In a tumble of limbs at the bottom sat Kylie. Dressed all in shades of blue, she had layered her clothes for an ombré effect similar to yesterday’s ensemble. Her hoodie concealed her face, and she brandished her flashlight like a weapon until she could shove back the fabric and gain her bearings.
“Goddess,” Grier breathed. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah.” Kylie jerked at the sound of Grier’s voice, startled. “I’m good.”
Grier hit the stairs at a clip, and Linus followed close in case whatever shoved Kylie tried again with Grier.
“Don’t move.” Linus knelt beside the teen. “Let me check to see if anything is broken.”
The tension in her body shouted a warning she didn’t handle touch well. “Are you really a doctor?”
His medical training was more than sufficient to care for a human. “Yes.”
With as little contact as possible, he coached her through a few movements to determine whether she had broken or sprained anything during her fall. From what he could tell without closer examination, she was lucky to have escaped with a bump where her forehead hit the railing.
Grier, who hovered behind him, rested her hands on his shoulders. “What are you doing here?”
“I…” Kylie worried the piercing in her lip but must have remembered what Grier told her about Linus being more willing to pay for honesty. “Things aren’t great at home. Mom has her panties in a wad about her boyfriend running off with her best friend, who she stole him from in the first place. Grams and Gramps are cool, but I hate putting them in the middle.” She sighed. “I come here to hang out when there are no guests. There were only two of you, so I figured I could stay out of your way. I didn’t mean for you to know I was here.”
At check-in, Kylie had implied she lived in the cottage behind the inn with her grandparents. Her mother wasn’t mentioned. Granted, she could have moved home, or perhaps she never left, but Kylie’s fidgeting made him wonder if she wasn’t editing her story to fit her audience.
Grier, who tightened her grip on him, put the most pressing question to Kylie gently. “How did you fall?”
“The ghost shoved me.” She glared at the staircase. “Again.”
“Can you remember if anything about this time was different from the last?”
“Yeah.” Her Adam’s apple bobbed. “A voice whispered in my ear.”
We waited for her to elaborate, but she burst into wild laughter.
“You should see your faces.” She cackled. “You totally believe this stuff is real.”
The stuff totally was real, but Linus had no intention of sparking that debate.
“I tripped over my shoelaces.” She tucked her legs under her. “One must have come untied.”
This incident discredited her earlier confessions, and she must have worried we would ask for a refund.
“The other stuff was true, though.” She pushed to her feet, expression earnest. “Promise.”
“Mm-hmm.” Grier shook her head. “You can stay here tonight, but you need to be gone in the morning.”
“You must know the lore,” Linus said, rising. “I doubt we’re the first to mention it.”
“We get morbids in here all the time. Folks pay extra for the rooms with the most activity.”
That might explain the markup on their room, given its proximity to the stairs. Though Mr. Oliphant had given him a discounted rate after he made it clear he wanted the entire inn at their disposal.
Linus raised his eyebrows. “Morbids?”
“Folks who get off on death, the occult, whatever.” She eyed him up and down. “I pegged you for one the second you got out of your fancy rental.” She flicked a glance at Grier, who was arguably the most powerful necromancer of their time. “You seem nice. What are you doing with this guy?”
The expression Grier wore got stuck between amusement and insult and stayed there.
“Are you even married?” Kylie narrowed her eyes on Linus. “Is this really your honeymoon?”
“Yes and yes,” Grier answered for him. “And if you ever want to see another dollar from us, you’ll watch your mouth when you talk to or about my husband.” Grier’s eyes brightened on the word, and her joy was contagious. “Now shoo. Back to your room.”
“Fine.”
Kylie tromped upstairs without another misstep, and they watched her go, just in case.
“We’ve got time before the big day.” Grier stared in the direction the girl had gone. “She ought to be safe here for one night.” She shook her head. “Something tells me that teen is going to be trouble.”
Linking their fingers, they walked into the kitchen together. “Something tells me you’re right.”
Five
As I was wont to do, I snooped more while Linus puttered around in the kitchen. After our run-in with Kylie, he had added a sigil to the door of the second refrigerator to keep any unsuspecting humans out of our groceries. There was blood in there, his, and it would be a teensy bit hard to explain if Kylie got the munchies and rooted through our supplies accidentally on purpose.
