“I’ve gotten some information,” I said, aware of how much I would have to leave out. But I didn’t want to have to explain Roman to him. And I wasn’t sure I was ready to talk about Mick. Or maybe I didn’t want to scare Jules off. “I’ve been told it’s a demon.”
“Are you joking?” he said, half laughing.
“Oh, yeah, because I would totally joke about something like this,” I said, spitting out the sarcasm.
“It’s just that... demons. That’s really getting into the lunatic fringe. But I think maybe your local Catholic priest can help you out. Do up a nice little exorcism for you.”
“That’s funny. I never really thought of Catholics as lunatic fringe. I thought that was you guys.”
“You’re not exactly middle-of-mainstream yourself.”
And I liked it that way. “It’s just that we’ve been trying to figure out what this thing is, and I got a lead that said demon. Thought you’d like to know.”
“But what are we supposed to do about a demon?”
We scoff at what we don’t understand. I had clearly stepped outside Jules’s comfort zone. “Jules, let me talk to Tina.”
“I’m sure she knows ever so much more about demons than I do.”
“Maybe she doesn’t, but I bet she doesn’t talk at me like I’m an idiot.” I smiled when I said it. Made me sound like a bitch. It was my radio-show voice.
The phone shifted, and then Tina said, “Yeah?”
“Here I was thinking Jules was starting to like me,” I said.
“Don’t worry about him. He’s pretty invested in keeping up his front. What did you say to get him riled up?”
“Demon.”
“Demon?” she said with a nervous chuckle.
“So. Do you know anything about repelling demons?”
“Don’t demons usually possess people? Spinning heads, projectile vomiting, that sort of thing,” she said.
“I don’t know anything about it. That’s why I’m calling you.”
“I don’t know anything about it, either.”
“But you talked to it! Or it talked to you, through the board. Didn’t that tell you anything?”
“It told me that this is way too big for me to deal with.”
Deep breath. Keep it together. “Okay. You guys had your equipment monitoring the séance at New Moon, right? Have you looked over the recordings at all? Were you able to collect any data from the fire?”
“We gave copies of the video footage to the fire investigator,” Tina said.
“But they’re not looking for the things you’d be looking for. Didn’t it occur to you to look for anything weird in the footage, anything to explain what happened?”
“Mostly we were worried about Gary,” she said.
Fair enough. “There’s got to be something, and we can cross-reference anything having to do with demons—”
“The chances are really slim we’ll even find anything. They always are.”
“I don’t have a choice. It’s getting worse.”
“Did something else happen? What?”
I hesitated before saying, “It killed someone.”
“Oh, my God. And after that you’re asking us to help you?”
“I can’t make you stay, but could you please review the video? Let me know if you find anything? I’m running out of ideas here.”
“Kitty, it was just a fire. A normal kitchen fire—”
“You of all people can tell me that?” I said.
“I can convince myself of that. Kitty, I don’t want to touch this thing again. It felt wrong.”
“I need evidence, Tina. And I need a plan.”
“I’ll talk to the others,” she said. She sounded tired, but I couldn’t afford to feel any sympathy. I couldn’t let them off the hook. “I’ll let you know what we decide.”
Reminding myself that screaming demands wouldn’t get me what I wanted, I clamped my jaw shut and took a breath before I was ready to say, “Thank you. Just think about it. Please.”
The next day, Ben and I made our weekly pilgrimage to Cañon City, about a hundred and fifty miles south of Denver. The timing was bad. I was afraid to leave town, in case something happened; on the other hand, it would be nice to get away. To run away. Ben wouldn’t let any excuse short of lying in the hospital in a coma cancel this visit. I found I didn’t want him to go alone, or I’d spend the whole day worrying about him.
Behind the glass at a visitors’ booth of the Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility, Cormac Bennett rubbed his forehead in a long-suffering manner. “I don’t know why you guys insist on telling me about a problem like this when there’s nothing I can do about it.”
Ben and I slumped in the chairs across from him, sharing an intercom phone, talking to a man serving time for manslaughter. Cormac—bounty hunter of the supernatural, Ben’s cousin, and my friend—had saved our lives with that manslaughter. We’d sort of gotten used to him arriving in the nick of time, guns blazing, to save our asses. He couldn’t do that much anymore.
Like we usually did on our visits, we asked how he was doing, and he said fine, as well as could be expected, and he asked how we were doing. I hadn’t meant to tell him. We were supposed to be cheerful and keep up a good front so he wouldn’t worry. He had enough to worry about. Then I’d said, “Oh, everything’s great except for the demon.”
Then I had to tell him the whole story, which left him rubbing his forehead like he suddenly had a headache.
“I’m not asking you to do anything. I’m just venting,” I said.
“And fishing for advice, right? Just in case I know anything about hunting demons.”
“Well, yeah, okay, if you know anything,” I said, squirming. “So—you ever hunt down a demon before?”
Even Ben was looking amused.
Cormac glared at me. “Can’t say that I have. I’d talk to a priest.”
“People keep telling me that,” I said.
“Interesting image,” Ben said. “You’ve never even been inside a church, have you?”
