Demons in My Driveway (11 page)

Having unloaded their prisoners, Kam and Stacy joined me on the porch and the three of us stood with our arms folded, our faces serious. Mom stood to the side, trying not to laugh.

Lionel turned to go, then stopped. “Have I done something to piss you off?”

I tilted my head. “Nope. You’re fine. I appreciate your coming out here.”

He looked doubtful. “Well, okay, then. I guess I’ll get going.”

He opened his door.

“Hey Lionel.” I took a few steps off the porch.

“Yeah?”

“Thanks for coming so quickly.”

“Sure. It’s my job.”

“Yeah, but Petaluma’s not exactly around the corner. So, thanks for answering Kam’s phone call and getting out here so quick.”

I watched his face for guilty twitches, but with his ill-fitting skin, his expressions were hard to read. He wasn’t giving off any guilt energy, either. Maybe I was wrong about him.

“It’s my pleasure, Aegis. Call me if anything new comes up.” His glanced at Pansy, then started the engine and drove off. Mom and Stacy disappeared into the house.

Kam made a disgusted face. “You know, he’s not nearly as good-looking with that new skin on. Guess there weren’t any better looking dead guys in the morgue that night.”

“That’s so disgusting,” I said.

She shrugged. “I’ll try anything once.” She leaned her head toward me and dropped her voice. “Except a mothman. I don’t know how your mom does it.”

My face felt hot. “I’d really rather not think about it.”

“Prude. I’m amazed you and Riley ever managed to get naked together.”

I smacked myself in the forehead. “Shit. I forgot about Riley. He’s going to be pissed that he missed this. Will you call him?”

She gave me a weak stink-eye. She’d been working on it, but hadn’t yet perfected it. “I’ll call him. Wimp.”

I hugged her with one arm. “Thanks. I’ve got to deal with Pansy. And I think he’ll want to be here for that part, at least, so tell him to hurry.”

“He’d hurry faster if you called, you know.” I didn’t need to be an empath to sense her disapproval whacking me over the head with a metaphysical wiffle bat.

I ignored her and walked toward Maurice and Darius. “Garage?”

Darius nodded. “Garage.”

Previously, the cultists who had been captured managed to poison themselves before reaching their destination. Knowing this, Lionel had his guys in the back of his van with the prisoners, and we kept Pansy’s arms tied behind her back so she couldn’t do anything.

I found it highly unlikely whoever was running this cult had provided cyanide tooth caps to its members in case of emergency. They didn’t seem like that sophisticated an operation. Whatever they were doing to open the portals and hypnotize aswangs, they didn’t have MI6 or the CIA backing them up with gadgets and deadly poisons. As long as someone stayed with Pansy at all times and her hands were incapacitated, she should be fine.

Darius took the squat little stone woman from Maurice and tied her to a chair at the back of the garage. I shuddered. I’d hoped we’d never have to do this again. In fact, I wasn’t entirely sure doing it now was a good idea.

Maurice was obviously compromised. He was too close to the situation to interrogate her without bias. Unfortunately, he was the only one who could understand her nonsense speech.

Darius was good at this, but also terrifying. In his mothman guise, he could terrify her, then literally suck the fear out of her through a proboscis tongue I hadn’t known he had until he started to do it on the last guy we had in here.

And for some reason, the bitch hated me. I wasn’t a big fan of hers, either.

Okay, maybe that was the reason she hated me.

“We need to wait for Riley,” I said.

“I agree.” Riley strode in behind me. For him to get here that fast, mom must’ve called him a while ago. Judging by the hard look on his face, he knew I hadn’t asked her to do it.

“Riley, I...” I didn’t know what I was going to say, but I didn’t want him angry with me. Even broken up, it seemed I wasn’t giving him enough thought. I should have called him the minute I saw the portal open.

He ignored me, which hurt worse than if he’d yelled at me. “So, Pansy. How do you want to do this? The easy way?” He gave her a charming smile that would have melted my underwear a few months ago.

She spit on his shoe in response.

“Fine.” His eyes sparked, and his voice took on the terrifying, echoey quality of his reaper persona. “We do it the hard way.”

