by Dave Ferraro
With a loud sigh, Jade knocked on Brett’s door a little harder, gasping as the door creaked open of its own accord.
She glanced over at the window as the night let out another haunting cry, then she pushed the door open slowly. Fumbling along the wall for a light switch, she called out “Brett?” tentatively.
Her foot connected with something or other. Then her other foot kicked something else. She located the light switch and flicked it on, bathing the room in light, staring down at the bear rug that was at least twice as big as any normal bear could have been. A giant. That’s what Brett hunted. Giants. Whether they were ogres, trolls or giant skunks. Jade imagined wasting werewolves with long-range weapons was much simpler than the gore fest that Brett had to go through to kill these things up close and personal. But then again, she was sure he enjoyed skinning the things, cleaning them…ugh. It was just Brett’s way. Frat boy Neanderthal at his most barbaric. Boys were so…predictable and childish. She looked up, gazed around the room, half in awe of the heads that adorned the walls, the bones that hung over the back of his closet door. She spotted a blue lock of hair hung at the corner of his computer screen. Trophies. All of them, trophies of his conquests. It was really twisted. He needed a psychiatrist, if they had any for orphaned hunters of monsters.
She nearly giggled as she crossed the room and peaked behind the bed. She couldn’t help but admire some of the things she found along the way. The deformed bones, the red scales. That innate curiosity was always with her.
Sweeping Brett’s room with her eyes, Jade zeroed in on the bathroom. She walked toward it slowly. “Brett?” She knocked on the door softly. “Brett? Brett, if you’re in there, cover up. I’m coming in!” Pushing the door open easily, she turned on the light and frowned. Nothing but a pile of dirty towels.
Jade turned and walked out of Brett’s room, feeling slightly guilty for having trespassed. But it was his fault for leaving his door unlocked, she decided, walking further down the hall. She stopped at Jordan’s door and gazed at it with scrutiny, as if it would tell her what her brother was doing right then. And it would, if she would just knock on it. But she wouldn’t. She would give him space. Twenty-one years of being his sister had given her enough insight to know when she shouldn’t bother him. He was dealing with something. Something he didn’t want her in on. When he wanted to come to her with it, he would. She sighed. They had to talk eventually. She would have to be the instigator too, of course. Jordan never made it easy for her, the stubborn brat. But she wasn’t about to have a heart-to-heart just then.
Passing by her brother’s door, she rapped on Amelia’s, having given up on brawn by this point. A minute later and she was at Shanna’s bedroom. She had just left her a half hour earlier. If she was gone too… She frowned as she knocked, wondering where everyone had gone. Were they in the pool or the game room or something? And if so, why hadn’t they invited her?
But this door yielded to her prompts. Shanna opened it after a moment, gazing out at her with a sweet, welcoming smile. God, that was a great smile. Jade felt a twinge of jealousy at how close Shanna and her brother had grown so quickly, but she couldn’t hold it against her. She was just a sweetheart. A gorgeous sweetheart.
“Can’t get enough of me?” Shanna inquired upon opening the door wider and walking back into her room. “No, wait…you aren’t hiding any needles on you by any chance, are you?”
Jade stepped inside and grinned. “No, I’m torture-free for the moment. I’m actually looking for people I can count on to help me with something.”
Shanna shook her head with a laugh that ignited the air with animation. “Are you trying to guilt me into helping you with something?”
“It’s like you read my mind.”
“Uh huh.” Shanna quickly shut off her laptop computer and turned to her guest with an eyebrow arched.
“I need help bringing the supplies in from the van,” Jade relayed in a quick breath. “Please, please, please.”
Shanna rolled her eyes with a smirk. “I think I can manage to squeeze it into my busy schedule, though my suitors will be ever so disappointed,” she announced, sliding on a pair of tennis shoes.
“Good. Everyone else is either missing or dead asleep.”
“Yeah, well, maybe in return for this favor, you can help me cover my shattered window for the night.”
“Window?”
