by J E McDonald
Our of the corner of his eye, Martinez stiffened. “Aren’t you resourceful,” he murmured.
“I like to think so.” He jogged up the two flights of stairs to the bridge, and Martinez kept pace.
Competition swelled between them. As they walked side by side on the bridge, each urged the other to pick up the pace little by little. By the time they reached the other side, they were practically jogging.
This is ridiculous. Roman stopped. Due to his speed, Martinez overshot him a few paces and had to turn around to come back. “What are you after, Martinez?” he asked after a brief stare-down.
“Why were you at Relics just now?”
“Why is that any of your business?”
“I have friends who hang out there.”
“Are they ghosts?” The question slipped out before he could think better of it.
Martinez stared at him, his brow furrowed. So not ghosts then. He must mean either Stella or Aubrey, or both of the women. Great. Not only did Jude have the FBI following him for some reason, but Aubrey had an FBI agent in her back pocket. Things kept getting better and better.
What was it about her that made this task so difficult? When he’d arrived in Wickwood from France a few days ago, everything had been simpler: find the person who would bring hell on Earth and end them before they could do so. Now everything was so damn complicated. He was attracted to his target, who had a pure soul and a witch for a friend. And now the FBI breathed down his neck. On top of that, Roman didn’t even know if he’d interpreted the prophecy correctly.
Martinez leaned his hip against the bridge’s railing like he had all the time in the world. “So, the Foreign Legion, that must have been fun.”
“Most of the time it sucked shit,” he replied, surprising himself with a bit of honesty. Working for a military system loathed by its own citizens had been its own sort of hell. During basic training, Roman had learned what it meant to be exhausted and expendable. Patriotism was swapped for brotherhood between soldiers, none of them loyal to a country that used them as disposable pawns. The only highlights were the moments of camaraderie between the men he trained with and served beside. Everything else was an ulcer on what remained of his soul.
“If you hated it so much, why did you stay?” Martinez asked, his eyes holding genuine interest.
“I signed a contract. I keep my word.” He’d been the only American in the recruitment process. Most of the men had been from European countries, some from Africa. There was one who’d been French, and he’d found out through idle conversation that he’d been kicked out of the French army after a failed drug test and had nowhere else to go. Everyone in his regiment had been running from something, with the Legion the last stop on a long train of bad choices.
Roman let out a breath, not wanting to think about his time in the military. “If you think I’ve done something wrong, arrest me.” He offered himself up with outstretched arms, his wrists together.
Instead, Martinez settled more fully against the bridge railing and crossed his arms over his chest. “I’m not here to arrest you.”
“Then what are you here for?”
“Not sure,” he said, looking toward the river, then back at him. “But the good people of Liller Investigations vouched for you when I called them up today. Seems you have some interesting…talents. Ones that weren’t in your sealed service record.”
Roman tensed. The agent had talked with the Lillers? What had they said? Roman hadn’t told Grace or Sam he’d returned to town. He knew he should have. But he didn’t have time for small jobs when the prophecy hung over his head, threatening everyone in Wickwood. If he survived the next two weeks, then maybe he’d let them know he’d returned.
If he remained in town that long.
And not only had Martinez invaded his privacy by contacting the Lillers, but he’d gotten a look at his sealed file. The missions he’d taken on for the Legion filtered through his mind. Which of those had Martinez taken a particular interest in? “And I suppose you have impeccable French.” Roman kept his tone even.
“Nah,” Martinez said with a grin. “I can’t read French, but the professor you mentioned earlier can.”
“I was told he was smart.”
“A true assessment.”
Quiet lay between them as they sized each other up, people passing them by without much of a glance, the river gurgling placidly beneath their feet—a contrast to the tension between them.
“After talking with Grace,” Martinez said after a minute, “I had the odd idea maybe we’re fighting the same thing.”
Roman turned away and headed toward the steps that would take him back down to the street level. “I don’t partner up,” he threw over his shoulder.
