Authors: Sierra Dean
“I…” His voice drifted. In the lull I heard exactly what he didn’t say. He didn’t want to leave, didn’t think he should go without me, but I’d asked him to do something and he felt compelled to obey.
“Go,” I urged.
“I’ll be waiting for you.”
“I’ll come. I promise.” I nearly hung up, and then one last thing popped into my head. “Wilder, wait.”
“What?”
“Call Cash. Tell him…” What would Cash believe? We couldn’t tell him to ditch Tansy, and there would be no way to make the truth believable without more time. “Tell him to meet us where I used to go running. Where I’d go for privacy.”
“Okay.”
I hung up this time and faced Santiago, who had been watching the whole conversation with quiet interest.
“Who’s Cash?” he asked.
“Someone I used to know.”
I headed towards the stairs and heard him quietly say, “We should all be so lucky to be someone you used to know,
brujita
.”
I climbed up and paused at the door, then looked back. “You’d be luckier to stay in the present tense.”
Santiago chuckled. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
I glanced past him and took in the scene one last time. The gears of my mind began to spin faster and faster, and I pressed my hand to Santiago’s chest to stop him. The cotton of his shirt was so soft it felt like cashmere under my palm.
“Wait,” I said.
“We really ought to go, I think. It’s only a matter of time before the demon realizes we’re down here, and I’m not set up to contain it right now.”
“Hold on, I’m trying to think.” I scanned the double outline of the circle, trying to remember the last time I’d seen something like it.
Memere
had done something similar once, though with an undersprite—a lesser immortal trickster, not as bad as a demon.
Why the two circles though? I know she’d told me, but I was having a hard time calling the lesson back to mind.
“The two circles,” I said, wondering if Santiago might be able to jog the magical recall for me. “I don’t think the second one is designed to keep us out.” Most magical circles were about containment, not protection. “So why the second circle?”
I nudged my way past him and jumped down the last couple steps. He followed behind me and re-lit the Zippo.
Shink-flick
.
“Can I see that?” I took it from him without waiting for his answer, but he let it go easily and stooped with me when I got low to the dirt floor outside the second circle. What I’d originally thought was chalk and blood was actually a thin line of bloody salt.
“It’s a binding blockade.” He prodded the line with one finger. “The inner circle was to bring it up. This one is what’s keeping it trapped.” Upon that last realization, he withdrew his hands and rested them on his knees, looking at me expectantly.
“This is what’s keeping it trapped in the house,” I summarized, and he nodded.
“How did you notice that? I honestly thought it was a guardian charm, to boost the strength of the inner circle and deter obstruction from the outside.”
I lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “It was the salt. I just did a pretty weird ceremony, and the salt reminded me.”
“This is good though, right? If the circle is intact, we only need to get everyone out of the house, and then I can perform the trap enchantment.”
I got back up with my heart in my throat. “Except Gamigan has a weird gift, if what your book told me is true. If it takes a human host, it can use that host’s form again whenever it wants. So, either the thing upstairs is Tansy, it’s Gamigan
in
Tansy, or it’s Gamigan pretending to be her. I mean… if she’s the one who called it. Meaning it could have used her to break the circle.” I was spitballing at this point, but seeing the cinder block on the altar was a pretty strong hint that this was all Tansy’s doing. What she was up to and
why
were questions I still couldn’t even remotely answer.
I walked the entire circumference of the circle, expecting to find it broken somewhere. In order for the demon to have learned Tansy’s shape, it had to have possessed her at some point. That was the only way it could mimic her appearance. If the demon had used her as a host body, that meant it had an opportunity to use her body to do anything it wanted. Including letting it out. That was the reason so few magic users messed around with demonic summoning. Ultimately it ended up going terribly wrong, and no one wanted to be the asshole who unleashed hell on earth.
Thanks, Tansy.
But the circle was unblemished, barely a crystal out of place.
