by J L Bryan
Contents
Fire Devil
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Also by J.L. Bryan:
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Fire Devil
Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper,
Book Eleven
by
J.L. Bryan
Copyright 2019 J. L. Bryan
All rights reserved
This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my wife Christina, who helps me keep writing around our crazy family schedule.
I appreciate everyone who has helped with this book, including beta readers Robert Duperre, Edeena Cross, and Andrea van der Westhuizen. Thanks to my proofreaders Thelia Kelly and Barb Ferrante. Thanks to Claudia from PhatPuppy Art, who created the great cover art for this book, and her daughter Catie, who's done all the lettering on the covers for this series.
Thanks to my agent Sarah Hershman and to everyone at Tantor Media and Audible who have made the audio versions of these books. The audio books are read by Carla Mercer-Meyer, who does an amazing job.
Thanks also to the book bloggers who's supported the series, including Heather from Bewitched Bookworms; Mandy from I Read Indie; Michelle from Much Loved Books; Shirley from Creative Deeds; Katie from Inkk Reviews; Lori from Contagious Reads; Kelly from Reading the Paranormal; Lili from Lili Lost in a Book; Heidi from Rainy Day Ramblings; Kelsey from Kelsey’s Cluttered Bookshelf; Abbie from Book Obsession; Ashley from Paranormal Sisters, Ali from My Guilty Obsession, and anyone else I missed!
Most of all, thanks to the readers who have supported this series. There are more books to come!
Also by J.L. Bryan:
The Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper series
Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper
Cold Shadows
The Crawling Darkness
Terminal
House of Whispers
Maze of Souls
Lullaby
The Keeper
The Tower
The Monster Museum
Fire Devil
For the various Schuberts
Chapter One
I was still groggy and aching as I knocked on the door that connected my hotel room at El Grande Chalet to Michael and Melissa's room next door.
Technically, I guess it was just Michael's room now, since Melissa had run off the previous night for parts unknown. She wasn't in control of herself, though. Anton Clay had taken control of her, possessing her sometime after Michael had been hospitalized.
Now Melissa's life was in danger. The pyrokinetic ghost of Clay was using her as a vehicle for the moment, but at some point he would no doubt discard her...and I doubted he would do so gently. More likely he would burn her alive, after he accomplished whatever it was he'd set out to do. I had no idea what his goals were now.
“Michael!” I shouted, hitting the door harder. I winced—my entire body was covered in bruises and scratches from a fight with a powerful ancient ghost that looked like a snake monster. That awful paranormal creature was Clay's new pet. “Michael, are you there or not?”
No response.
Michael had taken a bad beating, too, worse than mine as he tried to defend me from the Snake Man, and as he tried and failed to approach his possessed sister. His torso had been badly slashed up.
We'd barely managed to stumble back to the hotel through the freezing night from the ruins of an old resort outside of town. I'd passed out the instant I'd hit the warmth of my room.
What if Michael's injuries had been even worse than mine? What if he'd been bleeding all night, alone in his room, with nobody to notice?
I panicked, knocking harder. “Michael!”
No answer came.
I tested the door and found it was unlocked on his side.
“Michael!” I yelled as I pushed the door open, barging into his hotel room. I hadn't done that in hours. “Michael, are you okay?”
I looked at the empty bed where his sister was supposed to be.
Then I looked to his bed—also empty.
Like no one had touched it all night.
“Michael?” Puzzled, I stepped through into his room. His suitcase remained against the wall where he'd left it. Melissa's was gone; she must have put hers in Michael's truck when she'd stolen it. We hadn't seen her suitcase in there during the interval between her first and second theft of the truck, but she could have wedged it under the seats, out of sight.
“Michael!” I said again. Where could he have gone? Not far, without his truck. Or my van.
I checked the pocket of my mud-encrusted jeans. My van keys were still there.
Ahead, I heard a rustle somewhere out of sight.
“Michael?” I approached the bathroom area, just around the adobe-and-wainscoting corner. I could see the mirror and sink first.
It looked like a scene from a horror movie, with dried-brown smears of blood on the mirror and sink handles. Dried brown was everywhere on the floor, too; it was impossible to tell blood from mud.
“Michael!” I shouted, pushing open the slightly ajar door to the shower area.
The Psycho theme continued here—blood streaks ran down the brightly colored tiles of the shower walls that I could see.
The shower curtain hid most of the tub, though.
The curtain puffed out a little, and a soft moan sounded behind it.