“I wasn’t asking to partner up. I have enough of those already.” Martinez caught up and jogged down the steps beside him. The man couldn’t take a hint. “Grace wasn’t specific when I talked to her,” he continued. “What does a demonologist do, exactly?”
When Roman’s feet hit the pavement, he turned back to the agent. “So you’re not here to arrest me, you’re here to pester me?”
“That about sums it up,” he agreed with a grin.
That grin, the nonchalance of it, had Roman’s temper flaring. He didn’t have time for games, and he definitely didn’t have time to entertain a smug FBI agent so bored with his job he’d taken to tormenting him.
Roman took a threatening step forward, and the smile left the agent’s face. “If you want Jude for some reason,” he gritted out, trying to keep his tone even, “have at him with my blessing. Lord knows he’s had a reckoning coming for years now.” With every word he spoke, Roman kept getting angrier. He didn’t owe anyone anything, least of all this smart-ass agent with secrets up his sleeves. “I don’t make a habit of working with law enforcement. I shed all of that the second my military contract was up. I’m not here to join your band of misfits. I’m not here to make friends.”
After his little speech, Martinez watched him with an inscrutable expression. “Then what are you here for?”
That remained the question of the year. After his very short morning in Relics, Roman’s task in Wickwood had become infinitely more complicated. He felt the weight of it pressing down on him, the seconds ticking by. Never had a job been more important than this one, and he was starting to believe he would fail.
But he couldn’t tell Agent Martinez any of that. Without answering, Roman turned on his heel and strode away.
This time the agent didn’t follow.
10
The remainder of Aubrey’s day went by in a numb blur. She couldn’t even remember if she’d eaten lunch, and she hadn’t really cared. Finn was there, fogging up the window with smiley faces that she ignored. There was no way anything he could do would cheer her up.
She knew she could call Stella. Her friend would come back to the store in an instant when she found out what happened, but Aubrey didn’t want anyone with her. Finn was bad enough. Aubrey wanted to be left alone, but she kept the store open until five like she usually did, coasting on automatic, not really remembering who had stopped in or what they’d bought.
The image of Roman with a knife in his hand remained ever present in her head. He’d stalked through the store with deadly intent, changed into something she didn’t recognize. And it scared her.
His knife…it wasn’t an object someone had on hand “just because,” like a utility knife or something. About an hour before she closed the store, she’d come back into herself enough to do an internet search on different combat knives. The closest thing she found was something called a karambit. Even staring at the image on the screen made her shiver.
He hadn’t closed it up and put it in his back pocket. No. He’d sheathed it. He wore a specific holster for that particular knife, strapped to his body. And when he’d moved, she’d thought she’d seen a matching one on the other side. Who went around wearing knives that looked like they could kill a person in one slice?
Now, driving back home, another tremor ran through her. She expected Stella to be waiting with an arsenal of questions, but her friend probably didn’t know she’d have a stockpile of her own. What she wasn’t prepared for when she opened the front door and stepped inside was the backup her best friend had brought. Lucas was there too, and the concern on his face had her tensing.
“What’s wrong?” Aubrey closed the door quietly behind her.
“We want to talk to you about your new employee,” Stella said, meeting her eyes.
Aubrey set her messenger bag beside the closet. “I was expecting that.” Loki meowed, then weaved himself in and out of her legs. She leaned down to give him a scratch behind his ear before walking through to the kitchen to put water in the kettle for tea.
“Something else happened, didn’t it?” Stella asked, coming up behind her.
Aubrey nodded, turning to her, then said, “But I think you need to clear up a few things before I talk about that. What is it about Roman that makes you so uncomfortable?”
Stella’s eyes flicked to Lucas where he stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. “His energy,” she began, her voice hesitant. “It’s not good.”
Chest tightening, Aubrey turned away to find the teabag she wanted. “What do you mean by ‘not good’?”
“It’s dark, Aubrey. It’s been dark since the day I met him.”
