Chapter 3
THREE
Here’s a question for the mind readers out there.
—T-shirt
“There’s a key under the pot.”
After yet another furtive glance over her shoulder, Amber turned back to her newest client, Dora Rodriguez. The town of Madrid was tiny, and the residents kept an eye out for each other, but something strange was happening. Dora was the third person to die in as many days, and if the description of her attacker was any indication, a demon had caused her death.
Demons were jerks. No doubt about that. But they didn’t usually go around killing humans. They liked to feed off them. Off their energy. Especially fear. Killing them served no purpose. Then, depending on the type of demon, the human would either go insane or die. Some demons, however, jumped from body to body, eventually leaving their host to live out their life with only vague memories of what had happened to them. Then there were the ones that used humans to cross into this realm, but that was a whole other story.
If this was a demon as Amber feared, then the entire town could be in trouble. More people could die, and the authorities would have no idea what was going on—or how to stop it.
Amber lifted a terra-cotta pot and found the key hidden beneath it. With shaking hands, she unlocked the aging back door. After a bit of shoving, she got it open.
“Yeah, sorry. It sticks.”
“No worries,” Amber said, trying to disguise the quivering in her voice. She did not relish the idea of facing a demon. She had a small arsenal of protective paraphernalia, but she did not have the capability to actually kill a demon. In fact, upon quick inventory of the usual suspects she had in her bag—salt, holy water, a cross—she realized that she was pretty much only capable of pissing a demon off. Great.
“Maybe we shouldn’t do this,” Dora said. She was a lovely woman in her fifties, shorter than Amber with lots of curves and a kind face. She’d given Amber the lowdown in her office that morning.
“I was working late, cleaning up the shop, when I heard something upstairs. I use the top floor for storage. It’s more like a finished attic than an actual second story.” She sniffed into a handkerchief and, once again, Amber wondered how it had made it into the afterworld with her.
Kyle stood off to the side, clipboard in hand. He patted Mrs. Rodriguez’s shoulder, encouraging her to continue.
“Was it an intruder?” Amber asked the woman.
She shook her head. “I’m… I’m not really sure.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Rodriguez. Go ahead. What did you hear?”
“No need to be so formal, sweetheart. Call me Dora, please.”
“Dora. I interrupted. Please, continue. What did you hear?”
“It sounded like… I don’t know how to describe it really. Like a scratching?”
Pins prickled across Amber’s skin.
“Slow and steady, like someone was digging out from under the floorboards.” The woman clutched her fists to her chest, clearly overcome with the memory. “I got to the top of the stairs and turned on the light. That’s when I saw it.”
Amber fought to keep her hands from clenching. The last time something had come out of the ground and grabbed her, she’d died for two hours. If she hadn’t had a surrogate aunt named Charley Davidson, who just happened to be a god, she would still be in the afterworld. A place that was kind of wonderful. She’d felt safe and warm and loved. It was the getting there that was the hard part. The attack had been violent. Brutal beyond belief. The man had been so desperate to escape hell, he’d pulled Amber down with him. Ripping at her hair. Clawing at her skin. Beating her when she wouldn’t help him until her life slipped through the cracks in her psyche and left the earthly plane.
She shook out of the nauseating memory and refocused on her client. “What did you see?”
“At first, just a blur. It barely registered. But when I turned toward it… Its face. It…” She made the sign of the cross and pressed her fingers to her mouth. “It wasn’t human. Madre de Dios . It was a demon. I knew it the moment I saw it. Its face was contorted. Beastly. Gray and white and shiny. Like the flesh of a lizard. And the teeth.” She shuddered.
Amber followed suit. At least the thing that’d attacked her had been human once. She couldn’t imagine coming face-to-face with an actual demon.
Kyle glanced at her from over his glasses, his expression questioning.
She nodded. She would be fine. This was about their client. Not her.
“I don’t know if he pushed me or if I just fell, but the next thing I knew, I was floating above my body at the bottom of the stairs. I saw the light, but I knew I had to tell someone. My niece will be in soon. I have to warn her!”
