by P. R. Frost
“And I think you know Darren’s son, Teresa. His son is Donovan Estevez. That casino owner you met back in Washington.”
So what did that make his father? He couldn’t be a full demon and take human shape in this dimension. He’d need to be in the chat room or his home dimension to do that. Maybe Donovan inherited his demonic tendencies from his mother. A mother very much out of the picture for Darren, Mom’s fiancé.
Now I was totally confused.
Chapter 11
FRANTIC DOESN’T BEGIN to describe the next hour.
“New plan,” I announced to the two men in front of the bonfire. “Donovan, you and your father get the guesthouse. Gollum, take the apartment. MoonFeather gets the sleeper sofa in the sitting room, Mom goes upstairs in the guest room next to me.” I wanted my mother as far away from the demon contingent as possible.
If Darren had even a fraction of Donovan’s charismatic charm, she was easy bait.
I already had WindScribe in the attic. I doubted the house was this full when it was a fully functional bed and breakfast.
Maybe if I charged them all rent . . .
“Won’t your mom want to sleep with her fiancé?” Gollum asked, seemingly innocently. His glasses, firmly on the bridge of his nose for once, hid his true emotions. Then he flashed a goading grin toward Donovan.
“My mother is a French-Canadian-Catholic-June-Cleaver. She sleeps upstairs. Alone,” I snarled. I seemed to be doing a lot of that lately.
Then Allie showed up with the burn permit. Sans the infant Mike in tow. She stepped out of her squad car and surveyed the landscape and the two men with the keen interest of both a woman and a good cop. Her beloved monster SUV was in the shop. She had to settle for a sedan with studded tires.
“Did you get the permit for me?” I asked anxiously. “And where’s Mike?”
She pulled a folded piece of paper out of her inside jacket pocket as she approached, long legs eating up the distance at about twice my speed though she looked casual and unhurried. When she got within three feet of me, she carefully returned the permit to her pocket.
“Allie?”
“You promised to tell me what is going on, Tess. I left Mike doing paperwork, so feel free to tell me anything. Anything. Now would be a good time.” She raised her eyebrows at the sight of the table and chairs, the curtains, and my parka on and around the bonfire. “That’s good furniture to waste on a pagan religious rite. And I happen to know you are pretty agnostic if not downright atheist.”
She gulped and her eyes went wide, fixed upon the splotches of blood on the chair cushions.
“Do I need to get a crime scene team out here and arrest somebody?” Her hands hovered over her radio and her weapon.
“Um . . . No more than you did this morning.” I tried to signal with my eyes and my chin that I’d faced down alone the same unexplainable bad guys she’d seen before.
“And just what did happen this morning?”
“Um . . .”
Donovan fixed her with a feral grin. “This is what happened.” He reached into the guts of the bonfire and delicately withdrew one of the Orculli trolls. He held it gingerly by the coat between his thumb and index finger, careful not to let any of the blood touch him.
“That’s not a run-of-the-mill plastic garden gnome, is it?” Allie gulped. She looked a little pale, as if she could no longer dismiss this morning as a nightmare that didn’t really happen.
“Let’s go inside and talk about this. . . .” I grabbed Allie by the elbow and tugged.
She planted her feet and hitched her utility belt.
“I’ve got to call someone with more authority. We have to alert the feds. There is a paranormal unit in the FBI even though they don’t advertise it. They should already be on their way to investigate this WindScribe person.” She grabbed her radio.
“Allison Marie Engstrom,” Donovan said quietly. How the hell did he know her full name? “Look at me.” He smiled that wicked grin of his.
Allie’s face went slack, and her eyes glazed over.
“If word of this gets out,” Donovan chanted, “people will panic. The roads are a mess. How will you safely evacuate the Cape if people can’t drive? How will you explain this to normal God-fearing people? Think about the chaos and the danger if you tell anyone.”
“I can’t tell anyone,” Allie agreed in a monotone. Her eyes glazed over. Her lips moved, but her voice seemed to come from Donovan.
“Now come inside and help me clean up while Donovan lights the fire.” I tugged on Allie’s arm, and she docilely followed me into the kitchen.
The moment we cleared the threshold and got out of range of Donovan’s smile, Allie’s face cleared. Panic filled the blankness. “Oh, my God! We have to stop him. We can’t let him burn the evidence.” She turned to dash out the door again.
A whoosh of rapidly heated air pressed against the windows. Flames exploded into life and hungrily ate at the bonfire.
Not a natural fire. More of Donovan’s demon magic?
