Present Day
“Utah, huh?” Tre Sullivan said thoughtfully as he turned a slow circle next to their stalled, smoking rental van.
The group of eight travelers had been standing in the Southwest heat for approximately twenty seconds and every single one of them had already sweated through their shirts. The sun was a bright-hot marble turning slowly in the sky. The landscape was burnished and alien, with white cliffs rising behind them, slashed through with rocks as red as Mars. Across the road was a clump of single-story homes. They were weather-beaten and pale from the sun, sitting atop grass as green and out of place as AstroTurf.
Even the blacktop of the highway had been bleached a defeated gray. There was not a tree in sight. As if to make up for the astonishing lack of leaves, the sky was a breathtaking periwinkle. And as flat as the land was, with the exception of the cliffs, there was a hell of a lot of sky.
“It’s a shame we broke down here. I think we’re only about a mile or two from our destination,” Celia said as she studied the map an inch from her nose. Celia was no ordinary-looking woman with her chest and shoulders covered with tattoos, her septum piercing glinting in the sun and her dark hair shaved into a pompadour fade that she’d recently bleached out to a white blonde. And it was no ordinary map that she studied. This map was a bit more… interactive.
The way it had done three times before, the map—just like its six identical versions owned by others in the group—had wiped itself clean, only to reveal a new destination that the group was then obliged to find. This month’s destination was officially Middle-Of-Nowhere, Utah.
“Maybe we should call Triple A?” Caroline wondered out loud, shading her eyes as she tracked a plane across the gorgeous, expansive sky. She lost her balance and accidentally stumbled into Tre’s arms. He didn’t mind one bit. Tre’s coppery hair glinted in the unforgiving sun as he wrapped his arms around her, relishing the heat and sweat of her. It had taken a lifetime to be able to claim her as his woman and Tre wasn’t wasting another second.
“Not a bad idea,” Jack agreed, squinting his eyes against the sun and adjusting his formerly blue baseball cap against his blond hair.
Thea, Jack’s woman, couldn’t help but notice that he strangely seemed to fit in here, amongst this rugged landscape. On the other side of things, her black hair and milk-white skin most decidedly did not fit in here. She was more at home in the grays and soft greens of Montana where she’d grown up. When all this was over, that’s where she and Jack would return together.
“Fuck, it’s hot,” Tre complained, unsticking his sweaty shirt from his chest. “I blame you for this. And you.” He pointed first to Jack and then to Martine, who stood stoically off to one side of the group, the way she always did. Her usual outfit of black spandex everything hid her sweat, but she couldn’t hide her surprise at Tre’s words.
“Why?” she asked, at the same time Jack said, “Me?”
“Well,” Jean Luc said, stepping up behind Celia and dropping a kiss on her blonde pompadour. He towered over her, his athletic frame roughly the width of two normal-sized earthlings. “I figure, just like Tre does, that this destination must be your fault. Process of elimination.” He nodded his head toward Martine and Jack.
“Ah,” Thea said, thinking out loud. “Michigan had a connection to Celia and Tre. Florida had a connection to Jean Luc and Caroline. Montana was me and…” she trailed off, her face suddenly looking as if she smelled something rotten on the wind.
“And me,” Arturo said dryly, stepping out of the shadow of the van and into the sun. Even with the bright light directly on him, his face had more shadow than not. It was his intense bone structure, his dark eyes and darker hair. He absorbed light like a strip of black velvet. He generally absorbed good humor as well. He lingered on the outskirts of the group just like Martine did. But who could blame him? This group of mortals was almost entirely a joke to him. Here they were, on their little adventure, just thinking that if they tried hard enough, they could go ahead and beat the demon. They had no idea what they were dealing with. And none of them were apparently smart enough to realize that the two people in the group who did know what the hell they were dealing with, he and Martine, were squarely pulled away from all the ghastly camaraderie they were all so determined to engage in.
Arturo pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. Sometimes he exhausted himself.
“Right,” Thea continued on, as close to ignoring Arturo’s toxic presence as she was humanly capable of doing. “So, that means that Utah must have some connection to Jack and Martine?”
Jack peered at Martine for a minute before he just squinted his eyes and shrugged his shoulders. “Not particularly. I mean, I’ve been through this country a time or two. Camped over at Bryce Canyon when I was a kid…” he trailed off for a second, lost in a memory. “But yeah. Nothing particularly important about Utah for me.”
