I knew from personal experience that most demon-like creatures patrol the lower realms—those realms closest to our plane of existence—but they all need a portal of some kind to emerge into our territory.
This beastly creature, however, was far bigger and deadlier than anything I’d ever encountered. And I couldn’t imagine what size portal it’d come through, or, for that matter, how the hell we were ever going to find its portal and lock the demon back inside the lower realms again.
I remembered Sam’s words from my dream . . . what? A week ago? He’d said I’d need to kill the person who controlled the demon. “Well, that’s not happening,” I muttered. I wasn’t going to murder anyone, that’s for sure.
“What’s not happening?” said a voice right behind me.
“Eeeeeeek!”
I jumped a foot and whipped around.
“Shhhhh!” Gilley said.
I grabbed him by the sweatshirt and pulled him close to me. “
Stop
doing that!”
“I will if you will.”
I let go of him and turned around to survey the area. If my squeal hadn’t brought the demon into view, then it had likely moved on . . . for the moment at least.
I turned my attention back to Gilley. “I told you to stay in the bathroom!”
“I got scared,” he said meekly.
I inhaled and let my breath out slowly. “Come on. We’ve got to get to Ari’s.”
I then grabbed Gil’s wrist and pulled him along with me. It took me a minute to get my bearings, but eventually I located the cul-de-sac where Ari and Brody lived, surrounded on all sides by their relatives. As we neared the house, I could see Heath’s Durango in the driveway. They must’ve taken Ari’s car to the burial grounds.
“Thank God,” I said. We approached the house slowly and slightly crouched. Gil stuck to my side like glue, and I saw that he was gripping a spike in each hand. Once we got up next to Heath’s car, I happened to glance inside and to my surprise I saw Heath’s keys sitting in the cup holder. “Eureka!” I said, pointing them out to Gilley, who pointed his flashlight inside and nodded.
“We can drive this back to our rental and leave Heath a message that his car’s at the entrance of the Pueblo!” he said, reading my mind.
I tried the handle and gave a slight tug. It opened and just when I thought we were home free, the car alarm went off and it was so loud that I had to back away several steps and cover my ears.
“Make it stop!” Gilley yelled.
I looked around in a panic. There still didn’t appear to be anyone around, so I relaxed a little. Still, I was very worried the noise would alert the demon before I had a chance to grab the keys and make it stop.
Fortunately, the alarm didn’t alert the demon.
Unfortunately, it did alert the sheriff.
The moment I was reaching for Heath’s keys, a patrol car zoomed down the street and a strobe light clicked on, temporarily blinding both Gilley and me. “Put your hands in the air and step away from the car!” came a booming voice over the loudspeaker.
Gilley shot both hands in the air. I followed suit.
“Drop your weapons!”
“Aw, crap!” I muttered. I’d completely forgotten about the spikes. I dropped those to the ground and Gil did too.
“And your bag and backpack!” he ordered. “But move slowly!”
Gil shrugged out of his backpack and I slowly lifted the leather strap of my messenger bag over my head to let it plop to the earth.
The strobe light stayed on and the driver got out. I squinted into the brightness and made out a man with a gun pointed right at us. I’ve had a gun or two pointed at me before. For the record, it’s not something you really get used to, or wish to have repeated.
“On the ground!” the lawman shouted. “Facedown with your hands behind your head!”
I got down and lay flat on the cold dirt and did as he said. I heard his footsteps approach and I held very still, even though a rock poked into the side of my rib cage.
“Don’t you move!” he shouted at us.
“We won’t!” I told him. Jeez, for a sheriff, this guy was really flinchy. But then I figured that he had caught us standing next to a car with the alarm going off while we were holding flashlights and metal spikes in our hands. Of course we looked like we were trying to steal it.
I turned my head slightly so that I could face Gilley, who looked at me with big, round, frightened eyes. “Just do as he says,” I told him.
A boot landed on Gil’s back and he grunted. Then the sheriff bent and pulled Gil’s hand down off his head, twisting his arm at the elbow to cuff one wrist, then the other, before patting him down.
A moment later I felt his full weight press on my back too. I winced as the rock bit deeper into my side, but I didn’t protest because I knew it was going to be much worse if I did.
