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“It’s happening again.”
I sat bolt upright in bed. “Are you okay?” I strained to hear any sound of demonic predations, but the background seemed eerily quiet.
“We’re all right. We’re sitting out in the car because your mother didn’t want to stay inside.”
Well, I couldn’t really blame her for that. “I’ll be right over.”
“You don’t need to do that — ”
“Yes, I do,” I cut in. “I told you I’d help, and I meant it.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, sounding more tired than I’d ever heard him before. “We’re going to stay in a hotel.”
Maybe that was the smart thing to do, but I hated the thought of them simply running away. “Please, just give me a few minutes. I’ll be there as fast as I can.”
A pause as there seemed to be a muffled convo between Tom and my mother. Then he said, “All right. We’ll wait.”
“Thank you. I’m hanging up now.”
I ended the call and put the phone on my nightstand, then got out of bed and grabbed a pair of jeans and my Keds. Since I’d been wearing a T-shirt to sleep in, I just pulled it up out of the way so I could slide a bra on underneath.
Thus ready to go, I slipped out of the bedroom. To my annoyance, Archie was sitting in the hall, wide awake.
“Let me guess,” he said. “Another demon emergency.”
“Something like that,” I replied. “I’ll be fine. Go back to sleep.”
“I hope this doesn’t mean you’ll miss feeding me breakfast,” he remarked in ominous tones.
“I’ll do my best. Gotta go.”
I hurried over to the dining room table and grabbed my purse, then was out the door. From somewhere behind me, I heard an irritated hiss.
Say a prayer for me, Archie, I thought as I locked the door. Because if this goes sideways, you’re going to have much bigger problems than a missed meal….
10
Getting Out of Dodge
Even though the rain had stopped, the streets were still slick and treacherous. My instincts were all screaming at me to hurry, but I knew I wouldn’t be of much use to my mother and Tom if I managed to wrap my car around an electrical pole in my haste.
Somehow, I managed to obey the speed limit…mostly…and pulled into the now-familiar gravel driveway less than ten minutes after I’d left my apartment. The door to the garage bay where Tom had been parking his Cayenne stood open, and as soon as I pulled up and came to a stop, he and my mother emerged.
Their faces looked extra pale in the darkness, since the only illumination was some landscape lights and one of those motion-activated security fixtures bolted to the garage eaves. They were both fully dressed, so at least they’d had the presence of mind to put on some clothes before they fled the place.
“What happened?” I asked.
“The same thing as the last few times,” my mother replied. She didn’t seem all that relieved to see me, was actually frowning, as if my presence had only given her one more thing to worry about. “Pounding in the walls…all those horrible voices screaming and laughing. But then….”
Her words trailed off, and she shot an anxious look up at Tom. “Then it got worse,” he said.
“Worse how?” Honestly, I was hard pressed to think how anything could be worse than listening to that hellish cacophony.
I was about to find out.
“Smells,” he said. “Horrible smells. It was so bad we could barely breathe. That was when we realized we had to get out. So we got dressed and grabbed our things, and headed out to the garage.”
I glanced away from him, directing my gaze toward the house. Lights showed in several of the windows, seeming to signal that my mother and Tom hadn’t bothered to shut anything down as they fled the place. Not that I could blame them; I would’ve wanted to keep the lights on, too.