“Me neither,” Martine chimed in. As a celestial being who was primarily made of light and who also had the ability to shift into a hawk, Martine wasn’t generally earthbound. She’d traveled to almost every corner of this blue earth. She’d been to Utah before as well, but couldn’t think of any reason why she’d be particularly summoned here. It touched her, though, that they still thought of her as part of the group.
Especially when it had been recently revealed that she wasn’t actually part of the original seven. Nope. They’d detached Arturo from his demon master and boom! He was the seventh soul now. And Martine was… basically a hitchhiker.
The demon was after the group of seven, she was after the demon. It made sense, in a logistical way, that she’d stay with them. She worried though that it wasn’t logic that had her lingering on the side of the blistering hot highway, watching their van overheat. She worried it was emotion. She knew she couldn’t afford to get any more emotionally involved with this group. If anything happened to them it would inevitably weaken her. Which would weaken her ability to destroy the demon, which would put more innocent lives in danger.
Ugh. Sometimes she exhausted herself.
“I’ll shift and see if I can’t find our destination.” Martine tossed her small pack onto the red dirt road and stepped behind the van as she started slicking her clothes off her body. The group was very comfortable with male nudity, considering each and every one of the males was a shifter. They had to get naked all the time. But Martine was the only female shifter and it seemed that the group still hadn’t quite gotten the hang of nonchalance when she was skinning out of her skivvies.
She noted, as she peeled out of her black spandex attire, that every set of male eyes averted from her—Jean Luc staring hard at a blank phone, Jack squinting into the distance, Tre whistling and pretending to study a loose pebble at his feet—except for one. Arturo. He lazed against the car, his arms crossed over his chest, and watched her with those dark eyes. His expression gave absolutely nothing away. She stared right back. Unashamed and unabashed at her nakedness.
She kept that eye contact when, in one heated breath, she’d shifted into her hawk form and swooped into the air. She easily rode the thermal air pockets, rising up from the baked ground and off into the direction they were headed.
The star on their maps was actually further into the park, somewhere within Bryce Canyon and its strange, Dr. Seuss-like pillars of red rocks, but they’d rented an Airbnb as close as they could get without having to camp. So they were staying along the edge of the park, on private land.
The group watched the sky swallow up Martine’s hawk with an uncomfortable tension zinging between them all. They didn’t like to be separated. Even for the time it took to travel to the grocery store, or for one of them to go for a solitary run or walk. They knew that this whole mess was meant for all of them as a group. Watching one of them fly off into heaven was a distinctly worrisome feeling.
They didn’t have to wait long, though. She swooped back over the ridge, her brown feathers a million shades of amber as she banked hard and shifted on the descent. She landed, naked as a jaybird, and breathless from the flight. She immediately wiggled into her underwear and cami.
“Decent,” she called and the men turned back around. “We’re not far, actually. Ten-minute walk around that ridge. Our place is huge. It has… a lot of character.”
“Great. Just what you want from an Airbnb,” Celia said dryly. “Character.”
“I say we hoof it,” Thea chimed in. “We’ll call Triple A from the house and have them tow the van. I’d rather walk toward shade and water than go full on bacon out here in the sun.”
“Seconded,” Tre agreed, hitching his bag onto his back and taking Caroline’s rolling suitcase from her hand. He knew she could drag it all the way there. He just didn’t want her to have to. Call him old fashioned or whatever, he got a kick out of being chivalrous, considering he’d never imagined he’d love somebody enough to wanna be chivalrous.
The group made the trek. It was ten of the most blindingly hot, sweaty, and thirsty moments of any of their existences.
“Believe it or not,” Jack called to the group, “come sundown, it’ll be dead cold out here.”
“Really?” Caroline asked, wonder in her voice.
“Yeah. The rocks’ll hold heat for a few hours, but the air will have a real bite. We won’t even have to turn the air conditioning on.”
The group turned the final corner toward their house and came to a full halt.
“Yeah,” Celia said. “Somehow I don’t think air conditioning is gonna be the thing we have to worry about.”
They all gaped at the ‘mansion’ they’d rented to stay in for the next month. It seriously looked like four different houses all stapled together. One side was an adobe style ranch house painted a burnt orange. The other side was a sort of bungalow style with a big porch, painted bright New Orleans style colors. Then, as if they’d been plunked there from the heavens, in the back of the house rose two separate two-story additions. One was all glass and modern metal and the other was, inexplicably, in the style of a real-life gingerbread house. It was a Pepto-Bismol pink with trim like frosting on a cupcake.