Shanna stuck her thumb back at the gaping hole in the glass. “Yeah, I cleaned up the glass from all over the room, but when I came back from our little game of doctor, it was just broken. I’ll have to tell Valor that it needs replacing when I see her in the morning. If I see her in the morning.”
“It’s a weird night,” Jade sighed. “But I promise this won’t take too long. I, at least, want the stuff that I’m sticking in storage up on the third floor tonight. It should take two trips, tops.”
“It’s fine,” Shanna insisted. “Lead on.”
The air felt alive outside, as if upset. It fought the elastic band that held Jade’s hair in the confines of a ponytail, whipping it roughly, trying its best to ensnare her neck like a noose. Dirt was tossed into her face, bringing with it the thick, choking fumes of the freshly-tarred driveway. The Lilacs and Pines in the immediate area merely served as a poor attempt at masking the scent, unintentionally resulting in its ultimate mutation into something far worse, something that wreaked of decay and desolation, of civilizations trampled to death beneath an army’s parade of feet, left to rot in a mess of arms and legs and putrid, decomposing organs.
“Ugh, this wind,” Jade complained, pushing her stubborn hair out of her face. She glanced to her left as a tree groaned its concurrence.
Shanna didn’t seem to hear her as they trudged on toward the van, which was parked a few yards away before several garage doors.
Jade rummaged through her pockets for the key to unlock the van as they came upon it, quickly throwing open the doors and darting inside the refuge it offered from the wind’s barrage. She let out a sigh as Shanna stumbled in with a look of bewilderment.
“Jeez,” Shanna said, smoothing a hand over the shirt that had ridden up her torso, “It was a dark and stormy night, huh?”
“Hey, at least it’s not raining,” Jade chuckled. “Small favors.” She grabbed a bag of miscellaneous knives and stakes, tossing it at Shanna. Picking up a bag herself, she slid the straps of a backpack over her left shoulder. It would be a little awkward, but she’d promised only two trips, and with the way the wind was picking up, that’s all she would want to deal with anyway.
“Okay, here we go again,” Jade breathed, jumping outside once more. She felt Shanna join her as she sprinted across the lawn toward the mansion’s welcoming golden light. A quick glance to her right brought the front gate into view, gargoyles hunched upon stone pillars threatening to slip into the darkness that saturated the trees and shrubs. The sight sent a shiver clear down her tailbone.
The pair were inside before long and shut the door behind them with finality, expressing the same feelings to one another with but a look. Jade almost laughed at Shanna’s mess of hair, but decided against it when she realized that her own appearance couldn’t have fared much better. She opted for sifting a stray leaf from the girl’s golden tangles and gesturing toward the stairs. “Third floor,” she reminded her. “There’s a room for extra weapons almost at the end of the left hallway.”
Shanna nodded, following closely as Jade began the ascent up the corkscrew staircase.
Upon reaching the second story, Jade looked longingly down the hall, wondering what her brother was doing just then. Perhaps he wasn’t even in his room, but hanging out with the others somewhere, in the game room perhaps, drinking wine coolers and playing the Wii. She shrugged to herself, wondering if her brother would participate in a scene like that, given his detached mood of late, or whether he had tried knocking on her door, deciding he’d needed to
confide in her after all. She kept her eyes focused on that floor until the stairs brought them beyond its reach. Then there was only the task at hand.
“I’ve only been up here once,” Shanna informed her suddenly, as they began the trek down the hall. “On my first day here, when Cameron gave me the grand tour.”
“Yeah, Cameron wasn’t in his-” Jade looked back and suddenly found herself falling to the floor, her foot having caught on something or other. Her bag slipped from her fingers, disposing bottles of holy water, sheathed swords and quivers of arrows over the carpet. She gasped in surprise when she hit the ground, feeling foolish as she quickly brushed herself off and stood up. “Damn, I’m an uber klutz,” she muttered as Shanna set down her own bag to help her retrieve the strewn items. Upon reaching down for a pile of bottles, the backpack slipped from Jade’s shoulder and slid against the wall, falling with a clatter and a quick, sharp protest of static. Jade winced and realized that the backpack was the magick detector they’d used on their previous mission. She smiled at her own genius as she reached down lovingly for the device, as if it were a child. She would be doing more tinkering on the thing. No need to put it into storage yet.
