by E. M. Moore
Peeking behind him, he shifted until he was in front of me. “What the hell was that earlier at the sorority house?”
I glanced up at him, still embarrassed he’d caught me looking at him. “What the hell was what?”
“You staring daggers at Kaitlyn and I. Pissed that not all four of us want to jump into bed with you, is that it?”
“Whoa,” I said, anger bubbling up inside me. “Do whatever the hell you want. I don’t care.”
“Seemed like you did. You acted like a possessive girlfriend. If I haven’t been clear enough already, I don’t want any part of whatever you’ve got going on.”
His words knocked the wind right out of me. Not only was he right, I had been acting like a possessive girlfriend and had the smooth tops of my teeth to prove it, but he really hadn’t been giving me any vibes other than he didn’t want anything to do with me. That didn’t mean it didn’t suck to hear. “Gotcha,” I said, swallowing hard.
He glared at me longer, and the more he did, a scent reached my nose—cinnamon. Must’ve been him. It was the same aroma I smelled in his room back at the apartment that first night.
“Oh jeez,” a voice said from behind us. “Stand back before you both spontaneously combust. You two are so alike it baffles me why you hate each other.” Both Travis and I scoffed, but Randy just looked at us as if we’d just proved his point. “Can’t say that I mind.” Randy snaked his arm around me and squeezed my ass in the process. “Just one less I have to share with.”
Without a word, Travis threw the door open and left.
Unaffected Randy chuckled into my hair. “Don’t go toe-to-toe with him, babe.”
“I wasn’t trying to. He blindsided me.”
“C’mon,” he said, giving my ass a quick spank. “Let’s get to the car.”
He pinched me and I yelped, completely forgetting that I was supposed to make him pay for leaving me in the kitchen earlier. Apparently I wasn’t that upset about it anymore. Before getting on his bike and heading for the real Mandy’s house, he bent over and gave me a quick kiss on the lips. He was our communicator for the night. The one to spy the real Mandy while we tried to seek out the doppelgänger.
Liam and Gabe came out of the house shortly after. Good thing because the tension in the Jeep was palpable. With all of them there, though, it dispersed some of the pent-up feelings. Liam went over the plan for when we got there and we all nodded along. I could picture them doing this for years before I showed up. Sometimes I had to remember that I was the new member here, and that Travis had a connection with the one before me even though he didn’t end up being the greatest guy. I should cut him some slack, I supposed. Just the fact that I was thinking that after he’d given me the verbal lashing was saying something about the feelings that were growing inside me for him. Damnit.
The sorority house looked like a completely different house at night. College kids danced in the lawn with red plastic cups. Empties and other various trash were strewn all over the yard. We sidestepped everything as best we could as we made it up the porch, past a couple who needed a bedroom and stat, and pulled up short next to a big guy in a dark suit. Interesting. Since when did sorority houses have security at parties?
Travis tried to step around him, but the guy held his hands out to stop him. He sighed. “We’re here to see Kaitlyn. She invited us.”
“Pick a door,” a gruff voice came. His lips moved under a thick, black mustache, but the sound echoed as if had come from an overhead speaker.
“Excuse me?”
“Pick a door.” The guy moved out of the way and instead of the one door we went through earlier, there were now two red doors.
The fuck?
We all took a cautious step back. “Anyone else seeing what I’m seeing?” Liam asked.
“It’s just some trick,” Gabe said.
“I think we should—”
“Fuck it.” Gabe lunged for a door.
I gasped in a breath as pictures flickered in and out of my mind. “Pick a door,” the voice rumbled. Gabe picked the one on the right, dropping through a pitch black hole and landing in a crouch inside a dungeon-like room. Dupre was there. He sat on a throne of black, the jewels encrusted inside bleeding oily black liquid. It oozed out all over the floor, creeping toward Gabe’s shoes. Gabe tried to move his feet, but they were cemented. Dupre’s ominous laughter echoed throughout the chamber. “You chose.”
