0.5 Deadly Hearts (2 page)

His reflection looked to be warped in the mirror fragment. How was that possible? It almost looked like there was something bulging on the other side.

He leaned forward until his eye filled the triangle of glass.

A red light flashed in his pupil.

Rich gasped and stepped back, almost tripping on the bath mat. Only James’s hand kept him from falling into the tub.

“Careful, there,” he said.

Rich opened the top button of his shirt and fanned himself. “I’ll test for unusual EMF readings in here. Yes. That’s what I’ll do. Think you could turn up the air conditioner? I’m sweltering.”

James patted him on the shoulder. “Of course.”

He stepped away, and Rich waited until he heard the man’s footsteps retreat down the stairs before slipping into the hall again. He wanted to be as far from that mirror as possible.

There were a lot of haunting symptoms Rich could handle. Falling pictures? Big deal. Footsteps? Yawn. But voices, shattering mirrors, everything about the Faulkner woman—that was all outside Rich’s realm of experience. He didn’t even know how to begin.

He tried to loosen his collar, only to realize that he had already unbuttoned it.

Where were the photos? Rich couldn’t get that out of his head.

He pushed open a door and peered into what looked like a guest bedroom. Queen bed, dresser, silk flowers. It looked more like a hotel than anywhere someone actually lived—there wasn’t a single personal item in sight.

Rich pushed the closet open, and boxes nearly tumbled onto his head. So
that
was where they had shoved everything. He pushed it back with his shoulder and shut the door again.

The air conditioning clicked, and cool air swirled from the vent. Not cool enough.

“Colder,” he rasped, running a hand over the vent. It didn’t relieve his fevered skin at all.

He staggered into the hall again and checked the other room. It was an office. The gold wallpaper had pale squares where photos should have been. Bare circles on dusty shelves marked where knickknacks used to stand.

The Faulkners hadn’t mentioned any problems aside from the photos. So why hide all of their personal effects?

He shut the door and stood in the darkened hall with the heels of his palms pressed to his temples. Someone was moving downstairs, and it sounded like thunder rolling through the house.

Rich didn’t need to pretend he felt something anymore. Energy vibrated over him.

Kill them,
the voice whispered. He knew that voice. It was as familiar as his own.

A single item of furniture sharpened to crystalline clarity in his vision: an antique bureau standing against the wall opposite the stairs. One of the drawers was ajar.

Look inside.

Rich pulled the drawer open. All of the photos that had been removed from the walls were facedown among the napkins and spare cutlery.

He turned one of the frames over. It depicted an older couple, tanned and healthy and smiling. Grandparents?

Liars.

He turned over another picture, and another. Most of the photos were of the same couple—just ordinary studio portraits of two old people hugging each other. They also had a few photos of a teenage girl, kind of a lardass with a pig nose, and that girl with what looked like a boyfriend.

Not a single photo of the so-called Mr. and Mrs. Faulkner.

His knuckles were white as he gripped the side of the bureau, fighting to remain on his feet.

It didn’t make any sense. There was no reason for people to try to fool him like that. He was just a two-bit magician, a guy whose show in front of the Mermaids had been terminated by city police, someone who wanted to wiggle his way into the good graces of rich couples having trouble.

It’s a trap,
the voice hissed, and Rich knew it to be true, even if he didn’t understand why.

The door to the master bedroom at the end of the hall was ajar.

That was where Elise Faulkner had disappeared.

Kill her first.

Rich could imagine closing his hands around the woman’s throat and squeezing as clearly as though it were a memory. The bulging eyes, the frothing saliva. He could imagine the way her body would thrash underneath him.

Kill her.

He pushed the door open and stepped inside as though in a dream.

The door slammed shut behind him.

He whirled and banged his fist into the door, but it didn’t yield to his touch. The handle wouldn’t even jiggle.

Rich flattened his back to the wall and stared around the bedroom. Except it wasn’t a bedroom at all—there was no bed, no dresser, no clothes piled on the floor. The windows were blacked out by heavy drapes. A huge circle had been drawn on the ceramic floor in chalk, and candles burned at each of the four cardinal corners. They were the only light in the entire room.

