At the last moment, just before her own orgasm, Emma realized that the coldness had a name and an agenda, and she understood why her guides were so far away. While Tyler reached out to hold her and Quinn drifted in his afterglow, Emma fell into a deep pit inside herself and surrendered to the demon within her.
Chapter Twelve
The alarm on his phone went off with an hour to spare before they had to pack up, and Quinn turned the obnoxious buzzing off. Beside him on the bed, Emma was sleeping, small, secret smile on her face. Her head was nestled on Quinn’s shoulder, and she had her arm around his waist, loosely possessive. Tyler lay behind her, curled up as the big spoon to Emma’s little spoon, still sleeping.
Quinn felt utterly drained. He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt this tired. It was hard to even keep his eyes open. He picked up the phone and tried to set the alarm forward, but his thumbs were fumbly and he gave up, settling for hitting the snooze function instead.
Without opening his eyes, Tyler said, “We should get cleaned up and get some dinner.”
Emma sat up and stretched, and Quinn raked his gaze appreciatively over her full breasts. She looked into his eyes, and despite his fatigue, he felt his body respond with a hopeful twitch. She put her hand on him and stroked him slowly.
“It’s too bad we don’t have time for another round,” she said. Emma leaned down and kissed Quinn, her tongue dancing into his mouth. When she pulled away, he felt even more tired than before, and he sagged onto the pillow. She giggled.
“Dibs on the shower,” she chirped, and then she raced into the bathroom, leaving them lying there together. They were silent for a long while, listening to the water in the other room. Finally Tyler sat up turned his back on Quinn.
“I have to say,” Tyler said softly, “that was more of you than I ever wanted to see.”
Quinn snickered. “Same. That was...” He struggled to find the word, and the one he chose startled him. “Unnerving.”
Tyler turned and looked at him, and Quinn resisted the urge to pull the sheets up over his exposed privates. It hardly mattered now, but a sudden spasm of modesty made him feel ashamed.
“You, too?” his friend asked. “Man, I don’t even know what happened. I would never have done anything like that... That was...” He shook his head helplessly. “It felt like I was being controlled.”
Quinn frowned, thinking back. Why had he stayed? Only because Emma had ordered him to. He wasn’t the sort of person who did was he was told, especially not when staying kept him in a situation that had made him uncomfortable. He remembered looking into her eyes and having his objections melt away.
“Ty,” he said softly, “something’s really wrong here.”
The alarm on Quinn’s phone went off again, the snooze button defeated. He picked it up and turned it off again. He was about to put the phone away when his eyes were snagged by something on his screen. It was a colorful icon in the shape of a green ghost, and the label on it said, Ghost Vox 3.0. He had downloaded the app as a joke and hadn’t played with it yet. It was supposed to be a portable ghost box and EMF meter that worked through smart phones, something that he thought would be good for a party trick or picking up girls in bars at fan conventions. He activated the app and waited while it booted up. On a whim, Quinn pointed the phone and the ghost app at Tyler.
The needle on the EMF detector buried itself in the red.
“Dude,” he said, and showed the reading to his friend.
“That can’t be right,” Tyler objected.
Quinn pointed his phone at everything within arm’s reach, and he saw what he expected. Objects with electrical charges made the needle jump, and everything that should have been inert gave off no reading. When he pointed the detector at himself, the needle spiked, and it did it again when he pointed it back at Tyler.
“I... I don’t know what’s causing this.”
Tyler stood and gathered his clothes, covering himself and keeping his eyes averted. His friend’s body language was full of shame and embarrassment. Quinn felt the same.
“I don’t feel right,” Tyler told him.
“Neither do I.” He ran a hand over his face. “I mean, I’ve been tired before, and I’ve had some epic afterglows before, but I... I just feel like a balloon that somebody stuck a pin into.”
The water in the bathroom turned off, and they hurriedly finished dressing and left for their own rooms. The escape took nearly all the energy that Quinn had, but the panic he felt at being alone with her fueled his departure.
He would never have believed he’d be running from a woman he’d just had sex with.
TYLER STOOD IN THE shower in his room, feeling dirty down to his soul. He was mystified by what had happened, and the questions whirling in his head made him dizzy. He felt physically weak and emotionally numb. Nothing made sense.
He dried off from the shower and wrapped a towel around his waist, then stood over the sink, staring at his reflection in the mirror. He had dark circles that hadn’t been there before, and his eyes were badly bloodshot. Tyler ran his hands through his damp hair and tried to understand what was happening. He’d never felt so sideways.
He filled his palm with shaving cream and slathered it on his face, going through the motions of normalcy. He reached for his razor, still looking in the mirror, and was surprised when his fingers touched only tile. He looked down and saw the razor sliding away from him of its own volition. He froze in shock, and it moved again, scooting farther down the counter.
“What the fuck?” he breathed.
He ran out of the bathroom and came back with his phone. He trained the video camera on the razor, which obligingly trembled and shifted once again. A white mist formed slowly around the plastic handle, getting denser and thicker until he was looking at a disembodied hand.
“What the fuck?”
