Chapter 34
Xander
(Present Day)
DID I LIKE BEING AT Mountview where some goddamn demon had taken an interest in messing with Kendyll while preventing me from intervening?
Not one fucking bit. If I found the bastard, he was dead.
Even if I couldn’t send him back to our creator with my lesser abilities, I knew a Letum demon who’d be more than happy to complete the task for me.
While every alarm in my head was practically flashing red and demanding I evacuate immediately, Kendyll, my incredibly stubborn and determined human, was adamant on seeing this through. And she needed to. I knew that. But I still didn’t fucking like it.
Regardless, I followed her to the place where the issues with these haunting visitations seemed to trace back to. We stood side by side as we stared at the still open elevator, and even though I was a demon who preyed upon fear, a cold chill swept through me.
“There has to be something we can find out from here,” Kendyll declared as she pulled her shoulders back and charged into the elevator.
I looked down at our ghost cat and ordered, “Stay here. Don’t come inside this elevator in case it’s dangerous.”
“Meow,” he replied and stretched out along the floor.
With the cat taken care of, I followed and lit a flame within my upturned hand to offer us light to look around. It truly seemed like an ordinary elevator with nothing pointing toward a demonic influence. Even now, I sensed nothing from a fellow manifestation of Hell.
“When Maria was in here, she disappeared,” Kendyll murmured. She got on her knees to touch the floor where she and the ghost child had been. “But it was more than just disappearing. It almost seemed like she got … yanked down.”
Kendyll got on her hands and knees to press her face to the small crack between the elevator cart and the floor of the connecting hallway.
I mirrored her and pressed my own eye to the sliver of darkness before shooting my flames into that small space to light it up.
We both sucked in a sharp breath as that flame fell and fell and fell.
Our heads whipped up in shock at the same time.
“This is the first floor,” Kendyll sputtered with wide eyes. “Why does this elevator have a shoot that goes so many more floors deep? There’s a basement, but this is the public elevator, which doesn’t have access to the basement.”
The numbered floor panel confirmed this floor was the lowest option available.
“Let me try to shadow-walk down there.”
My body merged with shadows, yet the second I tried drifting beneath the elevator floor and into the shaft, a hot force smacked me back with a searing lash.
I gritted my teeth as I rematerialized exactly where I’d been kneeling.
The smell of burning flesh filled the elevator, and when I looked down, I found my shirt and jeans burnt to crisps in multiple places with red, boiling skin peeking through the shredded fabric.
“Xander!” Kendyll cried in alarm. Her hands shook as they reached toward me.
“Don’t!” I quickly shouted and held up a hand to keep her back. I grunted as a wave of pain rippled through me with the motion, and I breathed hard. “Don’t touch. There’s still demonic ward magic all over me. I don’t want you to get hurt. Give me a minute, and it will fade.”
I ground my teeth harder and fell back against the elevator wall, making the cart bounce slightly.
I tried to keep still as even breathing stretched the numerous burns lancing my body, making the searing skin tear to seep blood and black gunk.
The black sticky substance fizzled and vaporized into smoke once it hit the air.
It was the trace of this demon’s magic, which crackled and popped along my skin before completely vanishing from my body.
The burns followed moments after, leaving behind raw, red skin.
I blew out a hard breath and dropped my head back against the elevator wall with a heavy thud. “Well, that sucked.”
“What happened?” Kendyll worried.
I braced a hand on the wall and stood unsteadily. Kendyll shot to her feet and carefully touched me as though checking for more injuries.
“What was that?” she demanded.
“A demonic seal meant to keep other lesser demons out,” I answered in an annoyed grumble. “There’s definitely something down there that this demon doesn’t want disturbed.”
“Ghosts.”
Kendyll and I looked up at the sound of Maria’s small voice.
She stood in the hallway outside of the elevator, and her hands fidgeted in front of her.
Catsper was rubbing his face against her legs, but she didn’t seem to notice his affection today.
Her big brown, translucent eyes bounced between Kendyll and I to the same tempo in which she shifted from foot to foot. “That’s where he keeps them.”
“He?” Kendyll asked calmly.
She nodded. “He’s been here a long, long time. He went away for a little while, but he came back.”
“A demon like me?” I asked.
