Home Is Where the Demonology Library Is
I stood under the shower in my bathroom until the water ran clear.
The water pressure was intense, hammering like needles against my skull. It hurt to lift my right arm still—might’ve been my rotator cuff—and deep blue bruises ran up my right thigh. There was no sense of the little bites becoming infected, though goddess knows what kind of demonic diseases the things carried. Wasn’t like there were tetanus shots for things that go bump in the night.
The tattoo on my left thigh was unblemished. I idly wondered what would happen if it was accidentally sliced just so—did intention matter? But I thrust the thoughts aside, because it hadn’t happened and there was no point in thinking about it.
I hadn’t the patience to stay in the shower for long, and shut off the water to step into the steaming bathroom and wrap myself in a towel. Another for my hair and I padded into my bedroom, the temperature comfortable enough that the water dried from my bare legs and arms but didn’t make me feel cold.
Dad never changed our rooms or repurposed them—I would always have a place here, even though I hadn’t lived at home for almost four years now. The walls were painted—three black, one magenta against which the canopy bed was centered. A window seat was flanked by two bookshelves and my old desk rested against another wall. As a child I’d had room for a huge dollhouse, my parents indulged me so I never wanted for anything, and I suspected all of those items were packed away somewhere in the manor if I wanted to go looking.
Melinoë was perched on the foot of my bed, just waiting there without reaching for a book or pulling out her phone to occupy herself. Her body language spoke of discomfort—shoulders tense, expression guarded. Why, I could only speculate, but then depending on her circumstances the house and everything might be a little intimidating. At the very least, there was a cognitive dissidence going from Dev’s place in Magic Alley and the demon swarm to a polite vampire in a quiet mansion.
“You want the shower or anything to clean up?” I asked as I went for the door to my walk-in closet.
She waved a bandaged hand at me. “I cleaned up the blood and your dad brought a first aid kit. I really didn’t get bit that badly.”
I didn’t have a lot of clothes at home, but enough to do me in an emergency. Fresh cotton panties and a bra, socks, another pair of skinny jeans. My combat boots were fine, so I grabbed a fitted black tee, gray hoodie, and called it done. The closet was angled away from the bed so I couldn’t see Melinoë, but I wasn’t particularly shy anyway and dropped my towel in favor of the underwear.
“Odds of that swarm having something to do with Dev’s disappearance?” I asked.
“I’ve been thinking about that,” she returned. “It seems a little too coincidental, but at the same time, if anything weird like that was going to happen, it would be at Magic Alley. We might’ve been caught in someone else’s crossfire.”
I got my bra and t-shirt on next. “Until we know what kind of demon they were and precisely what Dev was doing when he disappeared, that might remain in the ‘unknown’ column.” I zipped up my jeans, slipped on socks, and grabbed my hoodie and boots as I left the closet. “If anyone around here will know anything, it’s Dad. Ready?”
She nodded mutely and followed, her leather coat creaking as she walked. She’d smoothed out her hair in addition to bandaging her hand and freshened up the kohl lining her eyes—no purse, so she must’ve had things stowed in her pockets...along with the gun holstered somewhere under there. Not a lot of people around here carried, so that was also a little weird.
I grabbed my old school messenger bag from the back of my bedroom door and stuffed everything from the pockets of my torn up jeans and hoodie—wallet, phone, pack of gum, keys—and there’d be plenty of room in case Dad had any supplies to send with us when he identified the swarm. We then retraced our steps back down to the second floor. Dad was still in the study but now he had books freshly stacked on the coffee table in the sitting area and was pulling another from the shelves as we entered the room.
Notably absent were the books and notes he was working on. More experiments, probably, and apparently I wouldn’t be sneaking a peak.
“A swarm, you said?” he asked, crouching to peer at the lower shelf.
“Thousands of them, easily.” I led Melinoë to sit; we took either end of the plush navy sofa. While she sat quietly, scanning the room, I reached for the top book.
None of the tomes were remotely dusty—quite a feat considering he had hundreds of them and some were centuries old. I honestly wasn’t sure whether he employed someone to dust them or did it himself—given their importance, he might not have trusted others to dust in here.
The lighting was low and comfortable, glinting on the glass of framed photos atop Dad’s desk across the room—I could picture them all without even looking, each carved in my memory. Me, Dev, and Mom—a frame of each. I didn’t have anything like that in my apartment. Did that make me weird? Well, beyond as weird as I already was. Maybe it was another sign that something was seriously wrong with me, but...
When I was with Dad, here at home, it was fine. I saw Mom everywhere, found it comforting behind home. But when I was alone, the reminders hurt. Hurt in a way I didn’t want to be confronted by every day. I got by better without thinking about it all the time, and that meant no sentimental photos.
Dad withdrew another book and brought them to the coffee table. He took the heavy armchair kitty-corner with the couch. “Off hand, there are half a dozen possibilities.” He flipped through the book. “Where were you when you encountered them?”
