Chapter 10 #2
She leaned back and pulled the remote from her desk so that she could turn on her smart board and play with it.
“Hey! Stop that! You’re elbowing me!” A loud hiss rang out.
“Brush your teeth if you’re going to do that.”
“You’re stepping on me!”
Each voice belonged to someone different. Some male. Some female. All of them with a guttural growl that sounded otherworldly.
“Just what the hell is this?” Getting up, Sorcha walked toward the wall she shared with Luke’s office where the voices seemed to be coming from. “Hello?”
“Who is that?” one of them whispered.
“Shh! Maybe she’ll go away.”
“You’re the one being loud!”
More voices whispering and complaining. And they were definitely coming from inside her wall.
Sorcha opened the closet door only to find that it was completely empty. Not even a coat hanger inside. So who was speaking and where exactly was it coming from?
“Hello?” she tried again. “Who’s here?”
“Boo! We’re ghosts.”
“We’re not ghosts, you moron.”
“She doesn’t know that. Follow my lead. Boo! Boo! Scary ghosts.”
“Ghosts don’t call themselves ghosts! How stupid are you?”
Another one snorted in anger. “Following your idiotic lead is what got us trapped. I’m not following you anywhere ever again.”
“Stop poking me!”
“Watch the horns!”
“Watch my tail!”
Sorcha pulled her phone out of her pocket. Since Elana was at school in a meeting, she dialed Bernadette.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Bernadette. It’s Sorcha. I’m in my office and—”
“Who’s she talking to?”
“Shh! I think she’s on the phone.”
“Now you’ve done it. She’s telling on us. We’ll all be in trouble.”
“I’m not in trouble. I didn’t do anything.”
“You’re talking, too, aren’t you? Then you’re doing what we are.”
“Doom! Despair! Rain agony on me!”
Bernadette started laughing in her ear.
Sorcha wasn’t amused. At all. “I take it you know what this is?”
“Oh yeah. Coming from your closet, right?”
“Yes. What is it?”
Bernadette kept laughing to the point it was beginning to piss her off. “You know how people keep skeletons in a closet?”
“I’m aware of the phrase, yes.”
“Well, your partner keeps demons in his. Real live ones.”
Sorcha stood there in complete stupefaction. Of course, Luke kept demons in a closet. Why not? She would laugh at the thought except for the fact that the bickering…demons were still fighting.
“Don’t touch me!”
“I didn’t touch you.”
“Not you, Envee. Stop touching me, Dohlar.”
“You wish I was touching you. Stop breathing on me. You stink!”
“Then move away.”
“I don’t have anywhere to go.”
Bernadette laughed even harder.
“Seriously, Bernadette? This isn’t funny.” Sorcha let out a growl of her own. “Are they always this vocal?”
“I don’t know. My office isn’t down there. But I know it drove Luke’s old partners crazy.”
Sorcha’s stomach sank at those words. “You put an s on the end of partner. Just how many has he had in the last year?”
“Counting you? Five.”
Five…in a year. Five. That number rattled around in her head as she left the closet and shut the door, then leaned back against it. Five. As in more than four.
In a year…
“You’re shitting me.”
“Nope. Luke likes to play hard to get along with. And personally, I don’t think it’s an act.”
Lovely. Just lovely.
And I sold my condo in New Orleans.
Not that it mattered. It wasn’t like she could go back there, anyway. She hadn’t just burned that bridge, she’d nuked it and toasted marshmallows over the smoldering remains.
Still, she was regretting the decision to move to Georgia.
It’s a new start. New job. New friends. You’ll love it there. Just imagine how great it’ll be. She could kill her father for his optimism.
Someone knocked on the wall in her closet. “Hey, humans? Can one of you let us out? It’s not hard. You just have to come over here and twist the knobby thing. Well, unlock it first, then twist. We’d be really grateful.”
“We would! You want money? My name may be Dohlar, but I can give you lots.”
“I’ll give you eternal life!”
“I have to pee!”
Bernadette kept laughing so hard that Sorcha wanted to choke her.
“Why me?” Sorcha asked the ceiling above.
“You shot your partner.”
She sucked her breath in sharply at Bernadette’s words. “What?”
“Oh, come on. Didn’t you learn yesterday that I’m the company snoop? Nothing gets past me. I knew when I met you what you’d done. I just wanted to see if you’d own up to it.”
“Fine, then. I quit.”
Bernadette tsked. “No, you don’t. Like me, you fit here and you know it. Just don’t let those demons out. I’m thinking it’d be really bad if they ran amok.”
You think?
“No, we won’t. We’ll behave.”
“We’re good demons. Just give us a chance.”
“I still have to pee!”
Sorcha groaned, worried that one of them might actually need the bathroom. “Thanks for the help, Bernadette. I’ll talk to you later.”
“Good luck.” Bernadette hung up as Sorcha tossed her phone on her desk.
