“What did your grandfather do for a living?” I asked.
“That’s an odd thing. I don’t know…”
“You don’t know?”
“He always seemed like he was retired. He didn’t talk about his job. I always got the feeling he was in the military, but he never said anything about it.”
“Why would you think that?”
“Well…I wondered if he had PTSD. He had this air about him like…he’d seen things. Some paranoia. Stockpiled food, and the off-grid living. I’m sure that was why he lived out here. I hope he was in the military. Occasionally I wondered if he was ex-mob or something, but maybe I’ve also watched Goodfellas a few too many times. Then I found all the occult shit in his house. I don’t know anymore. It’s fine if I never know.” It wasn’t fine. That was obvious. It was eating at him.
I had a strong hunch that his grandfather had been up to something. Once I got into the house I could dig into it and dispel all traces of dark magic. That was my favorite part of the job. Detective work, followed by a good cleanse. Graham would never know, poor guy. I definitely wasn’t going to tell him anything if he was a member of the government.
“Yeah, just…remember the good times you had with him, that’s all that matters,” I said.
He gave me a charming smile that had a little more mischief in it than the situation deserved. “You’re making quick work of that hunk of beef.”
“I need energy to make quick work of fixing that house,” I said. “And I’m a talented lady.”
“No doubt.” He picked up his coffee mug as if to make a toast. “Well, look, maybe this wasn’t the best date but I do feel better that the house is in good hands. Take care of the old girl.”
“I will,” I said. “Good luck with your House, too.”
“To houses,” he said. We clinked mugs and then he took his napkin and wiped something off my cheek. “Sesame seed.”
“I can take care of myself,” I said.
We shook hands outside the diner and I was sure I would never see Graham Capello again.
Chapter Four
Helena
The next day, I got up early and went to take a good long look at what a hundred Gs had bought me. The house still had its original skeleton keys, but as long as the original owner was alive, it would have been guarded by magical wards, so the keys didn’t really matter.
However, there was definitely a strong sense of foreboding that would be enough to keep out most people. As soon as I crossed the threshold, every single hair on my entire body stood on end. Well, except the hair on my head. That would have been a sight.
I took out my wand and whispered some counter spells to calm the house down. Once my body stopped tingling all over, I could take stock.
The house had no lights and very few outlets, but some permanent candle mounts were set in the walls. As I opened the curtains, the rooms flooded with natural lights through tall windows and transoms over the doors. This had once been a grand house.
The wallpaper was peeling and yellowing from smoke, but still beautiful, with hand painted deer, game birds, and berries against pale pink wallpaper in the dining room.
“Ooh…” I called my familiar. “Look at these amazing examples of visual magic! You never see these anymore…”
“Very nice,” he said. “Have you also noticed the ceiling is on the floor?”
A huge chunk of plaster had caved in and been swept into a corner. With the plaster had come dust and dirt. “Don’t rain on my parade yet,” I said. “The walls are still amazing.” Wizards in early settlements used to always paint their walls with pictures of local game and plants to forage, along with the plants in their gardens. They could focus spells of abundance on the pictures before they settled down to dinner, while sewing in the parlor, or before bed. The practice died out as wizards started shopping at markets and grocery stores like everyone else and raising more livestock instead of hunting and fishing.
The dining room had a table large enough to seat twelve. The surface had once been polished but was now scratched and dull. The kitchen had the large, grand old wood-fired stove I expected. The kitchen window looked out to the water pump for the cistern. The parlor was clearly the room the old man spent the most time in. A chair by the fire still had a blanket slumped into it like someone had plucked his body out from under it. I smelled sage. A few books were scattered on the floor. The house still had plenty of worthless junk left behind. I would have to get a Dumpster out here. The fireplace—one of four, all with impressive dark wooden mantels with mirrors above and green tiles around the hearths—had a strong sense of dark magic.
“I can’t believe Graham got rid of the magic stuff,” I said grumpily. I picked up a few books scattered around the chair: Steinbeck and James Bond novels. “Damn.”
“It’s probably for the best if you don’t know what went on here,” Bevan said. “This wizard was dabbling in something.”
“Yeah, I feel it,” I said. “But it doesn’t feel evil.”
“It feels Sinistral,” he said.
“According to the record he was an Sinistral warlock,” I said. “But he kept to himself. And not all Sinistrals are evil. That’s why I don’t want anything to do with it anymore.”
Ethereal wizards had long insisted that they were the moral police of the magical world and that it was their job to protect the world from the dark Sinistral forces. But when I was growing up, I felt like my soul was getting crushed under the boot of the rules we all followed. My parents expected us to act like we lived in the 19th century. My future was marriage, babies, and maintaining the all important symbol of the “hearth”. It wasn’t an easy life for a girl who liked running around outside collecting snake skins and animal skulls. When I was a kid, one of the family maids found my stash of animal remains, told my parents, and I was forced to throw them all in the Hudson River. Curiosity about the natural world was good, but collecting dead things was bad. They were ingredients for dark magic.
It wasn’t like I knew that. I just liked that stuff.
