Demon High (19 page)

With Brittany and Nellie on their feet brushing themselves off, I approached it.

The foot or so of light leaking into the loading area from under the garage door petered out quickly. I stepped through the doorway into complete darkness.

“It’s a maze.” Oscar brushed against me. His body was warm against mine and I could smell the woods on him. The scent made me wonder if he slept there, made a bed in the leaves surrounded by the foundation of his old home. I could see him there, me snuggled against him, both of us staring at the stars.

“There’s about five feet of open space and then a wall,” he continued.

His words startled me. I spun to hide the flush I knew was flooding my cheeks. “It’s a factory,” I said, sounding more in control than I felt. I walked a few feet until I could touch the wall he’d mentioned with my outstretched hands. “This must just be a hall. It probably leads to the factory floor.” I pressed my hand against the drywall and concentrated on remembering why Oscar and I were there.

“I think this door used to lead to the factory floor. This wall—” He placed his hand next to mine; his skin brushed mine. “—is new.”

I started to ask him how he knew, but then realized it didn’t matter. I believed him; I was just on edge. My own wayward thoughts making me testy. Something I needed to get over if I planned on getting out of here alive.

“What’s past it?” I asked.

“More walls,” he replied.

“How about people?” I asked.

“Not on this floor.”

I started to nod, but he interrupted me.

“Not alive anyway. I don’t know that I could sense them if they were dead.”

My hand, reaching inside my pack, froze. I forced myself to finish the nod and to keep looking for the flashlight I’d tucked in the pack, along with a few other mundane items I thought might come in handy. I started to flick the switch on, but thought better of it. “You think a light will give us away?” I asked.

His voice was detached. “If he’s like me, he already knows we’re here.”

At his pronouncement something thumped. I realized a few seconds later it was my heart.

I pulled out the flashlight and flipped it on. “If he knows we’re here, I guess we need to move fast.”

“Holmes knows we’re here?” Brittany had come up behind me. She had her hands wrapped around her arms.

Nellie replied, “We are demons.”

“What does that mean?” Brittany asked.

“They can sense humans,” I explained.

Brittany moved closer to me. I shone the light on her feet. She’d worn practical but still stylish shoes, a cross between hikers and tennis shoes. “Just humans? How about other demons? Can you tell if Holmes is here?” she asked.

It was a good question, one I should have thought to ask.

“Just humans,” Oscar replied.

“Wh—” I started.

“We’re hunters.” Nellie’s words slithered through the dark toward me. “We sense our prey.”

I turned toward Oscar, for some reason expecting him to dispute her statement, but he was silent. I covered my resulting unease by digging out another flashlight and handing it to Brittany. “If he knows we’re here, we might as well be able to see.”

As Brittany’s fingers wrapped around the plastic handle, something behind us creaked. We all turned. The twin beams of my and Brittany’s flashlights revealed the garage door we’d just crawled under slamming down until everything not illuminated by our lights was in complete darkness.

“Oh, sweet. A game.” Nellie wandered past me to peer out the doorway Oscar and I had found. “Who wants to go first?”

Unsure, I looked at Brittany. “It could have just given out.”

Nellie laughed. “You are naive, Kitten. But that’s one of the things I love about you.”

I turned the light on her. She was smiling.

I walked past her and tugged on the cotton strap that hung from the door. It wouldn’t budge.

I ran the beam of my flashlight around the space. “Wouldn’t there be a regular door too? People didn’t go in and out here did they?”

“If there was, there isn’t anymore.” Oscar’s words were quiet, not that he needed to be loud. We were standing within six feet of each other.

Nellie took a step back and waved toward the open doorway, the one Oscar claimed led to a maze. “Innocence first.”

I looked at Brittany. “Maybe you should stay here and try to get the door open.”

Nellie moved closer to my friend. “Oh, that’s a good idea. We’ll stay here.”

Something flickered in Brittany’s eyes. Fear? Longing? It was gone too fast for me to be sure, but either way I knew I couldn’t leave her alone with Nellie.

The succubus had said it best—she was a hunter, and right now she had Brittany in her sights. She didn’t care how she hurt her; she just wanted a prize for her mantel.

“All together then.” I turned, planning to lead the way, but Oscar stepped in front of me.

“I might as well lead. I can go a little ahead. Holmes won’t sense me.”

It was a good plan, but I kept my words of gratitude to myself. You don’t thank demons, and hard as it was for me to remember, Oscar was one.

We waited a few moments to let Oscar get ahead a bit, then Brittany and I pointed our beams at the floor and she, Nellie and I went through the doorway.

Oscar was right. We were in a maze, a dark one. I soon discovered our flashlights did us very little good. Not only was there no light in the space, the walls were painted black.

“Why?” Brittany placed a hand on the wall in front of us. Her spread fingers glowed against the dark paint. “Holmes did this, didn’t he?” she asked.

“Must have,” I murmured. I was beginning to believe Nellie had been right, that the garage door hadn’t fallen on its own and gotten jammed. And that these walls weren’t just poor design. They’d been place here with intent. And— I took another step forward, knocked into a dead end. —I thought I knew what that intent was.

Was one of Holmes’ cameras set up somewhere nearby? Was he watching with some kind of night vision TV? If so, what other surprises awaited us?

I pulled a spray bottle of holy water out of my bag and twisted the nozzle until I could feel water dripping from its tip.

“What level of demon do you think Holmes is, Oscar?” Nellie called. Her voice made me jump. I ground my jaws together and forced my heart to slow.

