Gary settled beside me as Diane sprinkled the sage over the burning candle. Suddenly, I regretted the way I’d talked to him. I knew he was with me in this. I knew his ugly mug would stare down an avalanche so long as I was beside him. So, I nudged him with my leg, hoping he’d take it as an unstated apology. He jabbed with a bony elbow, unofficially accepting it.
The smell of chalk and moldy ass filled the room as the sage burned in the candle’s flame. It was thick and all encompassing.
“There goes the security deposit,” Gary said, covering his pinched off nose with his hands.
A sharp, intense cold filled the room, replacing even the pungent odor. Before long, I could see my breath. Looking over at Renee, I saw her cross her arms over her chest and rub her hands up and down her sleeves for warmth.
Diane Freeman’s eyes were closed. She had scrunched her legs up into a curved knot on the bed, and her made up face seemed to grow paler by the second. Her teeth started to chatter, and a pissed off look disfigured her features.
“Would you just come on already?” Diane barked, suddenly annoyed. “We’re not new, bud. We get that you’re a big, bad ghost. There’s really no need for the theatrics.” As much as I disliked Diane at the moment, she definitely had a point. I just wanted to get this over with.
Then, as if scared off by Diane’s outburst, the temperature returned to normal. Her face pinked back up and her joints loosened.
“Goddamn it,” she muttered as her eyes opened. “Sorry,” she said, nodding at me. “I tried.”
“No,” I answered quickly. “You can’t pull that crap on me, Freeman!” There was too much at stake for me to just let her skate away after barely trying.
“It’s not crap,” she responded. “You saw me try. You watched it happen. There’s nothing else I can do.” She blew the candle out and hopped off the bed, standing upright. “What can I say? Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. I guess this isn’t your lucky da-”
Her body violently contorted, her back bending so fast and far. the snap I heard didn’t come as a surprise.
“Diane!” I gasped. “Diane, are you-”
Her head snapped toward me, her eyes going completely white. “You think you can fuck around with the way things are, half breed?” Her voice was a mangled mess, deep and screeching, like nails on a chalkboard. “What you have opened cannot be closed. What you have wrought cannot be unwrought. What happens next is your doing, Roy Morgan!”
Diane’s body pulled back upright. She stood there, unblinking and unmoving, her face a blank mask.
“Diane,” I said in a low voice. Guilt and a deep sense of fear and concern ran through me. I had done this to her, forced her into this. What the hell had I done to this woman? “Diane, are you alright?”
She blinked hard, the color returning to her eyes. Her face regained mobility. Tears filled her eyes and worry filled her expression.
“I can’t move,” she said in a rushed panic. “Why can’t I move?”
“You back might be broken,” I explained, remembering the loud crack when she bent.
“No,” she answered. “No!”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I know some healing spells. They won’t fix everything, but they’ll get you-”
“Get out of my head!” She shouted, and I realized that she wasn’t talking to me. “No!” She repeated. Her eyes darted over to me. “He’s not going to stop,” she continued. “He’s not going to stop until he has you back.”
“Who?” I asked. Those words didn’t make any sense to me. I wasn’t anybody’s property and I never had been. Who the hell was this woman talking about? “The Benefactor? He never had me in the first place.”
“I don’t want to,” she said, tears streaming down her face. “I don’t want to. Don’t make me. It’s so empty over there…in those dark places. They all tell me how empty it is. I can’t do that…not yet.”
She closed her eyes, and I knew whatever battle she was fighting inside herself had just been lost.
A high-pitched scream escaped her lips, and she darted toward the wall, toward Renee.
Renee threw herself out of the way, but Diane didn’t stop. That apparently wasn’t what she was aiming for, anyway.
Diane collided with the window, sending shards of glass flying everywhere as she flung her body out into the open air.
I rushed toward her, knowing I would be too late, but trying anyway.
By the time I got to the window, Diane had already kissed the pavement and her body lay bent and broken across the alley.