A closet full of demons…
She only had one question. “How did all of you get in there?”
“We were tricked.”
“We were cursed.”
“I followed an idiot.”
“We were conjured through a mirror and trapped in here.”
“I had to go to the bathroom and opened the wrong door.”
There were so many answers, including one who claimed he chased a chicken into the closet. She had no idea what, if anything, they said was true.
No wonder Luke played his music so loud. He was probably trying to drown them out. Which she attempted to do with her own music.
Impossible. They created a lot of noise, especially when they pounded on the walls, demanding freedom.
So she moved to her evidence board where she tried to figure out how to use it. It was actually a lot simpler than she thought. Even better, Luke had already entered in a lot of evidence for her to review and linked their accounts so that they could both access and share information.
That was nice.
Not nice? Two bodies. No souls. One killed and moved. The other killed on site in a place that was fairly public and right across the street from a hotel where they could have been caught at any minute. Obviously, that hadn’t been a concern for them.
Who was this brazen perp?
She grimaced at the horrific images she prayed their families never saw.
It was what she hated most about trials.
The looks on the faces of the people who’d loved the victims. Those who didn’t deserve their last memory to be a crime scene photo of their loved one being horribly killed and abandoned.
It wasn’t right and she damned the fact that this was the way things worked in the human world.
“I wish we had a better system of justice.” Because she lived with the same pain inside her that they did every day. No one should have to share such misery.
And it helped a lot more than it should for her to know for certain there really was a Hell for those who committed such atrocities.
Families and loved ones might not get justice in this lifetime, but there would be justice in the next. And for that, she’d be eternally grateful to Luke and even his awful father.
But her job was to get justice for them while they were here and could see it for themselves. They deserved that.
“Think, Sorcha, think,” she whispered to herself as she tried to get inside the head of the monster who’d done this to two innocent students. They had to find the culprit before there was another kid on her board.
The one thing she kept coming back to—why make one look like an animal attack and the other not? Had someone stumbled onto the scene of the second killing before the killer could do whatever they had planned?
Or was this done intentionally to confuse them?
“They were trying to open a portal.”
Sorcha screamed as that deep, smooth voice intruded on her thoughts. “Oh my God!”
“Uh, definitely not. Wouldn’t even attempt to take on the big guy.
Nor do I want any piece of His responsibilities.
” Luke shut her office door and moved closer to her.
“I wanted to tell you that I’m sorry about earlier.
I don’t normally act like that. Assholes tend to set me off and bring out the worst in me. ”
“Then I will try not to be an asshole.”
Shaking his head, he handed her the pink paper gift bag in his hand.
Sorcha frowned at it. “What’s this?”
“An I’m-an-asshole gift to make amends for my stupidity.” Those words charmed her a lot more than they should.
She smiled at him. “Thank you, but I’d already forgiven you.”
“’Preciate it, but don’t thank me yet. You might hate what I got you.”
“I doubt that.” Sorcha pulled the gold tissue paper off the top to find a bottle of Butterducks Merlot, a red and white striped box that held pralines, turtles and divinity and several small bags of Byrd’s cookies. “Should I ask?”
Luke shrugged nonchalantly. “Some of the best of Savannah. I couldn’t let you spend another night in town without some Byrd’s cookies and treats from Savannah’s Candy Kitchen. And Butterducks makes the best wines.”
It was incredibly sweet and thoughtful. But then Bert used to do things like this, too.
I got the cookie for you. Bert’s favorite saying. Fucking bastard would buy things he wanted and pretend like he was an altruist who only thought of others.
He was the real closet demon.
Get thee behind me, Douchebag! She was so sick of thinking about him and his cruelty.
Luke cleared his throat. “I don’t want anything from you, Sorcha, other than for you to forgive me for popping off when I shouldn’t have. While I have a temper, I normally corral it better, and I hate when it gets the best of me. I’m not my father. I don’t like snapping at people for no reason.”
“It’s okay. I have a bit of a nasty temper myself, and a mouth to match it. Means you’ll need to share the addresses for Butterducks, Byrd’s and Savannah’s Candy Kitchen so that I’ll know where to go buy gifts for you when I do the same.”
He chuckled. “I’m easy as I eat most anything…but ice cream works best for me.”
“Really?” Given his aversion to the cold, she’d have thought that was the last thing he’d want to eat.
“Yeah. I freeze my ass off when I eat it, but we don’t have it in Hell. Too hot. So I’m trying to get my fill before I go home.”
That made sense. Poor thing.
She set the bag down on the floor by her desk and turned her radio down. It was freakishly quiet now. Not a single peep from the closet brigade.
Were they afraid of Luke? Or had something happened to them?
“Made any progress?” Luke asked as he looked over the notes she’d added.
“Not at all. But I did discover one thing.”
He turned toward her with an arched brow. “And that is?”
“Want to explain to me about your closet filled with demons?”