I knew I’d have to say it but was hoping I could’ve avoided it. “Dev’s place.”
Dad looked sharply up at me. “I didn’t know you and your brother were speaking.”
“We’re not,” I replied. “But he’s kind of missing.”
“Missing.” His gaze moved pointedly from me to Melinoë—who was giving me some kind of look I couldn’t decipher, like she hadn’t expected me to say that—and then back to me again. “This swarm has something to do with it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Should I be concerned about your brother?”
“Not yet.”
He passed me the book open to a black and white drawing, a copy of something from the Middle Ages. “Was it this?”
I took the book and leaned over for Melinoë to see. It looked more like a tarantula than a rat and didn’t have the razor down the back. “Similar but not quite. They also had red eyes.”
He immediately cast aside two more books. “Not those ones, then. What sound did they make?”
“Um...like a chittering? High-pitched?”
“And they had a scent,” Melinoë added. “Or maybe whatever magic summoned them did, but I could smell sulfur.”
Another two books discarded. Dad settled on a thick green leather-bound number and thumbed through the yellowed pages. “There’s a passage...here. No picture. In the midst of the Black Death, there were villages wiped out in Norway by what some said was a demon, but it was passed off as superstition. Rats with glowing red eyes and too many legs, traveling in swarms. No taxonomy, no further sightings. There are thousands of stories like this, brief mentions of demons no one has been able to confirm the existence of. Sometimes they pop up once and never again. Other times they eventually get studied and understood.”
“So we found the bigfoot of demons, only tiny,” I said dryly, leaning back in my seat. “Great. How did they eradicate the swarm?”
“Unknown. Even demonologists and covens were focused on the threat of the Black Death and many died—there’s little more to go by than these stories.”
So we didn’t know where they came from, what they were vulnerable to, who might’ve brought them here now. Perfect.
“What did you find at Dev’s apartment?” Dad asked.
“Nothing. He took his laptop...” And potentially the pendant. We’d been in a rush, but Melinoë said there was demonic energy around it and the swarm had hit just as we’d found it. Hell, maybe some kind of boobytrap had been left there, though I didn’t know where my brother would’ve found those creatures, if that was the case. Simplest explanation remained that something was watching his apartment and came after us.
I can be tactful and subtle, and ask around a subject until I get what I want. And I did that with plenty of people. But Dad was Dad and we didn’t do secrets or subtleties in our household.
“Dev had a pendant,” I began. “One that he inherited from his mom. Creepy-ass red stone.”
Slowly, he nodded. “What about it?”
“What does it do?”
He leaned back in his plush navy chair, fingers steepled before him. “Why?”
“Because I always accepted it was none of my business but now I’m curious. He’s missing and so is the pendant. Either he took it with him—which, as far as I recall, he never wore or removed—or someone else took it. Which is probably a bad thing. The swarm also hit us just as I checked the empty box.”
Dad chewed on this for a moment, gaze absently on the hardwood floor. “Honestly, El, I’m not sure what it does. It came from another dimension—that much I know. His mom wanted it passed along to him, and it cost her soul to do it. Those wishes were honored, Dev was aware of the stone and officially given it when he was twelve, and that is all I know for sure.”
“When you say...” Melinoë’s voice trailed off and she glanced at us both as we turned to her, that awkwardness rising again. “Sorry, I just never got the details—when you say it cost her soul...?”
“Her soul crossed dimensions to reach this one and it was not an easy trip—to put it mildly. This is all second-hand, but from what I understand, there were no instructions, no backstory—she just asked that Dev have the pendant.”
“Second-hand from...?”
Tense silence stretched between the three of us.
“Someone no longer with us,” I said at last. “So we can’t really ask for more information.” I did not believe for a second that Dad hadn’t researched the hell out of the pendant in the past twenty-five years—he might not have confirmed information about the origin or purpose, but he’d have theories.
But if he wasn’t mentioning them in front of Melinoë...?
Though there was no sound, no indication of another presence, I nonetheless felt it and did not look away from Melinoë when I called in warning, “Rodney.”
The other presence across the room paused in the darkness and I heard a tail thump the wall as it swished.
Dad sighed and looked over his shoulder. “I didn’t even hear him.”
Melinoë frowned and peered past Dad into the darkness by the heavy curtains—I could tell the precise moment she saw him because she squealed and flew out of her seat, rounding the loveseat in the same movement that was less coordinated and graceful as it was sheer luck. “What the hell is that!”
Rodney made his presence fully known then by stalking over, heavy paws thumping on the hardwood. He could be entirely silent when he wanted to be, and then shift on a dime so you heard all six hundred pounds of him. His coat of spotted beige and brown fur was well groomed and smooth, and his amber eyes flashed in the light. Foot-long fangs gleamed—how Dad found someone to keep doing dental work on the beast, I had no idea, but his teeth were in top condition.