“There… are no words,” Jean Luc finally said, the first one of them to speak as they gaped at the architectural monstrosity.
“The address is right,” Celia said in confusion. “But this is not what the pictures looked like on the website.”
“You think the architect was a schizophrenic?” Thea asked, utterly bemused.
“Either that, or he had four houses handy that he could just, you know, slap together.” Tre sandwiched his hands together.
“Well, I love it!” Caroline enthused, taking her bag from Tre’s hand and venturing up the driveway. “It’s so whimsical! And we’ll definitely never forget it.”
***
Arturo, though technically a human, had never felt less human than when he was wandering through the rental house an hour later. He could hear the delighted, outrageous laughter from down the hallways. The group was roaring with laughter and disbelief at every new room they discovered in the strange house.
“Dibs on NOT having this room,” Tre called from somewhere in the house. “Too much… kitten stuff.”
Indeed, Arturo had already passed up that room himself. He’d also passed up the room that was exclusively decorated in orange velvet and the room that had seemed to have some sort of Candyland theme. Twenty-first century humans were weird. Arturo felt an unexpected stab of nostalgia for his life of several centuries ago. It had been a different continent, a different time. He supposed that antibiotics was a reasonable trade for the fact that the bedroom he’d chosen was plastered in posters of some sort of boys’ singing group.
He didn’t particularly care. He’d chosen the room because it was dark and half submerged underground, part of the sub-basement. There was only a single, thin window at the top of the ceiling and the pervasive, comforting scent of soil.
Arturo tossed his small rucksack of things on the bed and turned to explore the house. He veered away from where the humans were hooting and making noise down a more quiet hallway. Instantly, he was in the glass section of the house. The walls were floor-to-ceiling glass and the sweeping landscape was a burnished red in almost every direction. He turned to head back the way he had come when the ceiling creaked above him.
Arturo found the stairs and turned the corner at the top of them to step into a wide bedroom. The walls, the ceiling, everything was glass. It was like a bedroom set inside a greenhouse. In fact, there were plants scattered in the corners and on a set of shelves lining one window. Against the only real wall in the whole room was a large white bed. Across the bed was a punishingly bright shaft of sunlight. And in that shaft of sunlight was Martine. Her strawberry hair was spilled across the white comforter, her eyes closed, and her hands palm up.
Arturo had to squint to see through the brightness, but, for a moment, he almost couldn’t make out the line where her skin ended and the sunshine began. It almost looked as if she were dissolving away into the brightness.
“Figures you would choose this room,” Arturo said from where he leaned against the doorjamb. He had the strangest desire to destroy her peaceful, beautiful moment. And he couldn’t exactly have said why.
She cracked one of those celery-green eyes at him and just stared for a moment. “Let me guess. You chose the darkest, most depressing room this place has to offer?”
He shrugged and strolled into the room, inspecting one plant and the next. “Dark and depressing is a good look for me.”
She snorted. “If you say so.”
“You don’t think so?” He turned his back to the view of the landscape toward the view of Martine sprawled across her bed.
“You forget. I knew you before you were working for the devil. I know what actually looks good on you. And it sure wasn’t this.”
Her words irked him. And disturbed him. He didn’t like remembering who he’d been as a mortal. What his personality had been like. It didn’t matter either way. He’d been this dark and twisted version of himself for centuries. There was no going back. And there was no reason to waste time remembering that he used to have a sense of humor. A passionate side. A heart.
“I remember what you were like then as well,” he told her. He wasn’t sure if he was wanting to get the spotlight off of himself, or if he was trying to wound her. He wasn’t proud of either alternative.
She was quiet. She didn’t take the bait. It irritated him.
“You were exactly the same as you are now,” he told her caustically. “Lonely. Just skilled enough to keep this game going on and on. But never skilled enough to actually slay the demon.”
Martine did nothing but watch him with those steady green eyes of hers. She said nothing. Eventually, she sat up, and her hair sparkled in the sunlight. There was much more gold than he ever would have guessed.
Looking at her stirred something in Arturo’s gut and it hurt. It was an old feeling. Ancient. And it was painful to experience it.
He strode toward the door of her room but paused there, his chin over his shoulder. “Why haven’t you shown them what you can really do?”
In a rare show of temper, she lifted her hand in a slice across the air. A ball of glowing golden energy flung across the room toward Arturo. He barely had time to manifest his own blue energy to deflect the golden ball. Their mixed energy turned a spring green and was gone.
“Be gone, devil,” she said to him.
And he disappeared through the door.