Dweller on the Threshold (16 page)

“No,
pathetic
is how you’re going to be remembered when all the other ghoulies learn a woman took you out. Now be a good little monster and tell me who sent you here and why. Maybe I won’t take your head off your body then.”

He actually looked like he was considering.

Completely out of patience, I narrowed my eyes. “Did the Dweller send you?

He blinked at me.

“Where is this Dweller?”

He frowned. “Uh…I don’t know.”

I could tell that part was true which meant his usefulness had ended. I closed my right hand into a fist, hauled it back and let it fly. My knuckles hit one of those shifting, bulbous cheeks, but I hit what I was aiming for—the area right over the cheek and behind the eye.

Just like that, his eyes rolled back and he fell in a disgusting, hairy heap.

“Did you knock it out?” Blythe asked, gingerly creeping closer to it.

“Nope.”

“It’s dead?”

“
It
is.”

“With one punch?”

I shrugged. “Sometimes Blythe, all it takes is one solid punch.”

“Oh.” She finally got up the courage to stand over it, her shoes nearly touching one of its arms. “This is for trashing my shop, you stupid ugly creep!” Blythe pulled her foot back to kick and I quickly yanked her away.

“No!” I lifted her completely out of the way before setting her down. “If you hit a ghoul hard enough, you can kill it with one blow. But another hit in the same spot can bring it back to life.”

“Oh.” She rubbed her hands over her sleeves. “What if someone drops him?”

I shrugged. “Didn’t read that far in my research.”

“Guess we’ll have to hope that doesn’t happen.” She glanced around her ruined shop, her mouth turned down. When she started to shuffle from one foot to the other, I thought for a second that she was about to lose it.

“Blythe, why are you bouncing?”

“I always have to pee when I get upset.”

“So go.”

She turned toward the back but I stopped her.

“Wait, where were you attacked?”

She pointed.

I moved a heap of material aside with my foot. “We’re not safe here so we need to leave fast. Go pee then get that book.” When she didn’t say anything, I glanced over my shoulder.

Her bottom lip wobbled. “I’d like to cleanse the store first. I won’t take long.”

I only hesitated a couple of seconds before nodding. I knew how important rituals, especially cleaning rituals, were to a witch. I probably couldn’t get her to leave voluntarily until she got this out of her system anyway. I stopped by the door and looked through its foot-tall window. Nothing moved on the street outside. Didn’t mean nothing was out there.

Before I could check out the place she was attacked, Blythe came back into the room.
That was fast.
I watched her gather supplies for a couple of minutes, feeling really bad about the destruction of her store. It looked like it had been a pretty nice shop—nicer than a lot of ones I’d been to, anyway. It certainly had a lot more bright color and pretty things—she’d bypassed the popular Goth décor altogether.

She had a lot of candles. Too many for the ghoul to have broken them all. Some still graced the unbroken shelves in solid, rainbow colors along with a few surviving ceramic bowls, jewelry, small vials of oils and bells. I didn’t know what the bells were for, but the rest was pretty self-explanatory. The floor was littered with broken ceramics, glass and crushed herbs. Every step released a new scent as they smashed under our heels. The mix made the air cloying. Made my throat burn and my eyes water.

I fanned the front door open a few times. The tiny bells rang and I looked up to find them strapped to the door and the ceiling. They hung in miniature wind-chime fashion across the entire store, along with strands of fluttering, colorful ribbons.

“Blue for protection, for calm. I need calm,” Blythe muttered as she came back and grabbed a blue candle. She plucked up black and white ones next. “The black will banish the negative spirits and the white is for help and blessings from the goddess.”

“Which goddess do you suppose she means?” Phro asked. She’d given up her exploration and now stood by the front row of windows with Fred.

I looked around for Frida.

“We left him in the car,” she said. “We had to promise to watch the twit.”

“I can hear you.” Blythe stopped, her arms bulging with candles. “I can hear you and I think you’re rude.”

Phro snorted.

I pointed to the shelves. “Blythe, just do your thing. I really want out of here before the sun comes up and we have to start answering questions.”

She turned and went behind the counter into the small room beyond. I shook my head at Phro, who gave me one of her mysterious goddess smiles then pointed at one of the windows. I tiptoed over the debris so I wouldn’t distract the witch and followed Phro’s pointing finger.

Sure enough, there was another one of those soul symbols. This one was huge, round, and it had the three perpendicular lines inside. These formed a kind of flower before running down to the bottom of the open circle and flowing out in streaks that never connected.

“I guess Nikolos’s reflection theory is a good one,” Phro murmured.

“So it is.” I reached up to run my fingers over the image only to find the glass smooth on this side. The etching didn’t go all the way through. “Or is it theory? He could know more than he’s letting on. He could be behind this for all we know.”

“We still don’t know much.” This from Fred, who never failed to state the obvious.

I caught a glimpse of Blythe’s trashed computer through the open doorway of that back room, then my gaze was snagged by a wall of knives. Apparently, the ghoul hadn’t had time to hit those. I started toward that wall.

 
“No, we don’t know much about the man. But I think it’s time we learn.”

Chapter Eight

I eyed the assortment of magical tools. Blythe had gathered quite the collection—it covered nearly the entire back wall. She had everything from simple, unadorned knives to jewel-encrusted blades whose style and obvious attention to detail in the craftsmanship made them pretty old in my estimation. Since she’d hung them here, within customer reach, I couldn’t help but wonder about the few mounted behind the locked glass enclosure.

A set of keys dangled from the arm of a sturdy fairy statuette. Right next to the case.

I met Phro’s amused gaze and bit my lip.

Surely not.