Nothing had happened. We didn’t even know for sure Holmes was in this building; we hadn’t seen him. And I was jumping like an extra in a B movie horror flick.

“Let’s say he’s an arch demon. That’s not that high. You think a squirt of water will slow him down?”

I turned, my hand tightening on the bottle’s trigger. “What would it do to a succubus? I’m betting it would mess up that face you’re so proud of. Should we find out?”

A hand wrapped around my wrist. My fingers tightened. I could hear the water escaping the nozzle. I heard a sizzle too. Then nothing, silence.

The grip on my hand loosened. My arm fell to my side. What had I done?

“Oscar the brave. Who says you care for nothing? Or is that becoming old news?” Nellie again, sounding just as sassy and sure as ever.

I jerked my flashlight up.

Nellie stood in front of me dry as ever, but at my side water bubbled off Oscar’s skin. He brushed the quickly evaporating moisture away with his hand.

“It doesn’t take a lot of caring, if you know there’s no risk, Nellie,” he replied.

I stared at him, both relieved that I hadn’t hurt him and horrified that the holy water had so little affect.

He grabbed my wrist again and lifted my hand so the bottle was once again in front of me.

“Holmes isn’t me,” he murmured. “You’re on the right track.”

I was shaking. I wasn’t sure why. My brain was racing. I suddenly realized how insane our plan or lack of one was. If holy water didn’t hurt Oscar, how did I know any of my tools would hurt Holmes?

But at this point, what choice did I have? The garage door behind us was shut. If we wanted out, we had to find another way.

I started walking with my hand held out in front of my face. The path was open and straight for about ten feet. To preserve battery power we had flipped off our flashlights; the dark walls made them useless anyway. Again, Oscar had gone ahead. I could hear Nellie and Brittany behind me, but we were spaced out, at least there was space between them and me. I had no idea how close they were to each other.

My hand hit a wall, but the surface felt different from the walls beside me, smoother. I flipped on the flashlight. The wall in front of me was papered with pictures. Photographs of people cut open on an operating tables, their insides out of their bodies, their brains visible through their open skulls. Some images were in color, some in black and white, but all of them sent bile rising in my throat.

As I was still locked in place, staring at what quickly became just one giant mass of horror, Brittany bumped into me.

“Oh, my God, what are those?”

My thumb moved to turn off the light then, but I thought better of it. I didn’t want to be standing in the dark. Instead, I dropped the beam to our feet.

“Did Holmes…. Did you recognize anyone?” she asked.

I didn’t reply. I didn’t know. I hadn’t got past what I was seeing to really look at
who
I was seeing.

Brittany seemed to understand my silence. “We need to know.”

She was right. I took a breath. “Why do you think he posted them here?” she asked.

Nellie wandered up behind us. She was trailing her fingers over the wall beside her. “For this? Look at the two of you. A few pictures, and you’re shaking like rabbits caught in a trap. What will you be like when you see the real thing?”

I jerked my head toward her. “There won’t be the real thing. That’s why we’re here, to stop it.”

She sighed. “Are you sure? Maybe it’s already happened.”

I turned to the wall and forced my hand to shine the light back on the photos. There were even more than I had realized at first. They papered the wall from floor to ceiling.

“I’ll take the floor,” Brittany said, her voice solemn.

With Brittany working from below, I pointed my beam upward and began working left to right, checking every face while trying to ignore everything else.

After what felt like hours, Brittany’s beam met mine. She looked at me. “I don’t know any of these people. Do you?”

I shook my head. I wanted to be relieved, but the tension wouldn’t leave my body.

“I think they’re real,” Brittany continued. “I mean, I think he got them somewhere, but I don’t think he took them himself.”

I nodded. I’d come to the same conclusion. They were props, not souvenirs. That was good.

I started to flip off the light again, but Brittany touched my wrist. “Let’s leave them on now.”

Past the wall of photos we hit an intersecting path.

“Which way?” Brittany asked.

“We could split up,” Nellie offered. “You do have your little talkie things.”

I ignored her and pointed my beam to the right instead. “In a maze aren’t you always supposed to stay to the right?” I asked.

“Depends on whether you want to get to the end,” Brittany muttered.

We stood for a second, both of us unable to move or make a choice.

“Where’s Oscar?” Brittany asked. “Wasn’t he going ahead to help us?”

Good question. I’d wondered the same thing myself, but I wasn’t going to stand still waiting for him.

I went right. We’d traveled another twenty or so feet following a path that seemed narrower than the one we’d left, or that was growing narrower as we went along. There were more turns too. In one spot, we seemed to circle around almost back to where we had been only a few seconds earlier.

I stopped and placed my hand on the wall. “Do you think there’s something here?” I asked. The question was meant for Nellie, and she knew it.

“Nothing alive,” she answered.

I curled my fingers away from the wall, but didn’t move. “Do you hear something?”

Brittany stepped closer, until her arm pressed into mine. “Crying,” she said.

I tightened my grip on the flashlight. She was right. A low whimper sounded from somewhere ahead of us.

“A recording,” Brittany said.

I wanted her to be right.

We kept walking. It was getting harder to move my feet. The sound of life should have motivated me to move faster, to rush in, silver blades and crucifixes blazing, but it dragged down my steps instead. Each cry tore at me, made my stomach clench.

They were horrid, each and every one of them, and they were getting louder.

Suddenly the walls beside us ended, and the space opened up into a bigger, dark room. I waited, lost. I’d taken some strange comfort from the walls beside me, known no one could sneak up that way. But now I was out in the open, exposed.

I lifted my flashlight and shone it in the space ahead of us. Something moved, swayed.