by Andrea Speed
But the trouble had never really been getting in the gate. They could do that. They could handle it. No, the problem was the house. That thing was warded up the ass and beyond and contained things specifically to deter demons and angels and witches alike. The yard was simply to keep out the weaklings and those who weren’t serious. This was the mastermind round.
And, ironically, it was the mediocre man’s time to shine.
“Okay, before the two of you go in, I have some things for you,” Esme said, reaching into her coat pocket. She pulled out a necklace with a leather cord, which she put around Logan’s neck. It had two things on it: a tiny black velvet bag that smelled strongly of wormwood and a pendant that looked for all the world like a glass eye, although not the same kind as Ceri wore. These looked like glass eyes fished out of bowl, whereas the one on the Amulet of Azrael looked a bit like it might belong to a sinister cartoon character, and the one Ceri wore had a diamond-shaped pupil. Lyn was already wearing one because Logan wasn’t going into spooky death mansion alone. Again, nonsuperhero here.
“What does this do?” he asked.
“It should keep you safe from the more general curses,” Esme said. “And it gives me a way to see what’s going on so we can help you from out here if necessary.”
Ceri grabbed him and gave him a quick kiss before saying, “I have something for you too.” Ceri was holding Logan’s hand in a weird way, and only when his palm got unnaturally hot did he realize that Ceri was doing something to him.
Magic ran in bloodlines, and as the Prince of Hell, Ceri had some as well. More powerful, because he also had demon blood. But Ceri’s parentage got really confusing because Lucifer was his father, but so was some unsuspecting warlock from a long line of witches. It seems not just anyone could have the son of Satan, and there were no females who met the criteria, so he made do with what he had and picked the warlock. Ceri didn’t know all the details, but apparently he’d gestated like a parasite and burst out of the warlock a week later. Did the warlock know he was a vessel for Lucifer’s son? Knowing his dad, as Ceri had explained to Logan, he figured the guy didn’t know. Lucifer might have seduced him in a female guise, so the warlock likely never knew he’d been impregnated. He didn’t survive the birthing process. It was a whole big bunch of ick, but Lucifer was a complete dickbag, so at least it made sense.
As soon as he saw that Ceri had turned his hand red and leathery, like demon skin—no, like his demon skin—Logan knew exactly what he was going to do. “Oh no, Cer—”
“This will protect you from anything,” Ceri replied, taking the sword and sheath off his back and looping it over Logan’s shoulder. The thing about Godslayer, besides being a weapon that could kill or destroy fucking anything in the entire universe, was that only Ceri could touch it. If someone who was not him touched it, it would suck out their soul and life force. Sounded like a joke, right? But once during a fight another demon had tried to pick it up, and by the time he’d lifted it to a usable height, he’d turned into a desiccated husk. One second he was a demon in human guise; the next he was a piece of green beef jerky on the ground. Only the Destroyer, aka Son of Satan, could wield it. Full stop. It killed everyone else.
But of course, with the magic he had, Ceri could temporarily transfer an almost literal piece of himself to Logan. But it would be on Logan to remember to only touch the sword with his right hand. Otherwise, he wouldn’t even live long enough to say “Oops.”
Lucifer and his offspring could blow through most demon wards, but heavy duty wards they couldn’t breach existed and were in use in this house. So Ceri couldn’t enter with them. Even Esme was warded out. That left Logan and Lyn. Ahmed could have come in too, but he wasn’t here.
Lyn, being a harpy, didn’t need anything to protect her. Truth was, hardly anybody warded against harpies because most people didn’t seem to know about them. The same was true of Ahmed, although he was not a harpy. Obscure monsters didn’t get the love or fear they deserved.
Lyn gave the door a good push, and the wood cracked as the door gave way and gaped open like a hungry mouth. She stepped inside, and Logan followed.
The foyer and front room seemed cavernous, and despite the layer of dust that made everything seem faded, the floor was marble with streaks of gold and blue running through it like veins. A huge wooden staircase with a slight elegant curve to it ran up to the second floor, which seemed darker than it should have been. But the windows were all boarded or shuttered, right? It was going to be as murky as an abandoned swimming pool.
