Keeper Chronicles: Awakening (2 page)

“You’re sweet to say so. Tell me your favorite dish, and I’ll make sure to prepare it tomorrow for breakfast. Gourmet food is the best way I know to say thanks.” Biting her lip as another shard came out of her hand and was dropped in the water, Rebekah forced a crooked smile.

“Well, I don’t know how gourmet it is, but I love pecan waffles.” Lacey looked up from where she was working. “Won’t the milk be spoiled by then if the power doesn’t come back?”

“No. The refrigerator in the prep kitchen is on a generator and the ovens are gas, so everything should be fine. No need to worry.”

Lacey wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist and looked up. “I need to stitch that gash along the base of your palm. Three should be enough. Stay strong and hold still; I’ll do this as quickly as I can.”

Rebekah never feared pain. Her childhood rolled by on mountain bikes and skateboards and 4-wheeling at the dunes; such activities came with a certain amount of risk and a half dozen broken bones. Her mother had been the one to take her repelling the first time and skiing. Rebekah would swear that her parents had bought and refurbished the dilapidated keeper’s house from the state more for the nearby hiking and climbing and kayaking than for the profit from the b-n-b. So when the needle pierced the soft pad of flesh under her thumb, she did what her mother taught her: looked out the window and counted backwards from ten.

A fresh swell of wind slammed into the house with renewed anger, and a flash of lightning lit up the yard.

She yelped and jerked up, the needle dangling from her hand as she ran to the pair of windows overlooking the front porch. “Who was that?”

“Who was who?”

“There. Standing outside the window. I swear I saw someone. I think...I think he was naked.” Now she sounded as crazy as her father. Great. Next she was going to start seeing demons and want to go buy herself a sword. She started toward the door. “I’ll go-”

By this time, Lacey’s husband, a barrel-chested man who looked like he’d been a defensive end in high school, had abandoned his game and blocked Bekah’s path. “You stay here. I’ll go check the porch.”

She shook her head. “I can’t let you do that. This is my house, not yours. I’ll go.”

“Nonsense. If there really is someone out there, he might be dangerous or hurt. You’ll both be safer inside.”

She started to object, but he stopped her with a gesture.

“You’d better listen to him,” Lacey said as her son ran up to her side. She hugged him, kissed the top of his ginger hair, and then shooed him back to his games. “Now get your hand back over here.”

Although it went against everything she knew and felt, Rebekah sat and gave her hand back to the ministrations of her guest, and she watched as the woman’s husband put on his coat, grabbed a flashlight, and went outside. A chill wind crept in through the open door. Danger lurked in every shadow, crept in with every strange creak and groan of the house as the dim lantern light, like a candle at the bottom of a well, flickered fainter and fainter against the onslaught of the storm.

He’d be fine.

The porch was empty.

She’d just seen a light ghost, an illusion triggered by the blinding lightning. The Park Services had cleared the area out when the storm warning first sounded, and her father would have reached the lighthouse long ago. No one else would have a reason to be out in this weather. She’d been spending too much time alone with her father; his ravings were starting to affect her judgment and make her hallucinate. As if she needed more problems.

“There. All finished.”

Rebekah blinked. “Huh?” She looked down at her hand where three neat stitches closed her angry flesh.

Lacey squeezed some ointment on a gauze bandage and placed it over the stitches, taping it at the corners. “I’m finished, I said. Now I’m going to wrap the rest of your hand. You’ll have to take it easy for a few days. Get someone else to make the beds and straighten up, and then have those stitches removed in about five days. Understand? No lifting or sweeping or cooking. You shouldn’t even close your fist. It’s easy to get bacteria into cuts like that.”

“I won’t. Thank you.”

The front door opened and Lacey’s husband stomped inside, shaking the water off his coat and shoes. He clicked the flashlight off. “Nothing out there. At least, not anymore. I walked around the whole house to be certain.”

“Thank you so much.”

His cheeks dimpled when he smiled. “No problem. Good night.”

“Night.” Lacey and her son followed him upstairs.