It seemed like everything I liked was considered bad news. Ruins. Bonfires. Cemeteries. The history of witch burnings. Spending hours reading about arcane spells that were no longer practiced.
I was a little goth witch, but I didn’t know it. In the magical world, goth kids weren’t just a harmless embarrassment to parents trying to beg their daughter to put on a nice dress and take out the lip piercing to have dinner with Grandma at a steakhouse. It could actually lead you to dark magic, or so they said.
I didn’t want to cast dark magic, though. I just wanted to understand it, and then I was happy to get rid of it. That was what I did to every house I’d bought. I liked to know what had happened there, and then I wiped all the bad vibes away.
I sighed at the state of the parlor. Not only had it been ransacked by Graham, but the old man had tried to update it in the 1970s. Gross moss green shag carpet covered the floor and the plaster walls had been covered by dark wood paneling. The furniture looked like a Brady Bunch set except everything was threadbare and sagging. And the decor was all rapier swords and coats of arms. A zillion candles had dripped wax on the tables and the icky carpet.
“Well, this is a total gut job,” I said. “So…we’ve got to redo the parlor completely, fix the dining room ceiling, plus some more plaster cracks, and…well, some people will hate that range in the kitchen, but I think she’s a beauty.” Some wizards would love that old range, while others would expect a gas oven.
“You certainly will not have the budget to update the range,” Bevan said. “This is a very rural house. No one will expect a modern stove.”
“Good. That’s what I was thinking. So far this isn’t bad at all,” I said. “Graham made it sound awful, but what does a guy like that know? He probably lives in some fancy new townhouse with cable TV and a lawn service!” I laughed, slightly maniacally, because I had been so scared of what I’d find in here. Instead, the magical power of the herbal g
arden outside was translating to treasures inside. A gorgeous old wood-fired range, magical wallpaper…did I mention the built in bookcases in the hall, and the apothecary room lined with cabinets and plenty of workspace for making potions and tinctures?
“I doubt any of the chimneys have a lining,” Bevan said. “You’ll need to repoint them all too.”
“That’s fine. I can even call a mundane company to do that part.” I started making notes. “This orange carpet on the stairs is the first thing I’ll rip up, I’ll tell you that much…”
I was going up the stairs now, my eyes immediately gravitating to a beautiful silver chandelier at the top of the stairs, where a hall wrapped around to the bedroom doors, and the original “familiar doors”. I hardly ever saw those! They were mostly out of fashion even by the time this house was built, but some 18th century magical houses had tiny cut outs at the tops and bottoms of doors for familiar to crawl or fly out of rooms. If a witch or wizard was attacked by a rival or demon, their familiar could slip out to warn other members of the household.
“Oh—wow!” I said, trying to open one of the bedroom doors. It was stuck. The house must have settled over the years so that the door didn’t sit in the frame correctly. I slammed my shoulder into it and only hurt myself. Or was it locked? I tried the keys on my ring. Ah. That was it. As soon as the door unlocked, it flew open hard, probably thanks to the fact that I had been shoving on it so much. I tumbled forward—and my feet encountered rotten wood.
Really rotten wood. There was serious damage to the floor in this room. It seemed both scorched and water damaged. Was there a magical fight in here at some point? My foot plunged right through the boards. I lost my balance and flung myself toward a sturdy chair near the window. The arm of the chair was solid. One of my feet found a precarious balance on sturdier ground and I managed to yank my foot out of the hole.
There goes more plaster. Into the kitchen this time. Ugh.
Graham did warn me about termites, I thought.
But he could have warned me there was a whole room about to cave in.
Suddenly the door slammed shut so hard that I screamed and jumped—and stepped right back into the hole. Which completely gave out under my feet.
Along with more plaster and dirt and rotten wood, I fell eight feet onto the old flooring of the kitchen.
A pain shot up my leg immediately.
“Not bad at all, eh? What does that guy know?” Bevan said, flying down after me as I let out a moan. The pain was getting sharper and it was clear I couldn’t put weight on my leg. Not to mention all the other bruises and scratches.
“Get help, Bevan,” I said.
“I hate to leave you…here,” he said, his little bat face glancing around. “That door slammed without any windows open.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said, putting my hands on my swelling leg to try and stop the terrible pain. “But hurry. Please, hurry.”
“All right,” he said. “Be on guard. This house has been nothing but bad luck.”
He vanished, and as soon as he did, I heard heavy footsteps on the stairs, and all the air went out of my lungs.
Chapter Five
Helena
I was definitely tempted to call Bevan right back here to protect me. But I also needed him to tell someone I was here alone with a broken ankle, or at least a bad sprain.
It’s probably the old man’s ghost. This house meant a lot to him, and his grandson ditched his stuff. Maybe he had something he needs to tell me before he moves on.
The footsteps were coming closer. I held my wand at the ready. My hand was shaking terribly. So much for my tough, I-can-do-it-all-by-myself attitude. I couldn’t believe I was going to have to ask for help.
Well, the least I could do was face a ghost calmly. I took a slow breath, focusing on the powerful wand in my hand instead of the pain in my leg. Just a simple shift of focus went a long way. I felt stronger as the pain retreated somewhat into the background.