As I approached the altar I held the lighter out ahead of me, so the small sphere of light it cast fell on the framed photograph. In it, two dozen grinning college girls were lined up in neat rows, beaming for the camera like they were contestants in a Most Wholesome Smile contest. I squinted to get a better look and saw a sign in front of them. Delta Phi 2016. It was practically brand new, showing the most recent group of sisters from that year.
Several faces among the group were circled with blood. Having never met the missing girls, I couldn’t be positive, but I was almost certain the circled girls were Heidi, Laura, and Alexandra.
And one more.
Tansy.
We emerged in the kitchen and found it empty.
Plastic beer cups and glass bottles were strewn across every flat surface and all over the floor. The music had fallen silent, but the strobing lights remained, creating ghosts out of shadows every few seconds.
Santiago inched ahead of me and glanced around the vacant space, an expression of unmasked confusion lifting his brows and etching a frown out of his mouth. “Did your boyfriend get them out, maybe?”
Oh, so he
did
acknowledge that Wilder and I were romantically involved, he just didn’t care.
Had
Wilder gotten everyone out?
It seemed impossible. They had barely even responded to my pleas to vacate, and I’d been screaming down the stairs. Yet as we moved out of the kitchen and into the dining room, it quickly became apparent we were the only ones left in the house.
“What the hell?” I leaned past a doorframe to look into the living room, which mere moments before had been filled with grinding bodies and passed-out drunks. We were alone.
As we walked from room to room, a strange sensation passed over me, the feeling of something lifting, as though a heavy burden had been taken off my shoulders.
The lights flickered back on.
I stopped in my tracks so quickly Santiago smacked against my back. “Hey.”
Then he let out a low whistle, seeing what I was seeing.
The garbage was gone. The living room was as pristine and pin-tidy as it had been when I’d first come the previous morning.
“I…” My mind was a blank. I wanted to say something to address how completely insane this was, but there were no words. All traces of the party had vanished.
“Yeah,” he replied.
“You
saw
the party, right?” I was already making my way back to the kitchen where we’d only moments earlier been sidestepping beer bottles and puddles of spilled vodka.
It was spotless. The surfaces were polished to a high shine, and the only garbage can in the room was neatly tucked into a corner, looking as if it had never been used.
“
Tell me you saw it
.” I spun to face him, half-expecting him to have vanished like everything else.
He was still there.
“I saw it. I pulled you into a wall. I don’t do that sort of thing for kicks.”
“What’s going on here?” I started pacing around the room, then went back into the living room, hunting for any kind of sign there had been a party here. Nothing. No stereo system, no strobe lights, not a single Halloween decoration, balloon, or plastic cup.
I sat down on the floral-print couch and buried my face in my palms.
It had been real. The sights, the smells. That
thing
I’d seen upstairs. How could I have imagined that?
Was it possible the demon was that powerful now? Strong enough to make us all see things that weren’t here? To create a hundred people in our collective subconscious, only to make them vanish on a whim?
I had seen things tonight I would never be able to unsee. How could that have just been in my head?
And
why
?
To distract us.
To get scare us out of the house, because it wanted to hide something. I thought of the thing I’d seen upstairs that had made me long to run screaming for the hills, and it made sense. Gamigan wanted to get rid of us. It had just gone about it a really strange way.
“Come with me.” I got up again and ran up the stairs, two at a time, not sure what I was hoping to find when I got there.
Everything was still and calm. The bedroom doors were shut, including the one at the end of the hall where Gamigan had been.
And maybe still was?
I went to the first door, where I’d been so disturbed by what I’d seen I had to run away.
The room was vacant. Two tidily made beds sat empty, with no sign of a human sex monster having ever been there. There was no one on the ceiling.
I shut the door slowly, letting all my breath out in a puff.
With all the lights on and no one in the house, the frightening qualities of the place should have vanished. Except now it was all the more terrifying because of the absence.
I shut the bedroom door and stared down the hall to the room where I’d sealed Gamigan in.