Then again, she already thought we were morbids, a term I hadn’t heard in ages, so she might expect us to travel with chicken blood for satanic rituals.
Kids these days.
They had no proper occult education.
The pantry drew my attention time and again until I couldn’t resist the urge to tinker. “Do you mind if I get cracking on this lock?”
“Not at all.” He mashed a button on the blender, adding strawberries from a second carton into my nightly Vitamin L smoothie.
Pen in hand, I skimmed my memory then drew on a complex sigil that would work best. I pushed magic into the design, and it popped the lock with a satisfying snick. Eager as I was to get going, I left it intact until Linus could join me.
“Ready when you are,” I called, wiping off the sigil with a damp cloth in case we had more unexpected visitors. Say, apologetic grandparents or a harried mother searching for our stowaway.
Linus appeared at my shoulder, smoothie in hand, and watched me drink the first course of my breakfast like a good little half-vampire. And no, the need for blood and the truth of my parentage never got any less weird. Neither did the infrequent urge to drink straight from the tap.
Nutella-filled crepes topped with whipped cream and chopped hazelnuts came next, along with a side order of bacon. The dish was one of my favorite indulgences, and he was spoiling me rotten. As usual.
We cleaned up after ourselves and got ready to begin our adventure.
“Hellmouth, here we come.” I rubbed my hands together and drew open the pantry door. “Oh. Hrm.”
The pantry was a perfect cube of floor-to-ceiling shelves with an open door opposite the entrance.
The faintest whiff of sulfur tickled my nose from the yawning dark, and I almost sneezed twice.
“Why lock the pantry but not the basement?” I entered the small room. “Why leave this ajar?”
“Doors that open and shut on their own are a prerequisite for a haunted house,” he murmured, leaning around me for a clearer view. “You’re not getting spooked, are you?”
“Are you serious?” Grinning, I held up my arm to show off my goose bumps. “This is freaky as heck.”
Demons, the type from Christian hell, didn’t exist as far as I knew. That didn’t mean the lore didn’t come from somewhere. There were creatures aplenty in the world we shared with humans, and that didn’t take fae into consideration. They came in as many and as varied forms as anything born of Earth.
The possibilities were literally endless.
“As long as you’re enjoying yourself,” he said, planting a kiss on my temple.
“This is going to be epic.” I took out my phone and flicked on the flashlight. “It’s also going to be dark.” I shined the beam across the walls to either side of the rickety stairs. “I don’t see a light switch, do you?”
“Look up.”
“Well shoot.”
A single bulb had once hung above the top step, the simple kind of light you clicked on and off with a tug on a beaded chain. All that remained was a handful of wires where someone had yanked it out of the ceiling.
“Good thing we’ve got the advantage.” I tested the top step. “We should be okay.”
Necromancers came standard with excellent night vision. The light from our phones would be plenty to allow our eyes to adjust to the gloom once we got down there. And if we needed more, that could be arranged too.
“The blueprints indicate the basement itself is average.” Linus slid past me, slick as spit, then reached back for my hand. “Things don’t get peculiar until you reach the first subbasement.”
After he switched his phone’s flashlight on, he led us down. The space looked about how you might expect, except for its old wooden floors. I had never seen those in a basement. Only dirt or concrete. Then again, I had never been in a house built on top of a maze leading to the theoretical underworld.
“Do you smell that?” I wrinkled my nose but kept following the scent. “It’s coming from over here.”
The exterior walls were made from old brick, but the straight lines were broken in one corner where the neat rows deviated into an arch. A door appeared to be half buried, stuck between floors. No hardware was visible, and I wondered if it opened. There was only one way to find out.
“Do you see those marks?” Linus indicated rows of deep scratches across the planks nearest the door.
“They resemble the ones on your back.” I took a quick picture to add to our file. “Hard to tell if they were made by multiple creatures or the same one making repeated trips.”
“There are at least two,” Linus reminded me. “There could be more.”
Bending over, I pressed two fingers against the door, and it swung wide. “Well, hello.”
“There’s enough room for an adult to squeeze through, but barely.” Linus eyed the resulting hole with distrust. “Are you sure you want to go down?”