Fever (3 page)

‘Luke wants to stay here. With you?’ Jess burst out the second Eve hung up.

‘Yeah. The public health people don’t want healthy people and people with the flu in the same house,’ Eve answered.

‘His dad. That part flew out of my head for a second. Poor Luke. I can’t even imagine. I don’t want to even imagine …’ Jess shook her head.

‘I know. I couldn’t even come up with something decent to say to him. What are you supposed to say to someone whose father is that sick?’ Eve asked.

‘It’s more about being there than about what you say, I think,’ Jess answered. ‘It’ll be good for him to stay with you. Are you freaking about it though?’

‘A little,’ Eve admitted. ‘Of course I want him to come if he needs a place to stay. It’s just weird having a guy in your house.’

‘A guy you like,’ Jess corrected.

Eve didn’t confirm or deny. And she still hadn’t quite figured out if she was excited or anxious. ‘I’m going to go ask my mom if it’s OK.’

She crossed the patio, opened the sliding glass door, and headed into the living room. Her mother was watching CNN with the air conditioner cranked.

‘Mom, Luke just called. His dad is sick – Flu X – and so Luke needs a place to stay. Would it be OK …?’

She didn’t have to say anything else. ‘He’s welcome as long as he needs to be here,’ her mother told her. ‘No one healthy should be in the same house as someone who’s sick.’ Mrs Evergold stood up and turned off the TV. ‘I’ll go get the guest room ready.’

Eve returned to the back yard and her lounger.

‘She said yes, of course,’ Jess said.

‘Of course,’ Eve answered. She’d never doubted that would be her mother’s response. She picked up her iPhone and hesitated.

‘It’s going to be all good. You look adorable when you brush your teeth.’ Jess gave Eve’s shoulder a pat.

‘I’m not letting him see me brush my teeth,’ Eve shot back.

Jess held up her hands. ‘OK, OK, I just thought it would be cute, like in
Bring It On
, when Kirsten and Jesse were brushing their teeth together and taking turns spitting.’ Jess had seen every cheerleader film ever made. She considered it her cheerleader duty. Which meant Eve had seen all of them too.

‘Good scene. Still not letting him see me spit,’ Eve answered. She took a deep breath and called Luke. He answered on the first ring. ‘OK, get your stuff and come here,’ Eve told him. ‘Mom says you can stay as long as you need to.’

‘Great. That’s great. Thanks. I’ll be over in a couple of hours,’ he replied. ‘I want to make sure my dad’s nursing team gets here and all. You know, it’s good that I’m staying with you instead of one of the guys. It’ll make it easier to talk about
stuff
.’

Eve instantly knew what he meant. She was getting almost as telefriendic – a word she and Jess had come up with for friends being able to read each other’s minds – with Luke as she was with Jess. ‘You’re thinking that the plague is demon related,’ she said.

An expression of alarm flashed over Jess’s face. ‘It’s the flu!’ she cried.

‘Wait, I’m putting you on speaker. Jess has to hear or she’ll implode.’ Eve turned to Jess. ‘If you see my mom coming out here, tell me.’

‘You think we’re in the middle of a demon plague?’ Jess exclaimed. ‘Luke, the doctors are all saying it’s a mutant strain of the flu. They’re working on a vaccine. It’s bad, but it’s not demon bad.’

‘Tell that to my dad,’ Luke snapped. ‘Sorry,’ he said immediately. ‘I’m just—’

‘Worried about him,’ Jess supplied, her voice tender.

‘Yeah,’ Luke answered. ‘And maybe I’m just wanting it to be a demon thing because it would give me – us – something to fight. I hate not being able to do anything for my father.’

‘We get that,’ Eve told him. ‘It definitely went through my mind that the plague might be connected to a demon.’

‘It did?’ Jess exclaimed, outraged. ‘And you didn’t tell me?’

‘We were both already scared,’ Eve said. ‘And pretty much right away I decided all those doctors couldn’t be wrong about the epidemic being a weird strain of the flu.’

‘So why did you think demons at all?’ Jess asked.

‘Because it’s Deepdene, home to a portal to hell,’ Eve said. ‘And the last two times really bad stuff happened it was because a demon came through the portal. Plus I was thinking how the first demons caused mental illness and that maybe a demon causing physical illness was a possibility.’

‘Exactly,’ Luke jumped in. ‘And then there’s the bizarre weather. It’s the hottest temperature on record for March in the Hamptons, by almost fifteen degrees. It’s nearly a hundred today. The record for the beginning of March is eighty-three.’