Chapter Eleven

One of Darius’s inborn talents as a mothman was to induce fear in people. I don’t mean he was scary—though he was. I mean a deep, soul-vomiting fear that defied rationality and wasn’t contingent on actually looking at him. I’d experienced it by mistake, and it had shaken me hard.

Yet, Riley, a human, could be far more frightening using the power of the soul-stone in the ring he wore for reaping souls.

Part of that power came from years of mommy monsters threatening their kiddy monsters with a visit from a reaper if they didn’t behave. I wasn’t sure what the Big Bad Reaper was supposed to do to the kid if he showed up—steal her soul or consume her spirit with his ghastly, flat, human teeth, maybe.

Whatever the story was, I’d seen that fear before when people met Riley. They were preconditioned before he ever ran his finger over the stone in his ring and went all deep-voiced and spazzy-eyed on them.

Pansy was no different. In fact, I’d be willing to bet my favorite yellow beret that Pansy’s mother had been especially prolific with scary reaper stories. Pansy took one look at Riley as he came toward the back of the garage, screamed, then fainted.

Maurice threw his arms in the air and glared at Riley. “What the hell did you do?”

Riley looked stricken. “Nothing. I didn’t even say anything yet.”

Darius laughed, and his wings shook a layer of moth dust on the cardboard boxes next to him. His laughter had a hollow quality to it, coming out of the emptiness of his face. “I’ll get some water.”

I folded my arms and examined the gargoyle woman hunched over in the chair. The ugly polyester pantsuit accentuated her
otherness
, rather than hiding it. I curled my lip in distaste. I understood loving someone so much, looks didn’t matter. A person could see past the pig nose, the carved helmet hair, the buckteeth and the stubby body. Love comes in all shapes and sizes. But, unattractive as I found Pansy to be on the outside, the ugliness inside her far outmatched it. I felt that ugliness sweating from her pores as if her small body could no longer contain so much hatred and viciousness. I couldn’t find a single redeeming quality to justify Maurice having fallen in love with this bitch.

In fact, Pansy was the reason Maurice had broken up with Stacy all those years ago. Stacy was kooky and sometimes a little much to take, but she was beautiful and kind. Okay, beautiful in a monster way, but beautiful, all the same.

Boys were so dumb.

Pansy’s breathing changed. The movement in her chest sped up, but she kept her head down.

Darius had gone for water. I suspected that meant the hose, rather than a glass, but it was probably too soon to threaten her with a cold shower. No reason to wait for him. She was faking.

I nudged her with my foot. “I know you’re awake, Pansy. Sit up.”

She raised her head and shot a hateful look at me. “Lenticular relapse.”

Maurice sucked in his breath as if he’d been slapped. “Don’t you dare say that to her. Don’t you
ever
!”

I debated whether I wanted to know what she’d said, then decided it didn’t matter. “Look, Pansy. I don’t like you. You don’t like me. We both have our reasons—though personally, I think my reasons are far more compelling than yours.”

She muttered something I couldn’t quite hear and certainly wouldn’t have understood if I had, and Maurice took a fuming step toward her, fists clenched.

I held my hand up. “Let it go, Maurice. She doesn’t much matter to either of us. Her only value now is information. Isn’t that right, Riley?”

Riley had placed himself behind Pansy, where she couldn’t see him. “That’s right. And if she cooperates, she can keep her soul.” He was totally bluffing, of course. The only person in the room comfortable with torture of any kind was Darius, and we’d stopped him the last time he tried it. Still, as long as Riley was out of her line of vision she might believe him—without screaming or losing consciousness.

At the sound of Riley’s reaper voice, Pansy stiffened and her breath shook. “Tangerine mothballs furnished the cage.”

Maurice’s eyes grew wide. “She says she’s afraid to talk to us. If she says anything, he’ll find out and come back for her.”

I took a step toward her. “Who are you talking about?”

She frowned and shook her head.

Maurice knelt beside her and placed a gentle hand on her knee. “Look. No one can get to you here. And we’re not going to hurt you, either. But we have to know. For once, do the right thing. Please?”

Her expression softened, and for a moment, I could see a little of what Maurice must have seen in her once. She opened her mouth to say something, then clapped her lips together with the clatter of a rock dropping against a boulder.