Kyle knelt beside her. “Mrs. Rodriguez, your niece found your body a few hours ago. I guess someone heard a commotion and called her.”
Dora’s hands flew over her mouth again. “Oh, no, mija . I didn’t want that. Is she…? It didn’t hurt her, did it?”
“She’s okay,” Kyle assured her. “She’s upset, of course, but she’s with her family.”
Mrs. Rodriguez made the sign of the cross again and began reciting the Lord’s Prayer.
Amber understood completely. The prospect of facing an actual demon made her knees weak. And yet, here she was.
“I’ll keep watch,” Kyle said, and Amber could hardly blame him. “I’ll let you know if the authorities come back.”
She nodded, drew in a deep breath, and entered Dora’s shop that doubled as her humble abode. The back door opened into a kitchen. It was even smaller than Amber’s but adorable. Bright colors. Lots of knickknacks. A retro diner feel. Dora was an eclectic artist, and her décor spoke volumes.
“The stairs are to the right,” Dora said.
Amber wove around a turquoise table, fifties-style with Bettie Page placemats. She eased through a door and into a narrow hall. The stairs sat to one side of it.
Her pulse quickened, and she pulled her bag closer for something to hold on to. They navigated the hall to the bottom of the stairs. It was hauntingly unremarkable. There was no chalk outline like in the movies. No bloodstain or broken glass. No fingerprint powder or evidence marker. Nothing to reveal the fact that a woman had died there.
Amber’s phone dinged, startling both her and Dora. Dora put a hand on her chest, ironically to calm her racing heart. Amber took out her cell. Mrs. Harmon, wondering if Amber could fit her in. It was an emergency!
It was always an emergency with Mrs. Harmon. Amber fired off a text, telling her it would be that afternoon at the earliest, then put her phone on silent before stuffing it back into her bag. The bag, a conceal carry, matched her sweater. The same bone black but rather useless since she didn’t dare carry a gun. She’d never been a fan. The last time she went to the shooting range, she’d ended up shaking so bad after the first few rounds, she’d had to stop from embarrassment. So, she kept her phone in the side pocket where a sidearm would normally go.
“Are you okay, hon?” Amber asked Dora.
“Yes.” The woman’s voice was soft with fear.
While Amber could see the departed and talk to them and interact with them, she could not touch them physically. Besides the cold, she could not feel them. They were not solid to her like they were to her aunt Charley.
But again…god.
Still, when they touched Amber, she could feel their emotions, and Dora had tried reflexively to grab her arm when her phone dinged. The woman’s fear slammed into Amber’s, compounding her emotions exponentially, but she didn’t want to tell Dora to step away. The woman was scared, and Amber would absorb her emotions as long as she could.
He Who Must Not Be Named could feel the emotions of the departed if one of them touched him, as well. He’d always been able to. But for Amber, that ability had developed over time. And it wasn’t a particularly wanted ability. But it came with the gig, she supposed.
When someone reached out of the shadows and grabbed her arm successfully, the fear that had been building to a tipping point almost strangled her. She screamed, figuring it was either the demon or a cop, as she turned to see a blond standing beside her. A tall blond. Scruffy and disheveled with at least two days’ worth of growth on his jaw.
“What are you doing?” he asked, his signs sharp and edged with anger. The floor tilted beneath Amber’s feet.
He caught her in his arms and eased her onto the second step. Once she’d settled, she pushed his hands away. He Who Must Not Be Named stepped back, showing his palms in surrender, but his expression showed his irritation with her.
“Intruder!” Kyle said from behind him, a day late and a dollar short.
Quentin glared at him, and Kyle stepped back reflexively. Then he refocused his glare on Amber.
“What?” she asked, her hackles rising as hackles are wont to do.
“What are you doing here?” Again, his signs were sharp with irritation.
