage.

  “A star,” Audrey said softly.

  “Correct.” That was all Michael said, but he sounded pleased. Another shuffle of the deck, then, “What about now?”

  This one didn’t come to her with any particular imagery, but only the stark outlines of the image as it was drawn on its card. “A plus sign.”

  “Correct again.” He added, amusement clear in his voice, “What was that about me not getting my hopes up?”

  “Two cards isn’t statistically significant,” Audrey said in her primmest voice, and he chuckled.

  “No, it isn’t. So let’s see how many you can get. What am I holding now?”

  Once again, the picture of the card came to her with startling clarity. “A circle.”

  “Correct.”

  Now, three in a row wasn’t statistically significant, either. She’d managed to pull off such a feat before, although her streak ended immediately afterward. Despite that precedent, she couldn’t quite ignore the way an uneasy anticipation began to build somewhere in her midsection.

  “Now?”

  “A star again.”

  Another shuffling of the cards. “Now?”

  “The one with the three squiggly lines.”

  “And now?”

  “A square.”

  “Now?”

  “A circle.”

  “Now?”

  “Another plus sign.”

  So they went on, no banter this time, only Michael pulling card after card. With the blindfold on, she couldn’t see the clock, had no idea how many minutes had passed, but she did her best to mentally keep a count of how many cards they’d gone through. After around eighty-five, though, she began to lose track.

  At last she heard a scrape, which she thought might be Michael pushing his chair back away from the table. When he spoke, he said, “You can take off your blindfold now.”

  Audrey did as he requested. The cards were back in a neat stack to one side of the tabletop, and Michael was standing over by one of the bookcases, his expression one of wonder.

  “Do you know how many that was?” he asked.

  She stood up as well, mostly because she was beginning to feel a little stiff after sitting in one place, immobile, for so long. “I counted up to eighty-five, but I sort of lost the thread after that.”

  “One hundred and twenty-five,” he said. “I’ve done a lot of these tests — even though science has done its best to debunk the process — and I never had anyone, not even those who were highly psychic, get more than twenty or thirty in a row. What you just did — getting all of them right — should have b
een impossible.”

  How was she supposed to respond to that comment? She managed a weak little laugh, then lifted her shoulders. “Maybe you were providing some sort of auditory tell and just didn’t realize it.”

  “I assure you, I wasn’t. You know my intonation didn’t change from card to card.”

  He was right. He’d done his best to keep his tone completely neutral throughout the duration of the test. There was no way in the world she should have been able to get that many cards correct…and yet somehow, improbably, she had.

  Audrey had already been feeling uneasy, and now that sensation was ten times worse. While parapsychology fascinated her, she’d never expected to be psychic herself. Or at least, nothing more than the little twinges she’d gotten from time to time, that one incident in New Orleans, or the way she’d seemed to have felt her mother’s death, even though she hadn’t known what the sensation meant while it was happening. People often did have these flashes; Audrey’s friend Bettina had known almost to the minute when her grandmother had died, even though they were hundreds of miles apart at the time, and yet Bettina had otherwise never shown any sign of psychic talent.

  But to choose those cards correctly one hundred and twenty-five times in a row? As Michael had just said, it should have been impossible.

  “Well, I suppose that explains why I’ve had such strong reactions to the presence of the demons,” Audrey said, doing her best to keep her tone light. “For whatever reason, something seems to have set off my abilities. I suppose if this whole demon-hunting project doesn’t take off, we could consider putting together some kind of mentalist act.”

  Of course she was joking — once she was done with Project Demon Hunters, she planned to go back to her practice and live a quiet life — but Michael only nodded in an abstracted way, as if he thought it might actually be a good idea, or at least didn’t believe it was a bad one. “I’ll have to reconsider our approach from now on, that’s for sure.”