Cradling her hand to her chest and nursing another beer, Rebekah kept vigil out the bay window for the next few hours as the storm slowly abated its fury. Evenings used to be her favorite. Once the guests had all gone to sleep, her mother and father would sometimes let her sneak out of her room in the basement and come upstairs to sit by the fireplace or play a game of cards. Euchre, canasta, rummy, blackjack—they’d play them all and laugh until the sound was absorbed into the very walls like insulation. Since her mom died, she’d missed those nights the most.

What had always been a loyal, but small, business nearly tripled when Rebekah took over managing the property, making efforts to expand their marketing outreach by using social media and getting one of the local ghost hunting shows to do a special on the supposed hauntings in the attic. That had been a crazy week of cameras and chaos; her father had hid in the lighthouse, not even coming back for meals. Adding an executive chef, Mia, had helped cater to the growing foodie market. They used only local produce and meats, and each morning prepared a unique seven-course breakfast. One guest, thinking to put the claim to a lie, stayed eight nights in a row just waiting for a dish to repeat; he’d brought his wife back every summer since.

Rebekah should be happier. Perhaps even ecstatic at the success.

So why did she feel as though someone had taken a melon baller and scooped out her insides, leaving only a hard shell behind?

A knock on the door startled her awake sometime later.

Blinking, she rubbed her eyes and looked around. The fire had devoured itself into a slow simmer and the lantern’s wick was nearly consumed so that only a tiny ring of light circled its base. She glanced at her watch: 2:49 a.m. Her father had really outdone himself this time. Probably forgot his keys knowing him.

Rebekah stood and walked over to the small table where the lantern rested, twisting the gear to lengthen the wick. Blessed light chased away the shadows. Grabbing a fuzzy, white robe out from its hiding place in the cupboard near the door, she pushed her arms through the soft sleeves and tied the sash closed around her waist. Holding the lantern in the crook of her right elbow, she threw the door open wide.

“What were you
thinking
staying out so late, Dad...” She let the sentence die and hugged her waist with her free arm. In front of her, his hair and clothing dripping from the rain, stood the most attractive man she’d ever seen. “You’re...not my father.”

He grinned. “I hope not.” As if realizing what he just said, he blushed and looked at his feet for a second. His eyes impaled her as he looked back up. “My car broke down back the road a ways and my phone’s dead. Can I use yours to call a tow truck?”

Chapter Two

It’s a little known fact that demons, upon first entering the human world, are drawn to bright light. Keepers have debated many reasons for this over the centuries: that the demons are weakened by the trans-dimensional journey and so can only see very bright lights; that they mistake the bright lights for a sign of a city or other large gathering of food; that, much as a human child might, demons simply liked shiny things. Whatever the cause, it made Gabe’s job all that much easier.

Bologna sandwich in one hand, machete in the other, he scanned the waves from beneath the porch of his dilapidated house at the base of the Willamook Light and waited for the first of them to show. The small house, nestled behind the sixty-five-foot tower, was the only patch of dry land on the tiny island off the Oregon coast. Three nights of breakers crashing over the jagged rock and incessant rain had soaked everything, but the tower took the brunt of the attack like the prow of a boat slamming into a wave, slicing it down the middle and protecting the house in its shadow. It was a good thing, too. Weakened from the constant damp, the timbers might collapse if he sneezed hard.

Taking another bite of his sandwich, Gabe chewed mechanically. If tonight was anything like the last two, he’d need his strength. A forked tongue of lightning arched from the clouds, slamming into the ocean. So it began. He had maybe seventy to seventy-five seconds before the first one reached him. Stuffing the rest of his sandwich in his mouth, he put in a pair of ear buds, lowered the goggles over his eyes, and pulled down the hood of his sweater. Two more shots of lightning lit the sky. Thirty seconds. He took out his phone—whoever invented the life-proof case tough enough to be run over by a car or dropped in a bathtub was a genius—and set it to play his Frank Sinatra demon slaying mix.

Twenty.

Gabe did a final check of his weapons: crossbow and spare quivers slung over his back, second machete sheathed on his belt, one curved dagger secured to each thigh, and throwing knives lining his vest above his Green Lantern t-shirt.

As the music kicked in with its swanky beat, he held his machete between his index and middle finger like a cigarette and danced out into the rain. “My story is much too sad to be told,” he hummed along with the music, stepping up on a small outcropping and scanning the waves. “But practically everything leaves me really cold.”