She took a deep breath through her nose to keep the panic in her chest at bay. None of this mattered anyway. She’d fired him. He wouldn’t be back. But if that was true, why did it feel like it was still important?
“You said a while ago that Zack’s energy used to be dark,” she said, referring to the ghost hunter who Stella worked with from time to time. “But ever since he met Bree, his energy is brighter.” She glanced over her shoulder at Stella, who frowned back at her. “Doesn’t that mean people’s energy can change?”
Stella looked at Lucas, then back at her. “I’m not sure that’s a possibility here, Aubrey.”
The kettle clicked, signaling it was done boiling. Aubrey got out a mug and doused the tea bag. “What else aren’t you telling me?” she asked, picking up the steaming mug.
“Why don’t we all sit down in the living room?”
The concern on both of their faces created a knot of dread in Aubrey’s stomach that wasn’t going anywhere. Exhaling slowly, she followed the pair. In the middle of the room, she passed under the faint black circle about two feet across marring the ceiling’s otherwise all-white surface. A matching burn mark lay hidden beneath the area rug Stella had purchased from the thrift store—a remnant of the time Aubrey had accidentally opened a gateway to another dimension with a portal device. She’d painted the ceiling five times in an attempt to get rid of it, but for some reason the black always showed through.
Emotional exhaustion made her limbs heavy. Aubrey sat in one of the leather recliners, curling her feet under herself. After a moment, Loki hopped up on her lap and snuggled down in the groove of her thighs. Setting her tea on the side table, she gave him a few strokes, submerging her fingers into his fuzzy grey fur. The British shorthair purred against her.
Once Stella and Lucas were settled side by side on the couch, Aubrey stared, waiting for them to get to it. What could they say that would make the situation worse? What information did they have that would close the last door on her optimism, the unrelenting desire that she’d hoped the events of the day had all been a misunderstanding?
“Spit it out,” she finally said when neither of them spoke.
Stella glanced at Lucas, then back at her. “He’s a demonologist, Aubrey.”
The unfamiliar word made her hand still on Loki’s back. “What does that mean?”
The pair exchanged another look. “It means he searches for demons,” Stella said, her voice hesitant, “and gets rid of them. He works for the Church.”
Demons. Here. In this world. While Aubrey’s mind scrambled, her hand tightened in Loki’s fur. She had long accepted ghosts were real, of course, and after everything that had happened with Stella’s father, she knew other paranormal beings existed. But demons? An uneasy chill seeped into the base of her spine as she studied Stella’s face. A sudden worry for her friend made her heart pick up tempo. Ghosts were one thing, but did the work she did for the Lillers put her in the path of demons? Was she in danger?
The concern on Lucas’s face as he watched Stella made her think maybe she was.
Aubrey remembered watching an old horror movie as a teenager, where a possessed child became free of a demon at the hands of an exorcist. If Roman worked for the Church, did he do something similar? Was he some sort of priest?
She shook her head at herself. A priest didn’t carry knives and ask to become a part-time employee at an antique store. She needed to know more. “What do you mean by ‘gets rid of them’?” she asked and gave Loki another stroke.
Stella ran a shaky hand over her hair, and Lucas scooted closer to her, touching her back. “I talked to Grace today,” Stella said, her voice soft, “and asked if I could tell you some things about the first time I met Roman. She was resistant at first, but I told her how important it was you understand, since he might be working for you. She finally agreed, as long as I don’t reveal the clients’ names or anything specific about the location. And you need to promise not to pass this along to others, okay? She only relented when I told her how trustworthy you are.”
Aubrey nodded her agreement.
Stella flicked her eyes to Lucas’s face, her skin pale. “The same goes for you, but since they’ve offered you a job, Grace said it’s probably wise to let you know the about the kind of stuff you’ll be getting into if you decided to join them.”
He nodded too.