I gasped, my eyes opening wider. “No!” I pushed forward, knocking Travis out of the way to grab Gabe. His foot teetered over the edge of the threshold. Nothing but blackness greeted us, and screams from the inside rose up. I pulled at Gabe with all my might and we fell to the floor in a heap. “The hell, Love?” he said, coughing. My elbow had slammed into his solar plexus on the way down.
Like Randy had taught me, I gathered my magic in my palms and reached out toward the guard. My magic hit him square in the chest and he fell backward into the doorway. Eerie silence followed his departure for a good thirty seconds before the thud of him hitting echoed up to us.
“Shut the door!”
Travis broke out of his stunned stance first. He pulled the door closed with a resounding thud.
Liam was already beside Gabe and me. His hands fluttered over us as if he wasn’t sure what to do. “What was that?”
My heart thudding in my chest, I lay back, allowing Gabe to get up. “Short answer, sometimes I can see the future and that wasn’t the right door. Not by a long shot.” Holy shit. A feeling of dread overpowered me. I stared down at Gabe who still blinked up at me. I was about to lose him. We all were. That place was pure evil, yet the only inkling I got was from my premonition. That shouldn’t be possible.
“Is there a way for someone to block their evil?”
“I’ve never heard of that,” Liam said.
Travis’s phone rang, and he picked it up. It should be Randy with news about Mandy. “Yep, got it,” Travis said. Then, “No, we just had some shit happen here. Everyone’s fine.” Pause. “Yes, her too.”
Just then, there was a knock on the window beside us. Mandy, in all her polished sorority sister glory waved out at us. My stomach twisted.
Travis stilled. “We’ve got eyes on fake Mandy.”
There were two of them.
“Yep. Get your ass here. Now.”
Travis hung up the phone and reached for the other door. “No,” I yelled.
He turned, his fingertips just gracing the knob. “What? We need to get her.”
“Not through that way we don’t.” A tremor rocked my body, and I tried to concentrate. “Just…trust me. We’re not picking any fucking door. There’s got to be another way in.”
Liam rubbed my arms as goosebumps coursed up my skin. I let him help me up and then I paced the porch. Looking out and around the eaves, I spotted an upstairs deck. Travis followed my gaze. “There’s a window that leads right out to that small deck.”
I closed my eyes, the plan forming in my brain and already I was pulling at my magic, urging it out of me. The creeping vines that surrounded the porch grew upward. The stems lengthened, going through years of growth in the span of seconds as it reached all the way up to the second story deck. Leaves sprouted out from the stems and the roots grew thick like rope.
“Um, that’s great, Norah, but what are we going to do with that?” Gabe asked.
“We’re going to climb,” I told him before starting out, pulling myself up so my feet landed on the railing and then finally, securing my shoes around the thick vines as I shimmied up. I made it up, but by the end, my muscles ached and I gasped for air. Gym class had never been my thing.
Gabe was the next up after me, having no problem at all. Then, Travis, then Liam, who fell to the floor when he arrived. Knowing the feeling, I helped him up. When I straightened, I heard the roar of a motorcycle and saw Randy pull right up onto the lawn before shutting the engine off. Gabe whistled to him and pointed out the vine leading to us. Randy looked thoroughly confused, but
reluctantly started climbing the magical rope and was up in no time. All five of us stood on the little deck just staring at one another.
“Okay,” I said, trying to calm my breathing. “Dupre’s in there. At least, I saw him when I saw what was going to happen to Gabe.” I swallowed, the sickening feeling of almost losing him overtaking me once more.
“You saw what was going to happen to Gabe?” Randy questioned. “As in—”
“Yes, apparently Norah can see the future,” Travis quipped.
“I can’t,” I snapped. Then more calmly, with a forced smile, I told them, “I can’t see the future. Not all the time, and maybe that’s best explained some other time. Right now, we need to get in there and get Mandy and Dupre. There’s something evil here, and I bet it’s them.”
“This probably isn’t the time to talk about why none of us can feel the evil either, huh?” Gabe asked.
“No,” Travis said. “Definitely not.” He hefted the window up and slid a leg through. We all piled in afterward, ending up in a bedroom with two beds on opposite sides of the room. It was the girliest bedroom I’d ever seen. More pastels than I cared to look at on a daily basis, and not to mention the lacey undergarments strewn around the room as if we’d just walked into a Victoria’s Secret showroom.
