The Fell
Page 1
The Fell
Book 3
Adam Dark
Matthew Thrush
Angels and demons aren’t what your childhood nightmares portrayed. They’re far more powerful than that…
Contents
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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
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1
All Ben Robinson really wanted in this moment was just to make it to the house in Charlestown and get out of Peter’s car in one piece. The crackle and hiss of Chase pulling on his giant vape in the back seat, though, made him wonder if the guy was trying to get them all killed.
“Dude,” Peter shouted. “I told you no smoking in my car!”
“I’m not smoking anything, Pete. It’s called vaping.”
Peter slammed his hand down on the steering wheel and looked like he was about to either pull over or drive them into oncoming traffic.
“At least roll down a window, man,” Ben suggested.
“No,” Peter said, shaking his head furiously as he clenched the steering wheel with both pale, long-fingered hands. “Do not roll the window down, Chase. Do you know how long it took me to get the heat working? It’s February.”
“I mean, I can crack it,” Chase said.
Ben turned around to give the guy a look he hoped clearly expressed how much better it was for all of them if Chase just let Peter have this one.
“You can shut up and put that thing away is what you can do,” Peter said. His face had turned so red now, Ben was a little concerned about his ability to drive. It wasn’t the first time, though maybe a red face and a little anger weren’t nearly as bad as coughing his lungs out when Peter had driven them to Forwaithe Cemetery a month ago. The guy had battled a monster of a cold when they’d gone to face their last demon, where they’d also had their asses handed to them, almost died, and were somehow saved by a random dude in a business suit who seemed to know more about demon hunting than Ben, Peter, Chase, and April combined. Peter’s cold had cleared up since then, and Ben could only hope his friend’s disproportionate anger right now wouldn’t incapacitate him nearly as much as his cold had at the cemetery.
“Pete,” he said softly, “maybe you should just focus on—”
“I am focused,” Peter growled through clenched teeth. “But I can’t when the car starts filling up with all that smoke—”
“It’s not smoke…” Chase added.
“Whatever. You have to realize by now that I have severe asthma, right?”
“Oh that’s what that is…”
Shaking his head again, Peter glared through the windshield. Ben saw the guy’s hand move to the automatic buttons on the driver door’s armrest and stab at the window lock. “I don’t care if it’s smoke or vapor or… essential oils. Not in my car.”
Essential oils? Man, Peter must have really picked up a few extra phrases at that crystal shop—the one where he’d bought a ridiculous amount of clear, lumpy stones they’d been using to capture the demons they found and banish the gnarly things into them. Well, they had been. Their botched attempt at the cemetery had been their last, and they’d all decided it was probably best to take a break from newb-level demon hunting until they managed to learn a lot more about what they were doing and how not to almost die again. That was a month ago, and all because Ian had misinterpreted what he’d seen in the spirit realm—had somehow missed the fact that the cemetery demon had made a pact with an old Boston family centuries ago, and some ancient law meant Ben and his friends couldn’t intervene.
‘Hey, wait a minute,’ Ian said. ‘I apologized for that one.’ The bodiless-but-not-dead spirit of Ben and Peter’s childhood friend had been pretty quiet since the group had piled together into Peter’s car. But of course, seeing as he shared Ben’s body now and apparently his thoughts, the guy hadn’t missed a chance in the last month to offer the same remark whenever Ben thought of how close they’d come to being four more dead bodies in Forwaithe Cemetery.
You can be sorry, Ben told him, and I get that you made a mistake. Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
He’d been getting steadily better at holding two simultaneous conversations—one with the physical, living people around him and the other with his super-powerful, undead, Guardian-acolyte friend living inside him. Ben’s friends still didn’t know that he’d agreed to share his body with Ian in order to break him out of the Guardian’s time loop and save all their lives. Well, except for Chase, who hadn’t been there for that one. But so far, the guy hadn’t spilled a single bean of Ben’s secret.
‘Yeah, ‘cause he knows I’ll destroy him,’ Ian said.
More pointless observations on Ben’s own train of thought. Thanks. But Ian was right. They’d reached a stalemate with Chase. He wouldn’t say a thing about Ian’s spirit sharing Ben’s body, and Ben wouldn’t say a thing about Chase’s highly illegal hacking episodes or the cache of incriminating evidence on the guy’s ridiculously over-the-top … computer system? All of which Ian had discovered at Chase’s house, because apparently Ian could now dive into servers and highly encrypted databanks and do with computers what most people would rush head-first into calling possession. The same thing might be said about Ben and Ian’s body-mind arrangement, but they didn’t like to think about that.
