“Then that’s probably true.”
He leaned against the back of the chair, cupping his hands behind his neck. He rolled his thoughts around for a moment before speaking. “Do you think Elise and James…?”
She took a long, slow drink of her coffee, setting it down with a satisfied sigh. “No.”
“But—”
“No. That dance studio is a monastery. I promise.”
“Then she just doesn’t like me,” he concluded stubbornly. Betty ignored him. “I’m not going to wait around for her to notice me and I’m not going to give her another chance.”
“Sure,” she said. “Did I remember to mention that she joined that pole dance class at that rival studio? They’re doing an exhibition next week and she’s going to be dancing in a bikini. Gyrating. Sweaty.”
His eyes lit up. “Really? When?”
“I’m lying, Elise didn’t join the class. She doesn’t even know where her hips are.” Betty laughed. “‘Giving up on her.’ You’re so full of shit.”
He couldn’t help but laugh too. “You’re nuts, Betty. You know—” Anthony suddenly went rigid. His eyes widened. “Wait. Did you hear that?”
The window exploded.
Glass showered into the kitchen. Betty shrieked, throwing herself under the table, and Anthony followed, sliding to the floor for cover.
Something heavy—not large, but insanely dense—crashed through the broken window. It rolled on the glass shards, knocking the appliances from the counters to the floor, and hit the linoleum with the thud of a cannonball hitting concrete.
It stopped moving for an instant. Only an instant. It was gray, hulking, covered in twisted red scars. Eyes like soft balls stuck out on either side of its head.
And it was screaming.
Its eyelids flashed open and then shut again. It clawed at its own face, its screech the mix of a sob and a wail, and Betty slapped her hands over her ears to block out the noise. Blood trailed from the corners of its eyes and the gash of its mouth.
Icy terror smashed into Anthony’s chest, and for an instant, he couldn’t breathe.
His focus narrowed on the monster. Fight.
He knocked the table over, putting it between himself and the monster. It smashed into the tabletop. Wood squealed against the floor, and Betty cried out.
“Move,” Anthony said, “move! Hide!”
It barreled into the table again and then fell back, still tearing at its eyes and screaming. Betty hurried to her feet, and he pushed her toward the hallway. She knocked over one of the chairs in her haste.
The monster rushed her, a blur of shrieking rage and agony.
Anthony threw himself into its side, knocking them both down. Its three-fingered hands clamped onto his arms like a steel vice.
He was airborne. The wall became huge in his vision.
Pain rang through his body, and his face hit the floor.
It went for Betty again. Anthony pushed himself to all fours and shook his head to clear his vision. His cousin threw herself into the closet and tried to pull it shut, but it had gotten a hand in the way and she was screaming and Anthony couldn’t revel in his pain. He had to focus.
“Where’s your dad’s shotgun?” he yelled.
Betty’s panicked eyes met his. “My bedroom closet—it’s not loaded—”
He slid into the kitchen, scooping up the first sharp thing he saw. The monster tore open the closet door and reached for Betty.
“Hey,” Anthony said, “hey! Over here!”
He flung the knife at the monster, missing by at least two feet. It turned its bulging eyes on him. Eyelids cracked, he could just make out a sliver of massive pupil staring at him. Betty jerked her foot into the closet and shut the door.
Its jaw dropped wide and it roared, shrill and berserk. Sputum slapped against its chin.
Anthony made a break for the bedroom. The monster dodged into his path. He leapt over its head, dashing for the bedroom, and slammed the door. The lock clicked.
It crashed into the door with a wail.
Anthony paused for an instant, sucking in a hard breath of air, watching Betty’s door. The monster hit again, but it held.
He went to the closet and began to search.
Tío Jacob didn’t like the idea of his little girl living alone without protection, even with her cousin next door, so he had gifted her with a combat assault shotgun as a housewarming gift. At the time, Betty had teased her dad for being so paranoid, but it didn’t seem nearly so paranoid now.