We tiptoed through the area and out into a hall that led to a grand staircase. “Where’d you see her?” Randy whispered.
Travis pointed down the stairs and we all started down them, almost tiptoeing because we didn’t know what we were walking int. The floor beneath us trembled, and the stairs moved, pitching forward until we were on a smooth, slick surface. Gabe lost his footing first and then all five of us fell, tumbling down the slide-like stairs into a mess at the bottom. Before we could even get our bearings, Mandy popped into view. “Hi!”
“Christ, that’s all we need,” Randy muttered. He cracked his neck and started to stand. “A happy evil person.”
“Evil person? But I’m just a sorority girl.” She kicked up her back leg in a cheerleader like move.
Around us, the party raged on as if nothing had happened. Couples danced suggestively while others grooved to the music with their cups of alcohol high in the air.
“Sorority girl my ass,” I said, pulling myself to my feet. “We know you’re not the real Mandy. We met the real Mandy, and I bet a million dollars the real Mandy couldn’t make a flight of stairs turn into a fucking slide.”
Doppelgänger Mandy giggled. Straight up giggled like a schoolgirl. “That was pretty cool, wasn’t it? It kind of just popped into my head as you guys were coming down, so I just rolled with it. It was fun to see you all tumbling down, crashing into one another with no real control over what you were doing. Feels familiar, doesn’t it? I mean, at least lately, right?”
Her sickeningly sweet voice burned my ass.
Travis blew out a breath. “I so hate it when our targets start talking as if they’re somehow going to beat us. It just gets old after a while. I mean, you stop as much shit as we do and trust me, it all starts to bleed together. We’re never going to remember this and soon, you’re just going to be another evil thing we’ve taken out. Another notch in our metaphorical kickass belt.”
Mandy’s face morphed. Shadows deepened under her eyes as she snarled, “So cocky?”
“You’re the ones coming after us, so… Shouldn’t we be? That means we’re the threat.”
“Hmm,” she said, turning. “I don’t think I like your attitude.” She snapped her fingers and Travis clutched his chest. Pain radiated through him which I felt as much as my own.
At once, my hand shot out with a minuscule amount of magic and blasted her in the chest. She fell backward, her short skirt coming up around her hips.
“Playtime’s over,” Randy fumed.
The guys joined hands, Liam moving me in between him and Gabe. Magic flowed through us, sending my nerve endings crackling and snapping. Before us, the air shifted and moved, glowing long bars of neon green as they locked into place, securing Mandy into a magical cell—a mobile, magical cell. Badass. I hadn’t even known we could do that.
As soon as the last bar locked into place, screams pierced the air. Instinctively, I dropped the hands I held and placed my palms over my ears, drowning out the sound. The once partying college students around us twisted into grief-stricken horror. If they weren’t screaming, their faces were twisted in pain and their mouths were open as if they had been screaming and were now permanently stuck that way. They stumbled, searching the room in agonizing terror.
I exchanged terrified looks with Liam. This picture looked awfully fucking familiar.
25
“Sleep!” Travis yelled.
Silence descended over the house. The lost souls stood there for a brief second before collapsing into heaps on the floor. Thuds sounded from the upstairs, the ceiling light glass even tinkling with the dropping bodies above it.
“The cell removes all magic,” Liam said, in awe
A dark laugh pierced the room. We all turned toward the sound. Mandy wasn’t in the magical cell anymore. It was Dupre. “Well, I’ll be fucked,” he said. “Shit.” His eyes narrowed as he took all of us in. “That was fun, though. I didn’t even hate being that stupid bitch for a few weeks. Did you know that when sorority girls get drunk they sometimes makeout with one another? I know,” he said. “I’m shocked, too.”
Fucking sick. These poor girls. My hands turned to fists. “How the hell were you able to do this?”
He grabbed the magical bars of the cell and then hissed, stepping back. He was distracted for a hot second—literally—before looking back at me. “Do you not pay attention? I told you Jay helped me out with the voodoo doll and now this. For the record, he’s way more badass than you.”