He shrugged. “I’ve dodged a couple of vampires by going into churches.”
Which was exactly the sort of answer I’d come to expect from him. That sufficiently changed the subject so that we didn’t talk again about demons and how Cormac couldn’t help us much from behind bars.
Before our hour was up, Cormac leaned forward. His expression was stonelike, unemotional. His voice was flat, but the words were fraught.
“I don’t want to get too cheesy, but knowing you two are rooting for me is about the only thing that’s getting me through this. So be careful. Don’t get yourselves killed by whatever’s going on out there.”
It was a heavy responsibility. But it was also incentive. When, I reflected absently, had I collected so much responsibility? Since when had this many people been depending on me? This time last year, I was all on my own.
Strangely, I didn’t miss those days.
We answered him with thin, strained smiles.
Straightening again, Cormac said to Ben, “Can I talk to Kitty alone for a minute?”
Without a word, Ben stood to leave, giving Cormac a grim smile and touching me on the shoulder as he did.
Alone now, we spent a long moment looking at each other. Reading too much into each other’s gazes. For as short a time as we’d known each other, we’d managed to work up a lot of history between us. A lot of missed chances. I couldn’t make either one of us stop regretting them.
“What is it?” I said. “What can you say to me that you can’t say to him?”
“You really want me to answer that?”
I ducked my gaze and shook my head.
“I don’t want him to worry.” He tipped his chair back, and his gaze turned slightly away from me, into space, into nothing. “Kitty, do you believe in ghosts?”
I wasn’t in a good state of mind to answer that question rationally—I’d spent the last week hanging out with paranormal investigators and bein
g hunted by a fire-breathing demon. My first reaction was emotional, maybe even screechy, with the thought, Oh, not him, too! Cormac wouldn’t be asking this if something wasn’t going on here.
I managed to answer calmly, “Of course I do.” Didn’t a werewolf have to believe in ghosts?
He leaned forward. “Can you do some of that research you’re so good at?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“I need to know the names of any women who were executed here. Let’s say right around 1900, give or take a decade. And any history you can find on them.”
I narrowed a suspicious gaze at him. I almost hated to ask, “Are you being haunted or something?”
Absently, he shook his head, his mind in a totally different place. “I don’t know. It’s a hunch. It may be nothing.”
I hadn’t considered the kind of trouble Cormac could get into in prison. Prison was supposed to keep him out of trouble.
“Is everything okay?”
The smile turned grim. “Hanging in there. Sometimes by my fingernails. But hanging in there.”
I had a hunch, as well. “Would this make a good story for Paradox PI?”
“Just don’t tell them it came from me.”
“Wouldn’t think of it.”
“ ’Til next time, then,” he said. A uniformed guard loomed behind him to escort him back to the bowels of the place.
“Yeah. I’ll see you,” I answered.
Ben was waiting for me outside, in the grim parking lot outside the fences and coils of razor wire. “What did he say? If you can tell me. Not that I want to encourage my clients to keep secrets from me.”
I joined him, and together we walked to the car. “He just wants me to look something up for him. He wouldn’t tell me exactly why. He was worried that you’d freak out about it.”
Ben didn’t freak out. I didn’t think he would. But Cormac had spent most of his life believing that he was looking out for Ben, protecting him. Funny how Ben thought the same about Cormac.
We walked on a few steps, silent. I let Ben ponder. Then he said, “This doesn’t have anything to do with those Tiamat guys, does it?”
“No. This seems to be completely unrelated.”
“Is he in trouble?”
I shrugged. How did you answer that question about someone in prison? “I don’t think so. He didn’t seem worried, just curious.”
“Oh.” A few more steps in silence. “Then I’m going to decide not to worry about this.”
“You go right ahead,” I said with a smile. Because of course we were both going to worry.
“This isn’t anything he can’t handle, right?” Ben said.
“Right.”
We reached the car. He was driving today. In a few moments, we were back on the highway.
I said, “It’s weird. I met Cormac before I met you, that time he tried to kill me. Remember?”
“Yeah, and if I recall he never actually fired at you.”
“No. If he’d fired I probably wouldn’t be here now.” Ben grunted an agreement. We drove a few more miles, and I said, “Remember when we met?”
He smiled. “You needed a lawyer who wouldn’t freak out when you told him you’re a werewolf. So Cormac referred you to me. Now I have to ask, did you have any idea we’d end up like this?”
This was one of those heavy relationship questions that had no good answer. Just about anything I said would get me in trouble. “Not a clue. To tell you the truth, I thought you were kind of sleazy.”
“Sleazy?” he said, indignant, but he was still smiling.
“Come on, anyone who’d be Cormac’s lawyer?” I said. He laughed, because I definitely had a point. “Seems like a million years ago.”
So much had happened. So much had changed. So many people just weren’t here anymore.
“Yeah.” He sounded sad. He’d been normal then. Human. Uninfected, with no hint that his life would swerve in this direction.
I squeezed his hand. More for my own comfort than his, if I was honest. But he squeezed back, smiled at me, and I felt better.
