by Deanna Chase
They definitely had Elise’s attention.
“I told you. The records room is dark; we can go in,” the smaller one said.
“You’re still fucking crazy, bro.” Scarface’s voice was low, growling, tinged with annoyance.
“Dude, keep your voice down.”
“What, do you think someone’s listening in? We’re in St. Bumfuck-Nowhere. It’s not filled with spies. Nobody gives a shit.”
The smaller man rubbed the back of his neck, shifted uncomfortably on his feet. “Quiet down. It’s dark tonight.”
“Yeah, it’s nighttime. Dark? Wow, shocker. Give this guy a diploma.” Yet the other man’s paranoia must have been contagious, because Scarface’s derision was softer than earlier.
Elise slid across the earth and curled around their ankles. Her eyes and ears were everywhere—the shadow under the car, the branches of the trees, the spaces between the rubber treads of their hiking boots.
Their boots were a whole different type of interesting, in fact. They were muddy to the ankles, flecked with tree bark and fragments of leaves. The smaller guy’s heel smelled like shit. He had walked through animal droppings and didn’t seem to have noticed.
“I’ll just pop in and out,” said the first man, rubbing the back of his neck again, almost like a nervous tic. “They won’t see me coming.”
“Seth…”
“I’ve got this. Five minutes.”
The one called Seth flipped up the collar of his jacket so that it covered the bottom half of his face, jammed a ball cap on his head, and jogged across the street.
Swearing under his breath, Scarface followed.
Elise slipped after them.
She reached the unlit back door of the sheriff’s office before Seth did, clinging to the trees as he dropped to his knees. Metal glinted in his hand—looked like picks of some kind. It took about five seconds for him to turn the lock and disappear inside.
Scarface paced beyond the range of the security cameras. His muscles seemed to ripple under his skin when he paced, like his veins ran with quicksilver. He was a little hunched, almost prowling, and Elise imagined he was the kind of man who enjoyed hunting. But she didn’t think he was the type to rely on guns. No, he was someone who would prefer a knife—or maybe even more primal weapons.
She curled around him, making his skin prick with goosebumps. Elise drew close enough that she could get a good look at his face.
His irises were unmistakably gold.
Seth slipped out the back door again, manila folders barely concealed under his jacket. It made the leather gap enough that Elise could verify that he was carrying a handgun. Big one, too. Elise’s fog dropped back to the grass.
“Told you I could do it,” Seth said.
Scarface grabbed him by the scruff of the neck. “Great. You proved your nuts are the size of cue balls and your brain’s the size of your prick. Now let’s go before we get arrested and I have to spend the full moon behind bars.”
Seth slapped his hand away, then itched the back of his neck again.
It wasn’t a nervous tic, Elise realized. Seth was sensing her presence. That was how kopides felt demons—like an itching scalp, or eyes on the back of one’s neck.
A werewolf and a kopis. Possibly brothers. And they were working together.
Suddenly, Northgate seemed a hell of a lot more interesting.
They jogged across the street and got back into the Chevelle. Their conversation probably continued inside. Elise was tempted to follow them—find out why a werewolf and demon hunter might want to steal files from the sheriff’s department, what they were doing together, where they were going. But Anthony’s warnings drifted to the forefront of her mind.
Someone had beckoned Elise to Northgate. Someone, maybe, who knew how to hurt her.
Like another kopis?
The Chevelle pulled out of the parking lot. Elise fell into her corporeal form again, standing in the middle of the road to watch the taillights retreat. They were gone in moments. If sunrise hadn’t been a short hour away, she would have followed, Anthony be damned.
Any doubts she might have had about Deputy Marshall’s werewolf problem were certainly gone. But those doubts had been replaced by a thousand questions.
Brick’s surveillance tape felt weighty in her fingers.
Where was the tape meant to go? Who was willing to pay two thousand dollars for a glimpse of Elise? How were they connected to those two brothers? And who, in such a barely-populated county, would bother warding a sheriff’s department against incorporeal demons, yet have an easily lock-picked back door?