Jess pressed one hand over her face. ‘Demons,’ she whispered.

‘Maybe not,’ Eve said. ‘I think the first thing we have to do is check the portal to make sure it’s still blocked.’ The wargs – demon-faced hellhounds – hadn’t come back through the electric spider web that she’d woven over the opening, so she’d assumed it was holding.

‘Good idea,’ Luke told her. Jess nodded in agreement. ‘But even if your net is still in place, it doesn’t mean a demon couldn’t come through. Maybe it’s only strong enough to keep out lesser demons, like the wargs. Maybe a more powerful demon could stroll right through, no problem.’

‘You are definitely not an orange popsicle,’ Eve muttered.

‘What?’ Luke asked.

‘Nothing,’ Eve said. But he so was not a beam of lickable sunshine right now. He was more like a dark cloud. She got it though. She could see why he’d want something to fight to save his dad. ‘Let me check the portal first. Jess and I will go over right now. When you get here, we can decide what to do next.’

‘Sounds good. Thanks. See you guys soon,’ Luke replied.

‘See you.’ Eve snapped her phone closed and stood up. ‘Feel like taking a walk to the edge of hell?’ she asked Jess.

‘Absolutely,’ her friend answered, tying a sarong around her hips and pulling on the oversized white shirt she liked to use as a cover-up. Eve slipped into the T-shirt and denim shorts she’d had on when they first came out to the back yard.

‘And then we have to go shopping,’ Eve announced.

‘For new pyjamas, right?’ Jess knew her way too well.

‘I’ve been needing some,’ Eve said.

‘Right. It has nothing to do with the fact that Luke’s going to be sleeping over,’ Jess teased her.

‘Of course not!’ But Eve didn’t even manage to convince herself, never mind Jess. Luke was sleeping over. Which meant that they might run into each other in the hallway or the bathroom or on a midnight-snack fridge raid. Demon investigation might be advisable. But pyjama prep was
mandatory
.

A shudder rippled through Eve, and she shivered as she and Jess stepped onto the wildly overgrown lawn in front of the Medway mansion. Make that the
remains
of the Medway mansion – the place was nothing more than piles of brick and masonry scattered about like a giant had stomped on them. One of the worst nights of her life had happened in that house, back when it was still standing, and just to put the cherry on top of the horribleness, it was a night that had started out feeling like one of the best.

Mal – gorgeous, sexy Mal – had invited Eve over for dinner, a dinner he was cooking just for her. It had been so insanely romantic. Until she realized that Mal was in fact Malphas, a Prince of Hell, and she’d had to use her power to blast him into a few wisps of smoke.

‘Thinking about Mal?’ Jess asked, being telefriendic, as usual.

‘Malphas,’ Eve corrected her. She preferred to use his true name, his demon name. Not the name they had all known him by at school. ‘And, yeah, I was. I still can’t believe I dated a demon.’

‘Why not? He was unbelievably cute. Pretty much every girl in school wanted to go out with him,’ Jess reminded her. ‘It’s not like he walked around smelling like brimstone – whatever brimstone smells like – with horns sprouting out of his head. You didn’t know he was a demon.’

‘Actually, he did always smell. Like wood-smoke,’ Eve said. ‘Not brimstone. Or maybe that’s how brimstone smells?’ She frowned. ‘I smelled wood-smoke when the wargs were out too.’ She gave a long sniff. ‘But right now, nothing.’

‘Another reason to think the plague is a virus or something,’ Jess said.

‘Come on. Let’s do this, then it’s shopping time.’ Eve wanted to shop, but even more, she wanted to get away from ruins of the Medway manor and the portal. She grabbed Jess’s hand and pulled her towards a gothic stone arch. The portal, the only part of the mansion that hadn’t crumbled when Eve had finished Malphas.

They stopped a few metres away. ‘Anything could be over there,’ Jess whispered.

She was right. Who knew what was on the other side, invisible to their eyes. Any one of the creatures from hell could be crouched there, waiting for a chance to come through.

Eve nervously flexed her fingers, ready to blast her power if she needed to. Jess noticed and asked, ‘Are you sensing something?’

‘Nuh-uh,’ Eve reassured her. She needed to get closer to the portal to check that her web of power was still in place. Until she touched it, it would remain hidden.