There was very little in the way of furniture, but what there was had been covered with white sheets for that extra layer of spooky. Of course the dust had turned them gray, but one couldn’t have everything.
No obvious sigils or visible fetishes appeared, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. A really good witch or warlock kept that shit hidden. What good was a trap if everyone saw it coming?
They checked out the first side room they came to, which, judging from the empty shelves that ran up one wall, was a former library. From the shape of the sheets, a small table and an armchair were still in this room.
“Wanna look?” Lyn asked.
Logan shrugged. “Why not?”
The closest thing to him was the small side table, so he lifted up the grungy sheet, face turned away so he didn’t get a nose full of dust, and revealed a plain old table, although it looked like it had some scratches on it. No—was that wax? Something drawn in wax?
Suddenly he was no longer inside the house but plunging to the bottom of a lake. Or some body of water that was deep and cold. Now Logan was glad he’d been holding his breath. As he swam to the surface, Logan knew he had to figure out quickly if that had been some kind of teleportation spell or if this was all in his head. Which would be an issue because hallucination spells were a pain in the ass. They could trick the brain into thinking everything about it was reality, to the point that the body would respond to it. People who supposedly died of spontaneous combustion? Hallucination spell victims. They hallucinated they were burning, so they did. The human brain was a marvel and could be fooled into destroying itself quite easily.
He broke the surface to find a thick wall of ice that gave him maybe an inch or two of an air pocket and no more. So, cool. Was this real or fake?
Logan looked at the palm of his right hand. It was unlikely he’d have a demon-skin hand in here. In fact, he told himself he wouldn’t, if indeed this was a hallucination. If it was a real place he was dropped into, he wouldn’t make the demon hand disappear by refusing to believe it was real.
The skin of his hand was that odd fleshy pink colloquially described as white. Yep, hallucination. Even though he was alone, he shouted, “Lyn, if you can hear me, I’m stuck in a hallucination. Punch me out of it.” That was a dangerous ask, since she could technically punch him through a wall, but he was hoping she didn’t unleash on him completely. He was relatively sure he hadn’t pissed her off lately.
Of course, it was always weird having an ex for a friend. On the plus side, at least they had both gotten into gay relationships post breakup. Strange how that seemed to leech out any possible jealousy or hang-ups. Or at least it had in their case.
There was no immediate response, making him wonder if she was caught in a hallucination trap as well. Being a harpy, she was less subject to such things, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t happen. It just meant it was unlikely.
The water was so cold his balls seemed to have retracted completely inside his body. Even his bone marrow was contracting. Goddamn, he was turning into an ice cube. He wondered if he was going to die of hypothermia before he drowned. “Any time now, Ly—”
Pain suddenly exploded against the side of his face, and he stumbled and fell to the floor. The dry, warm floor. With an aching jaw. “Oww,” he said, shuddering from the sudden temperature shift as he reached up and made sure his face was still intact. “I didn’t mean for you to break my jaw.”
“
Don’t be a baby,” she said. “You said punch you.” It didn’t help that she was grinning while she said this. Okay, this was the problem with being exes. She took way too much enjoyment from that.
“You could have pulled it a little more.”
“Could I?” She reached down and gave him a hand up to his feet. He took it, but he frowned at her. She knew exactly how strong she was.
“Did you find anything on the chair?”
She shook her head. “Standard fear-induction sigil. I’m sure if I was a human, I’d be a gibbering wreck.”
Sometimes she overdid the whole “harpies are superior” thing, but he couldn’t do much about it except shake his head. She was, and she goddamn knew it, and that was the most annoying thing about it. They couldn’t all be nigh-invulnerable birdwomen of vengeance.
All the cold had fled from his extremities by the time they went to the next room, which was the living room or the drawing room or whatever the fuck. He came from a working-poor background. Houses even remotely like this he’d seen only on films and TV shows. He didn’t know the names for all the rooms, if they even had them.
