Suddenly the fatigue that had been chasing me since I’d moved back into Gran’s house made more sense—sure, I’d been working hard and training lots, but this was bigger than that. Getting a good night’s sleep was nearly impossible with a house like this next door.
I paused on the top step. Maybe it wasn’t the goblin intruder who’d hurt Gran. What if she was fading because the Sorrel-Weed house was affecting both of us? In the shadow world, almost anything was possible, and it seemed as likely an explanation as any other.
I closed the distance to the front door before I could turn and run the other way. Knocked once, and the door swung open on its own, with no one behind it. Yeah, I don’t think that happened to everyone who came here either.
Beside me, Robert growled and I kind of wanted to do the same. Instead, I pulled a knife out of my bag, wishing that I’d strapped them over my jeans instead of tucking them away. I didn’t shout out “hello.” I knew better—I knew how the horror movies went.
Because more than likely someone who was not alive would answer me.
If not for Gran’s certainty that this was the best place to hide Grimm’s stuff, and for Bridgette backing her up, I’d already have been out of the house and running the other way.
“Matilda,” I whispered her name, hoping the lady of the house would show herself and help me.
The floorboards creaked under my feet, and I wrinkled my nose in self-disgust. I mean, I didn’t know the house well enough to avoid its creaking patterns, but still—I absolutely did not want to attract that dark creature’s attention if I could avoid it.
I let my feet go where they wanted, following some instinct that I wasn’t sure I wanted to acknowledge. Robert slid one hand into mine and I clamped down on his skeletal fingers, never more grateful for him than I was then.
Voices circled up to us from an open doorway. I found myself letting us into another room to stay hidden. Which turned out to be small but with a writing desk in it, a single chair, and a handful of fake coins piled in the center of the desk.
The sounds of running feet snapped my eyes back to the doorway I’d left open just a crack. A moment later, a group of tourists burst out of the door across from the main entrance. Stumbling over one another in their haste to leave, more than one of them had wide eyes, pale skin, and a sweat-covered face. I’d love to say it was from the heat, but I doubted it very much, which made own sweat glands turn on the faucet.
Fear had never looked so real, and it had never looked me so straight in the face.
The tour guide lifted her hands above her head, her dark skin pale with what could only be the same shock the others clearly felt. “Please, everyone be calm. Let’s make sure we’re all here.”
The group huddled together as the tour guide counted, nodding as she got to the end. “Okay, I think that’s enough for today. There are times that the ghosts of the Sorrel-Weed house are more . . . active than others, and it looks like it was your lucky day.”
“Lucky?” An oversized man with a bright shiny head ringed with brown hair stepped toward the tour guide. “That thing down there attacked us!”
The tour guide swallowed hard. “As I said, some days are better than others in terms of—”
“I want my money back,” he snapped and his hands clenched into fists.
For a moment, I saw them not as they were, but as the house saw them, and its perception fed into a story older than any of the living people who were there.
The large, overbearing white master, his clothing expensive and his attitude beyond shitty, beyond inhuman. Cruel. Unjust. And the diminutive black enslaved girl unsure if she should run or stay, trying to figure out the best way to protect herself since no one else ever had.
How many times had the house seen this moment played out in slightly different variations? Too many, far too many.
My eyes pricked with angry tears as I stepped out of hiding and entered the foyer. I found myself stomping on the floorboards with the heel of my boot without even thinking. Three times, drawing all the attention to me despite what I suspected it would mean. That the entity here would know I was inside.
Those three strikes reverberated through the room and, from there, through the house. Everyone in the group turned to look at me. I don’t know what they saw besides a forty-one-year-old woman with a knife in her hand, but that alone seemed to make enough of an impression.
“Everyone get the duck out.” I snapped the words and they seemed to lash at the tourists, driving them into action. They scrambled out the door in a pushing, shoving flash. Fat boy was at the front, shoving two women out of his way.
The tour guide was the last to leave. “Who are you?”
“A neighbor who specializes in stuff like this.” I waved my hand to encompass the house. Because I wasn’t sure how else to describe what I did for a living and why I was there uninvited. “What happened?”
Her eyes closed and then opened wide. “Don’t go into the basement. Certainly not today. The demon down there is . . . he is wide awake today and angry. He cut a few of them, and he cut me too.” She held out her arms to show me long scratches running from the crook of her elbows to her wrists. Three strikes on each arm, six total.
“Demon?” It was my turn for wide eyes. Sure, I’d killed demons before, but I’d never set out to fight one. The first two had been accidental. “Did you say demon?”
She frowned and shuddered, rubbing her arms. “Yeah, I did. But you specialize in this, so you’re like a demon hunter then?”
I stared at her, horror flickering through me, shrugged and then nodded. “Yeah, sure, why not.”
“Be careful then,” she whispered.
And she left me there, alone in the house with a gawd-in-heaven, lawdy Jaysus demon.
15
“Here’s the thing,” I whispered to Robert as we crept upstairs onto the second level of the Sorrel-Weed house. “We need to hide this stuff here because Gran said it would be safe. And I gotta agree—if goblins are afraid of the dark, this place is the damn darkest.”
The plan was as simple as could be. Stash the stuff from Grimm in the desk in the room across from Gran’s. So, perfect, simple.
That was if I could make it all the way to the second floor without peeing my pants. Now that my anger was gone, fear ate at me like worms burrowing in deeply under my skin. I kept one hand on Robert, unable to let him go. He swayed along next to me, quiet as he’d ever been.
The tour guide’s words were still banging away in my head, which was my main problem.
She’d said there was a demon in the house.
I’d faced two demons before, killed them both. So you would’ve thought I’d be good with whatever I might’ve run into.
The thing was, I’d read up on demons after my encounters last week. The demons I’d faced were lower level, barely conscious balls of negative energy created for a single purpose and without any real thought behind them. As bad as they were—and they were bad, don’t get me wrong—they weren’t the worst of the bunch.
There were three levels of demons, it turned out, and each level had different subcategories of strength.
Initiate—the kind I’d faced and managed to kill. Even if I hadn’t killed them, they would have faded as the power used to bring them forward ran out.