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“I miss the forest,” Thorn lamented as he collapsed the rest of his body to the floor of the attic. “I miss the way the moon shone through the trees. I miss the petrichor and moving in tune with nature. This… thisbuildingwas never where I was meant to be.”
“I know that, friend,” Nox responded sympathetically. “This captivity has affected you worst of all.” The shadow creature’s eyes scanned Thorn’s attic hideout and took note of all the small attempts to create a space that felt like home. Rocks and stones stolen from the garden and arranged in piles littered the floor, fallen tree branches adorned the walls, and a bough of evergreen needles hung between rafters. Thorn had done his best, but his best was still a pitiful sliver of the real thing. The creatures had their run of the property, yes, but the property ended just as the thick of the forest began, and all three of them were tied back by invisible leashes that prevented them from going any further.
Thorn let out a low whine similar to that of a dog’s as he inhaled Logan’s scent one more time.
“I wish I could assure you that we would make it out of here with her help, but I don’t want to make any promises I can’t guarantee,” Nox mused. “But I can promise you that I’ll do everything I can to encourage the girl to you.”
“She’s not going to be encouraged, Nox,” Thorn whined. “Look at me.”
“She may just surprise you,” Nox said as he melted back into the shadows and crept out of the attic through the gap in the door.
* * *
Ruse had flown as high as his bat form would let him before shifting into a falcon to gain more height. The borders of their captivity were more rigid on the ground, so he would occasionally take to the air to feel a sense of freedom. He flew above the clouds so he could not see the sprawling mansion below, and the quiet of the night time air gave him the peace to be alone with his thoughts.
“Astounding that those two have been so easily won over byher,” he said to himself in a breathy voice between beats of his wings. “Of course they’d suck up to the one person in all this time to offer us sympathy, but for what? To feel the sting of heartbreak when she fails?” Ruse dove like a torpedo, bracing against the sting of the wind on his avian eyes before spreading his wings to catch the air and bob back upward. “She’s only here for a month. That’s the timeline the Man always gives our offerings.” Ruse continued to think out loud, trying to piece together a solution for what would happen if that month's timer ran out, and she was still alive, and they were still stuck there.
Never once had an offering still been alive after a month. They were lucky if they survived into the third week. There was no imagining what the Man would do if her employment timeline ran out and she was still there. He’d expected to do some serious acting to get himself away from the situation scot-free—not to mention that Logan already knew too much. Would he guess she knew?
The possibility stood that the Man could kill Logan himself if Ruse and his monstrous roommates didn’t do the job for him. Having her alive was a risk he knew the Man would be unlikely to take. The question remained if Nox and Thorn would see things the way he was seeing them, or if Logan-colored glasses would cloud their judgment.
“No matter,” Ruse concluded as he swooped and dove back down to the mansion. “If they want to play her games, let them.”
He perched himself on the iron weathervane that swung happily in the evening air. “I’ll just have to work extra hard to build her fear from nothing. Fear can be forced if necessary. She will just have to be my longest hunt.”
If he could have smiled, he would.
Chapter11
Logan
I called Blair the next morning to no answer. Considering her heavy-handed concern the day prior, I should have been a little worried or surprised at her lack of awareness, but I knew this to be just like her. She would call me back the moment she woke up and tell me all about how she had “no idea what happened” and she “must have really needed the sleep.”
Sleep had eluded me the entire night before as the image of Jake with pitch black eyes haunted me every time I closed mine. No matter how I sliced it, and no matter how I tried to dismiss my feelings or justify them away, I knew I was at least partially to blame for Jake’s disappearance. He’d never wanted to come back to the mansion in the first place, but I’d brought him back anyway, despiteknowingthere was truth to his story. No matter how much the monsters’ plight and imprisonment tore at my emotions, my primary goal had to be making sure Jake’s name would be the final one on their list of victims. I was just glad his experience hadn’t been a deadly one.
With the morning to myself and the need to shake off some crappy feelings, I decided to make myself a large breakfast and revel in my victory over the monsters in the mansion. We’d made a modicum of peace and found some common ground, and that wasn’t nothing. I felt sort of like a character in the after-school TV shows I’d watched when I was younger. Like I was the plucky-but-still-cute booksmart sidekick to the main character who knew that if I just hit the books hard enough, I couldhelpthe creatures of the night instead of just slaying them.
Okay, so I was Willow fromBuffy, but there are worse things to be.
The kitchen was so welcoming first thing in the morning as the sun shone through the windows, making the all-white cabinets even brighter than usual. I turned my phone on to listen to one of my many paranormal podcasts as I gathered the ingredients to make myself French toast with berries.
After I finished cooking, I brought my breakfast to the sunny table off the kitchen and fetched my notebook from my bag so I could gather my thoughts and take some notes. If I was going to help out the creatures in this house, I had to make sure I had a full understanding of what was going on and label all the moving parts.
I wrote down to the best of my ability a timeline of events, recounting what I’d been told the night before. It would probably be a smart move on my part to research as much as I could about my employer and his family—anything from business ventures, social media accounts, anything that could just give me more details to work with. I considered reaching out to a metaphysical shop near me to see if they had any advice on the breaking of curses and severing of magical bonds, and made a note to remind me of that option. Rather than making any solid forward progress, I just dumped all the information I had in my brain onto the paper to better visualize everything. It was a trick one of my professors had taught me in college. “It doesn’t have to make sense, be organized, or at all pretty. It just has to work for you.”
And it did. Once I was cleaning up the aftermath of my breakfast, I felt like my brain was warmed up and ready to tackle anything.
Like clockwork, my phone rang, jogging me from my train of thought, and as I pulled my phone out of the waistband of my pajama pants, I saw Blair’s face trying to video call.
I clicked “accept” and held the phone out in front of me.
“So much for beingsoooworried about me, huh?” I asked playfully as I got an eyeful of Blair still in bed with her hair knotted in a rat’s nest on top of her head. Her nose and forehead were bright red, telling me she got more than enough sun yesterday and was probably facing the consequences today.
“Yeah, well, my skin feels like it’s on fire, Logan,” Blair said defensively as she gestured to her raw skin. “I thought rum slushies and laying out all day was a great ‘self-care’ idea until I fucking fell asleep in my chair outside and woke up absolutely fried.”
I walked back up the stairs to my bedroom as she explained what happened so I could get my clothes together for the day.
“Sorry, dude,” I said with as much sympathy as I could come up with. “But I’ve told you how many times that you absolutely have to wear sunscreen?”
