Chapter Thirteen – Carter

 

“You okay?” I asked as Lucy’s eyes fluttered open.

I hovered over where I’d laid her on the bed, fanning her face.

I couldn’t believe I’d been so stupid as to think that turning into a bear in the hotel room was a good idea!

The whole time I’d been scooping her up from the floor and trying to wake her up, I’d cursed myself in a steady litany of less than pleasant words. God, I’d made such a mistake doing this to Lucy, springing my true nature on her in such a way.

But now, she was back in the land of the waking, her big, beautiful eyes open and peering up at me. “Hey,” she said airily. “Wow, that was a crazy dream.”

“Yeah?” I asked, reaching down, brushing a stray piece of hair from her cheek.

“Yeah,” she agreed, turning her face to follow my finger as I let it linger for just a second longer. “I dreamed I came out of the bathroom, and this big brown bear was sitting here in the room, just staring at me. And then, when I came back out, you told me it was actually you. That I hadn’t imagined anything, and you really were a bear.”

I sucked in my lips, like I was trying to swallow them, and glanced away from her eyes. This was not going as planned.

She must have sensed what I was feeling, though, and I heard her suck in a sharp breath. “Oh my God,” she whispered as she went to sit up. “It wasn’t a dream, was it?”

I leaned back, getting out of her way so she could be upright without my crowding. “Sorry,” I whispered, shaking my head. “No.”

She slid her legs off the edge of the bed and tried to put them on the floor. From where she was sitting, though, they hung just short of the edge. She leaned forward, tightly closing her eyes.

“Lucy?” I paused, licking my lips. “You okay?”

She held up a hand towards me. “Just give me a second. This is, uh, a lot to process. A lot.”

“Trust me,” I replied with a little smile. “I know.”

And I did. Just because you grow up as an oddity, that doesn’t mean you’re suddenly aware of the wider, weirder world around you. There’s not some orientation they give you when you’re suddenly able to shift into a bear at will. Hell, even my father didn’t know much of anything about the world around us.

The news that vampires were real, demons were real, banshees, and, hell, even other kinds of shifters were all actually real? That knowledge had more or less knocked me on my ass, too.

“Just take your time, okay?”

She leaned forward, still doing her breathing technique I’d heard through the door just a few minutes earlier. Rocking a little, her head tilting, her eyes closed. Finally, without opening her eyes or turning towards me, she spoke. “How long was I out?”

“Less than a minute.”

Lucy nodded to herself as she bit the corner of her lower lip, her brow furrowed in concentration. She went to say something, but stopped herself, closing her mouth.

I didn’t say anything. She needed time. She needed to move at her own pace. Even if, as far as I knew, time was running out. It didn’t matter. I needed her calm, collected, and accepting of what was going on. And, of course, all the information I was about to lay on her.

After a few moments of calm breathing, she opened her eyes again and turned to me. “You’re a bear? Like, really a bear?”

“We’re called shifters,” I replied, nodding. “At least, that’s what we all call ourselves at the agency. I don’t know if that’s really our name, but that’s what we use. It does the trick, I guess.”

“The agency?” she asked.

“We really are private security,” I replied with a shrug. “We do normal investigations and stuff, too, not just this kind of thing.”

“And, by that, you don’t mean fire investigations, do you?”

I slowly shook my head. “No. Not exactly.”

Nodding to herself, she looked away from me. “That’s what I thought.”

“Are you okay?” I asked, reaching out to put a hand on her shoulder.

She tensed at first, but then relaxed as she raised her own, much smaller, hand on top of my mine. “Yeah. This is just crazy, that’s all. Absolutely crazy. If you’d told me all this six weeks ago, or even last month, and I’d seen the whole bear thing, I don’t know what I would have thought or done.” She turned to look at me, her lips pressed into a firm, grim line. The kind of determined line that could stop an advancing army in its tracks. “Now, since Cassidy and the others?”

I squeezed her shoulder a little. Not too tightly, but enough to show her I understood. Losing a friend to all this was tough. The toughest thing you could imagine, really. And, on top of that, to have the supernatural world revealed to you right after? I couldn’t imagine what she was going through. “You believe me, then?”

She nodded. “Of course I do. Seeing might as well be believing, right?”

I grinned a little. “Something like that, yeah.”

She took a deep breath and sighed again, nodding as she did. “All right, you said you do private security, right? But you do this on the side? What is…this?”

“Hunting,” I replied. “We kill things like vampires and demons, and put angry spirits and ghosts to rest.”

With each creature I added to the list, her eyes widened more and more, till they were the size of dinner plates. “Demons?” she whispered, turning to face me. “They’re real?”

“Well, we call them demons,” I explained. “Because they clearly come from someplace else, and they love to torment people, and they do things as favors for people who…make deals with them.”

She looked forward, off into the distance like she was staring out to some point a thousand yards away. “If demons are real, does that mean angels are, too? Or the soul?”