The hand closed around the razor, then vanished. The object was inanimate once more, and Tyler stood for a long time, watching the video again and again. He finally went out into the hallway, still wearing only his towel, and went next door to Professor Montcalm’s room.
“Prof?” he called. “You’ve got to see this...”
QUINN TOOK A HOT SHOWER while his coffee maker burbled, making black gold. He stood in water that was hot enough to turn his skin red, but he didn’t mind the pain. At least it felt real.
He kept thinking about the look in Emma’s eyes, and the way he’d been totally controlled by her will. The more he considered it, the more he realized that the person who had commanded him, the person who had taken control of his mind, wasn’t Emma at all. The thought begged the question of exactly who he’d gone to bed with - or what.
After his shower, he dressed and drank his coffee. When he picked up his phone, he noticed that the ghost hunting app was still running, and the little banner on the screen that acted like a news bulletin ticker was covered in words.
Emma Emma Emma Emma Emma
Outside in the corridor, he heard Tyler calling for Professor Montcalm. Quinn went to see what was going on, prepared to add his own dose of weirdness to the proceedings.
He wasn’t prepared to see Tyler, face full of shaving cream and naked except for a towel, excitedly waving his phone around in their advisor’s suite. Brent, Montcalm, Talia, and the camera men were all in attendance, crowding around to see what he was trying to show them.
“I got out of the shower and I was going to shave, and it moved on its own. I got it on video.”
“What moved on its own?” Quinn asked.
“My razor.”
He joined them to watch the video on Tyler’s phone. “Shit,” he breathed.
“Right?” Brent was excited, and he punched their half-naked friend in the shoulder. “Great catch, dude!”
Quinn held out his own phone, putting it into Professor Montcalm’s hand. Their advisor read the message on the ghost app.
“Bizarre,” the professor said. “Have you asked Emma for her impressions?”
>
“No,” Quinn answered quickly. “I don’t want to talk to her.”
“I guess you got what you wanted and now you don’t feel the need to be nice,” a female voice said from the doorway. Quinn turned around to face her, not recognizing what he heard. To his surprise, it was Emma, even though he would have sworn that he just heard the voice of a stranger. She looked calm, almost prim, as she walked into the room.
“That’s not what happened, and you know it,” he said, taking a subconscious step backward.
“Do I?” She smiled. “Sounds a lot like you’re having some regrets, boys.”
The professor looked at her and furrowed his brow, but he kept his thoughts to himself. “Why don’t you all go down to the hotel restaurant and get some dinner? Tyler, finish getting dressed. Quinn and I will catch up.”
“That’s a great idea,” Talia said. “I don’t want to be up all night on an empty stomach.”
“You’re coming to the investigation?” Brent asked her, sounding hopeful.
“Yeah, but I’m staying in the van with Charlie... er, Professor Montcalm.”
Quinn and Tyler glanced at one another, and Quinn mouthed, Charlie?
“Go on, please,” the professor pushed. “And please close the door on the way out.”
Tyler returned to his room, and Quinn and the professor were left alone. Quinn waited, expecting the worst.
Professor Montcalm sat down heavily, and Quinn tried to head him off at the pass. “Listen, if this is about Emma...”
“It’s very much about Emma, but not in the way you think.” He looked up. “I got a call this afternoon from Dr. Begay, who’s been doing some research of his own about our location.”
Quinn frowned. “All the way from Arizona?”
“Remote viewing and clairsentience,” he nodded. “And he pointed me in the direction of an interesting document.”
“What?”
The professor went to a large beige envelope and took out a trio of photocopies. “Ezra Keifer’s suicide note. It’s in German, which isn’t that unusual for a man from Germany, but what attracted Dr. Begay’s attention and mine was this section here.” The professor handed the note to Quinn and pointed to a section of the letter that had been highlighted. “It translates to, ‘That thing was not my wife and I had no choice. Killing her body was the only way to save her soul.’”
“So the old man was crazy and it wasn’t a crime of passion?” Quinn shook his head. “That’s not cool.”
“More than that.” Professor Montcalm brought out more pages. “This is from the diary of Paul Brennan. He wasn’t roustabout, and he wasn’t having an affair with Catherine Harvey Keifer. He was a Catholic priest, and he was sent out here to Iowa to do an exorcism.”
Quinn almost laughed, even though there was nothing funny about what he was hearing. “Are you kidding?”
“I wish I were.”
Quinn looked at the pages from the priest’s diary. They were neatly written, painstakingly detailed descriptions of the demon that he thought he was battling. In the margins of one page, Brennan had written, ‘Deus defendat. Est falsum mulier.’
“My church Latin is really rusty,” Quinn said. “I know the first part is ‘God defend us.’ What’s the second?”
“‘It is no woman.’”
He thought of the look in Emma’s eyes and shuddered. “Uh... Prof....”
Montcalm put the pages back into their envelope. “Tell me what happened with you and Tyler when you went with Emma. I don’t need to know the play by play, but was there anything unusual that happened?”