“Michael?” I asked, a little more uncertainly. I reached out to grab the dark adobe-colored shower curtain, but hesitated to open it. Strange sounds behind a heavy curtain can be a touch hair-raising, especially considering some of the awful things I've encountered in the past.
My body tensed, ready to fight or flee as I pulled the curtain aside.
Michael lay within, his body thickly coated in dark brown. Most of it was mud, I hoped, but some of it had to be blood. The Snake Man had inflicted a lot of damage on Michael, especially around the chest.
“Michael!” I knelt beside the tub and took his pulse. He was alive, at least, but his unresponsiveness was not a good sign.
The tub was dry. He must have sat down in it the previous night, intending to clean his many wounds like a responsible person—and promptly zonked out, just as I had
, exhausted from a long hike deep into the caves under the Monster Museum, and from the Snake Man's many abuses, and from our freezing, wind-lashed hike back to town after Clay had taken off with Michael's truck.
I turned on the water, which came out icy cold at first, even though I'd started with the hot water knob.
Michael flinched, kicking the side of the tub, and let out a kind of “Yah!” sound, like he was trying to kick-start a horse or something.
“Oh, good, you're up,” I said. “Interesting choice, sleeping in the bathtub. But I'm sure the hotel's cleaning staff will be glad you did. Especially after they see the mud all over my bed.”
“Huh?” Michael looked around, blinking as he put together where he was. The water turned dark and swampy as it soaked the many layers of filth off him. “It's cold.”
“It's getting warmer,” I said, passing my hand under the flow from the faucet. It rinsed open a clear path through the crusted mud on my fingers. “You might want to switch to shower mode, though. I don't think you want to sit and soak in this—”
“Melissa!” Michael stood up, his eyes wide, as memories apparently flooded back. Then he swayed, unsteady on his feet in the tub.
“Wait!” I scrambled to balance him, reaching out for his legs. “We'll take care of it, I promise but...uh...hey, you managed to get completely undressed before the tub, huh? I kind of thought you still had a layer or so under there...”
Once he had his balance, I turned away and finally noticed his clothes, heaped beyond the mostly-closed sliding door to the closet.
“We have to go find her,” Michael said.
“Of course, but we have to figure out where she is,” I said. “And I just know that will work out better if we don't go around looking like we just crawled out of a landfill in a war zone. Also, Stacey and Jacob will be here before long, so we'll have more help. I suggest we use that time to clean up, lick our wounds, and figure out some kind of realistic, rational plan.”
“How bad are you hurt?” He opened the shower curtain again, as if I hadn't just made a point of closing it. He was less muddy than ever. “He burned you, didn't he?”
“Yeah, just a little...” I looked down at my hand, throbbing under its layer of mud.
“Let me see. You need burn gel.”
“I need a shower,” I said. “And so do you. We can patch each other up after that.”
“Sure. Meet you in five minutes?”
I looked from my mud-covered self to his.
“Twenty minutes,” I said. “Leaning toward thirty.”
“Come on! We have to hurry.”
“Nineteen minutes,” I said. “Starting five minutes from now.”
“Wait, that's...” He squinted, doing the math, and I closed the door and hurried back to my own room.
Twenty-four minutes later, I was showered and dressed in clean clothes, though every movement made me wince. My muscles were sore and battered. My hand ached where Clay had burned it. My entire head hurt with injuries from our fight.
I was just starting on some quick, basic makeup when Michael knocked at my door. He'd already showered and shaved off his stubble, leaving his face smooth, framed by his slightly shaggy brown hair, and was completely dressed in a thick black sweater and jeans. Shoes, even.
“Let me check you out,” he said, moving closer.
“Haven't you been doing that this whole trip?” I asked.
“I...” He shook his head and smiled a little, but it was obviously forced, like he was so busy thinking about his sister being kidnapped by a mass murderer that he didn't even have time to flirt around. Totally understandable. “Of course,” he said.
We checked each other out, raising and lowering articles of each other's clothing to apply bandaging and burn gel as needed. It wasn't too romantic, but it sure as heck was intimate.
“Okay,” I said, when we were as patched as we were going to get. “Let's try the obvious first. Call Melissa's phone.”
“You think Clay's going to just tell us where he is?” Michael said. “After he went to all that trouble ditching us in the freezing ruins?”
“He's toying with us,” I said. “He could have killed me, but he didn't. He wants us chasing him, that's what I think.”
“Why would he toy with us?” Michael said. He was already dialing Melissa on his phone.
“I don't know. I don't pretend to fully understand him. I thought killing me would be a top priority for him. The rest of this doesn't make sense. I wouldn't have thought of him as the toying type—”
“Hey, it's me. Call me back right away,” Michael said, then hung up. “Voicemail.”