I felt the cold metal of the handcuffs on my wrists when they were locked tightly behind me, and the guy gave me the same pat down. Then the lawman’s weight lifted off me when he’d made sure I wasn’t hiding a weapon, and I was grabbed roughly by the arm and yanked to my feet. I was then spun around to face him and I realized why he’d been so flinchy. It wasn’t Sheriff Pena; it was his deputy, whose name currently escaped my panicked mind.
Without a word he marched Gil and me over to the side of his squad car, pushing us one at a time into the interior; then he slammed the door and for a few seconds we were left alone. “Say nothing,” I told Gil. “Let me do all the talking, okay?”
“A time to worry,” Gil said.
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
Chapter 8
An hour later my patience was wearing thin. The deputy had left us in the squad car while he went inside the station and didn’t appear to be coming back out. “This blows,” Gilley said.
“Are your cuffs supertight?” I asked him, leaning forward to try to find a comfortable position, but why I bothered I couldn’t really say, because when your hands are restrained behind your back while you’re in a sitting position for longer than ten minutes, there is no comfortable position.
“They’re not as bad as yours,” Gil said, and I noticed he was looking down at my hands. “Your fingers are turning blue.”
I glanced out the window again. “The son of a bitch cut off my circulation.” I sat back up again and planted my feet on the floor, arching my back for a moment to angle my hands under me. I squirmed and wiggled and contorted myself until I managed to get my butt through the loop of my arms. “If a life of crime doesn’t work out for you, M. J., might I suggest Cirque du Soleil?”
I grunted, shimmying my wrists forward to just behind my knees, then had to sit there and pant for a second before craning my neck all the way to the side to mash my face against the back of the seat so I could get my boots through the loop.
With a sigh I sat back and held up my hands. “Ah-hhh,” I said. “That’s better.”
“Now what?” Gil asked.
I tried the door handle. It was locked and there was a cage separating the front seat from the back. I eyed the window. “With a few good kicks I could break us out of here.”
“Oh, please
do
!” Gil said with mock enthusiasm. “By all means make a bad situation worse by breaking out of the squad car!”
“We’re already in trouble,” I reasoned.
“Yes, but we’re not necessarily facing jail time. Once Heath shows up and vouches for us, I’m pretty sure they’ll let us go with only a fine for trespassing.”
I laid my head back on the seat and closed my eyes. I’d almost rather risk escaping police custody than face my boyfriend after this. “Do you think he’ll break up with me?”
“Who, Heath?”
“Yes.”
Gilley was quiet for a minute. “Maybe,” he said. “I mean, what you did was pretty bad for a girlfriend, and if I were a straight guy, I’d probably break up with you.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“On the bright side, maybe you and Steven could get back together?”
I shook my head. “That ship has sailed,” I told him. “He’s dating some new girl.”
“How do you know?”
“Teeko.”
“Ah,” Gil said. “Well, then maybe you should leave all the talking to
me
when Heath shows up.”
I smiled. “What would you say?”
“That it was my idea to come here,” he said simply.
I lifted my head and stared at him. “You’d do that for me?”
He seemed surprised that I’d even ask. “Well, duh, M. J. It is my job, isn’t it?”
“Your job?”
“Yeah. Don’t you remember what your mom told us? That it was my job to watch out for you?”
My eyes widened. “You remember that?”
“Of course I remember it,” he said. “We were playing on my back porch and your mom came over and told me to look after you. That was right before she died, wasn’t it?”
I smiled. Gilley’s mind had reshaped the events of that morning so that the memory wouldn’t frighten him. “Yes,” I said, not seeing any point in correcting him.
“Well, see?” he said. “I’ve been doing that ever since.”
I nudged him with my shoulder. For all the bickering and petty arguing we did, Gilley was still the best friend I could ask for. I saw his eyes flicker to somewhere behind me. “Here comes the law,” he said.
I turned and saw the deputy approaching the squad car. Opening my door, he said, “Out.”
