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“Just come with me.” He took hold of my hand and led me out of the closet. The same girl who had been hitting on Wilder and me earlier was outside the door, making out with the fallback guy who had approached her.
She came up for air long enough to say, “Lucky.”
“Go home,” I snapped.
This was hopeless. These idiots would rather go around putting their tongues into the mouths of strangers than to run for the hills. So it was up to me to save their stupid, horny lives.
Fucking hell.
Santiago navigated us through the crowd and into the kitchen, where a girl was up on the kitchen island shaking her hips in a coordinated rhythm to whatever song was now playing. A pack of bystanders surrounded the counter, gazing up at the girl like she was a goddess.
I kept scanning the crowd, hoping to see any sign of Wilder. My phone was buzzing in my pocket, but I couldn’t easily reach it with Santiago holding my hand. He was a man with single-minded focus, and he dragged me through the kitchen to a small door that looked like a pantry. It had once had a padlock on it, but the lock was hanging open.
“Did you do that?” I nodded at the open clasp.
“Yeah.”
I made a mental note to ask him how later, since the lock hadn’t been cut or physically tampered with in any obvious way. That might be a useful trick to have up my sleeve somewhere down the road.
“How long have you been here?” I had been in the house fifteen minutes tops. Either he’d beaten me here or had just arrived. Regardless, I was impressed he’d already managed to pick a lock and save my life.
“I left right after you called. I haven’t been here long.”
He opened the door and held it ajar for me, while keeping an eye on the kitchen. So far no sign of Tansy—or the demon version of her—and no one had tried to stop us.
Still, this felt like the moment in a horror movie where the dumb girl has a chance to run out the back door and go for help, but instead she runs up the stairs.
Or down them, in this case.
A narrow set of wooden steps angled down into a dark basement space. From the smell of damp soil and old wood, I was going to assume this was a storm cellar and not a happy-go-lucky game room sort of basement. Hopefully that meant there wouldn’t be any amorous partygoers down here.
I let my eyes get used to this new darkness before taking the first step. Thankfully this was nothing like the basement I’d gone into at Ezekiel’s, and ten stairs later we were both in a musty crawlspace with a low ceiling.
“Did you bring me to the creepy basement of doom because you could kill me down here and no one would find the body?” I was kidding. Mostly.
“They’d smell you eventually.” Damn. Listen to this guy with the dark humor.
He patted his pockets and withdrew a Zippo lighter, which he ignited with a shink-flick noise. I had to readjust to the sudden brightness, but as soon as I was able to blink away the spots of light, I saw what he had brought me here for.
At the farthest wall from us, where the hard-packed dirt floor curved up towards the low-beam ceiling, was a folding card table covered in a short black sheet. A dozen unlit candles were spaced out across the surface, and as I took in the whole scene I noticed even more half-melted pillar candles on the floor. They marked the pentacle points around a chalk circle drawn in the dirt.
Besides the candles, the table was laden with other unseemly goodies. Fruit, which had started to rot, filling the air with a cloying sweet smell I’d originally thought was spillover from the party. A large bowl was brimming with something deep red and swarming with flies. I sniffed the air, and under the potent reek of fruit and all the perfume I’d inhaled upstairs was the unmistakable scent of blood.
The first question, and the one I couldn’t shake, was, Where did she get all that blood?
Indeed, the chalk outline on the floor was marked by rust-colored symbols, the same brown as dried blood.
This was some dark
magic.
Next to the bowl of blood was a framed photo, but I couldn’t make out what it showed. The gold frame glimmered faintly in the guttering light of Santiago’s lighter. I inched closer, but he clamped a hand around my wrist and held me back.
“I wouldn’t.” He crouched low to the dirt floor, taking his lighter with him, and showed me a second chalk-and-blood outline, this one a good two feet from the smaller symbol I’d been looking at.
God only knew what would have happened to me if I’d stepped over it.
“Thanks,” I whispered.