Refocusing on Aubrey, Stella said, “A little over a year ago, the Lillers called me to an emergency job. The house was in the middle of nowhere, this little, old, dilapidated thing. The Lillers were in way over their heads. They’d called both me and Roman, and we arrived at the same time. The energy in the house—it was so bad, so evil, I couldn’t even get near it. I could tell it wasn’t a ghost problem right off. The energy was too thick to be spirits.”
Stella paused for a moment, and Aubrey’s fingers flexed in Loki’s fur again. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to hear the rest. Loki shifted in her lap, and she loosened her grip, absorbing his purrs like they might ease the apprehension in her chest.
“A woman screamed inside,” Stella continued, a faraway look in her eyes. “And she wouldn’t stop screaming. Roman, he went straight into the house, not even hesitating. I was in bad shape, only able to protect myself from what was happening. Pretty much useless.” A self-deprecating smirk upturned the corner of her mouth for a brief second. “It was already decided that Sam,” she said, referring to Grace’s husband, “was going to take me home, but I heard things before I left. Roman told them there were two kinds of demons in the house, air demons and fire demons, and he needed to call a priest for the air demons, but he would take care of the fire demons first.”
The words were coming faster now, like she wanted to get the story out as quick as possible. “He went inside again. That’s when Sam finally got me in the car, and the screaming from inside the house just stopped. I watched out the back window as we drove away, and I saw Roman there on the front porch, and he had these knives in his hand.” Stella swallowed. “And they were covered in some sort of dark goo. Demon blood, I think.”
Aubrey couldn’t speak, her hand at her throat and her face hot.
“The next day,” Stella went on, “The Lillers asked if I was okay enough to do a blessing on the land. They assured me there were no more demons left.” She met Aubrey’s eyes directly. “I was going to refuse them, but then, I don’t know, I made a last-minute decision to go.” She licked her lips, and her eyes focused past Aubrey. “When I arrived, the house was gone, leveled by fire. Roman was there too, and he sifted through the ash. I don’t know what he
was looking for, and I don’t care to learn. I tried to stay away from him because I realized some of the darkness I had felt from the day before had come from him, not only what was inside the house. His energy was heavy and made me uncomfortable the whole time I was there. I couldn’t get away from it.”
A sickening sensation settled in Aubrey’s limbs, not even Loki’s purrs banishing it.
“I performed a cleanse and a blessing,” Stella went on, her gaze focusing on her hands in her lap. “But there was something wrong with the place. I knew what I was doing wouldn’t be enough to truly get rid of the evil there. The Lillers told me the Church would make sure nothing was built on the land ever again, that they did the same for all possessions of that severity.”
Stella stopped talking, an edgy silence settling itself around them. Keeping his eyes on the top of Stella’s bent head, Lucas continued to rub circles on her back. A minute later, Stella lifted her head and met Aubrey’s eyes again. “After that, I hadn’t seen Roman again until yesterday. I think the Lillers tried to keep our consultations apart on purpose. Grace somehow understood I wasn’t comfortable around him without me saying so.”
Aubrey swallowed around the hard lump in her throat. “What happened to the people in that house? The woman?”
Shaking her head, Stella looked away. “I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”
Aubrey tried to let everything soak in, everything she had learned. Stella didn’t usually talk about her consults because her contract meant she couldn’t. “Is it always that bad for you?”
“No, not usually,” she said, swallowing. “It’s usually spirits who are thankful to be guided to the other side.”
When Lucas brushed Stella’s knee with his fingers, they exchanged a look that told Aubrey there was more. “What is it?”
After breaking Lucas’s gaze, Stella’s met her eyes, her cheeks turning pink. “Since Roman was working at the store with you, I asked Lucas to do a background check on him.”
“What?” She knew it made sense, but an employer was supposed to get a person’s permission to do a background check. It had been one of things listed in the government website she’d found when first considering a part-time employee. Doing one without Roman’s permission…felt invasive. But curiosity made her ask, “What did you find out?” When neither answered her, her hand went to her throat. “Is he a criminal?”