6
“You didn’t do this,” I said, watching Renee pace a circular path into the living room carpet of my brand new fleabag apartment. Her dark hair was loose and frazzled from all the times she’d run her hands through it, and her eyes were red and ringed into smudged mascara, leading me to the conclusion she was upset. Ever the detective.
She didn’t respond.
“Are you even hearing me?” I asked, a little louder than I’d initially intended, but you know what? Fuck it. This was the third time I’d told her she wasn’t responsible, and the third time she’d ignored me. Apparently, I wasn’t doing such a great job.
How could I though? I was feeling all of the same things that were probably racing through Renee’s head right now. I had launched a series of events which led to the death of an innocent woman. Sure, she was creepy and mean. Yeah. She was more than a little bitchy and she obviously got off on the idea of death and people dying, but she hadn’t done anything wrong. I wouldn’t have ‘eaten’ her for that. So-by that estimate- she didn’t deserve to die.
She had though, and it was my fault. I was going to have to live with that. I was going to have to make my peace with it, but I’d be damned it I let Renee blame herself too. This wasn’t her fault.
“Renee!” I shouted, shaking my head.
“What?” she turned toward me. Her face was painted with the same frantic expression she’d worn since we’d hauled ass from the Drury after Diane Freeman took a header into the pavement.
I didn’t need to wonder who had killed her. I knew because she’d all but told me when she’d begged the spiritual sonofabitch who had invaded her body and forced her to take her own life. It had to be the Benefactor, or at least, someone associated with him.
Sure, we had forced her to let into the demon into her head in the first place, but that didn’t make it Renee’s fault. Mine, maybe. But definitely not hers.
“You need to calm down,” I said, trying to sound sincere, but the words came out flat and even.
“I am calm, Roy,” she answered, shaking her head at me in dismissal.
“You don’t look calm,” I answered, cracking a smile that didn’t quite fit my face.
“And you don’t look innocent, but I’m sure you’re about to tell me all the reasons you are.” She took a deep breath before crashing onto the couch, her head in her hands. “It’s been a lot, Roy. I know it’s not your fault. I know you didn’t ask for any of this, and I know you’re just as lost in all of this as I am, but I have to vent to somebody.” She looked up at me. “That’s what boyfriends are for, right?”
Okay. So, the world is falling apart around me, a woman just killed herself before my eyes after trying to kill me, and I still had no idea what was after us. She had called me her boyfriend though, and I didn’t feel a bit ashamed about the ‘I’m an idiot’ grin that crept across my face.
“That’s most definitely what we’re for,” I answered, sitting next to her. “Among other things…”
I heard the bedroom door open and close as Renee rested her head on my shoulder. A scurrying of tiny footsteps followed, culminating in Gary barging into the living room with a cigar sticking out of his oblong mouth.
“When did you start smoking?” I asked, narrowing my eyes at him.
“Since I figured we’d all be dead by the end of the weekend anyway,” he answered, popping the disgusting thing out of his mouth and holding it between hi
s three clawed fingers. “I mean, you saw what happened to that bitchy medium chick, and that was in a room you had already spelled up with your top shelf magic.” He put the cigar back into his mouth and gestured at us. “Sitting ducks.”
A cloud of regret passed over me, slumping my shoulders. He was right. For all my abilities, I was useless in dealing with the Benefactor, and that made me want to scream.
“Just tell me what happened back at the hotel, Gary,” I said, wrapping an arm around Renee and leaning back against the couch. Though all this crap was happening, just being with her like this made me feel better in some small way.
“About what you’d figure,” he said, moving toward us and hopping on the coffee table. He pulled an open beer can closer and used it to dump the ashes at the end of the cancer stick. “You’re finished with that, right?”
“I am now,” I answered, wishing I hadn’t sent the half full beer down. “Now focus.”
“What do you want to know?” He shrugged in a way that let me know I was going to have to pull anything of importance out of him. “Cops came, they sealed off the area around the pile of smashed up meat that used to be Diane, and searched the hotel room.”