I composed myself just in time to face the ghost—
Not ghost.
Not ghost.
Demon!
Red alert!
My brain fuzzed into complete terror as a full-on demon appeared in the door. Wings, big sharp curved horns, a tail, and amber eyes that seemed to glow just a little. His hair was dark and thick with an artfully untamed look, his skin a golden brown color. When I encountered incubi in the real world, they looked human—just extra sexy.
Not this dude. He was pure fantasy. He filled the entire doorframe with his half-spread wings and huge muscular shoulders. Technically, he was wearing a long-sleeved shirt and pants, but his muscles and his—uh—package—were all testing the limits of cotton and wool. But in contrast to this, his face was downright beautiful, like a dark angel.
An incubus, I thought. An incubus. Okay. They’re low demons. No big deal. No big deal. All they want is sex.
I really had no idea how to react to this. If I was healthy, I could definitely just cast a ward to keep him off me. It wasn’t like I was the kind of girl an incubus was really gunning for. They could have anyone they wanted. I wasn’t the sexiest witch out there, or the most powerful. I didn’t fall for enchantments easily either. Sure, the primal part of my brain had noticed that this was a very hot demon, but most of my brain was not primal. Most of my brain was just thinking that I would rather eat rats than get knocked up by an incubus. That was just so…trashy. And I had too much to do.
I remained completely frozen. I managed to open my mouth.
“You should leave this house,” the incubus said.
“Leave?” I gasped.
An incubus wasn’t supposed to ask you to leave. They were supposed to seduce you.
I couldn’t help but feel a teeny, tiny bit insulted. I mean, he could at least try.
“Yes,” he said. “Leave. I don’t know you.”
“I’ve broken my leg,” I said. “So…I’m waiting for someone to help me leave, and then…I’ll leave.” I remembered that this was my house, however. “For now. I bought this place. I own it.”
“This is your house?” he asked—or more like, demanded, stepping into the room and spreading his wings like he was trying to intimidate me with his size. “I don’t care by what means you think you made this house yours. This house belongs to the Capellos.”
“Well…senior is dead and junior isn’t interested,” I said. “I’m all you’ve got.”
“Young Graham simply sold off the house to a stranger? No. You should not be here.”
“I paid for this place, fair and square,” I said. “I paid for it with my last dime, because I love this house, even though it is already trying its best to destroy me. So you can try, but I know plenty of locksmith spells.” I winced, as I realized this was escalating. “Look, I didn’t mean to snap. I’m Helena.”
He started it, but I knew enough about dealing with pesky demons and spirits and…really, any sort of being with a connection to a place. I needed to wipe away his connection in order to sell the place, and so I had to reason with him.
“I knew it was a bad idea to leave the place to the boy,” the demon said.
I snickered. “I know it’s easy to lose track of time in the magical world, but Graham is probably almost forty now.”
“But still so innocent! He was lost to the mundane world. I told Fiore that he needed to bring the boy here, but he wouldn’t listen. He said Graham would come home when it was time, but the time is now past. So he has decided he doesn’t want this home at all?”
“No…” I realized that while I had killed most of the pain of my broken leg with a spell, my skin had broken into a sweat all over and little quivers of nausea were passing through me. Mild shock, maybe. I needed a real healer. I didn’t even know who Bevan could find to help me. I had a few friends from school that I kept in touch with. God help me if he contacted any family members.
“You really are hurt,” the demon said, now showing some concern. “Can I help?”
The incubus raised an eyebrow at me. “I wonder if it will,” he said. “We are very far away from any other soul.”
“Bevan can go to the Ethereal plane and find another familiar and talk to one of my witch friends that way and then they might be able to travel through the Ethereal realm and come here.”
“If it’s that easy, it is certainly taking him a while,” the demon said.
“He knows what he’s doing.” I tried to move. Nope. As soon as I did, a lance of pain overwhelmed my magic and I let out an involuntary moan. The demon moved closer. I held out my palm. “No—no! Stay back. I don’t want any of your magic.”
“It’s just magic,” he said. “And, if you haven’t noticed, I am just a spirit. I can’t leave the bounds of this house.”
“Oh…so that’s how you just appeared…,” I panted. “You look so solid.”
“I can look that way,” he said. “And feel that way. But really…I am not here at all.” He crouched next to me and put a hand on my leg, and he definitely did feel like he was there. His hand was warm. And before I could say another word, he kissed me while his hand stroked my leg.
The thing about incubi is that they are, by definition, irresistible. That is their entire deal. So I couldn’t really blame myself for not resisting. Even when his warm, wet tongue slipped inside my mouth and proceeded to give me the most slow, sensuous kiss I had ever experienced in my entire life. It was like he was tasting and savoring my mouth like no normal man could, while his hand steadied my head, supporting my neck, and his other hand kept moving up and down my leg like it was a naughtier body part than it was, and his tail wrapped around my ankle to keep me steady—or trapped.
I started feeling better right away.
I moved my leg, and I could tell the pain was leaving. He had knitted my bones back together with some…uh…sexual healing.
Demons in the Bedroom (Paranormal House Flippers Book 1) Page 3