“Too late, Allie. He’s already started the fire. The bodies are at the heart of that conflagration.” Sure enough, an awful stench filled the air. I slammed the door closed once more.
Goddess, my heating bill was going to eat up most of the money the publisher owed me for turning in the book if people didn’t stop coming and going, leaving the door open. And Donovan had pilfered most of my remaining woodpile. Could I get another cord of wood this late in the season?
“But . . . but . . .”
“No buts about it, Allie. We can’t let this information past the door. Even to the FBI. I have to have your promise that you won’t breathe a word of this to anyone. ” I stood solidly in front of the door, feet braced, hands on hips. I automatically shifted my weight, ready to launch myself into a wrestler’s lunge to stop her if I had to.
Allie seemed to shrink in on herself. “This isn’t right, Tess.”
“You don’t have any evidence anymore.”
“I’d call the blood painting your kitchen evidence.”
As she spoke, one of the splotches began to move, slithering into the rough outline of a gnome, complete with hat, coat, striped stockings and pointy shoes. And teeth. Lots and lots of teeth. They took shape before the rest of the face.
From one heartbeat to the next it took on three dimensions.
Heart in my mouth, I threw an entire basin of bleach at the thing. “Please, oh please, let this be enough. I don’t have the energy to fight them again,” I murmured.
The blood dissolved into a pink puddle. Was that a screech of a death rattle humming behind my ears?
I sank to the floor with a sigh of relief.
Allie stood there for a long moment, mouth agape, eyes wide and horrified. Then she swallowed heavily and regained a bit of composure. “So what do we do next? You know you can’t exclude me. I’m part of this.”
“The next step is to clean up this mess and con Zeb Falwell into letting me have that antique pine table in his showroom for a decent price, and deliver it within the hour. It’s been sitting there for two years. He should be anxious to get rid of it. He’s only three blocks away. Maybe Gollum can fetch it in his van.”
As I filled the basin with fresh bleach water, I related the latest development with my mother. I didn’t tell her that I assumed Darren Estevez was part Damiri demon.
“I can’t believe Genevieve is really going to put the past behind her and marry again.” Allie shook her head as she shed her jacket and donned rubber gloves.
“It will seem kind of strange for Mom not to have a reason to complain about Dad deserting her, leaving her dependent on her ungrateful children.” Financially, she didn’t have to be dependent. Dad paid gobs of alimony every month. He and I handled her bills. Emotionally, she had reverted to the age of thirteen.
Come to think about it, on the phone she sounded like a giddy adolescent with her first crush.
I handed Allie the basin and then dialed the local antiques
emporium.
Somehow in the next hour we managed to get enough of the bonfire burned to disguise the fact that I’d trashed my own furniture, I conned the local antique dealer into delivering a plank table with six chairs for two thirds the asking price, stuffed Mom’s clothes into the guest bedroom next to mine and installed Gollum in the apartment. Donovan unloaded his own gear into the cottage, grumbling all the while. I didn’t catch his exact words but got the impression he wasn’t happy about sharing digs with his dad. I also made up the sleeper sofa for MoonFeather even though she wasn’t due to be discharged from the hospital until the next day.
WindScribe drifted downstairs three times, trailing her fingers along the wainscoting or pieces of furniture as if checking for dust.
I figured she was too wobbly to stand on her own two feet and was keeping something close at hand to catch herself. She continued to hum that white rabbit thing. A promise of more pills—that I never delivered—got her back into bed and out of the way.
"WindScribe—if she truly is the woman who disappeared twenty-eight years ago—her real name is Joyce Milner,” Allie said after the first appearance of the girl. She poured lemon oil onto the faded and worn tabletop, rubbing it in with an aggressive stroke.
I sensed a lot of frustration in her work.
“Can we send her home to her parents?” I asked hopefully. “If you haven’t noticed, my house is full to overflowing.” I scrubbed the walls around the table, trying desperately to get out every trace of the dried blood. I’d have to run to the new discount store on the highway to find something resembling curtains, chair pads, and coordinating place mats and napkins. Nothing less would please my mother. Or me. I like a coordinated and well ordered kitchen when I’m not ignoring reality while on a tight deadline.
Speaking of which, I still had four chapters to finish editing.
“Presuming she really is Joyce Milner/WindScribe— we don’t have any fingerprints or DNA samples in the cold case file, and we didn’t get any hits on her prints on any of the networks. I’ve ordered a DNA test to match her against Milner’s father. But that’s going to take to the middle of next week, with the weekend coming up and the backlog. Dental records came up blank. Seems Milner’s mother didn’t believe in dentists.” Allie shook her head and applied more of her considerable elbow grease to the table.