For each step he took forward, Melinoë took one back.
“That’s a saber-tooth tiger,” she said.
“That’s actually a misnomer,” I said. “Not a tiger.”
She stared silently.
“He’s harmless,” I assured her.
“He is not,” Dad corrected. “But he attacks from above—if he’s on ground-level, he’s not hunting.”
The big saber-tooth cat sauntered over, wound around Dad’s chair and gave him a warning glare and dismissive snort, then came to sit directly at my feet, his short tail swishing and whiskers flicking.
Melinoë had not come back to sit. “I...uh...”
I reached out to stroke Rodney’s head and his eyes closed, a deep purr rumbling contentedly.
“I don’t like cats,” she blurted out suddenly, still wide-eyed and worried. “Like even normal-sized ones.”
Many would claim Rodney did not understand human language, but he stopped purring, opened his eyes into slits, and glared at her with a deep growl.
“Sorry—”
“It’s okay,” Dad said smoothly. “He doesn’t really follow instructions or move when he doesn’t want to, so he probably won’t leave the room—do you want to meet us downstairs?”
“Aunt Roo is in the kitchen,” I said. “Go back the way we came, hang a right at the bottom of the stairs, then another right. You can’t miss the kitchen and you’ll probably hear her.”
Slowly Melinoë nodded while backing up toward the door—in another few seconds, she was gone.
Rodney followed, going just to the closed door, where he turned twice and dropped gracelessly to sit.
I leaned back on the couch with a sigh. “He needs to get out more, his people skills are atrophying.”
“Mine too.”
“How are the experiments going?”
He smiled wryly. “What makes you think I’m still doing them?”
“Because you closed that book pretty quickly when we walked in earlier.”
He nodded, granting me that. “When I have progress, I’ll let you know. I’m trying something new, I’m hopeful, but I’m basically inventing spells as I go without test subjects.”
“That doesn’t mean—”
“Everything’s different now, El. I’m working within a new framework of rules I have no idea of—there are a confirmed five vampires in all of the Americas left including me, with roughly eight in Europe Roo can identify through rumors and a handful in Asia. Six more in Africa. We can’t find any record of any of them turning someone since the virus.”
“That doesn’t mean it can’t be done.”
“Eleven years of failure is not heartening.”
“If anyone can do it, blah blah blah—I suck at pep talks. But if I can help—”
“This is my work, El. It’s fine.”
I could argue two witches would be better than one. Hell, I had argued it. But if he reached a point of wanting help, he’d ask.
“I ask, again, should I be concerned about Dev?” Dad not-so-subtly diverted the conversation, though I supposed it was reasonable since I told him his only son was missing.
“I don’t know yet. Whole thing is news to me. No clues in his apartment except that missing pendant. He never took it out or wore it as far as I can recall, so either he did this time—which is strange and worrisome in itself—or someone took it. Which is also strange and worrisome. And we were attacked by a swarm, so...? I’m not really sure which option I’d prefer at this point, but Melinoë said there was demon energy—”
“Melinoë,” he repeated, steepling his fingers again as his brow pulled into a frown. “That’s her full name?”
“Yeah. Melinoë...I don’t remember. Started with a T?”
“Takata.”
Blood left my face and my gut went cold at his expression. “Right. She said she’s Dev’s cousin.”
Dad went very still as he absorbed this, and I could practically see the thoughts whirling around his brain. “She told you this?”
“Yes. She said she’s been in contact with him, they’ve been working together on stuff. Spells and that.” No need to freak him out more by bringing up the Aanzhenii.
“When did you meet her?”
What aren’t you telling me? “Like literally today. What the fuck, Dad?”
He gave himself a shake. “Sorry. I’ve never met her, I don’t know anything about her. But her mother...was not a friend, El.”
“I know that side of Dev’s family is fucked up—”
“She killed people. Including someone...close to our family. I know of Melinoë’s existence and I never met her before tonight, so I don’t know anything about her. She introduced herself to you freely and probably has nothing to hide.”
“So be careful,” I filled in, squirming uncomfortably—I didn’t like him to worry, and I really didn’t like him to nag.
“Be safe,” he said instead. “And be smart. Because I know you are genetically incapable of being careful.”
“Ha ha,” I said dryly. “For once are you telling me not to see the best in someone?”
“Give her the benefit of the doubt but don’t drop your guard. Because there was nothing good to see in Peri Takata and until you know Melinoë’s agenda, you might learn that firsthand.”
That was the very last thing I expected my father to ever say about anyone. It left my world a bit off-kilter, like everything had tilted a little to the left and I couldn’t see it the right way anymore.
“Now despite your protests, you are clearly not fine.” He shifted to face me and reached out for my hand. “Let me help.”
I bit back a whiny, But Daaaaad, and accepted his hand—and the healing magic it offered.