Luke had cleared most of the rubble in front of the arch when they’d first discovered it, so it was easy to walk up to the portal. When she was a breath away from it, she tried to ignore the words carved into the stone – words that she could read easily even though Luke and Jess said they looked like hieroglyphics to them.

Apparently one of the bonuses of being the Deepdene Witch was that Eve could understand Demonese. The words were basically just instructions to the Medway family about how they had to open the portal every hundred years. Helena, a girl in their year at school, had been the most recent descendant of Lord Medway. She’d opened the portal and let the hellhounds into Deepdene, thinking she could control them. Instead, they’d destroyed her, ripping her to shreds.

Looking at the words reminded Eve of how different she was now that she had grown into the witchiness she’d inherited from her great-great-multiple-great-grandmother.
OK, Ms Superwitch, get to it
, she thought.

Eve reached out and tried to put her hand through the arch. Things on the other side looked normal, just like she was staring through an open doorway. But as soon as her fingers touched the air within the archway, a spark flew out, sending faint, fuzzy golden lines crisscrossing all across the opening with a series of crackling sounds.

She looked over her shoulder at Jess. ‘Does it seem—’

‘Different,’ Jess said. ‘Yeah. In a weaker kind of way. The lines are fuzzy and they weren’t before.’

‘They’re more translucent too,’ Eve added. ‘But it’s still working. I can’t put my hand through, so the other side should be blocked too.’ She frowned. ‘I don’t like that it’s fading, though. I want to try to juice it up some more.’

Eve closed her eyes, trying to remember what it felt like when she’d created the web the first time. Her power had felt softer somehow, warm rather than hot. When she attacked demons it felt scalding, although the heat didn’t bring her any pain.

She focused on gathering her power together. Her hair began to gently undulate around her face, as if she was underwater. Her skin started to tingle, her tongue and the backs of her eyes too.
It’s time
, she thought, and released the power.

Rays of golden light began to flow from the tips of her fingers. Eve pressed her hands against the portal arch, feeling the carved markings against her palms. The stone was cold, even though the day was sweltering, but it began to warm as Eve’s power entered it.

‘It’s working,’ Jess said softly as the golden strands of the web grew brighter and crisper.

Eve didn’t let go of the arch. As she continued to fill it with her power, more rays of light were added to the web, weaving over and under the ones that had already been there, until the portal opening looked like it was completely covered by a dense golden tapestry.

With a sigh of satisfaction, she pulled her hands away. The golden light slowly faded, but Eve knew that the opening to the portal was still completely covered.

‘Can I just say that you have moments of total awesomeness?’ Jess asked.

Eve smiled as she turned towards her friend. ‘You too.’

‘Well, yeah,’ Jess agreed with a wink. ‘Now on to the stores!’

Before Eve could take a step, she heard a dull
thunk
. She jerked her head towards the sound, and saw a chunk of stone from the ruin of the dovecote roll into the high weeds. ‘That scared me to—’

Another sound interrupted her, a softer sound, but one that also came from the crumbled stone remains of the nearby dovecote. Jess gave a yelp of surprise when a man stumbled into sight. He wore several layers of clothes, despite the heat, all stained and dirty.

‘What are you doing here?’ Eve blurted, although she and Jess had no right to be on the Medway property either.

The man didn’t answer. Jess and Eve moved closer together. He lurched towards them, then veered away, heading for the front gate, muttering as he went. His words were so slurred and raspy Eve couldn’t understand them.

‘Do you think that guy is living here?’ Jess asked when he’d disappeared from sight. ‘I mean, do you think he’s homeless?’

‘Maybe,’ Eve said. ‘He was really skinny under all those clothes, and it didn’t seem like he’s had access to a shower in a good while. What I want to know is – did he see anything?’ She wiggled her fingers in front of Jess’s face to indicate her power.

‘He didn’t act like he had,’ Jess said. ‘He wasn’t really staring over here or anything.’

‘But if he was back there behind all those stones from the dovecote, he might have,’ Eve answered.

‘Did you get a sniff of him when he headed by?’ Jess said. ‘Eau de Beer mixed with garbage. I hope he hasn’t had to go dumpster-diving to eat. That would be so sad.’

‘He did smell like he’d been drinking,’ Eve agreed. ‘Not good, but a lot better than Eau de Wood-smoke.’

‘So much better. And if he did happen to see something – well, he probably walks around seeing groovy glowing lights all the time,’ Jess said. Eve pulled out her cell. ‘Giving Luke an update?’ Jess asked.