Elise stood in the center of the circle beside a chair. The oven mitts were gone, baring the kind of black gloves a biker might wear. As he watched, she stripped the pink shirt off over her head. Underneath, she wore a white tank top so tight it might have been painted on, revealing every line of her muscular abs. And her biceps made it look like she could snap him in half with a pinkie.

Without the baggy clothes or oven mitts, she looked less like a cute young housewife and more like something that had crawled out of Hell.

Elise reached back, drew a sword from a spine sheath, and then spun the chair around to face him. “Sit down,” she said, and her tone left no room for argument.

“What’s going on?” He was proud of the fact that his voice only trembled a little bit, even though he felt like he might faint.

“Sit down,” she said, biting out each word.

He was prepared to obey her—shit, with a sword like that, she could tell him to jump off a bridge and he would obey—but his body didn’t budge an inch. His leg warmed and something trickled down his ankle. Rich looked down. His slacks were wet.

Oh, fuck.

“I think I just—”

Elise kicked the chair forward an inch. “You’ll sit down, and you’ll do it fast if you know what’s good for you.” But still, his feet didn’t move. Impatience drew her eyebrows low over her eyes. “You’ll die if I don’t take care of you now. Both of you. So let him sit down.”

Every inch of Rich trembled. “Who are you—I don’t know—I mean, I can’t—”

“Shut up, Rich. I’m not talking to you anymore,” Elise said. She unclasped the chains at her waist and wound them around her wrist, like brass knuckles made of crucifixes and pentacles. “In the name of God, I’m ordering you to sit the fuck down.”

A growl rose from deep within his chest. It was an inhuman sound, like the roaring of a furnace, and it burned in his throat. Sulfur stung his nose. His eyes watered.

Another flash of blinding pain. Rich pressed his fists to his chest as his ribs groaned. Pressure from the inside made them bow outward, straining against his ligaments, and the tension in his sternum was too much.

And then he spoke.

“
Fuck you, exorcist.
”

It wasn’t his voice. He hadn’t even meant to say anything.

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Elise said, passing the sword to the fist that was wrapped with chains. The blade was short, only about two feet, but the curved side looked terrifyingly sharp.

Rich wrapped his arms around himself, and he shook with the effort it took for him to hold his ribs together.

“It hurts,” he gasped in a normal, human voice.

“Yeah, possession’s not meant to feel like tender bunny kisses,” she said, clapping a hand on the back of his collar and jerking him away from the wall. Elise tossed him into the circle.

The room whirled around him, and his face smacked into the tile.

His flesh enflamed instantly. Something popped. A ragged scream tore from him, shaking his skull, and it wasn’t the scream of a single man—it was the scream of a thousand damned souls writhing in fire.

Rich caught a glimpse of flame licking in front of his face.

Then he didn’t see anything at all.

ONE WEEK EARLIER.

Elise realized she
had walked through the pool of blood, and she grimaced. “You owe me a new pair of shoes,” she said, stepping over the arm flopped in front of the TV stand. It was lacerated with a deep gouge from elbow to wrist and perpendicular slices that looked more like tooth marks in the middle.

Lucas McIntyre smiled weakly. “Shoes, huh? How about an IOU on that?”

She bit back a sharp reply. Elise and James were already doing him a favor by stepping in on his investigation in Vegas, so it only seemed fair that he’d be responsible for damages she incurred while on the job. But it wasn’t worth arguing over. Not only did the McIntyres have zero money, but after the Grand Canyon, she was going to owe the guy favors until she died.

When she looked down to see her Doc Martens stained with blood and ichor, it was easy to forget that she was so deep in his debt that she couldn’t see sunlight anymore.

“Don’t worry about it,” Elise said.

James circled the room, studying the murder scene with that look he always got at the sight of dead humans. It was a mix of academic interest and detached horror. Human bodies still bothered him, even after all this time.

Elise nudged the woman’s head over with the toe of her bloodied boot. Looked like she was forty, maybe forty-five years old, with pearl bobs in her ears. There were no bruises at her throat—she had died too soon after the trauma for those to properly develop. But there were burns down her skin, dipping behind her hair, underneath her shirt.