Maurice sighed. “How about this. I’ll ask you questions and you can answer yes or no. You don’t have to say anything.”

She appeared to think about it, then nodded once. We all relaxed a little. Maybe this wouldn’t be a wasted effort after all.

Maurice looked at me for directions, and I gestured for him to proceed. He’d gotten her this far. The rest of us were likely to make her hostile again.

I’d thought Maurice’s bias would be a hindrance. Instead, he was the one best equipped to handle his ex-wife.

Riley was the fear inducement. Darius was the muscle.

And I settled in to be the lie detector.

Very little emotion was allowed to come through my filters when I was at home. For one thing, feeling the emotions of others was exhausting, so I needed a break. For another, I didn’t like to eavesdrop on the feelings of my friends and family. That wasn’t cool.

But the feelings of a woman more than likely related to the Aegis killings, and certainly a part of the cult that kept trespassing on my property—she was fair game.

I opened my filters wider and envisioned a cone, wide at my end and narrowing as it grew closer to her. This would ensure I could pinpoint Pansy’s emotions and not pick up residual feelings from the guys around me. Maurice, especially, was probably feeling some powerful emotions under the circumstances. I didn’t want to muddy my perceptions with his baggage.

I had enough baggage of my own with Riley standing there.

Maurice took a deep breath and let it out. “Let’s start with some simple ones. Are you with that group of people they took away?”

Pansy remained silent, but bobbed her head. Since we knew she’d been with them—hell, it looked as if she were leading them—this gave me a baseline so I knew what she felt like when she told the truth.

“Are you all from the Church of Hidden Wisdom?”

She hesitated, then nodded. Truth, though not all of the truth.

Maurice frowned. “The church, but not the church?”

Pansy wrinkled her stony face, confused about how to answer.

I wasn’t sure how Maurice could get an explanation out of her if she wasn’t going to answer in words. But he used to live with her, and he was a pretty good body-language reader.

“A group
within
the Church of Hidden Wisdom?”

Her eyes brightened and she smiled. Her pride was a thick perfume wafting through my narrow beacon. She seemed to think being a member of some secret society within an archaic, mostly forgotten church was an enormous honor.

We knew she was telling the truth. It meshed with what the church’s pastor had hinted at when I’d gone to see him several months back—Pansy’s group was working outside the parameters of the official church.

“Did your group open the portals to the demon and vampire worlds?” His face was nearly as hardened as hers—not easy when his was made of flesh and hers of granite.

She snorted and looked away. Riley nudged her shoulder, reminding her of his presence. The gargoyle went rigid, then shook her head. I tasted truth from her but, again, not the full truth. My best guess was that Pansy wanted to open the portals but couldn’t.

Maurice squeezed Pansy’s knee and softened his voice. “Pansy, was your group responsible for the aswangs? Were you trying to kill Zoey and her mom?”

Pansy sniffed and looked at me from the corner of her eye. Anger boiled toward me in orange waves, then crashed as they were overtaken by shame when we made eye contact. Pansy dropped her head and wouldn’t look at either Maurice or me.

I signaled to Riley, and he untied the gargoyle’s hands. Maurice held them and helped her rub the circulation into her fingers. “Honey, I need you to tell me who’s opening the portals. Who gives you your orders?”

She shook her head. “My ballroom is full of Siamese porcupines and Portobello mushrooms. Farmland isn’t cheap.”

On the bright side, she was speaking again. And whatever she said didn’t feel like a lie.

I touched Maurice’s sleeve. “What did she say?”

He sighed. “Their leader always wore a hood and met with them at night, in shadows. She doesn’t think he even had anything to do with the church.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “I thought it was a religious thing.”

Maurice clutched Pansy’s hands, patience and kindness pulsing from his body. “Why did you do it?”

She glanced at me, this time with more sadness than animosity. “Sometimes the wombat loses. Homeruns are inevitable.” A muddy tear slid down her cheek.

Maurice, whose emotions were always on the surface, looked crushed. “Honey, you know that’s not true. You kicked
me
out.
You
had the affair. I came here because you gave me no place else to go.” He wiped away her tears. “I would have stayed forever.”