She threw the tape into a trash bin and vanished.
CHAPTER FOUR
Lincoln Marshall’s return flight from Nevada was due to arrive at five o’clock in the afternoon. It wasn’t hard to find where the deputy lived; public employees weren’t afforded a good deal of privacy, and a quick call from McIntyre gave her access to a pay stub with an address. Elise reached his home thirteen hours before he would be back, chased by the first hints of dawn, and prepared to receive him.
His neighborhood was cute. A few clusters of duplexes with vinyl siding stood together in a field off a dirt road, like it could protect them from the lurking dangers of the night. He had a well-tended flower bed and a doorway painted cerulean.
The color of the door was far more interesting to Elise than any other detail of Deputy Marshall’s tidy duplex. She hadn’t seen that unusual door color outside the southwest. It was common in New Mexico, where they thought it warded away evil, but definitely not back east. And his was the only door painted like that.
She probed his threshold, searching for the same wards that had prevented her from slipping in the GCSD building. Color of the door aside, there was no hint of magic.
Elise slipped through the cracks of his window frame, then helped herself to the deputy’s phone. McIntyre answered the call immediately. “There’s a reward on my head,” she said. “Not for capturing me. Just for sightings.”
“Fuck,” he said. She had to agree. How was she supposed to investigate murders when the entire county was clamoring to report her to an anonymous player?
She peered out the front window. A dark shape moved over the path between houses, then disappeared into another duplex. Someone was awake awfully early. Maybe a shift worker.
Elise held the phone between her ear and shoulder, flipping through the accumulated mail on the table. It looked like the deputy was friendly with the neighbors. Someone had been bringing in his bills while he was on the trip.
“Anthony wants you to come home,” McIntyre said.
“I didn’t know he cared,” Elise said.
“Bullshit.”
Okay, she knew that Anthony cared. He had always cared way too much, and becoming a seasoned demon hunter under her tutelage hadn’t changed anything. If anything, saving people had rendered him more empathetic, not less. The fact that he wasted that empathy on Elise didn’t escape her.
“I’m looking out for myself,” she said. “No attempts on my life yet. No reason to worry.” Of course, the week was young.
She ripped open an envelope with no return address. There was a slip of paper inside with four words printed on it: I’ll be there soon. It looked like it had been produced by a typewriter. Charmingly eerie. Kind of had a low-budget serial killer vibe to it.
“Should we join you?” McIntyre asked.
“Not yet,” Elise said, stuffing the paper back into the envelope. “I’m going to have a talk with our favorite deputy later today. I’ll update you after that. Have you heard from Augustin Ramirez?”
“The number you gave me didn’t work. He’s closed his Reno law offices.”
No surprise there—pretty much everyone left Reno after what happened in 2009. Elise scowled at nothing in particular. “I already found the werewolf, by the way. Did you receive the payment yet? This might end quick and messy.”
“Deputy Marshall wired the fee. It hit our accoun
t before he got back to Vegas.”
Well, that was something. If Deputy Lincoln Marshall was out to kill Elise, at least Dana and Deb McIntyre’s college funds would be fattened first.
“Does it seem weird to you that a public employee could afford us?” Elise asked.
“Oh yeah. Weird as fuck.”
“That’s what I thought. Give Deb a squeeze for me.” Debora McIntyre was a sprightly, obnoxious four-year-old who insisted on having her blond curls dyed blue with Kool-Aid, just like Daddy’s. The little monster never failed to miss Elise’s absences.
“Sure thing.”
McIntyre hung up.
Elise returned the deputy’s mail to a neat stack and explored his house. He looked like a typical bachelor. His sink was filled with dirty dishes and his carpet hadn’t been vacuumed in weeks. He had football jerseys with “MARSHALL” on the backs hanging in his kitchen. Underneath the clutter, the duplex was decorated nicely. Either he had been slacking on cleaning lately, or someone more meticulous had handled his decor.