The man, conversely, had been stabbed with a kitchen knife at least six or seven times. His chest and stomach were hamburger meat. One of his hands was still closed over the handle.

“Hell of a domestic disturbance,” Elise said, patting down the woman’s pockets. They were empty. “Why did you call me here for this, exactly?”

McIntyre shrugged. “Does it matter? You were in the neighborhood anyway.”

“San Francisco is the neighborhood?”

“Close enough,” he said. He flipped his knife open and scraped at the crusty material on the woman’s neck. “This isn’t skin. This is sulfur.”

“That’s not normal for domestic violence,” she said as she searched the husband’s clothes. She came up with a business card.
Rich Harris, Priest of the Church of Light
. There was a website and a phone number. Interesting.

“But sulfur residue
is
typical of demonic possession,” James said.

“So you called me here to do an exorcism,” Elise said, tucking the card into her own pocket.

McIntyre grinned. “You’re the best I know.”

“I’m the
only
one you know.”

“Either way, I need you for this. It’s over my head. The demon’s got a funny pattern—it’s wandering all over Vegas and Boulder, and I have no clue how.”

“Incorporeal demons don’t wander,” Elise said.

James put on his reading glasses and gently moved the woman’s chin so he could see the burn marks at her collar. “They don’t wander without vessels.”

Which meant that there had to be a human culprit. Someone like a priest with the Church of Light.

“We need security footage,” Elise said.

She washed her hands in the sink, dried them using the dead couples’ towels, and left with McIntyre to find the security office.

It was nighttime, and nobody was monitoring the cameras that watched the community’s gates. They broke in and stole video files off of the server, which showed the victims in question meeting with someone earlier in the day.

“So he’s got to be our perp,” McIntyre said. “What do you think? Nightmare?”

Elise squinted at his laptop screen. She was seated on a battered couch in his trailer going over hours of boring footage while James flirted with McIntyre’s girlfriend, Leticia. Her giggles drifted from the kitchen. He just couldn’t help himself.

Forcing herself to focus on the screen, Elise played it back one more time. The probable attacker didn’t look like a demon of any persuasion to her. More like some random asshole who fancied himself an exorcist. “How did you find those bodies, exactly?” she asked, rolling Rich Harris’s card between her fingers. She had already looked up his website, but he didn’t have a photo to help her identify him.

“Surge of power,” McIntyre said. “I’m surprised you didn’t feel it. Lots of noise. Whatever’s happening, this thing is getting powerful.”

Elise drummed her fingers on her chin as the video looped back and played again. The man was wearing a fedora and some kind of trench coat—overkill in Las Vegas winter. He looked like an old-school detective. Or someone who wanted to look like that, anyway.

“And you said that there have been other bodies,” Elise said. A purring cat wrapped itself around her ankles, and she reached down to stroke its back.

“Got the articles here.” McIntyre grabbed a box that had been sitting next to the couch. The outside advertised a “family pack” of potato chips, but the inside was all newspaper clippings and printouts. “Counting the folks tonight, that’s twelve dead.”

“Six couples,” Elise said.

“Twelve bodies, six couples. Does that matter?” He tried to hand the box to her. She pushed it away.

“I don’t need to see that. I know what we’re after.” Elise sighed. “We’re going to need to borrow someone’s house. A nice house.”

“Tish’s parents have a place in the suburbs, but I don’t understand why…?”

“Because I’m going to do an exorcism there,” she said.

And that was how Elise ended up playing housewife, of all the goddamn things she could be doing on her visit to Vegas.

Rich Harris crumbled in front of her, breathing fire and stinking of piss, and the only thing Elise could think was,
I could be in San Francisco right now.

Only a few seconds until the prick woke up again. She hauled his limp body into the chair, pulled a face at the wet spot on his pants, and tied his wrists and ankles down.

James slipped through the door and locked it behind him. “I see our trap worked,” he said, pulling the notebook out of his back pocket and flipping to a page in the back.