Chapter 6
Sed, the demon, followed Ruby into a building that was identified as a library. She asked the person behind the desk where she could look up old newspaper articles, then followed his directions toward the back.
The place was not very busy. He searched for Crescents, who would be able to see him. A Deuce was checking out. Sed ducked behind the aisle as the man left. A handful of Mundanes. Easy to dispense with.
That was what had gotten him into trouble in the first place, relegated to a prison on the Dark Side. He had been sprung to carry out a task, the kind he most enjoyed.
The object of his task took a seat in the back of the building, the perfect location. If he could get rid of the rest of the inhabitants, he would be done and allowed to play as his reward.
Mundanes couldn’t see him, but they could feel him. Sed moved up close to one male who was reading at a table. Mm, would love to eat him, torment him. All he was allowed to do was send him a feeling of dread.
The man shivered and looked around. He closed his book and left. Several others were just as easily sent away. Some took the time to check out, while the more sensitive ones left their stacks of books behind.
Now, the workers. Sed made two of them violently ill by flooding them with negative energy.
They staggered out, barfing in the bushes outside the front door.
They agreed there must have been something toxic in the coffee they had shared.
Another employee became unaccountably angry and stormed out.
Which left the man who appeared to be in charge, and who was accountably angry that his entire staff was gone.
He did not respond to the demon’s emotional blasts because anger and hopelessness already saturated his energy.
He reached for the phone and looked at a list of names and numbers. Before he would call replacements, the demon reached into the man’s chest and squeezed his heart. He gasped, shock on his face.
The demon inhaled his pain. Die, Mundane. Die by my hand, and no one will know any better.
The man dropped to his knees and collapsed, claimed by the heart attack.
Sed ran to the door and locked it just as someone approached with a stack of books.
The woman tried the door, peered in, and then with a shrug, dropped the books into the metal bin.
The demon thought about sliding his materialized hand out of the rotating bin and grabbing her.
How amusing it would be to see her expression of horror.
Alas, he had to follow the rules if he hoped to gain freedom. He flicked off the light switches at the front and made his way to his target. The one he could torment.
* * *
Ruby’s brain was literally buzzing. Hah, I knew he put some funky drug in the air.
Except that didn’t explain the killer orb.
That was no hallucination, nor was Mon’s death.
And she didn’t feel high or dizzy or otherwise altered.
Her rash was flaring big time, though. God, it felt like ants crawled beneath her skin.
She even checked, expecting to see creatures crawling under the red skin. Nothing, thank goodness.
She’d barely taken time to enjoy the smell of the books, a scent she found oddly comforting, on her way to the bulky machines at the back of the building. Why had she never thought to look at the old newspaper stories dating back to the time of the boating accident?
She stopped at the headline: family perishes at sea.
This was it. To the side was a picture of all three of them, posing at what looked like a picnic.
Despite the ache in her heart and the pit in her stomach, she plunged in.
Her father, Justin Winston, was obviously doing well in whatever job he’d been working on—something to do with physics—as the boat was described as a yacht.
The Yard certainly wouldn’t fund such a thing.
The press played it up as another mysterious Devil’s Triangle disappearance.
Investigators speculated that it was either an accidental explosion, rogue wave, or pirates.
Some debris had been found floating in the area where the EPIRB, Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon, had signaled the sinking of the yacht but not much else.
The family’s disappearance. It hit her then, that she was included in the missing and presumed dead. There was no mention of her rescue. At the time, she was Ruby Winston. Mon adopted her and, as Cyntag had pointed out, immediately changed her name for some legal reason she had never questioned.
Because he was hiding you?
She’d been a distraught nine-year-old and had just gone along: name change, Mon’s move into a new neighborhood, and his continuing touring, bringing them back to Miami every two weeks but leaving again soon after.
The way he’d set up the Yard so it wasn’t in her name until she turned eighteen.
It also explained why she couldn’t get her belongings or visit her friends.
All those things she’d accepted and forgotten about. Until now.
It also explained why her grandfather kept his distance, something that had always hurt.