Pansy sniffed, nodded, then wrapped her arms around Maurice. The rest of us averted our eyes to give them privacy. They whispered together for some time, and the emotions Pansy gave off were nothing like what she’d had before.

Regret.

Sorrow.

Shame.

I signaled to Riley and Darius to follow me, and we moved away so the two could talk.

When they parted, Maurice called us back, and Pansy gave us all a watery smile. “Anchovies live in a box of marshmallow pops. Parliament.”

Maurice pulled himself to his feet. “She says she’s very sorry. She didn’t mean for things to get so out of hand and hopes someday you’ll forgive her.” He glanced at her and she nodded permission for him to tell us more.

“She said their leader made promises of a better future—a new world where Hidden could go where they pleased without the threat of human discovery. She was angry with me for leaving and blamed Zoey for taking me away.”

Heaven help me, I felt sorry for the little thing. In a way, she’d been a victim in all this. I wasn’t ready to hug her and tell her she was a good person, but I wasn’t as angry with her anymore. Everyone had a story about what made them. For all we knew, Pansy had a terrible childhood or some sort of tragedy in her past.

She touched Maurice’s sleeve with a tentative hand. “Anyone can build a snowshoe from a garden hose.” Her eyes filled with tears. “Fermentation isn’t the only horse in town.”

Maurice patted her hand and nodded. “The leader recruited them all from an anger management group the church was hosting in the basement. She’d been trying to get help, but he showed up one day and offered another solution.”

“Don’t get mad, get even,” Riley said in a low voice. “Nice.”

Again, I felt no lies from Pansy. She was sincere. But I didn’t know what to do with her, either. The rest of her group was locked up, so shouldn’t she be under arrest too? And more importantly, who would be after her now that she’d talked to us?

“Are you in danger, Pansy?” I asked. “We have room for you here.”

Pansy’s eyes widened and puddled with fresh tears. Guilt blew in again like a fog. She glanced at Maurice, then looked away, as if ashamed to meet his eyes. “My symbiotic rock hopper plays the cello with plastic cheese slices.” She stared at her hands.

Maurice swallowed hard. Whatever she said was difficult for him to hear. I felt his heart hurting without focusing on him. “Go,” he whispered. “Get as far away as you can.”

Darius took a step forward to object, but I shook my head. If Maurice wanted to let her go, I wasn’t going to argue. Something in Pansy had changed. I felt it. And I trusted Maurice.

Pansy rose from her chair and walked toward the door. She stopped and turned to look at Maurice over her shoulder, then made her way out into the predawn. Her wings scraped together, then spread from her shoulders. She leaped into the air and was gone.

I walked past the gargoyle’s recently vacated chair and held Maurice’s hand. “Are you okay?”

He nodded. “I’m fine. I have closure now. I finished crying over her a long time ago.”

Darius growled. I’d never heard him make that noise before. “I can’t believe you let her go.”

Riley patted Maurice on the back.

“She thought I stole you from her,” I said.

“Yes.” Maurice sniffed. “She was angry and wanted to hurt us. She’s not mad now.”

Darius folded his arms across his broad chest. “What makes you think she’s not lying so she can go back to chanting at aswangs?”

“You can’t lie to an empath,” Riley said. His voice was quiet. Sad.

I slammed my filters shut before I caught any emotions I’d regret feeling.

Maurice rubbed his arms, as if chilled. “She had to go back home. She’s afraid someone may go after her...boyfriend.” He winced. “She’s going to grab a bag and get out of town with him. Try to keep themselves safe.”

I gestured for the guys to head out of the garage so I could turn off the light. “She should have brought him back here where it’s safe.”

Darius snorted. “She was trying to get you killed here. I don’t think she’s got a lot of faith in the security of this place.”

I shrugged. “I wish her luck, then.”

“So do I,” Maurice whispered. “So do I.”

* * *

We’d all been up since three in the morning. Some, like Maurice and Darius, didn’t need much sleep anyway. The rest of us went back to bed for a few hours. Riley stayed, dozing on the couch. I pictured him keeping one eye open on the window into the front yard, in case another portal popped up.

As far as we knew, the folks responsible for calling forth aswang assassins in our area were all locked up in a cell in Petaluma. We had to hope that was all of them, anyway.