She nodded again, albeit a bit slower this time. “Master. He has a lot of us.”
“Where is this demon right now?” I questioned as gently as I could.
“He’s out right now, so I snuck away.”
I barely managed to refrain from narrowing my eyes.
Mischief demons who had hordes of ghosts under their command had favorites.
The favorites were typically spirits who generated the most power from the fear and games they played without relying on the demonic master’s own energy.
Those same ghosts often had more freedom than the other spirits, such as being allowed to roam as they liked.
This was a ghost child who seemed timid and friendly, yet she “snuck away?”
“You snuck out?” I snapped, unable to keep the harsh suspicion from my voice. “How’d you manage that when you have such a powerful master who surely knows how to keep his toys locked up?”
The little ghost jumped at the sound of my biting questions. Her lip trembled, and she immediately curled in on herself as though to shield herself from my verbal lashing.
“Xander,” Kendyll admonished.
Maria sniffled and started to turn away with tears in her eyes. “I don’t know when he’ll be back, so you’ll have to hurry. You can’t go down your demon way. You have to take the elevator. There’s a hidden button for the bottom floor.” She vanished the second the words left her mouth.
Kendyll sighed in clear frustration and turned to me. “Why did you yell at her like that?”
“I don’t trust her.”
Kendyll’s brow rose as she shot me a disbelieving look.
“Don’t trust her? She’s a little girl. And she saved me last night.
I was about to be … I don’t know. Attacked by that Monster of Mountview thing when she knocked me out of reach and opened up a way for me to call for you.
Why would she have done that if she wasn’t trustworthy? ”
“I don’t know, but I don’t trust anything about what’s happening here at Mountview.”
While I stewed in my uneasy suspicions, Kendyll put her back to me and rubbed at her forehead. With a heavy sigh, she scanned the number panel and felt around, most likely searching for this hidden button that Maria mentioned.
“What are you doing?” I asked, grabbing her arm. “You can’t seriously be trying to go down there!”
“Of course I am,” she replied calmly. “There are ghosts trapped down there.”
“There’s nothing you can do for ghosts that belong to a Mischief demon, Kendyll. They’re trapped unless he frees them or dies.”
“We’ll figure something out. First, we need to see how many ghosts there are and get a feel for what we’re up against.”
I frowned and bounced my attention between Kendyll and the panel. “Do you not find it odd? Maria was out somehow, which means the demon she belongs to favors her. She wouldn’t have that ability otherwise. It’s like they want us to go down there.”
“Yeah. Maria probably wants us to go down there to help them.”
“You don’t know that, though.”
“I trust Maria,” Kendyll argued unwaveringly.
I wanted to grab Kendyll’s shoulders and shake some sense of danger into her. This was all fucking suspicious, no matter how you looked at it. “Why are you so sure this isn’t a trap?”
Kendyll’s green eyes searched mine for a beat before she turned away and swallowed hard. She revealed quietly, “She reminds me of myself.”
I went rigid with unwanted understanding.
Kendyll pushed her glasses up her nose and continued, “She’s just a little girl who’s been abandoned. Forgotten. The way she acts, I can’t help but wonder what horrors she’s seen or been through.” Kendyll’s eyes closed, and her head hung. “If they’re anything like mine.”
Comparing the ghost child to little Kendyll made it harder to view the phantom as anything more than just that—a scared child who wanted to be loved, believed. Kendyll wanted to do for Maria what she wished someone had done for her, and that knocked the frustration and unease right out of me.
Releasing a silent sigh, I stood next to her and studied the numbered buttons with her. Maria had said there was a secret button with a way down, but she’d failed to mention how to find it. I ran my fingertips along the sleek metal in search of something, anything, that felt out of place.
“If I was a hidden button, how would you find me? I don’t see a place for a key,” Kendyll pondered. She poked the number one on the panel while nibbling her lip. “Maybe there’s a secret code?”
Hearing the suggestion made me recall the weird set of numbers I’d found in the small compartment in the director’s office bookshelves.
The seemingly random numbers that someone wanted hidden away may’ve been a key to a more nefarious area of the hospital right beneath our feet.
I had no idea if that was the case, but there was no harm in trying it out.
I pumped power into the elevator to turn it on before punching in the string of numbers.
331524