As Amber sat in utter astonishment—He Who Must Not Be Named was literally the last person on Earth she’d expected to see today—she used the break to take him in.
How much could a guy change in five years?
If Quentin Rutherford was any indication, a hella lot.
She barely recognized him. He’d hardened—in all the right places. His shoulders had widened more than most twenty-seven-year-olds. He’d always been muscular, even when they were kids, but either he’d been hitting the gym, or he’d been magically photoshopped. The hills and valleys that covered his body to exquisite perfection could be seen through the long-sleeved T-shirt he wore, his biceps stretching the seams to their limits. And the jeans, the ones with a few holes here and there, were not a fashion statement so much as a favored pair of work pants.
“Ms. Kowalski?” Kyle said.
Quentin turned to him, and Amber caught a glimpse of two things: the profile of his steely buttocks that had developed as much as the rest of him, and a particularly well-placed rip in the worn jeans that showed part of the indentation in his left ass cheek. The fact that he wasn’t wearing underwear was a bonus. How could anyone she hated so much be so startlingly drop-dead sexy? Life was not fair.
Then she realized something. He’d heard Kyle. Quentin had turned when Kyle spoke, and she wondered if he’d finally gotten a pair of hearing aids. They’d never helped him that much before, so he never wore them, but technology had advanced a lot since then. Maybe they had more powerful aids now that could help him hear.
She snuck a glance but didn’t see any mechanical earpieces. Interesting.
When he turned back to her, she couldn’t get over how much he’d changed. His hair was shorter now and a little darker but still a rich, tawny blond. And he’d either started wearing it spiked, or he had bedhead. Either way, he was even more gorgeous than before. Full mouth. Straight nose. Deep blue eyes like the cobalt on a ceramic bowl.
Damn it.
He studied her as much as she studied him, and she cringed in self-consciousness. She scrambled to her feet on the stairs that allowed her to be a little taller than him and asked him, “What are you doing?”
“I asked first,” he signed.
“This is Dora Rodriguez. She died last night.” Amber signed and spoke at the same time to benefit her mixed audience. “She asked me to take a look.”
Quentin turned and gave the perplexed woman a thorough exam. “Did you see it?” he asked. With his voice. His voice! No signing. And he spoke almost perfectly. But his voice was soft, almost impossible to hear, like he didn’t want to speak too loudly. Regardless, she could hear the rich timbre in it, like warm honey over Amber’s pitter-pattering heart.
She pressed her fingernails into her palms again. Enough. He was the one who’d left. He’d made that decision. She would not give her heart to him again. Not that he was asking, but just in case. She promised herself.
Dora nodded and pointed up the stairs.
Without the slightest hesitation, he reached up, lifted Amber off the stairs, and planted her on the floor in front of him. “Go,” he said, his tone brusque as he headed up the steps she’d just been evicted from.
“What? No.” When he turned back to her, she said, “You go. Dora is my client.”
He pointed toward the second floor with his chin and signed, “Demon.”
“Yes. I know.”
He tapped his chest with his middle two fingers. “Demon hunter.”
She blinked in surprise. Demon hunter? Like professionally? Was that even a thing?
It didn’t matter. This was her case. She needed to see this thing through so Dora could cross over, and Amber knew exactly who to send her to when the time came. First things first, though.
She shoved past He Who Must Not Be Named—who would henceforth be known as He Who Shall Not Tell Her What to Do—and headed toward the attic.
He wrapped a large hand around her upper arm.
She shrugged it off. The demon probably wasn’t even up there anymore anyway.
But when she crested the stairs, she felt it instantly. Damn it. Not the demon, per se. But the cold. Her breath fogged the air. She looked around at the boxes and bags of merchandise and supplies that occupied the area. Just as she turned to a hissing sound behind her, she felt him. He Who Shall Not Tell Her What to Do. Close behind her. His warmth as he pressed into her back. Wrapped an arm around her neck. Bent until his mouth was at her ear and whispered, “Shhh,” just as the demon rushed her.