She drew his curtains. He had horizontal blinds layered underneath flimsy cotton curtains—the kind of shoddy covering that only morning people used. Anyone who liked to sleep in properly could do better than that. She grabbed winter flannels out of Lincoln’s linen closet and draped them over his curtain rods, careful to make sure that there were no gaps.
Satisfied that his house was adequately secure, Elise took a seat in his leather recliner. It was positioned directly in front of a sixty-inch flat screen TV, above which hung an impressive crucifix. The savior’s face had been lovingly carved into a rictus of pain. Delicate etchings of blood tracked his skeletal form. The statue must have cost a fortune. Maybe as much as the TV.
Elise wondered why Lincoln liked having Jesus’s death above his football games on Sunday afternoons. At least his gaze wasn’t focused on the chair—that would have been too much, even for her.
She steepled her fingers in front of her face, closed her eyes, and waited.
Lucinde Ramirez’s bedroom had been a chilly oasis in the middle of the Reno high desert. Her parents had drawn every curtain in the house, turned on the ceiling fans, and blasted the swamp cooler to make their fevered daughter as comfortable as possible. Her white, four-poster bed had practically been growing icicles from its filmy princess drapes.
Elise had arrived at the Ramirezes’ house doubtful that demonic possession was responsible for Lucinde’s sickness, and when she questioned the parents to find none of the usual indicators present, it had only confirmed her doubts. Full possession required flashy rituals or lots of time—weeks of demonic oppression, with nightmares and strange voices. Nothing out of the ordinary had happened for months.
Yet Lucinde had been curled in the twilit corner of her bedroom, knees raw with carpet burn, and veins gripping the sclera of her eyes.
“Colder,” she had whispered with a voice that didn’t belong to a five year old girl.
The demon had been burning her from the inside out.
Lucinde had been a pawn in a game of chess, with demons on one side and Elise on the other. But to Augustin Ramirez, and to Elise, Lucinde hadn’t been a tool. She had been a child. A victim.
Elise had failed her.
There weren’t many people in Elise’s life that would remember that failure. Anthony was one of them. Stephanie Whyte, an emergency room doctor with a flair for magic, was another possibility—but, as much as they hated each other, Stephanie wouldn’t deign to spit on Elise, much less try to trap her. Augustin Ramirez was the only other survivor that should have known about it.
Anthony, Stephanie, Augustin. Not much of a suspect list.
But there was one other name that came to mind. A name that Elise immediately banished.
James Faulkner. Of all of the crystal-clear human memories Elise wished that she could forget, James featured prominently in most of them.
James was rumored to have been in southern California a few months earlier. That was about as far from Grove County as one could get within the continental United States, and much too close to Las Vegas for Elise’s comfort. But James hadn’t tried to contact her when he was in the neighborhood. There seemed no reason for him to change his mind now.
Who else could know about Lucinde Ramirez? Who would use it as a beacon to draw Elise to Northgate—and why now? Where did the deputy fit?
None of it made sense.
But Elise remembered Lucinde Ramirez’s tiny whisper: “Colder…” She remembered what James had looked like when he had been possessed by Death’s Hand—he’d had exactly the same feral, bloody-eyed frenzy as Lucinde. And it was with no small amount of regret that Elise remembered what she had done to save him, at the cost of Lucinde’s life.
Colder…
For the first time in a long time, Elise felt a chill.
“You didn’t tell me that you have a new girlfriend.”
It was a bright, crisp morning. The air had that faint, bitter edge of rotting leaves, the bite of approaching winter, the smell of wet soil. Dawn glimmered on the wind-blown leaves, shimmering in shades of crimson and gold. Looked like it would be a nice day. Lincoln Marshall hadn’t been expecting to be assaulted the instant he arrived at home.
He slammed the door of his cruiser. “Pardon?” he asked, frowning at Mrs. Kitteridge.
The sun highlighted his elderly neighbor’s gray curls so that he could see the outline of her skull through them. She had carefully painted her lips a glossy peach color and wore the eyeshadow to match. Her frail body was draped in a muumuu that looked like one of Lincoln’s flower print curtains. Mrs. Kitteridge owned all of the duplexes in Lincoln’s complex, and she seemed to think that it made her some kind of den mother for everyone who rented from her.