“Milner Dad is in a nursing home with Alzheimer’s,” she continued with grunted punctuation. “Milner Mom hasn’t been heard from since she locked up her husband two years ago. Local opinion is that he’s better off in the nursing home without her.”
“That good a marriage?” I quipped. The particularly stubborn stain beneath the table must be Orculli troll blood rather than MoonFeather’s. It was as big as my fist and would not come out. I could barely keep enough bleach on it to keep it from reanimating.
“We do have a medical record of WindScribe having a broken arm at age ten. Possibly caused by the mom. They took a couple X rays this morning to rule out injury under her bruises. Our WindScribe has an old break in the same place. Little enough evidence to claim she is who she is, though.”
“My wireless card isn’t talking to your router,” Gollum said from the doorway. He pushed up his glasses and peered appreciatively at Allie—who was still in uniform and officially supposed to be supervising the burn.
Something bitter twisted in my midsection.
“If it can’t wait, then boot up my computer and get the protocols off it. It’s not password protected,” I snapped rather than deal with strange and unwanted emotions. “Is your cat locked in the apartment?”
“Of course. Gandalf is very well behaved.”
“Like hell he is,” I muttered.
He wandered off.
“So that’s the new anthro prof at the community college, ” Allie breathed through her teeth. “Where did you find him? And why didn’t you tell me about him?” She preened a bit, smoothing her uniform over her lush figure.
“He found me. And if you can drag his attention away from his books and the Internet, go for it, Allie.” I redoubled my efforts with the scrub brush on the stain, not certain if I felt relief or anxiety at my last comment.
“He’s so . . . tall,” she said with a sigh and dumped more lemon oil into the pine. Tall was definitely a priority for Allie in her search for her soul mate. She had a hard enough time finding any men she liked and she could trust, who were not criminals or fellow cops. Allie did not mix her personal and professional life. Ever.
She’d told me once that she got to know her work-mates too well and often saw the ugly and brutish side of them when handling lawbreakers. Dealing with scumbag criminals brought that side of her out too often, and she didn’t want to have to live with it or be reminded of it during her precious free time.
“So, you want to tell me now what’s going on?”
“My mom is returning home suddenly with a surprise fiancé.”
“That’s not what I mean. Like where WindScribe came from? Like why you are burning garden gnomes that came to life? Really ugly garden gnomes, not those cute things the garden club sells. And why your kitchen was smeared with enough blood to overload the blood bank?”
The blood that was still left must be MoonFeather’s since it stayed in place.
“You don’t want to know, Allie.” I couldn’t meet her gaze.
“But I do want to know. I have a right to know.” Allie abandoned her polishing and hunkered down beside me. “I’m more than the local cop. I’m your best friend, Tess. There’s a lot of strange in your life, I’ve seen some of it, and you need to talk about it.”
“Trust me, Allison Engstrom, you do not want to be dragged into the strangeness that is my life now.” This time I pierced her with a firm glare worthy of Miss Wilcox, our third-grade teacher.
“In case you haven’t noticed, I am involved. I got you the emergency burn permit so you can destroy the evidence of weird bodies. I’m helping you scrub blood off the floor and walls. I saw WindScribe step through a doorway from . . . elsewhere. A woman who should be as old as your aunt but looks ten years younger than you or me. I watched you attack those gnomes with a really weird weapon that appeared and disappeared in an eye blink. So what’s going on, Tess? Or do I have to take you down to the station?”
“This isn’t a Saturday night brawl at McT’s Bar and Grill.”
“I’m a cop, Tess. Not much in this world scares me.”
“This should. It isn’t part of this world.”
She sat back on her heels a moment, thumbs in her gun belt, thinking. “Okay. Shoot. I’ll believe weird. Couldn’t be much weirder than skinny little you tossing McT’s bouncer over your shoulder last January when he got a little too fresh.”
“That was balance and training, not supernatural.”
“And the other stuff?”
“Read my books.”
“I did.”
“They’re real.”
“Not the post-apocalyptic world part, I’m guessing.”
I kept my silence.
“The Sisterhood with the imps and enchanted blade weapons?”
Again I let silence speak for me.
“You one of them?”
I nodded.
“Of course you are. That’s where you were during the year you went missing after Dill died. Okay. So how come you’ve got two luscious men drooling after you, and I don’t have one?” She cocked me a grin and returned to her lemon oil and rags. But she was really looking out the window at Donovan and Gollum at the bonfire.