Seaweed clung to the demon’s arms and legs as it crawled up the jagged rocks, beady eyes glinting red in the darkness. Truly one of the uglier beasts he’d ever seen, the half-crab, half-scorpion demon had patchy, red carapace for skin; two sets of legs; and pinchers the size of a small car. Why did the big ones always come through first?

“I get no kick from champagne,” he continued singing, having missed the rest of the first verse while taking stock of his opponent. “Mere alcohol doesn’t thrill me at all.”

Faster than should have been possible, the demon topped the rocks, perching almost bird like on its legs as it scanned the island. When it spotted Gabe, it gurgle-screeched in joy, snapping its pinchers and pulverizing the rock it stood on. It skittered across the small clearing toward Gabe as a second lightning bolt struck the distant ocean.

Up close, the demon reeked of sulfur and decay in that rotten-egg-two-day-old-road-kill kind of way. It lunged for Gabe mouth first, double rows of razor-sharp teeth glinting golden when the beam from the lighthouse light swept their way.

“So tell me why” —Gabe, instead of dodging, stepped forward into the demon, stabbing his machete through the creature’s neck with a crunch—”it should be true” —holding the hilt in both hands, he twisted the blade, popping the demon’s head clean from its neck as its massive pinchers snapped uselessly at his legs—”that I get a
kick
” —he kicked the carapace-head like it were a soccer ball, sending it back into the waves as the rest of the creature tumbled backward into the surf—”out of you.”

The shriek of an inhuman female voice drew his attention upward and away from his first kill of the night.

Great.

A harpy.

“Some, they may go for cocaine,” he mumbled, flicking the gore off his machete and sheathing it. With the body of a feathered bird and the torso of a woman, the harpy circled the lighthouse tower once, a flying chicken with DDs, blonde curls, and eyes like pools of midnight.

Gabe hated second-order demons. Hated killing something that looked even partially human so much so that he stopped mid-motion. For a terrible moment, the demon looked past him toward the shore and started flapping in that direction.

He was losing it.

“...one sniff,” he mumbled a little too late for his song as he waived his arms in the air, drawing its hunger toward himself. The harpy screamed again and flew toward him, claws extended. “...would bore me terrifically, too.”

Gabe drew his crossbow, readied a bolt, and aimed for the harpy’s eyes. He fired. The harpy flapped to the side, narrowly avoiding the bolt. It shrieked again as more lightning struck the nearby water.

It was fifteen feet away. He positioned another bolt, placed the horn of the crossbow on the ground and stepped on it, then pulled back on the handle until the mechanism clicked in place. Ten feet. Its blonde curls were plastered against the side of its face with water, and the thing was close enough to make out the too-human nipples on its breasts. Gabe shuddered.

He aimed the crossbow and fired the second shot. The creature dropped from the sky like a duck, circling twice before it exploded against a rocky outcropping in a burst of blood and feathers.

His voice fell flat. “Yet I get a kick out of you.”

Before the song ended, he took out one more demon, a three-eyed thing with a humped back and frail arms barely strong enough to climb up the rocks to the tiny island. A butcher could do his work. Or a trash collector. Or anyone handy with a large pair of scissors—like a kindergarten teacher. Gabe chuckled, picturing some young, smiling teacher with a pencil in her hair and paint on her dress out in the storm trying to lull a Gorgon to sleep with a bedtime story.

As the storm kicked into full swing and swells broke against the island like grenades, the music faded to a faint vibration in the back of his head that gave beat to his movements. He didn’t have to think, didn’t have to strategize his next move. He’d been Keeper at this seemingly abandoned light since his sixteenth birthday when his powers first awoke. That was a decade ago. A decade spent killing every time a storm struck.

Time faded out of meaning. The storm raged, each strike of lightning on the water allowing another demon to cross over into the world. Another monstrosity for him to kill like a logger felling trees—only for loggers, the trees didn’t fight back. And so he slaughtered to the beat of “Almost Like Being in Love” and “Can’t We Be Friends” and “I Won’t Dance” and “Come Fly with Me” as he spent an entire quiver of bolts and half his supply of throwing daggers. Foul, putrid green blood dripped from his machetes; when drops hit his skin, they burned in such a way that even rain couldn’t wash off.