I shrugged. When I’d first joined up with Col. Harrington and the PRB, I’d thought about this a lot. Or, rather, things like it. How much did we really know about the supernatural world? If it was as much as we did about the natural, there was still plenty that was undiscovered. “Never ran across an angel before. Doesn’t mean they’re not real, though. You thought I wasn’t real for your entire life, and that didn’t stop me from existing. Why should my not believing in angels be any different in the grand scheme of things? And, as to souls, I don’t know. I really don’t. There’s still a spirited debate about ghosts, and what they actually are. Are they just psychic impressions? Are they souls that have been forced to wander? No one really knows.”

She smiled and nodded. “Yeah, I think I see what you’re saying.” She paused, then got a weird look on her face, almost something like a sense of wonder. “Wait, let me get this straight. So, if all this stuff is real, the vampires and the demons and, you? I mean, shifters. Does that mean magic is real, too?”

I took a deep breath. “Yes, but it’s really, incredibly dangerous.”

She shifted on the bed, tucking one leg up beneath her as she twisted her whole body to face me. “Do you know anyone who does it? Like a magician?” she asked, waggling her eyebrows.

I laughed a little as I ran a hand down my face. “Yeah,” I replied. “I do. She’s not what you’d expect.”

“Does she use a wand?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know, to tell you the truth. And she likes to be called a witch, I think.”

“Really? How about a broom, then?”

“She drives a Prius,” I said with a laugh. “But, don’t you think doing all this other stuff isn’t time-consuming enough? I go and hunt these creatures, and do other work. Tabitha deals with the magic stuff, and we deal with everything else.”

“Tabitha?” she asked, smiling a little. “That’s such a witchy name.”

I laughed as I shook my head. She was taking this much better than I’d thought she would. Well, aside from the passing out on me part. Maybe I had made the right decision, after all.

“Now,” she said, going to stand, “we need to talk about these victims. And whatever it is that’s killing them.”

I nodded. “Demons. Demonic possessions, to be exact.”

She turned back to me, putting her hands on her hips. “You’re completely, one-hundred-percent sure?”

“It’s gotta be,” I said, waving my hand. “Sulfur smell at the crime scene, no immediate sources of ignition or fuel. No apparent source of fuel could lead us to a few other things, like pyrokinetics, or even a direct magical spell, from what Tabitha and Kris are saying. But the smell of sulfur definitely clinches it. There has to be some commonality, either a place they’ve visited or someone they know.”

“Demons?” she repeated, running her fingers back through her hair as her face seemed to drop. “Demons? Jesus, this shit really is real. And sulfur?”

“Brimstone. Know the whole fire and brimstone thing they taught you in church?”

“My dad wasn’t religious so I never really went to church or anything,” she replied, but quickly nodded and waved a hand for me to continue, “but I know what you’re talking about.”

“Well, there’s a reason we associate it with hell. Demons, or what we think of as demons, smell like that. Wherever they go, that stench follows them around.”

She chuckled again as she turned and looked away, walking over to the dark curtains drawn together to cover the windows. I had a sudden urge to go to her, to pull her into my arms, to tell her everything was going to be fine. To hold her, make sure she was safe. I stayed seated on the bed, though, just shaking my head at myself.

Just because I’d saved her life, that didn’t mean she was attracted to me. Not like that.

“They’re really fucking real,” she whispered as she turned back to face me, her eyes uncertain, her lips pressed together in a thin line. She looked like the world might be shaking her apart any minute, and that only pure determination was holding her together.

“Unfortunately, yes.” I rose from my spot on the bed, and she took an uncertain step towards me. “But, it’s something I can handle. We can handle. Together. I promise.”

“You’ve done this before, I’m guessing?”

“Yeah. One time in Montreal three years ago, and another time in Berlin right afterwards. There’s a process to driving them out, but we need to find the people who are affected.”

“So you people have what? A manual, or something, on this?”

“Or something.”

The PRB wasn’t the first to fight the supernatural, and they certainly wouldn’t be the last. All of our research had been built on the work of previous generations trying to do the same thing: keep humanity safe. And the ritual of exorcism was no different.

The ritual was an old one, so old no one really knew who had written it originally. Passed along trade routes out of ancient lands, translated into a hundred different languages. Not the words, but the phonetic pronunciations. Those were what was key, it seemed.

No one knew how, or why, it worked. They just knew it did.

She bit her lower lip, nodding. “Okay. As long as you’ve done this before, I guess.” She paused, laughing a little as she wrapped her arms around herself. “I’m sorry, I still just can’t believe this is all happening. It just seems too wild.”

“Well, you’re handling it pretty all right, as far as I can tell.”

“Think so?”

I smiled. “Yeah. I think so.”

“Guess I should have been an actress instead of a fire inspector, then.” As she spoke, she went over to the bed, beginning to pull files from her briefcase and lay them out on the covers. “You said there has to be some sort of commonality, right? Well, we better start here.”

I picked up one of the files, the one for the woman who had died in the Stop & Shop. Marissa Hawkins.

Together, Lucy and I began to go through the files, desperate to find any new piece of information we could use. Because the sooner we found out why these demons were possessing humans, the sooner we’d be able to put a stop to it.

And maybe, just maybe, find a reason why Phillips Winters wanted me dead.