I scooted forward and exited the car, noting that he was looking pointedly at my hands, which were now in front of me. The deputy didn’t say anything or recuff me, which I was grateful for. Gil struggled out and nearly fell when his legs got tangled under him. I reached out and caught him because the deputy seemed just fine with letting him take a tumble.
Jerk,
I thought.
“Inside,” he ordered.
We headed in and waited for him to get the door. “Down the hall and to the right,” he instructed.
We followed his every command without a word between us, moving along the well-lit corridor to a doorway that led into a large room with two desks, rows of filing cabinets, and a single jail cell.
The smell of pizza still lingered and I noticed a mostly eaten microwave pizza on one of the desks. Ah, so he’d decided to catch his dinner before dealing with us. My own stomach grumbled and I could hardly say that I blamed him.
“Sit,” he commanded, pointing to two chairs in front of the desk with the pizza.
Gil sat in the chair on the right and I took the one on the left. The deputy then went behind his desk, which was oddly placed in the center of the room, with his back to the jail cell.
Putting his fingers to a keyboard, the deputy said, “Names?”
I glanced sideways at Gilley. He stared at me as if he didn’t know what to say.
“Names?”
the deputy repeated, and this time his tone said, “Right the freak now!”
Gil and I spoke at the same time, so the words came out in a tumble. The deputy eyed me. “You first,” he said before those eyes swiveled to Gil. “Then you.”
We relayed all our information to him, and in front of us he took out all the contents of our bags one at a time, laying them out on the desk to catalog them. He’d already confiscated our cell phones, which both Gil and I had had in our back pockets, and thrown them into his desk drawer.
After he’d cataloged all the contents of Gilley’s backpack (he’d brought his tablet and keyboard along—why I didn’t know), the deputy put the items back, then moved on to the contents of my messenger bag.
He looked over the magnetic spikes curiously, but didn’t ask me about them. Instead he wrote them down, then put them back and tossed my bag and Gilley’s backpack onto a nearby chair.
By the time he was done, my hands, which had been throbbing, were now completely numb. I eyed them and became concerned. They were both swollen and blue. I held them up to show the deputy. “Can you do something about this, please?”
He ignored me and continued to type at his keyboard.
“We know the Whitefeathers,” I said. “Heath and his mom are friends of ours.”
That got the deputy’s attention, but maybe not in quite the way I’d hoped for. “You were the other two with them at Milton Whitefeather’s cabin, right?”
“Yes. Heath and Gilley and I are in a television series together.”
The deputy leaned back in his chair and considered us. “Did he bring you here tonight?”
I shook my head vigorously. “No!”
“Then how’d you get here?”
“We drove,” I told him.
He looked at me skeptically. “Where’s your car?”
“At the entrance to the Pueblo,” I admitted.
“We had car trouble,” Gilley piped in. “Our car died on the side of the road and we thought we’d come find Heath to see if we could get a ride back to the hotel.”
I took up Gilley’s story with ease. “That’s right,” I said, nodding my head. “We had car trouble and we came looking for Heath.”
“Entering the Pueblo on sacred ceremonial days is a crime,” the deputy said.
“We’re so sorry,” I told him, doing my best to sound contrite. “We were just looking for our friend and we didn’t realize we were doing anything wrong.”
The deputy squinted at me. I could tell he didn’t buy it. “You can’t read?” he asked.
I knew he was referring to the sign posted at the entrance of the Pueblo. I smiled tightly. “Technically, we’re not tourists,” I said. “I’ve been here before, so I just figured the invitation extended to tonight.”
“Heath has no authority to invite you onto tribal land,” the deputy said. “He doesn’t live on the Pueblo, so he couldn’t legally invite you here.”
“He didn’t,” I told him.
“Then who did?”
“Ari Whitefeather.” I knew I was in quicksand, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself from offering up names.
“Ari invited you here tonight?”
I shook my head again. We were going in circles, and I had a feeling the deputy was trying to find the holes in our story. “No. The day her aunt Beverly died. She invited me into Molly’s house. At least I think it was Molly’s house. It’s the one at the top of the cul-de-sac, three down from Ari’s. Oh!
And
we were invited here just yesterday to drop off Serena Whitefeather at Ari’s house! So, technically, we’ve been invited onto the Pueblo twice now.”