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“Let’s go home, muttlet. I’m done with this crappy holiday.”
* * *
When I got to the apartment, all I wanted to do was kick off my boots, strip off my dirty clothes, and climb into a hot shower. A quick look at the black sludge on my hands had me rethinking that plan.
“Matty, I’m home,” I called out as I headed straight for the kitchen sink. It took longer than I expected to wash the demon’s gag-inducing blood off my skin, but I eventually succeeded. I washed my knife too, because, ew.
I was just tucking the blade safely back in my boot when I heard Lily whimper behind me. The sound sent a fresh wave of panic through me. She didn’t whimper, ever. Then it hit me: Matty hadn’t said anything when I got home. On any other night, he would be buzzing around me with a million questions about how my night went, but he hadn’t made a peep.
Maybe he’d gone to bed early. I held onto that thought for as long as it took me to make it to his bedroom. The door was wide open and the light at his desk was on. All perfectly normal. What brought me to the brink of panic was the smell.
“Matty, where are you?” I tried to smother the fear threading through me, but there was no response.
I checked the closet, my room, the bathroom, under the bed, everywhere. Even places his six-foot-tall frame could never fit because I clearly was not thinking straight. Then I stomped back into his room.
“Matthew Michael Hinkins, I am not fucking around. Get out here, right now!”
Silence.
I took a closer look at everything in the room, searching for anything out of place. That’s when I spotted the smear of black on the windowsill. It was small, barely noticeable with the sheers pulled, but when I bent down to check it, the stench was unmistakable.
The demon had been there. In my apartment. In my little brother’s bedroom.
Yeah, I was going to make that piece of shit suffer when I got my hands on it again.
The question was, how exactly did I go about finding it? And what the hell was it doing in my house in the first place?
I remembered the way it sniffed the air, and the way it damned near purred my last name.
Darling was my mother’s last name, which she’d graciously passed on to me, the unwanted product of a drunken one-night stand. Matty was spared that humiliation by his dad, who was adamant that any child of his would bear his name. Hinkins was better, a little.
My hand crept up my neck and I winced at the tenderness as my fingertips brushed the still-seeping cut there. Just lovely. I pulled my hand away and examined the thick red blood smeared across my fingertips. My vision narrowed to the streak of crimson, and the world around me pulsed. I couldn’t explain the sensation. I’d seen my own blood a thousand times, but something about it in that instance felt… different. Powerful.
A frantic scratching noise stole my attention, and my gaze darted around the room. It wasn’t coming from any of Matty’s stuff.
“Now what?” Stepping quietly, I traced the sound back to my bedroom to find Lily flat on her belly pawing at something beneath my bed. Hope blossomed for a split second before logic kicked in. There was no way my brother could be hiding under there.
I got down on my hands and knees beside her and craned my neck to see what she was after. “It’s just a box of old junk, Lily.” I flattened myself on the floor and batted at it, dislodging the lid with my impatience. I hooked a finger over the lip of the box and dragged it out.
“See?” I said, motioning to the contents.
Lily sniffed hesitantly, then slammed her big paw down on the edge, flipping the box on its side and scattering my mom’s old worthless crap all over the floor.
“What the hell, furball?”
She pawed at a few little trinkets before gently nudging something toward me with her snout. When I didn’t reach for it, she picked it up gently with her teeth and brought it to me.
“What does this have to do with Matty?” I asked, taking it from her. Not that I expected an answer. Hellhound or no, she was still a canine. It wasn’t like she could spell it out for me.
Did that stop her from huffing at me in the most condescending way?
Nope.
“What?” I snapped, tossing the necklace back on the floor with the other junk. “I obviously don’t understand how a shitty bauble is supposed to help me here.”
She would not let it go. She flicked the pendant with her nose, sending it tumbling back toward me. In a fit of tired, panicked irritation, I snatched it off the ground and glared at her. “I want to find Matty, not—”
I didn’t get a chance to finish my rant, because the cursed thing sent a jolt of electricity up my arm so strong, I jerked hard enough to fling it across the room.