The only furniture in here was odd things pushed off into the corner and, again, covered with dusty sheets. Coatracks? Maybe. Maybe sculptures too? But that didn’t make a ton of sense. Then again, creepy mansion. Anything pretty much went. Judging by Scooby-Doo, this included trapdoors, secret rooms, and evil caretakers who hid behind shitty monster masks.
Considering what had happened last time, Logan hung back and let Lyn take the lead. She uncovered one of the weirdass things in the corner. It turned out to be a coatrack, but it had things dangling from its coat-hanging branches, or whatever they were called. “What the hell are those?” he wondered aloud.
She eyed them, grabbing one for a closer look. The fact that she sniffed it was generally a bad sign. “Okay, this must be related to a spell, or else something really bizarre happened a long time ago because I’m pretty sure these are dried intestines.”
“Gross. Are intestines used in a spell?”
“In some? Probably. But don’t ask me, I only date a witch. I ain’t one.”
“Do you feel weird or anything?”
She scowled at him. “Almost always. I doubt it’s—”
Lyn was interrupted by a deep, guttural growling noise that made both of them turn back toward the doorway. In it stood some kind of huge black dog, maybe a Rottweiler on steroids, although Logan noticed it was slightly translucent at the edges. A hellhound?
“Ceri!” he shouted. The dog hadn’t stopped growling or drooling blood and acidic saliva.
Suddenly there was a noise that sounded like someone playing a book on tape backward, with some warps and gaps in the tape. That was what demon tongue sounded like, at least to human ears. Humans couldn’t speak it or understand it, which was why humans being able to summon demons was a rare thing. They had to do it in their human language, and some demons didn’t bother to respond to requests in other languages.
But the hellhound immediately lay down, no longer snarling or drooling. It was pretty much encoded in their DNA—well, whatever passed for their DNA—to respond to Ceri and Lucifer as their masters. No matter that he was summoned up as part of some spell to protect this place. If Ceri told him to knock it off, he knocked it the fuck off. He couldn’t disobey him.
The spectral dog rested its head on its front paws, watching them with its red-hot eyes but unable to do anything since Ceri had commanded it to stay. The thing about hellhounds was they were tangible enough to rip people apart like soggy bread but intangible enough that attempts to hurt them inevitably failed. It was like trying to punch a cloud.
Logan heard another burst of demon language, and the dog hefted itself to its feet. “Hon?” he asked.
“I’ve ordered it to protect the two of you,” Ceri shouted back.
Lyn coughed out a laugh that startled the dog. “It’s working for us now? Cool.”
Logan gestured toward the opposite door and said, “Come on, Cujo, give us a tour.”
The dog’s fiery eyes glanced his way, but Logan doubted it understood him. But he had orders, and he padded onward, with Logan and Lyn following behind.
Another thing about hellhounds? They were death omens, meaning anyone who saw one was dead within a few hours, or less if it caught them first. But that didn’t apply to Logan, whose boyfriend was the Destroyer. Man, I should just start bossing hellhounds around. Talk about giving him street cred.
“Cujo is so played out as a reference,” Lyn said. “Why don’t we call him Ralph or something?”
“Ralph? Why Ralph?”
She shrugged. “Pretty silly name for a hellhound.”
Now it was hard to believe they had ever dated. Of course it made all kinds of sense in retrospect, since Lyn was basically a mercenary hired by the angels to keep an eye on him and he was desperately clinging to the idea that he was hetero while trying not to acknowledge that maybe he sorta kinda had thoughts that meant maybe he wasn’t. The lies he told himself were more pervasive and powerful than any of the other lies in his life, which was earthshaking and very sad, especially considering how much of his life was built on lies. Without lies, what would he have had? An alcoholic mother, an absent father, and a younger sister he was equally protective of and alienated from. And now he had kind of an ad hoc family, although it was a desperately weird one, and he was the only human in it. He couldn’t continue to lie to himself, not after everything he’d been through. He missed Gill sometimes. He wished he still had his sister. But that ship had sailed, and once someone was reborn as an angel, there was no going back.