Anthony found the gun, unzipping the sleeve to withdraw it. The monster smashed into the other side of the door. It began to buckle.
He tore through Betty’s shelves, knocking her collection of records to the floor and shuffling through a pile of stuffed animals to find where she kept the ammo. A stack of boxes were clustered in the back corner of her closet, dusty and unopened since the day Anthony had given them to her. He had bought her two kinds of rounds: one for target shooting, and double ought for making sure a live target would never get up again.
He grabbed the double ought.
Another hit. The door splintered.
Anthony slammed his shoulder into the crack to keep it from breaking entirely. His hands shook as he tried to get a round out of the box. He dropped it. Ammunition spilled across the carpet.
Swearing, he dropped to the floor and held the door shut with a foot, back pressed against the foot of Betty’s bed. He slid open the loading port on the bottom of the shotgun.
Anthony counted out the shells he could reach as he loaded it—no time to panic—and pumped once. The chamber wasn’t full, but if he needed more rounds to kill that thing, he probably wouldn’t live to do it anyway. He kept the number of rounds hovering in his head—five—and let go of the door.
He had only an instant to get on one knee, shotgun braced against his shoulder, before the monster broke through. It rushed at him on all fours, its nails tearing into the carpet.
He angled down and squeezed the trigger.
BLAM.
The recoil knocked the butt of the shotgun into the pad of his shoulder and he rocked backward. The monster’s arm disappeared in a spray of blood and pellets smacked into the floor.
He pumped the action and an empty casing went flying. Four.
It screamed a terrible scream that made his eardrums throb, rearing back on its stubby legs. Anthony braced properly this time and squeezed the trigger again.
BLAM.
Suddenly, the monster didn’t have a face.
Three rounds.
With no flesh, Anthony could see all too well the pellets that had buried into its skull. There was blood everywhere, tassels of skin, the dribbling remnants of its left eyeball. Some of the pellets had implanted in the drywall behind its head and Anthony’s ears were ringing.
It raised onto its remaining forearm and dragged its carcass toward him.
He stood, pointing the muzzle of the shotgun straight down at its head, and pulled the trigger once more.
BLAM.
The monster flattened without the back of its skull.
Two.
Was it dead? Anthony didn’t care to find out. He pumped again.
BLAM. Pump. The casing hit the carpet. BLAM.
Empty.
Anthony lifted the shotgun and tapped the remnants of the monster with the toe of his shoe. Its mangled body didn’t react. It occurred to him, distantly, that his only pair of nice jeans were soaked in blood and that he couldn’t hear anymore.
But the monster was dead. Very dead.
“You can come out, Betty,” he called. He wasn’t sure if he actually yelled or not—he couldn’t hear his own voice.
The closet door at the end of the hall opened and Betty crept out. Her mouth moved, and he knew she was speaking, but all he heard was a sound like a vibrating tuning fork.
She stood in the doorway, gaping at the body, and her mouth kept on moving. Judging by her expression, he was glad he didn’t have
to listen to her.
The quality of the air in the room changed, and the remnants of the monster dissolved into the carpet.
Anthony leapt forward and tried to grab what used to be a finger—for what, he wasn’t sure—but it crumbled in his hand. Even the blood and chunks of intestine on his pants evaporated into puffs of smoke, leaving him as clean as he had been before the fight.
The entire thing was gone in seconds, and only the mess of shotgun damage proved there had ever been a fight.
Betty was agape. “Oh…my…god. What just happened?” It sounded as though she was whispering.
“I have no idea,” Anthony said. Biggest understatement of his life.
“Dad is going to be pissed when I tell him what happened to his carpet.” She stared at the floor—the empty shell casings, the chewed-up shag, and the pile of ash that had once been a body. Then she looked up at her cousin, the shotgun balanced between his hands, and a grin broke across her face. “That was so cool!” She punched his arm. “You’re practically G.I.-fucking-Joe!”
He dropped the shotgun and collapsed on the end of her bed. Anthony’s hands wouldn’t stop shaking. “Fuck.”