When the call from the Paradox crew came the next morning, it was Jules. That was the first surprise. The second was how pleased he sounded when he said, “We’re staying. You’ve got to come over here.”
“Why, what is it?”
“We found something,” he said.
Chapter 15
Ben and I arrived at their hotel suite within the hour.
The suite, in one of those modern, functional hotels that catered to business travelers, had a living-room area between bedrooms. The coffeemaker smelled like it had been going all night, and a half-empty box of donuts sat on the dresser.
The team had pulled chairs to a round table, where they huddled around a couple of humming laptops attached to heavy-duty speakers. Gary lay on a nearby sofa, resting. A gauze square was taped over his left temple. It actually made him look tough.
“Gary, it’s good to see you conscious again,” I said, smiling.
“Good to be conscious. I had no idea Denver would be this exciting,” he said.
“It usually isn’t. Most of our ghost stories are the garden-variety kind.”
“Who wants garden variety when we’ve got this?” Jules said, nodding at one of the screens.
“What is it?”
“Here, watch,” Jules said. We crowded around the laptop.
A video clip filled the screen. It had the grainy, filtered quality of a low-light, night-vision-type camera. Everything in the scene had a green tinge, but I recognized the view: looking along the bar at New Moon, across the back half of the restaurant, including the table where we’d worked and a partial view into the kitchen. A stainless-steel worktable and the industrial gas grill were visible, along with some shelves of pots, pans, utensils, and packages. It was one of a half dozen cameras the crew had set up before the séance.
The time stamp in the corner ticking off seconds was the only indication that time was passing. Nothing in the clip showed movement; we sat still around the table. And these guys watched film like this for hours. Even if you scanned through using the fast-forward button, it must have been tedious. But they’d also had a lot of practice. I certainly wouldn’t have noticed the anomaly that Jules pointed out.
“There, there it is. You see it?”
He put his finger on the screen showing where, on the upper corner of the kitchen doorframe, a tongue of flame emerged. It looked white and glaring in the night-vision footage. It was like a fire had started on the inside of the wall, then burned through, licking outward and expanding like an explosion. One moment it was a hint of fire, emerging in one or two places. The next moment, a wall of fierce fire blew from the kitchen through the dining room, pushing air and heat—and the table, and us—before it. This was the fireball that had roared out to shock us. The rest of the film showed us reacting, panicking, the table knocking Gary’s head, me running for the fire extinguishers, Ben running after me, and so forth. Pandemonium.
The fire itself seemed to come out of nowhere.
“Spontaneous building combustion?” I said. If it could happen to people, why not structures?
“There’s usually a reason a place catches fire like that,” Jules said. “I talked to the investigators about this. They haven’t finished their report, but they haven’t found anything obvious like a gas leak or faulty wiring, or ignition of flammable materials, which is usually what happens. In an older building like this, there’s any number of things that can go wrong, but there’s something else. I didn’t see it until I went through it frame by frame. The investigators wouldn’t have caught it.”
He proceeded to show us, backing up to the point where the fire started and clicking forward, a half second at a time. The flames moved almost like they were alive, dancing, swaying, each step and unexpected flicker captured on a split second of video. When the fireball burst, a brilliant sphere of light expanding out, searing my eyes, it was almost beautiful. Like some cosmic event rather th
an a destructive earthly force.
Jules hit pause and pointed, his excitement clear. “There, do you see it?”
I’d never have caught it. No one who didn’t have the investigators’ experience in looking for weird shadows, blips, and anomalies in video like this would have seen it.
A human figure stood outlined in the middle of the billowing flames.
It was off-color, a slightly more golden tinge than the fire surrounding it, a heat mirage within a heat mirage, shimmering at a different angle. But it had a head, body, legs, and arms, spread in something like ecstasy.
A frame later, it vanished, melting into the rest of the fire. The image only lasted for a split second. At full speed, the clip just looked like flames changing shapes.
Jules backed the clip up, so that we were all staring at that figure, unreal, undeniable.
“Is it someone in a suit?” I said. “Like one of those fireproof stunt-guy suits?”
“Except that it just disappears,” Jules answered. “Granted, fire does strange things, it’s unpredictable, but it’s right there on the video.”
I should have been happy to see a form, an actual enemy—the demon. We now had an image, a being that reveled in fire, maybe used it to destroy. But that also meant we were dealing with something sentient, with a mind, a will, and a mean streak. My gut felt cold.
Jules, at least, seemed happy at the discovery. “This is proof. It’s proof.”
“Proof of what?” Ben said.
“The impossible.”
Ben pointed at the screen. “Just so you all know, the insurance company is buying that it was an accident. So I don’t care if there’s the slightest hint of supernatural nastiness going on with this. I don’t care if you find Casper the Friendly Ghost playing with matches. If any of you talk to the insurance company, it was a gas leak due to the age of the building. That’s what’s going on the paperwork, that’s the story, and we’re all sticking to it. Got it?”
Full-on lawyer mode. That was my honey. “Got it,” I said.
From the sofa, Gary shook his head. “A video like that is too easy to fake. It’s not good enough for proof.”
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