Grabbing a strap of the device, Jade yanked it over her shoulder again, startled when Shanna put a hand to her arm.
“Huh?” Jade looked down at Shanna with a look of confusion, following the girl’s gaze to the magick detector. “Oh, yeah. It’s the magick detector,” she said, assuming Shanna had merely forgotten.
With a shaky hand, Shanna grabbed the machine in hand and tilted it up so that Jade could see it, pointing at the gauge upon its face plate.
Jade gasped as she saw that the arrow of the gauge was deep into the red.
“Red means magick residue, right?” Shanna asked. “We didn’t break it, did we?”
“I…” Pulling the machine off of her shoulder, Jade maneuvered it away from the wall she’d stumbled into. The arrow slowly slipped back into yellow territory. Pulling it back toward the wall sent it climbing into the red zone again. “It’s still working. It’s…it’s still fine.” She looked at Shanna, then up at the blank wall before them, the plaster admitting nothing.
“So…why?”
“Sssshhh,” Jade tilted her head, her eyes roving over the wall, up to the ceiling. She examined the wall with utmost scrutiny, finding no flaw in it. But when her eyes were looking up at the ceiling, something strange lingered at the corner of her eye, something lower down the wall. When she looked at the spot directly, however, she didn’t detect a thing. “A glamour. Something’s being covered up by a glamour.”
Shanna let out a breath. “Something old? I mean, it couldn’t have been new, right? Or…”
Jade shrugged, feeling the air in front of her. “I wish we had more of Amelia’s magic dust about now.”
“I wish we knew where she was,” Shanna added.
“That too,” Jade concurred, face in deep concentration. “Okay, I feel something.”
Shanna’s eyes widened as Jade’s hand seemed to grab mere air in front of the wall. She watched on, fascinated, as the girl turned the handful of air clockwise and the entire wall shimmered, as if from a dream, as if ready to shatter into a thousand tiny shards of glass. And then everything just fell into focus. It was as if the door that now opened slowly before them had materialized from out of nowhere. But in reality, it had only been hidden, draped with a spell that rendered it unseen. And as the hunters watched, that door creaked open of its own accord, yawning as if just awakening from a long nap. It was inviting them into its black abyss.
Chapter Five
“I can’t find a light switch,” Jade announced, feeling along the wall of the room tentatively.
Shanna peeked her head in, greeted immediately by a spider web. She cried out as she swatted it from her face. “God, the air feels so stale in here, like a tomb.” She cocked her head and listened, as if something should identify itself or, at the very least, give some hint as to what they should expect.
“You’re telling me. Dark as a tomb too.” Jade reached a hand out toward the center of the room and stepped bravely out a few feet, her hand rewarding her for her courage by locating a string. “Bingo.” She yanked on the string and a single naked bulb illuminated the room.
The room was roughly the size of the living room of Shanna’s old apartment in Minnesota; a rather small room for the mansion. It was also completely bare, without a piece of furniture, let alone a window to let some air through the space.
“Look at those cobwebs,” Shanna remarked, pointing up at the ceiling and the filth that loitered there. “Could this place get any nastier?”
“Yeah, it…” Jade frowned as she gazed over the room, turning back to Shanna with a “hmmm…”
“Hmmm, what?”
“Why was there such a nasty glamour on this room if there was nothing to hide?”
Shanna bit her lip and looked about the room, as if she would find something upon closer inspection. She walked over to the far end and back, shrugging a reply.
“Something’s…amiss,” Jade murmured.
“Amiss?”
“Amiss.”
“Who uses that word anymore?”