Quinn paced. “Honestly? The fact that it happened at all was unusual. I didn’t want to be there. I was leaving, and she looked me in the eye and ordered me to stay.”
“And?”
“And I stayed.” He gestured helplessly. “And I don’t even know why. There was just this... she had this look in her eye, and I didn’t...”
He trailed off, feeling foolish, but the professor nodded. “We saw the video from the house.”
“Yeah. Something went into her.” He looked at Professor Montcalm. “You think was a demon, don’t you? The same demon that the priest was trying to exorcise out of Catherine?”
The professor nodded. “I’m afraid so. Based on the things I read today - the priest’s journal, the suicide note, even a few accounts from neighbors who’d had strange conversations with both of the Keifers - I’d say that the exorcism wasn’t complete when the murder took place. Possibly it was enough to get the demon to lose its control over Catherine, but not enough to cast it out. When she was shot in that state, the demon was trapped in the house.”
Quinn’s mind whirled. “At the beginning, she was talking about an old man’s spirit. That was Keifer, and he was warning her not to go upstairs. And she talked about there being two spirits upstairs. I thought that would be Catherine and Paul. But you think one of them was this demon?”
“No. I think she legitimately encountered the spirits of all three victims, but she was unable to detect the demon in the room until it was too late.”
Quinn scoffed, “Some medium! You’d think if she was going to pick up on anything, it would be the demon.”
“Not if she was already under an oppression.” The professor’s voice was quiet and troubled, and he sat down again. He rubbed his fingertips over his forehead. “God, I could use a drink.”
“An oppression?” Quinn prompted. “What do you mean?”
“I contacted Dr. Begay about the photos that Tyler found when he was investigating Emma’s background. The entity that the photographer called in, the one that was in those pictures... It was a demon. Emma was supposed to have an exorcism, but she left Arizona before it could be completed.”
He sat down, too. “So you think she’s possessed by two different demons now?”
Professor Montcalm nodded sadly. “Yes. And I think that they’re working together to steal the life force from human beings to make themselves stronger.”
“Steal the...”
“Like a succubus,” he said. “Your life’s energy was drained out during sex.”
It all made sense, now. The fatigue, the feeling of being commanded... He shook his head and resisted the urge to put his face in his hands. Hiding wouldn’t help.
He looked at Professor Montcalm. “So now what?”
“So now we take her back to that house, and we finish what Father Brennan started all those years ago.”
“How?” Quinn demanded. “We don’t have a priest.”
“Father Domenico Leone, the chief exorcist of the Archdiocese of Dubuque will be meeting us at the house.” He nodded to his younger companion. “And I know that you have some experience as an assistant with such things.”
Memories he had tried too hard to forget rose in his mind’s eye, and Quinn stood up, too agitated to sit. “I’m not an exorcist. The best I can do is hold her down.”
“That’s going to take all of us, I fear,” the professor said. “Henry is going to get the footage of his dreams.”
Chapter Thirteen
Emma sat silently in the car for the majority of the trip from the hotel, her eyes closed. By the time he and the professor had joined their group for a rushed dinner, her voice had been hers again, and she had done her best to keep from looking either Quinn or Tyler in the eye. Apparently, their demon-fueled sexual encounter hadn’t been her finest hour, either.
The house was silent when they arrived, but it wasn’t empty. Quinn felt like the place was watching and waiting, as if it knew what they were planning. He hoped that wasn’t the case.
They occupied themselves for an hour or so, setting up their cameras and devices. Emma sat in the car with Talia, still ostensibly meditating. While she was out of ear shot, Quinn took the team into the back yard, and he and Professor Montcalm explained their theories and what needed to be done. Rick quit on the spot, going out to sit in the second of the two vehicles their group had driven out to the site.
Emma saw the man arrive and sneered in a voice far too low to be her own. “Well, hello, Father. What brings you here tonight? No little kiddies to bugger, I’m afraid.”
Brent gaped at her. “That’s rude.”
“Don’t talk to it,” Quinn advised. “Don’t give it anything that it can work with or use against you.”
The look that Brent gave him was eloquently horrified. This was probably the first time that his friends had ever encountered something this dark. Quinn was sorry for them to have lost their innocence. There would be no going back.
The priest smiled at Emma. “Miss Ray,” he said, offering her his hand. “I’ve heard so much about you. I’m a friend of Dr. Begay’s.”
Emma faltered, and for the briefest of moments, uncertainty and the real Emma shone through. “Dr. Begay?” she echoed.
Tyler came and stood beside Quinn, his expression grim. They were prepared.
She put her hand in the priest’s, and Father Leone smiled gently. “May God bless you, child.”
His words snapped her occupant back into control. “I don’t need blessings.”
“What do you need?”
“I think we need to get started with this investigation,” Quinn said. Father Leone and Emma turned to him, and she smiled. There was raw lust in her eyes, and he looked away. “Let’s go.”
They went into the house, and as soon as they walked through the front door, the team was enveloped by a blast of cold air. Brent whipped out his hand-held infrared thermometer.
Hearts of Darkness: A Valentine's Day Bully Romance Collection Page 28