“What does he want with me then? If he’s so great, what does he even care about me for?”
“Not just you, Norah Darbonne. All of you.”
The guys didn’t flinch, but no one expected that. Every one of them stood in their power stances. Travis, with his hands across his chest. Randy’s hands were on his hips, looking almost nonchalant. Gabe, too, stood there with one foot in front of the other in ready stance as if he still expected Dupre to come busting out of the cell. And Liam? Well, Liam’s fists were clenched at his sides, and his shoulders were bunched up as if he was ready to pounce.
A dark glint pierced Dupre’s eyes, and he smirked. The bastard, who was currently in captivity due to us, had the audacity to smirk.
Yeah, I didn’t take too kindly to that. I motioned toward the neon green bars and smiled. “I guess Jay lied when he told you his magic was stronger than ours.”
Dupre frowned. “I’m shocked I’m in this cell right now, but girl, you have no idea what you’re up against. No one is stronger than Jay, not with the blood of a demon running through him.”
A demon? I peeked at the guys for confirmation. Was that even possible? Holy fuck, what were we involved in? Sure, I knew there was bad magic and good magic, and I supposed bad magic had to come from somewhere, but actual demons? What in the actual fuck?
“It doesn’t matter what Jay’s going to do,” Travis said, sounding bored now. “You’re done for. I bet you’re glad you got yourself mixed up in this just so you can pay for your sins. Don’t you know the sidekick always takes the heat?”
Dupre’s smirk grew until he was all out laughing. Not just a chuckle either, an all-out belly laugh. Around us, the house started to shake. In front of our eyes, the neon green bars of the magical cell dissolved into puddles on the floor. While we watched, dumbfounded, Dupre stepped out of the cell that no longer held him in place. Pulling at his coat jacket, he stopped and saluted us. “See ya.”
He disappeared. Gone. The cell was gone and now so was he.
As if on cue of his leaving, the drunk college students started waking up complaining about bad hangovers. “Shit. How much did I drink?” one asked as she stumbled past us. Others got up off the floor, looking for their
friends, or just leaving the house all together without asking questions like waking up on the floor of someone’s house was a regular occurrence. What were the parents of these kids paying for, anyway?
While the world seemed to move on around us, we were frozen in place until Randy broke us out of our stupor. “How the fuck did that happen? The cell’s always held up.”
“We’re going to have to call the higher-ups,” Liam said. He shrugged, still stunned and staring at the place where the cell had been. He stuck his hand out where one of the neon green bars had formed, but came back with nothing.
Gabe glanced at me. “Not right now. Right now, we get the fuck back to Liam’s place and deconstruct. This is bigger than anything else we’ve dealt with before.”
We threaded our way through drunk brothers and sisters and spilled out onto the lawn. Randy grabbed my arm. “I want you with me.”
He steered me toward the bike and I waved at Liam, letting him know I was okay.
I was, right? In theory, yes. I was still alive, all of us were. But it felt like the ultimate gauntlet had just been thrown and we still didn’t have any answers.
Randy helped me put on a helmet and then got on the bike before pulling me behind him. I wrapped my arms and legs around him, securely holding onto his waist with everything I had. Before he started the engine, I asked, “Are demons real?”
His chest expanded, moving my arms out. “Yes.”
The engine roared to life, and Randy stepped on it, squealing off ahead of the Jeep and making a beeline toward the house. Like when I was little and Granny made me, I closed my eyes and prayed.
Chapter 26
The next few days was a mess of what I could only call obligatory bullshit.
When it came right down to it, the guys knew they had to get their superiors involved. Members from the longest-running Order came to Salem. I stayed out of the way, hidden. We all agreed that was the only way since we still weren’t sure about me yet. Well, that was the cover-up story, anyway. Gabe pushed for that, and each and every time, I glanced at Randy and Liam, guilt souring my stomach. We’d have to tell them what Gabe found out soon. It just wasn’t fair to hold back a vital piece of the story from them whether he was trying to keep me safe or not.
