Page 63 of Housesitter

“Wait.”

Kel shrugged an apology to Emily—she ignored him; he didn’t know why he’d bothered—and caught the door before it shut. He went back outside and looked expectantly at Shepherd.

“What?”

Shepherd held up a book. The font was too decorative to read the title, but there was a dragon foiled on the cover.

“I think I know where the contract is,” he said and tossed the book down. It thumped down on top of a stack of Mills and Boons. “We need to go back to the house.”

“Now?”

“Now.”

Chapter Fifteen

Hell House Client Brief: The mailman is called Brian. He'll ask for a drink. Don't let him in the house. Don't mention him to anyone else.

Shepherd shoved the placemats out of the way and dumped his canvas bag onto the table. He fumbled the buckles open and tossed the top back.

Shithead glared at him from inside it. The Milky Bar he’d tossed in back at the gas station was soft and squirming in the doll’s lap. Shepherd gingerly picked it out, the wrapper folding over his fingers, and tossed it toward the bin.

“Well, at least you didn’t starve,” he said. Shithead rolled its eyes as he lifted it out. Not that it had much choice—that was just how its eyelids worked—but this time it felt deliberate. Shepherd folded its leg out and set it down on the table so it was sitting up. “Don’t try that. You could have gotten out if you wanted, and you aren’t a Betsy Wetsy, so you didn’t need a toilet break. Besides, we both know that if you could piss, you would have done it there.”

“That,” Kel remarked sourly, “I didn’t miss.”

Shithead looked pleased with itself. To put a stop to that, Shepherd tossed a T-shirt over its head. Then he went back to digging through the bag. Halfway down, between his second and third pair of cargo shorts, his fingers brushed along the cracked back of what he was looking for.

He yanked it out and waved it triumphantly at Kel, who recoiled with a grimace.

“It smells like…sewage,” he said with distaste.

City boy. The book didn’t smell like sewage, although Kel had picked up on the notes of shit and piss. It smelled like the inside of a carcass shed: all fear, blood, and soaked dirt. Dry clots of mildew bubbled the slick paperback cover, and the pages were stained and stuck together.

“I shelved this book with Dio’s in the study,” Shepherd explained. “But—”

“Why?” Kel asked.

“It keeps them in line,” Shepherd shrugged. “This one got led astray. I thought it was just contagion, but what if it’s an infection?”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

“...maybe?” Shepherd admitted as he riffled the pages of the book with his thumb to unstick the edges. “The cultists didn’t do a lot of spelling bees, OK? It should have clicked when we were talking to Ruby. She was right, Dio had a habit of marking his place in a book with anything flat and smaller than his palm. Toffee paper, bloodstained driver’s licenses, receipts, a dead mouse…”

He turned the book upside down and shook it.

A thin strip of worn parchment fell out. It fluttered down to the table and sparks flew. Kel reached for it.

Easy got there first. He reached past Shepherd—his sudden presence making Shepherd flinch—and grabbed the parchment.

“There you are,” he said. As he unfolded the paper, his hands coarsened, the skin over his knuckles dark and wrinkled and his manicured nails thickening.

“Where did you come from?” Shepherd asked as he edged to the side.

Easy glanced away from his quick perusal of the contract. The red had settled into his eyes, bleeding out from the pupils.

“It’s my house,” he said. “I’m always here.”

Creepy statement delivered, Easy went back to the contract. His eyes cut back and forth across the dense, closely scribbled script as he looked for something. When he did, he spat on his thumb–it smoked–and rubbed it over the paper.