“Oh man, I think that might have been the most incredible experience of my life!”
Anthony worked his jaw around, trying to clear out his ears. His hearing had almost entirely returned, and the ringing was replaced by…silence.
“Why is it so quiet?”
Betty stopped quivering with delight to look at him. “Huh?”
“Where are the sirens?”
“There aren’t any.”
“That thing was loud. If someone had phoned in a disturbance, we’d have at least one car by now.”
Betty peered through her window to the silent street beyond. “I don’t know. There’s nobody outside, so maybe no one’s home—or the cops could be called away on something else.”
“Or something big is going on,” Anthony said. “I think someone just tried to kill us.”
“Kill us? With a deformed monkey? Why?”
Anthony used Betty’s bed post to haul himself into a standing position. “Something weird was happening with the coven. James said there were—I don’t know, demons or something. He called in an exorcist to help him. Didn’t he say that she was a friend?”
Betty nodded. “Yeah, but that was about Marisa’s kid.” A light clicked on behind her eyes. “Oh. Oh. But that’s impossible, I would know if…”
“Elise is the exorcist,” he finished. “She’s been injured. She’s not talking about why.”
“Aren’t priests the only ones who can do that stuff?” Betty asked, starting to pace. She didn’t let Anthony respond before continuing. “Okay, let’s say something is happening—maybe Elise is an exorcist or maybe she isn’t. It already attacked Marisa’s family. It attacked us. For all we know, it could have attacked Elise and James last night. Maybe that’s why she ditched you.” She gasped. “Maybe it’s after our coven!”
“That’s kind of a leap.” He laughed. “This is ridiculous.”
Betty rested her hands on his shoulders. “Anthony, not to sound patronizing, but you just killed a gargoyle on my carpet.”
“Good point.”
She left the room, searching through the rubble that had been her kitchen. “We need to find out if anyone else has been attacked. Help me find my cell phone?”
Anthony nodded. “Yeah, sure. Who’s left?”
“Those two witches that live up at the lake,” Betty said. “Windsong and her husband, Phoenix. Then there’s Morrighan, but she left to visit her grandparents in Virginia this morning. Stephanie lives in the area, but I don’t have her number. The only person in town is Ann.”
He plucked Betty’s pink phone from the spilled coffee pot. “Found it.” Betty hurried to remove the battery, but it was too late—something inside the phone fizzled. She sighed.
“Okay, we’ll just have to use the neighbor’s house phone to call everyone.”
“Ann lives just up the hill from the university. I’ll go check on her. Want to come?”
She surveyed the damage around her. “No. I should patch the window and clean up all that glass.”
“Call her and tell her I’m on my way. Whatever’s going on…it’s serious. Do you think you could get a hold of Elise too?”
“I’ll make sure she’s okay,” Betty said. She grabbed the shotgun from the bedroom and gave it to him, as well as a new box of shells. “I’ll make sure everyone’s okay. Call me when you find Ann—we should get together and figure out what’s going on. She’s smart. She’ll know.”
“Okay,” he said, dropping the ammo into his pocket. “Watch yourself.”
He ran out to his Jeep and jumped in, stowing the gun behind his seat. Anthony suspected he was scared—probably even terrified—and he just couldn’t feel it yet. He hadn’t stopped shaking. It wasn’t the time to freak out. Later, the shock of what had just happened would probably sink in, and he could really freak out.
At the moment, though, he had a purpose, and that was enough to keep him moving.
Chapter 13
Drip…drip drip…
Elise’s head throbbed in time with a distant beat. Her shoulders and ankles ached. Her eyes felt sticky.
Drip drip…
Where was she?
“James?” she croaked. Her throat was too thick and dry to speak properly. She swallowed and smacked her lips, rolling her tongue around in her mouth. “James?”
Drip…drip…
Something was running down her arm. She tried to lift her head against gravity, which seemed to have tripled while she was unconscious. The plain gray ceiling had a drain in the middle. The floor was covered in exposed beams.