“Obviously, I do,” she looked at Shanna sharply, raising a comedic eyebrow. Shanna stifled a laugh as Jade turned the room over in her mind, seeking out possibilities, searching for something that seemed off. She examined the walls closely, the light bulb, the spider webs. Then she hunched down and looked at the floor, the coat of dust covering it. It seemed almost too perfect, like the wall hiding the room. No flaws. She looked back toward the door and gasped as she looked at the floor that led up to where Shanna stood. Dust. A perfectly preserved layer of dust. Dust that should be showing her footprints after she’d walked over it.
Swallowing hard, Jade touched the floor with a fingertip, running it laterally before her. The dust didn’t come up. She examined her naked finger. “The dust seems to be stuck to the floor, my dear Watson.”
“Huh?” Shanna stepped over to her and kneeled, running both her hands over the ground. The dust remained stubbornly in place. “I don’t believe it. It’s another glamour?”
Jade looked up at her. “Yeah, but not a very good one. This was made quickly.”
They stared at each other for a moment, in deep contemplation.
“Maybe…maybe I should get Amelia up here right now to break this glamour, end the mystery here. There’s bound to be clues that will tell us what the heck is going on.” Shanna stood up and walked back toward the door.
“I…I couldn’t find her earlier,” Jade said. “She wasn’t in her room. Maybe…”
“Maybe what? We’re being attacked? Monitored?” Shanna demanded, turning back toward the door and suddenly tripping and falling to the floor.
Except she didn’t fall all the way. Her arms and legs dangled toward the floor while her midsection was caught on something. Something very solid and very invisible. Shanna tentatively touched the unseen object she was sprawled over, jumping up and screeching after a moment. “It’s a person! I felt a head!” She scrambled away quickly.
Jade, in contrast, moved toward the person and felt it over, confirming the shape of the head, the body, the arms and legs. “Long hair. I feel long hair. It’s a woman. But she’s not moving. I think you knocked her over…or she was leaning against the wall or something.” She looked back at Shanna. “Okay. Go find Amelia. Quick. Check the lounge, the pool…everywhere.”
“On it,” Shanna gasped, standing quickly and running from the room. She stumbled along the hallway before stampeding down the staircase to the second floor, her eyes on the lounge. Amelia was in the lounge quite often. Chances were, that’s where she would find her.
Lifting a hand to swipe at the sweat that was trickling down her face, Shanna cried out, actually starting as she noticed blood smeared over her hand. She looked at her ot
her hand, noting blood covering that one as well. Picking up her pace, she practically threw the doors of the lounge aside as she strode in, ready to spew her demands. But the lounge was empty and still. Shanna frowned as she walked over to the coffee table. It looked wet and sticky. And there was a red stain on the carpet, but Shanna could tell from where she stood that it wasn’t blood. It was wine.
A light shiver crept into Shanna’s skin, to which she conceded as she walked from the room and knocked on Amelia’s bedroom door. There was no answer. Letting out a deep breath, Shanna let the unease of the situation settle over her. Something felt…wrong. She hesitated and glanced over at Jordan’s door. Maybe she was…with someone else? Before she could think about it for long, Shanna moved on to Jordan’s room, where she was greeted by the blonde boy’s wide grin. His appearance calmed her unease, as he was someone she could ultimately relax with, having been saved at his hands several times. And they shared a connection that she hadn’t felt with anyone, since they’d gone through a lot together, shared similar experiences. And Jordan had ultimately confided his homosexuality in her, which was extremely gutsy as he hadn’t even confessed such to his sister. Jade would certainly understand his predicament, of course, being gay herself, but…something held him back. She wasn’t sure what exactly, but she had to respect his decision to tell her in his own time.
“Hey, Shanna,” he greeted her. “We were just talking about you.”
“We?” Shanna asked, looking past him to catch a glimpse of brunette curls peeping out randomly from a baseball cap. She caught Cameron’s eye and sent him a little wave, feeling her heart flutter despite the urgent matter at hand. “Uh, hi guys. I was wondering if you've maybe seen Amelia?”