‘You don’t like to think about it,’ Ian said. ‘I don’t care what someone else thinks this is.’
Shut up.
A light click came from the back seat, followed by another and another. Ben turned around to see Chase pressing down on the automatic window button over and over, and the guy just kept staring out the window.
“I told you not to roll down the window,” Peter shouted.
Chase raised an eyebrow. “Did you lock it?”
“Are you seriously still trying?” Peter glanced at Ben with wide eyes and flared nostrils. “Is he trying to roll down the window?”
“You locked it,” Chase replied.
Peter’s head spun back and forth between Ben and the road ahead of them. “Why is he trying to roll down the window?”
“Can you guys please just give it a rest already?” April’s voice from the back seat wasn’t nearly as loud as Peter’s in his frustrated disbelief, but it honestly sounded like she’d just screamed at them. “I swear, it’s like if you have less than five feet between you, you start going at each other�
��s throats.”
Chase snorted. “Betta fish do the same thing—”
“Dude,” Peter shouted.
“Stop it!” That time, April did raise her voice, and the car fell silent.
Ben turned around to look at her between his headrest and the passenger door. She met his gaze with wide eyes and raised eyebrows, the short, fed-up shake of her head almost making him laugh. But that would probably just annoy Peter even more and encourage Chase, even though April had nailed it.
Yes, technically, they’d accepted Chase into their merry little band, because he really did have a handle on where to find their next demon to take down. Or put back. Or put away. The guy said he got the information from dark-web forums, and as far as Ben was concerned, Chase could keep that business to himself. Despite how infuriating the guy could be—or pretty much was all the time, as a standard rule—he had a lot of resources at his disposal and a relentless perseverance that made putting up with him the lesser of two evils. It was better than being all but stalked by the guy and pressured at every turn to let him do what they hadn’t quite mastered doing. Still, this group of four slightly experienced demon hunters were well aware of the fact that they had a lot to learn. Specifically, how to split the dangerous beings from the spirit realm into two categories—those they could probably handle on their own, and those they should never have tried to mess with in the first place.
‘I said I was sorry,’ Ian whined.
I’m not talking to you.
Thankfully, the last seven or eight minutes of their drive were as silent as any of them could have expected; Chase kept clicking his tongue against his teeth, but even Peter was willing to make a concession with that. When they rolled up to the giant house on Trenton Street—pretty much right on the Mystic, or as close as anyone could get short of living in a shipyard—even Chase stopped making noise.
This was one of the oldest areas of Charlestown, Massachusetts, one of the richest, and definitely one of the most impressive. Chase had willingly and with a little too much enthusiasm admitted to Ben that he was a trust-fund baby, which accounted for the guy’s ridiculously nice house and maybe part of his super-tech-lab dining room—just maybe not the illegal hacking. But when the four of them got out of Peter’s car at a few minutes before 6:00 p.m., Chase let out a low whistle.
“Know anybody who lives in a place like this?” he asked, glancing from Peter to Ben and back again.
Ben puffed out his cheeks. “Not really.”
“This might not be his house,” April added.
Chase stepped around Peter’s car to head toward the front door. “This is obviously a neighborhood.”
Peter stepped up beside Ben and muttered, “Yeah, ‘cause he knows all about this kind of neighborhood.” It was both true and Peter’s way of calling the guy a snob.
When Ben and April had told Peter and Chase about the letter delivered to Ben’s apartment this time—and not Peter’s, like their other anonymously sent gifts—Peter had been ridiculously skeptical. Chase had all but darted off to his little tech cave to go look up the address and anything else he could find about the person living there. In two weeks, all he’d found was that the house had been in one family for a few hundred years, but he’d said it wasn’t connected anywhere to bank accounts, titles or deeds he could find, not even tax records, which the guy seemed kind of weirded out about—just listed as an old Boston family home with very little activity at all. It definitely wasn’t going to tell them who’d been sending them all this stuff with no explanation. First Peter’s lumpy, pyramidal wooden cabinet for holding the stones and keeping the demons from busting their way out of them again, and then the creepy wooden figurine April had stuck into a mutilated cat to actually release a flesh-eating ghost from the spirit realm. To move on. No, they hadn’t tried to get that figurine back afterward, all covered in blood and guts and hair as it had been. And it wasn’t like they were likely to stumble upon another cat-eating ghost any time soon.
‘As far as you know,’ Ian quipped.
I’m just gonna let that one go.