“Did it ring, though?”
“It rang a few times.”
“So it's charged up, at least,” I said. “That's good.”
“Yeah, I guess. Doesn't tell us where she is, though.”
“Let me try.” I called Melissa's phone, with the same results—a few rings, then voicemail. “It's Eleanor. Call me. I know you're afraid of me, Anton, but you can't escape your destiny.” I hung up.
“What was that?” Michael asked.
I shrugged. “I'm just grasping at straws, Michael.”
“At least I'm not the only one.”
“Clay is evolving. He's always been an obsessive-repetition entity: burn down the house, kill the family. He's been playing out his own murder-suicide again and again across the centuries, but always confined to that spot. The site of his lover's home, where she lived with her husband and children and slaves. All of them killed by Clay when he burned the house down with himself inside...” I shook my head. “But he's loose now. He's possessing people. He's evolving. Somehow he broke his bonds with the site of my old house.”
“How?”
“Maybe the new construction hit something that set him free,” I said. “I need to look into that, but right now we have to focus on tracking down your sister.”
“Agreed. So...how?”
“Start by checking her phone records. Can you access her phone account online?”
“I pay for it, so yeah. We're on a family plan.”
“Does she have a credit card?”
“No. Not unless she took mine...” Michael frowned a little deeper and returned to his room. A moment later, he let out a pretty unhappy grunt.
“Gone?” I asked.
“Gone. What does he want with my sister?” Michael stomped back into my room, his anger looking ready to boil over.
“He probably just needed to hitch a ride away from you,” I said. “She was available.”
Michael was pacing, making me think of a restless lion in cramped quarters at a zoo. “So that explains...just about everything strange about her lately. How long do you think he's been controlling her?”
“It must have been a gradual process,” I said. “Anton died in 1841. He didn't know how to drive a truck, or use a smart phone. And ghosts aren't usually that great at learning new skills; they tend to be pretty focused on the past.”
“But Clay's not acting like a usual ghost, right?”
“That's true. Most of them cling to a specific place, or less often, an object. Break that connection and they move on. But he's not moving on. He's doing...this. Whatever this is.” I gestured helplessly to indicate my general cluelessness. Then I grabbed a tablet and handed it to him. “Here you go. Check the phone and bank records. If we're lucky, maybe Clay hasn't yet learned to avoid leaving digital footprints along his path.”
Chapter Two
Michael sat at the little side table in his room, on a stiff-backed chair with thin, badly worn Aztec-pattern upholstery. I kept the connecting door propped halfway open so I could talk to him while I finished getting ready.
He found no new charges on his credit card since Melissa had disappeared, nor any outgoing texts or calls from her phone. There had been some incoming stuff, like the calls from Michael and me, plus some texts from Savannah's 912 area code, which could have been any of Melissa's friends from back home.
The online account didn't provide anything more useful than numbers and the times of incoming and outgoing contacts. There was no content of the text messages, no association with the contact list in Melissa's phone to help us identify any of the numbers.
Michael jotted a long list of numbers, scratching them with an El Grande Chateau pen onto the El Grande Chateau clock-and-cactus stationery.
“It's going to take forever to call these numbers,” he said. “I feel like Melissa's getting farther and farther away while we just sit here.”
“We can go out and canvas the town,” I said. “Show her picture around, see if anyone's seen her today.”
“Do you really think she's still here in town?”
“No, I think Clay wanted to get out of here. Still, the logical thing is to look at his last known whereabouts. If we are going to ask around town, the time to do it is now, because the trail's only going to get colder.”
“What about these phone numbers?” Michael held up the list.
“Bring them with us. You can walk and talk at the same time. Then you'll really feel like you're getting things done.”
We bundled up in our warmest clothes and headed outside.
There was no fresh snow today, and the stuff in the street was just dirty slush. So was the town square, where the Santa's Village attraction was being taken apart by a number of workers. Gingerbread huts, fiberglass reindeer, and plastic light-up snowmen were getting broken down and loaded into trucks.
“I guess Christmas really is over,” I said.
“Yep. Next they'll set up the giant glowing tomato that drops on New Year's Eve.” Michael was looking at his phone as we walked down the sidewalk toward the center of town.
“Why a giant tomato?”
“It's the Tennessee state fruit. Didn't you have to memorize all the state fruits in fourth grade?”
“Um...no.” I approached one of the workers breaking down the Christmas decorations and showed him a picture of Melissa on my phone. “Excuse me, sir? Have you seen this girl?”