She rapped a rolled newspaper against his pectoral. “I saw your girlfriend last night. She’s hot stuff, but you should put a ring on it, as the kids say, if she’s going to be sleeping over. I don’t run a brothel.”
“Mrs. Kitteridge,” he said warningly.
“Well, you know how I feel about extramarital relations. I daresay your mama would agree if she knew what her golden boy was getting up to. Mrs. Marshall would be shocked, just shocked, to see all the leather. I’m not, though. A boy’s got to have his fun.” She gave him a lascivious wink. “But save it for the marriage bed. That’s all I’m saying. You got me?”
“No, I don’t ‘got you’ at all,” Lincoln said. He knew he must have looked stupid and slack-jawed, but talking to Mrs. Kitteridge was similar to getting struck by a permed freight train. Had she finally lost it? “What’s this you’re saying about leather?”
“You know.” She waggled her bony hips underneath the muumuu. “Leather boots, leather jacket. Very nice.”
“On a woman.”
“That’s right. The girl visiting your house last night.”
Realization dawned. A woman in leather had been sneaking around his house. His neighbor believed her to be a girlfriend. But Lincoln wasn’t dating anyone, and nobody in Northgate wore leather, inside or outside the marriage bed.
Worry crossed Mrs. Kitteridge’s features. “Is she your girlfriend?”
Lincoln’s hand fell to his sidearm. He swallowed hard. “Oh, yeah. I just, ah—no, she’s a friend. I wouldn’t date a girl that dresses like that. I asked her to check on my house while I was away.”
“But I was checking on your house while you were away. Lincoln Mathias Marshall, you’re not trying to pull a fast one on me, are you?”
He didn’t have time for this. “Did you see her leave?”
“No. As far as I know, she’s still in there.”
The hair on the back of his neck stood on end. He thumbed the strap on his holster, loosening the gun. “Thank you for watching my house, Mrs. Kitteridge,” he said, dropping a kiss to her temple. She smelled like clinical-strength moisturizer and Earl Gray tea.
She gave him a sharp, knowing look, and shuffled back toward her own unit.
&nbs
p; He stood in front of his door, keys cupped against his palm so that they wouldn’t jingle. Someone had closed his blinds so that he couldn’t see into the entryway. Lincoln was fairly certain that he had left everything open when he left.
He unlocked the door. It swung open silently.
His house was dark inside—darker than he had ever seen it before. The narrow rectangle of sunlight that spilled over the carpet wasn’t enough to penetrate the shadows all the way to his back wall. The faint scent of tobacco lingered on the air. It was disturbingly reminiscent of The Pump Lounge, and he didn’t want to go inside.
Lincoln couldn’t wait long on his doorstep. As his landlady had proven, the neighbors would be watching, and he wanted to keep the questions to a minimum.
He waited to draw his gun until he had stepped inside and shut the door.
“Come out with your hands up,” Lincoln said, squinting into the darkness of the living room. He couldn’t make out the figure that he knew had to be there, but he could feel the presence of another living being as surely as if she were breathing down his neck.
She didn’t reply.
He shuffled forward, gun aimed at the floor. When he rounded the couch, he saw her.
Elise Kavanagh sat cross-legged in his recliner, feet tucked underneath her body, elbows on her knees, fingers steepled. It was a meditative position. Her hair flowed around her as if caught in a current, though the air in his house was still.
Her eyes opened slowly as if she were rising from a dream.
“You’re early,” Elise said.
Lincoln might have been disturbed that she seemed to know his itinerary if he hadn’t been much more disturbed by finding her in his house in the first place. “I switched flights so I could make it to Sunday mass.”
“Church boy,” she said dully, not like it was a compliment. “Cute.”
Electricity rippled down his arms, tickling the hairs until they stood at attention. “You sound like you’re not a believer. I’d think a demon would know better.”