But that would mean Cyntag was telling the truth, and that was, well, insane.
She flipped through the follow-up articles and was even more stunned: her father painted a villain, having sabotaged the physics work he had been doing at SUNLAB.
One theory was that he’d stolen his research to sell to the highest bidder.
Another was that he’d gone on a rampage before taking his family to sea to their deaths.
No way. The man she remembered was kind and soft-spoken. Never once had she seen him lose his temper, and, God no, he wouldn’t have killed his family.
So the alternative was… someone had killed her parents. All these horrible allegations were a setup to cover the murders. It sounded as crazy as anything else she’d heard that day.
She sat back in the chair, feeling so cold she was shivering. How had she survived? She remembered being on the boat, the jarring thud that knocked her out. The next thing she knew, she was at Brom’s, about to get the worst news of her life.
As she absently rubbed her neck, she realized she was still feeling the weird warmth.
She searched for nearby vents. Except it was summer and the heat wouldn’t be on.
Something odd prickled through her. This library branch was a small building, but it was eerily quiet.
Though sunlight came through the windows near her, the interior looked dim.
The electricity hadn’t gone out, or the microfiche machine would have died.
Earlier she’d heard a couple of thumps and someone coughing violently, but now she heard nothing but a low-level hissing. She lurched to her feet. Danger bristled up the back of her neck. Her rash felt as though it was literally on fire.
A shadow moved in the corner of her eye. She twisted to the right. Nothing. Or maybe it was something, like that creature in Cyntag’s office.
“Allander?”
She reached for the gun she still had tucked into the holster inside her waistband, keeping it down as she walked to the middle of the library. The fluorescent panels were dark, yet lights twinkled from a computer behind the check-out desk.
More eerily, not one person in sight. She raised the gun, ready to shoot. Something knocked it out of her hand, sending it skidding across the carpet. Something she couldn’t see.
Hell.
That weird little creature would have no reason to do that.
Hot breath pulsed against her neck. She spun around, banging into the end of a book aisle. The gun lay only a few feet away, but what good was the damned thing going to be if she couldn’t see what threatened her?
You cannot see…
The shadow moved again. She strained her eyes, trying to discern an outline, anything. It, whatever it was, shoved her. She felt pressure against her upper chest a second before she tumbled backward to the floor.
Not small like Allander.
A book toppled from an upper shelf, landing several feet in front of her.
She scrambled to her feet, eyeing the door.
Not again. As she dashed toward it, something hot pushed her from behind.
She kept her balance, darting down the aisle to the check-out desk and coming to a bone-jarring halt.
A man lay sprawled on the floor, his hand clutching his chest. His face was frozen in an expression of pain and shock.
She knew, even without checking, that he was dead.
The sound of metal rattling against metal pulled her attention to the front door again. Cyntag! Trying to open the door that was obviously locked. Could she really be happy to see him?
Arms—at least that’s what they felt like—wrapped around her from behind. She dove forward, out of the thing’s grasp. It pushed, sending her rolling across the hard, carpeted floor. Even with the room still spinning, she could see that Cyntag wasn’t at the door any longer.
Maybe she’d imagined him. But she sure as hell wasn’t imagining this thing attacking her. No, she wasn’t that crazy or drugged. Her body ached where she’d hit the floor. She held her hands aloft, ready for anything. Hunter/Prey.
Wait—was this what Mon had prepared her for?
A crashing sound drew her attention to the back door flinging open. Cyntag shoved the door closed, his hard gaze on something to the right of her. Of course, he could see it. And from the expression on his face, it was something as horrid as she imagined.
She ran toward him, definitely the lesser of two evils. He moved in that preternatural way, suddenly beside her with his arm protectively across her as he faced… well, nothing.
“Who sent you?” he asked it. “Who released you?”
“What is it?” she whispered, though she didn’t know why. The thing could no doubt hear her.
“Humanoid demon.”
Uh… great. “What does it look like? How big is it?”
Cyntag didn’t take his eyes from it, or where she guessed it was. “You don’t want to know.”