Cujo/Ralph had led them to what Logan guessed was a dining room when it paused and looked toward the front of the house with a small, almost endearing warning woof. He and Lyn shared a look before Logan shouted, “Everything okay out there?”
There was no immediate answer, but a breeze blew through the house, followed by a small sandstorm—some might call it a dust devil—that swirled into the room. The sand became a pile that suddenly resolved into the shape of an average-sized man who was lean and very handsome.
“Ahmed! You could’ve called, you know,” Logan said.
Ahmed shrugged. “It was quicker to just show up.” His dark eyes, such a deep brown they usually appeared black, settled on the hellhound, which was looking at him as if it was unsure if it should attack or not. “You have a hellhound in here.”
“Yeah, Ceri made it work for us,” Logan told him.
“What’s up, Mum?” Lyn said.
Ahmed scowled at her. “I told you not to call me that.”
Ahmed was a mummy. Or so he said. It was actually unclear what he was. According to Esme, he was cursed by an actual mummy and not mummified himself, but since what a mummy was as a supernatural being was a nebulous category, who was to say? Unlike cartoonish old horror movies, he was not a guy wrapped up in bandages like toilet paper, or as in more recent horror movies, not a commander of CGI scarabs or anything. He was technically undead, in the sense that he was dead but still somehow alive, and there was some doubt he could be killed. His power, such as it was, was his ability to turn into sand—basically his body weight in sand—and he could move in that fashion and coalesce back into human form. He couldn’t cause a sandstorm, nor could he control all sand. Just himself.
But he appeared to be a handsome Egyptian man in his midtwenties, with cheekbones so high a male model would fight him to death in the street for them. He was a bit of a clotheshorse, so he often conjured up stylish clothes for himself, and right now Ahmed had conjured up one of his favorite suits, based on an actual Issey Miyake, that consisted of a maroon-and-white jacket and pants with a checkered pattern so tight and strange it looked like it was trying to become an optical illusion. He often paired it with bright and somewhat startling shirts, and today was no exception, as he’d conjured up a royal blue one for himself. It clashed, and yet somehow he made it work, the male-modeling son of a
bitch. Logan had asked him once why he wore clashing colors, and Ahmed gave him a snooty look before replying, “It’s Miyake. If you want something conservative, go to Walmart.” Had Logan been asked what he thought a mummy might be like, he’d never have said fashion snob, but hey, he wouldn’t have thought his fucked-up family had angel blood in it either. Surprises abounded.
To no one’s shock, Ahmed’s hair was always perfectly coifed, but it became amazing upon realizing he was a man of sand and none of this was real. His detailing was exquisite, but then again, he claimed to have been around since “sometime BC”—he would claim he forgot what time exactly, because he was super old and calendars changed depending on the country and/or religion involved. Which was fair because Logan looked it up, and he was 100 percent correct.
He and Ceri stumbled upon Ahmed when they went after a dangerous collector of occult artifacts. They found a heavy chest with lots of ominous but unknown markings on it and decided to open it, because they were stupid like that. All they found was sand, which they were sure was some kind of prank or something, maybe someone sold the collector an expensive box of nothing. But then it formed into Ahmed, who was pissed at being locked in a fucking box—as anyone would be—but realized immediately they weren’t responsible, and oh yeah, Ceri had a power aura like Satan, and he wasn’t fucking with that. But after that, they became sort of acquaintances.
Ahmed was naturally(?) a loner—though dapper—and a depressive on a scale that made Eeyore look almost cheerful. He’d long ago declared humankind worthless and a failed experiment. But he didn’t want the apocalypse to come, because where would he get clothing ideas? Also he was relatively sure after the demons and angels had wiped everyone out, he would still be around. Because he wasn’t sure he could die. He had tried to kill himself numerous times, only to be disappointed. For instance, his first attempt had been throwing himself in the Nile, but all he could do was travel the sea without a boat. And as sand, neither fish nor humans had any interest in him. So he was a sad, grumpy, aesthete immortal. Exactly like all the old stereotypes.