Wait. No. That wasn’t right.
Elise was hanging upside down by her ankles.
She squinted at her arm in the dim light. Blood trickled out of the inner corner of her elbow, trailed down her hand, and dripped off her fingertip. That sound was her blood hitting the floor. Never a good sign.
She relaxed and shut her eyes to collect herself. It wasn’t the first time Elise had been captured by a demon. This was like riding a bicycle. A hell bicycle made of damned skeletons and fire, but a bicycle nevertheless.
Counting silently to ten, she opened her eyes again to study the room around her.
It was empty. No furniture, which meant no obstructions to use as hiding places. She knew she must have been disarmed, but she double checked her waist anyway. Even her holsters had been taken away. She wasn’t surprised to find that the stone staff was missing.
Flexing her abs to sit up, she held onto her ankles and examined the bindings. Silk ropes. What kind of demon used silk ropes? They were pulled tight against the iron hook by her weight, but nothing prevented her from untying them. She lifted herself on the hook with one hand while she picked at the knots with her fingernails.
The loss of blood made her weak. She had to rest twice before she could unravel the knots enough to get her first leg free. The second was short work after that, and she lowered herself carefully to the floor.
Changing orientation after being upside down for so long made her head rush. She braced a hand against the wall for a moment.
Deep breaths.
The only light came from the crack underneath the door. It looked like she was in an unfurnished, windowless basement, and her own blood was oozing toward the drain in the floor.
She finally got a good look at the wall she had been hanging on, and she jerked her hand back. The sigil from Lucinde’s forehead had been painted in blood on the wall. It stretched from floor to ceiling. Elise had been hanging in the middle of it.
All that blood couldn’t have come from her. She searched her body for injuries and only found a nick in the veins of each arm. It was already clotting.
She sniffed it. Definitely blood.
Someone moved on the other side of the door.
Elise crouched behind it, twisting the ropes aro
und her fists and stretching them tight to form a garrote. Her heart wasn’t even beating fast. A strange kind of calm settled over her—the calm before the killing.
It swung open. She prepared to jump.
And Ann stepped in.
Elise brought the ropes down in front of the witch, yanking them against her throat to pull her back against Elise’s body.
She wrenched the ropes back. Ann choked.
“Elise—”
Turning her fists to tighten the ropes, Ann’s words became incoherent gurgles. She slapped against Elise’s hands as they sank to the floor together. The witch’s feet kicked helplessly against the concrete.
Elise nudged the door open with a toe to look in the hall. Empty. Shouldn’t there have been something guarding her?
Doubt crept in as Ann’s struggles grew weaker. What if James had sent her?
Ann gave strained spluttering noise.
Elise released her. She collapsed.
“What are you doing here?” Elise asked, crouching over her body. She gave Ann’s legs and sides a brief pat, searching for weapons, and didn’t find anything.
The witch sucked in several hard breaths. Her ruddy face had broken out in sweat.
“They aren’t kidding when they say you’re like a human weapon, are they?” she gasped. “That really hurt. I thought you were going to kill me.”
“I was,” she said. There was no point dancing around the subject. “I thought you were working for Death’s Hand. Did James send you? Is he okay?”
“James is fine for now.” Ann sat up and smiled.
The situation felt completely wrong for a rescue. Elise wrapped the rope around her fists again. She recalled seeing those bright blue eyes under a ski mask at the cemetery—the same eyes that smiled at her now.
“James told me you’re an herb witch,” Elise said. “But you’re the necromancer, aren’t you?”
Ann shrugged. “Kitchen witchery is easy to fake.” When Elise tensed, she held up a hand like it could stop an attack. “There are more than a dozen fiends in the house above us.”
“Why?”
“I’m not a fighter. It makes sense to have guards.”
Demons & Djinn: Nine Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy Novels Featuring Demons, Djinn, and other Bad Boys of the Underworld Page 180