“And you got rid of our fingerprints?” I asked, a flare of guilt rising in me as I thought about what had happened. I was cleaning up a crimes scene. Whether I pushed the woman out the window or not, that wasn’t what good cops did. Some detective I was.
“Licked ‘em off myself,” Gary answered, his forked tongue moving up the space around his mouth where his lips should be. “I stole the security tapes too, and since we checked in using a fake name, we should be in the clear. Trust me, Roy boy, there’s no sign of us being anywhere near that place.”
“Fake name?” Renee asked, looking up at me. She hadn’t been with me earlier in the day when I’d rented the place.
“Darrin Stephens,” I answered, shrugging by way of explanation.
“From Bewitched?” she asked, scrunching her nose.
“I used to have a thing for Elizabeth Montgomery. It’s not important now,” I said, changing the extremely embarrassing subject. “What is important is that we’re in the clear. At least, in terms of the police department.” I shook my head, trying to wrap my brain around everything that had just happened and the shit storm we were currently in the middle of. “Everything else, not so much.”
“Who do you think it was?” Renee asked. Her voice was tense, and while she might have said she was calm, how could she be? She had just lost her brother. She had lost her sense of safety and security, and if she wasn’t lucky and I wasn’t good, she’d lose her life too. So, no, in retrospect, there was really no way she could have been calm. “Who do you think took that poor woman over?” She blinked back tears. “Who do you think forced her to do that to herself?”
“I-I don’t know,” I admitted, feeling like the biggest failure in the entire world. I wasn’t much of a detective, not if I couldn’t figure this out. I’d dropped the ball with Isa before. I wasn’t able to connect the dots in time, and because of that, I’d lost my mother’s soul and almost got the people who meant the most to me in the world killed-well, the person and the imp. I couldn’t let that happen again. I needed to be better. I needed to be smarter. I needed to be effective. “Whoever it was, they were mad about something I did. They said I opened something, but I have no idea what that could be.”
“You don’t-you don’t think it was Isa, do you?” Renee asked, looking over at me. Her voice was shaky, but not with fear. It was almost like she felt bad for the part she’d played in things, like she felt responsible for something she could have never possibly had any control over.
“No,” I answered flatly. “I knew Isa for a long time. She wasn’t always Fulton. She wasn’t always crazy like that. I like to think that when she died, she was freed from that sickness. Though, even if she wasn’t, there’s no way it could have been her. Fae souls go into a different realm. Diane Freeman said she couldn’t access it, and since I’ve never even heard of a medium who could, I don’t think she was lying.”
I sounded sure partially because I was. Besides, there was a huge part of me that just hoped I was right. Isa had been through so much. She had lost herself before the end, and I wanted to believe she might be at peace now.
Before I could vocalize that any further, there was a knock on the door. My body tensed. Could it be the cops? Had we missed something out at the hotel that lead them straight back here? Or was it someone else, someone with much more dreadful and intense motivations.
Renee looked over at me with the same thoughts running obviously through her mind.
“Stay here,” I said as I stood up and moved toward the door.
“Like hell,” Renee said from behind me and wasn’t surprised at all to hear her walking toward me.
“Fine,” I conceded, half-proud of her and half-scared at how quickly she threw herself into dangerous situations. “Just try to run if it’s something bad. Is that too much to ask?”
“I’ll consider it,” she said, tenderness evident in her voice.
I got to the door, pausing for only an instant before turning the knob and pulling it open.
As the door swung open, I set my jaw and balled my hands into fists and was met with… a pizza guy.
He was about seventeen, had a crater face full of pimples and held a closed pizza box out in front of him.
Relief flooded me.
“We didn’t order a pizza,” I said, looking at the kid in confusion. “Oh, wait a sec. Gary,” I said, yelling behind me. “Did you order a pizza?”
“No,” he answered from the living room. “I filled up on fingerprints.”
