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“Are you shitting me? I feel like I’m about to have a heart attack because you went all Count Dracula on me as a fucked up lie detector test? You scared me half to death.”
“I needed to see if you were telling the truth. And please spare me the Dracula references, I find them at best tiring and at worst excruciatingly irritating.”
I scowl at him and at the same time feel like kissing his face off. Stupid lust potion. “I’m going back to bed.”
As I reach out to turn the handle on the back door and go inside, I feel Ethan’s arms slip around my waist. He nuzzles his nose into the side of my neck. “How it kills me to know you sleep under the same roof as that slayer,” he whispers, and butterflies consume me.
A second later his tender hold on me goes hard and tight, too tight. “And oh how I long for the day when I don’t want you anymore. Perhaps then I’ll have the courage to walk away.”
Air gets trapped in my lungs, but just before I have the chance to question what he means I turn around and he’s gone.
The next day I join Rita in her trailer and we hit the books. Gabriel left her with two big boxes full of magical texts as research material before he, Alvie and Noreen departed on their travels. I’m kind of envious of them, because with everything that’s going on right now I really wouldn’t mind a road trip to get away from the city.
We sit and read for most of the morning and well into the afternoon, taking notes here and there. Rita’s looking for information on how to either destroy the mist or send it back to wherever it came from.
I’m simultaneously looking for details on how to hide the Ultimate Power blood from vampires and how to retrieve a human from hell. I read for so long that it feels like my eyes are going to fall out of their sockets. I put down the dusty old hardback when Rita suddenly slams her hands onto the surface of the table.
“That’s it! I can’t believe how simple it is,” she exclaims, grinning from ear to ear.
“What? Did you find something?” I ask, scooting along the bench to sit closer to her and peer over her shoulder at the book spread out before her. I flip over to the front cover for a second to see the title. It reads: On Other Dimensions and Their Inhabitants by E.J. Edwards. Seriously, where does Gabriel get all of these books from? More to the point, who writes and publishes them? I guess there really is a whole other world out there that I don’t even know about. I’ve only unearthed a tiny grain of it so far.
I open it back to the page Rita had been on and she taps her finger down on a small paragraph.
“This bit here explains what the mists are. They’re a kind of physical manifestation of chaos, but not just a manifestation, a parasite too. When they manage to break out of hell and into other planes where there’s a moral life-force they infest it and drive it to self-destruction. In the case of earth, human beings are the life-force that they corrupt. It’s likely that they can’t get to the vampires or to you and me because we’re a mutation. I need to warn Finn about this. He and the majority of Pamphrock’s slayers are human and susceptible to the corruption. It says that once these chaos creatures mix with a foreign atmosphere they multiply, kind of like bacteria in a Petri dish.”
I let out a sigh. “Ugh. We never get an easy run of it, do we?”
Rita smiles. “Oh don’t despair, my friend. This page also contains directions for how to kill them.” She lets out a little laugh. “It’s so simple too. All we need is a mixture of salt, holy water and vinegar. We spray it at the mists and they disintegrate.”
I cock an eyebrow. “Holy water? So like, all that God stuff actually means something?”
She shrugs and pinches me on the nose. “Maybe. But it’s too late to go and start getting all holy now, Tegan. If you’re friends with me then you ain’t getting into heaven any which way you try to spin it.” She’s joking, but I also sense a sadness in her. All this business with Theodore is really making her second guess who she is.
“Don’t be ridiculous, you’ll be the one most likely to get in out of all of us. I say it’s the people who don’t know they’re good who really are. The ones who go around acting all pious always turn out to have secret sex-torture dungeons under their houses.” I make the joke to try and cheer her up, but it doesn’t have the desired effect.
She shakes her head and leans back, all smiles gone from her face. “You don’t know what it’s like inside my head. Ever since Theodore tried to lure me to him the other day I’ve been feeling the part of me that comes from him getting stronger. It’s like it’s growing.”
I squeeze her arm in reassurance. What she’s said worries me, but I don’t want her to know that it does. “You’re just going to have to try harder to hold on to the part that comes from Noreen, okay?”
“Okay,” she sighs, and a moment of quiet elapses between the two of us. “Come on, there’s vinegar and salt in the kitchen. Let’s find Finn and see if he knows where we can get our hands on some holy water.”
A half an hour later we’re belted up in Finn’s car, driving towards the church he attends in the inner city called St. Peter’s. Apparently, Finn’s a practising Catholic and goes to mass whenever he has the time to spare. I never would have taken him for the religious sort. I tell him so and he shrugs, explaining that he’s Irish and Catholicism was drilled into him so much growing up that going to mass is a comfort to him. It makes him feel at home.
It sounds kind of nice when he puts it like that. I wish I had something that made me feel at home. It used to be going to visit my dad, but now there’s a strange family living in our house and he’s lost in a world he should never have even known existed in the first place.
The traffic is thick on the way into the city centre, so Finn turns on the radio to pass the time. A news bulletin starts to play and a male announcer’s voice streams through the speakers.
“There has been a traffic accident involving a number of vehicles in the city today causing unexpected delays. The area around Renfrew Avenue has been cordoned off so that emergency services can take care of the injured parties and clear away the wreckage. This event comes heavy on the heels of a string of violent attacks, which occurred late last night. Like the riots two days ago, these attacks are thought to be gang related. The authorities are advising citizens to avo
id the inner city at night, as this is when the bulk of the attacks have been taking place. I’m Dean Jones bringing you the afternoon news. We’ll be back at six with an update.”
Oh no, Ethan was definitely right when he told me to watch the news today.
“Well shit,” says Finn, letting out a frustrated breath.
“Do you think we should turn back? The announcer said the accident happened around Renfrew Avenue. That’s close to St. Peter’s, isn’t it?”
Finn runs his teeth over his bottom lip, deciding. “We’ll have to be in and out like a fiddler’s elbow, buy as many bottles of holy water as we can and then get the feck out of there. There’s a little shop to the left just as you go inside that’s run by nuns; they sell funeral cards and all that sort of stuff. I’m willing to take the chance if you two lovely ladies are.”