I wanted to check, but I also didn’t want to check.
If it was still trapped in the room, we were okay. Santiago could perform his ritual, the demon would be sealed into something forever, and Cain could keep it on his bookshelf, or whatever he wanted to do with it.
Only even with the door closed I didn’t believe Gamigan was still in the bedroom.
“Are you warded?” I asked.
He lifted the sleeve of his shirt, flashing tattooed words I’d seen the previous night at his house.
That was the thing about magic. The words and language didn’t matter. You got out of it what you put in, meaning belief and intention were what gave the words and symbols power. Santiago could have been showing me a Hello Kitty tattoo, and it would protect him as long as he believed it would.
“What about you?”
“I’ll be fine.” Physical objects were pointless for me as protective measures. Because of my monthly shift, I’d have to leave behind whatever it was I’d chosen to ward me. Instead,
Memere
had taught me to craft a psychic charm. I imagined it now, a small jade stone—it had to be simple but specific, something that was the same every time but easy to recall at a moment’s notice—and kept it at the forefront of my mind as we approached the door.
My fingers were trembling.
I walked with purposeful slowness, each step getting me a little closer to an answer I didn’t want. When we were within inches of Laura and Heidi’s room, I didn’t need to get any farther to know what was on the other side. The protection spell I’d cast on the door was gone.
So was the demon.
I pushed the bedroom door wide, since there were no locks engaged on the outside to stop me, and stepped across the threshold, lifting my gaze to the ceiling to be sure nothing was up there to surprise me.
The room hadn’t been touched since yesterday. One bed was made, the other messy, the stamp of both girls’ presence lingering, as if they’d just stepped out and would be back any minute.
Santiago came in behind me, flicking the overhead light on.
I flinched, half-expecting the spider-faced demon to fall on me, fangs out and legs ready to embrace me.
Nothing happened.
“It’s gone.” Santiago paced the length of the room, picking up random objects and setting them back down exactly where he’d found them. “But there’s still magic here, can you feel it?”
I’d only been trying to sense my own spell, not anyone else’s, so I hadn’t tried to get a read on any extra magic. At his words, though, I opened my mind, prepared to sense anything that might have been lingering. It was not unlike being in my wolf form and sniffing the air for a trail left behind by a deer or rabbit.
The moment I let myself open, I could feel the lingering forces in the room. There was a powerful and dark magic in place here.
“Please, please, please.”
Santiago went still, the only thing moving his eyes, which drifted to meet mine.
“Yeah, I hear it. That’s Heidi.”
“You gave the intangible begging entity a name?”
A small laugh escaped my mouth.
Downstairs, the front door opened, and before either of us had a chance to panic, Wilder was already at the end of the hall. He joined us in the room, saying nothing about Santiago’s presence. They shared mutual, silent nods.
“Are you okay?” He came to my side, touching my shoulders, my chin, my waist, his hands moving constantly, as if he was worried by letting me go I might vanish. Who could blame him when an entire party had disappeared in the blink of an eye?
“Yeah. Santiago found an altar in the basement, so I think it’s safe to say Gamigan didn’t come here on his own. But that’s where things stop making sense. Were you still inside when the party, you know…?”
“Ceased to be?”
I nodded.
“No, I had just gotten outside and was waiting for you, and suddenly it got quiet. Like eerie quiet. And while I was looking for a good view through one of the windows, I noticed all the Halloween decorations on the lawn were gone. So here I am.”
Here he was.
“This is fucked up,” he declared.
“I think, for the first time in recorded history, that really doesn’t even begin to cover this situation.”
“What happened to all the drunks?” Wilder asked.
“I don’t think they were real.”
“But…” He drifted off, then said, “This is fucked up.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Santiago had lost interest in us and was continuing his exploration of the room. When he got to the large mirror hanging above the bricked-in fireplace, the glass unexpectedly rattled with a loud
thud
. He took a couple steps back, and I realized he and I had both lifted our hands as if to cast a spell.