Chase and Peter headed toward the row of stairs leading up to the brick house’s ornately carved front door—complete with stained-glass panels that seemed to depict either an angel or someone dressed in robes falling through the sky to their death. Yeah, that was heartening.
April stepped up beside Ben and grabbed his arm. Then one of her hands slipped into his, lacing their fingers. She didn’t say anything, just looked up at him with raised eyebrows that seemed to ask if he was ready. Yes, the oddly phrased invitation left outside Ben’s door and addressed specifically to him had invited him for a little chat about opportunities for putting his unique skillset to better use. The only skillset Ben had that his friends didn’t was almost four years of studying every world religion he could dig up to figure out how to avoid their demons and keep the worst night of his life eleven years ago from repeating. His angelology major wasn’t particularly impressive, though, as far as academia went, and it didn’t exactly qualify as something he could put to better use, as the letter by the still-anonymous R.M. had stated. But Ben had a feeling that this mystery person wanted to talk about something else, which wasn’t a skillset at all. It was Ian.
‘Yeah, you definitely can’t take all the credit for what I know,’ Ian added, bringing Ben’s train of thought to a jolting halt.
How about you not being trapped for thirty-thousand more years in the spirit realm? Ben asked.
‘Okay, a little credit.’
Ben offered April a hesitant smile and sucked a breath in through his teeth. “Here we go.” Then they walked up the staircase to the narrow stoop and gave themselves a moment to stand awkwardly there next to Peter and Chase.
“I guess you knock,” April said, untangling their fingers to release Ben’s hand.
Part of him wished she hadn’t. They still weren’t actually dating, as far as he could tell, though they’d spent a lot more time together in the last two weeks. Ben had actually kissed her for real the first time—and not with Ian in total control of his body—the night he’d gotten this invitation. The night he’d been so close to telling April everything about Ian and the deal he’d had to make with his friend’s undead spirit in order to keep the Guardian from ripping all of them to endlessly tortured pieces. Since then, there just hadn’t been another right time, though she’d definitely warmed to him a lot more after his attempt to unload the unbelievable secret he’d been keeping from her and Peter. Well, unbelievable to anybody who didn’t hunt demons and banish them and get anonymous presents from a person who typed out invitations like a lord of some castle throwing a nineteenth-century ball.
‘Really?’ Ian asked. ‘This is the kind of crap you want to focus on right now?’
Ben only sighed in response and lifted his hand to knock three times on the thick wood framing the stained glass. Even this close, he still couldn’t tell exactly what the depicted scene was supposed to be.
They just stood there, with no sound at all from behind the door indicating someone was actually coming to open it for them. It was already almost dark at this point, and Ben really hoped this wasn’t another one of Chase’s jokes. If it was, the guy had put up a really convincing gag, acting all excited to find what information he could about the house and almost devastated by his inability to do so.
“Maybe they’re all the way on the other side of the house,” Peter offered, but it sounded more like a question.
“Okay.” Ben went to knock again, getting in just one rap on the door before the thing was abruptly pulled open from the inside. April jumped beside him, and Peter took a step back onto what must have been Chase’s shoe; the guy grumbled for Peter to watch it at the same time the figure in the doorway showed itself.
“You’re almost right on time,” the man said, peering out at each of them with wide blue eyes. He was tall, thin, with a thick head of gray hair and a short, squished nose. His linen trousers and tightly fitting t-shirt
—showing off a more chiseled physique than Ben thought any man old enough for gray hair had a right to maintain—seemed a lot more appropriate for this time of year in Florida. Not New England in February. “You’ll have to wait a few minutes, but you’re welcome to come in now.”
“Thanks,” Ben said a little hesitantly, then glanced at April and stepped first through the open door.
2
Chase was the last one to step inside, and the man who’d opened the door for them closed it again. Ben didn’t miss the sound of the deadbolt being turned into its slot.
“Your host will be in shortly,” the man said, offering a small nod. “May I offer any of you a beverage in the meantime?”
Ben glanced at Peter, whose eyes had a grown just a little wider than was probably appropriate for a guest in someone else’s home. Yeah, Ben was thinking the exact same thing. The last time the two of them had stepped into a house they knew nothing about, greeted by a complete stranger and offered refreshments, they’d barely made it out alive. Then again, they’d never been invited to that house eleven years ago on Wry Road.
‘Don’t get all jumpy,’ Ian said. ‘There’s literally nothing here but living people and a whole crapload of stuff.’
Yeah, okay. That was something.
“Uh, no, thanks,” Ben said, turning back to the super-fit old guy with a small shake of his head.