“You didn’t have to order it,” the pizza guy said, his voice all monotone and creepy. “It’s not for you. It’s only because of you.”
Dread filled my chest, cold and foreboding... Something wasn’t right. Something was very not right.
“Remember,” he said, swaying back and forth like he was barely holding himself up. “This is happening because of you.”
He opened the pizza box and a swarm of bees rushed out of it. My muscles tensed as I watched them quickly swarm into a cloud of buzzing terror. They collided with him, stinging him repeatedly until he fell to the floor screaming and begging me to get them off him.
“Dispertise!” I cried, unleashing a blast of magic. The spell scattered the bees, but by the time I got to him, the poor kid was a writhing mess on the floor. He was swollen, and his face was a swollen red mess.
Worse still, he didn’t appear to be breathing. I took a deep breath of my own and searched for a pulse for a lot longer than I should have. Still, despite my best efforts, I couldn’t find one.
He was dead and all I could think of was the words he’d spoken.
This is happening because of you.
7
The pizza guy lay dead on the floor, his body covered in bee stings, his face swollen and forever frozen in anguish and pain. He was just a kid.
The bees, a mass of angry yellow and black killers, swirled before us in a frenzy of buzzing madness. They moved in tandem, settling in the air and readying for another attack, obviously still under whatever thrall controlled them.
“Close the door!” Renee yelled, grabbing my shoulder and nearly yanking me backward before she stopped. “Get him inside and close the door!”
I didn’t even think, not that it would have done much good. I had no idea what we were up against. I mean, what sort of self-respecting supernatural creature controls a swarm of bees, anyway? It was like if the Animal Planet channel decided to go rogue and mount an attack in the strangest way possible.
The moment I’d lugged the pizza guy’s corpse inside, Renee slammed the door shut to keep the still swarming bees out. It worked, mostly.
“He’s dead, Renee,” I said, looking down at his bloated and reddened face.
“You don’t know that,” she said quickly, pushing me backward and kneeling in front of
him.
“He’s not moving,” I answered as Gary rushed out from the living room. “And I checked his pulse. There was nothing there.”
“Then you did a piss poor job,” Renee said, checking his wrist herself and looking him over. “It’s faint, but it’s there.” I bristled, turning away from her. She was intense, but she was also intent on saving this guy, and that was a good thing.
“What the fuck kind of pizza was that?” Gary asked, catching sight of the guy, his spider eyes widening.
“Grab a couple towels from the bathroom,” I said loudly, looking over at my imp and then at the crease under the door. A few bees were already flying in through it. I stomped hard as they flew, taking as many as I could out with the heel of my boot. That wouldn’t be enough before long. As soon as the rest of the bees started coming through, we’d be in the middle of a full-scale insect attack. Which, judging from the guy on the floor, was probably a lot more dangerous than I would have previously imagined.
Renee leaned closer and pulled an EpiPen out of her jacket. Quickly, she pulled open the poor guy’s shirt, revealing a red and blotchy chest as well as a crucifix tattoo sitting above his heart. Looking up at me, she jabbed the pen into the man’s chest and pushed down.
“He’s allergic,” she said, shaking her head. “Pray we got the drugs into his system in time.” She pressed her lips together. “And hopefully it’s enough. There were so many damn bees. Even if he wasn’t allergic it could be fatal.”
Gary came rushing out of the bathroom, two large bath towels dragging the floor behind him. It wasn’t a moment too soon. The bees were growing in number and rushing through the sliver under the door quickly.
As Gary tossed me one and then the other, I grabbed them and stuffed them under the door, sealing the crease as best I could. Bees had spilled through it and-even with the towels in place- some were still getting through. And swarming around my head.
Turning quickly, I scooped up the pizza guy as gently as I could while still hauling ass. Bees were bees, and not exactly the most terrifying things in the world, but this many of them could take down anything, let alone a poor kid who was allergic to their stingers.
Flesh and Blood: An Urban Fantasy Novel (The Half-Demon Warlock Book 2) Page 4