I was reaching for the keys when Blythe came into the room again. She couldn’t have finished the cleansing. Heat crept up my neck when I realized she knew good and well I was about to snoop. I spoke quickly. “You said you had money issues and yet you have all this.” I waived my hand toward the wall and around the room. “There’s expensive stuff in here. Stuff you could sell.”

She nodded. “I plan to. I only just closed the shop.”

“Well, I’ll buy something. I need a weapon,”

“What kind of weapon do you normally use?”

Shrugging, I ran my fingers down a soft, purple feathery thing hanging near my head. I had no idea what it was. My stomach rumbled and I absently patted it. I needed food. “Whatever’s handy.”

“What about guns?”

“Hate ‘em.”

Her eyes lit up. “Really? Me, too.” She took a step closer and we both heard the squish of something not quite solid. Grimacing, she lifted her foot, frowned at the green slime covering her shoe and rubbed the bottom of the peach slipper on a clean spot of the floor. “You know, I would have thought someone in your um…profession, would need one.”

The corner of my mouth went up. “You say that like my profession is prostitution.”

Blue eyes flared wide as her mouth dropped open. Then she laughed.

“Why is that so funny? Do you think I couldn’t get work or something?”

She choked on her laugh, hiccoughed and shook her head. “Oh no. The opposite, in fact. It’s not something… I just can’t see you…” She cleared her throat. “Never mind. So why don’t you like guns?”

I sighed. Partly because I realized I didn’t really want to know why the thought of me as a prostitute was so funny to her and partly because I wasn’t sure how to put my feelings into words. I’d gone round after round about this with Elsa in the past. She had four guns and was always trying to give me one. “Guns just seem too easy—too impersonal.”

“How can killing ever be impersonal?”

“Believe me, it can.” I glanced at the wall of potential weapons before meeting her eyes again. “I’ve seen plenty of creatures kill without a second thought. Taking a life should never be easy. You should have to get close, look them in the eye.”

She pushed up the loose gray sleeves of Elsa’s sweatshirt. “Have you ever killed someone?”

I pointed to the ghoul. Okay, technically, he was bound to come back. His existence alone was going to freak out whoever found him and in the ensuing chaos, he’d probably be dropped on his head at least once. But as of now, he was dead.

Blythe was eyeing the hooves that jutted out past the row of shelves we’d tucked him behind. “So, you consider beings like him and even those demons earlier…someones?”

Tricky question, that one. I took a deep breath and tried to think of the best way to put this. Like the gun thing, it was another really gray area. Not for the first time, I thought about how much easier my life would be if I only saw things in black and white. There were others who tracked down the monsters and killed them just because they considered all monsters to be just that—the very worst definition of the word. But I never killed anything unless I absolutely had to and it was usually in self-defense. Okay, there were a couple of serial killers I’d dispatched but they had been more deserving of death than most of the supernatural creatures I’d come across.

It was what I’d done with Elsa. Track down serial killers. For me, it had been easy. Unsolved murder victims followed their killers until their murder was solved or the killer died. Silent, sad spirits that had looked at me with such entreaty, I’d caved and offed a couple of the deadlier ones. But I’d stopped, discovered it was much better to find the evidence needed to turn over to my sister. Give some closure to the families of the victims.

Regular people—especially the more innocent, sweet ones like Blythe—didn’t need to know how many killers wandered these streets. I suddenly wondered if her new ability to see spirit guides would include ghosts. I hoped not.

“Yeah, I consider anything that breathes a someone. For the most part. There are exceptions, like those demons earlier. I do know that the people they used to come into this dimension were very real and deserve to be avenged. We need to find a way to get to the demons before they come through more.”

“The answer might be in that book, but I still need help translating it. You think Nikolos knows more than he shared?”

“That’s where we’re headed after leaving here. I still need a weapon, though.”

“What have you done in the past when you came upon something stronger than you?”

“She got beat up,” Phro drawled. The goddess was perched on the counter that held all sorts of pretty crystals and bowls of herbs. Seemed the ghoul hadn’t gotten this far into the store. Phro blew Blythe a kiss when the witch jumped and swung around to face her.

I curled my lip at Phro. “I did not.”

She ran one fingernail over her teeth, then tapped it under her eye. “You’ve got a bruise forming there. But don’t worry, it helps to even out all the ones you got from the demon yesterday.”

“I won both fights.”

Phro nodded. “Yeah, and you had a knife with the demon. Your strength might have been good enough to knock that ghoul on his ass, but it won’t be if you run across another one of those Dweller things. So pick a damn knife so you can get some food and stop that annoying rumbling in your gut.”

Blythe giggled. I closed my eyes and counted slowly to ten to calm myself down. One of these days, I was going to find out why the hell I was stuck with her. I ran my hand over the handle of a ten inch curved blade. It felt like bone and the light color suggested it as such. “Is this a scythe?”

“No, it’s a bolline,” Blythe answered.

“Looks pretty wicked. The handle is lovely.”

“It’s not a weapon. It’s for cutting herbs.”

“I know. But it would work as one.”

Blythe shook her head so hard her curls went bouncing all over the place. “No. Never. You can’t use a sacred tool for harm. None of these were meant to be weapons.”

“This will work.”

“Is it really the one you want?”
 

I glanced at the glass case quickly before looking back at Blythe. I opened my mouth to lie, but couldn’t. Something about that deceptively innocent gaze of hers got to me. “I actually want the one in that case. The one with the blood-red ruby in the handle. But I can tell it’s worth more money than I plan to spend.”

She stared at me silently, not even looking at the knife in discussion. Then she moved to open the case and—sure enough—the keys on the fairy’s arm fit. I rolled my eyes.