“That’s not true. Sprites aren’t tied to light or dark, they just are.”
I managed not to roll my eyes, but it was hard. Instead, I helped myself to some pizza. They had more than just the pepperoni I’d smelled and my smile widened in appreciation when I spotted black olives and mushrooms. I eat meat, love meat, but give me a veggie pizza anytime. “Ooh, green peppers too. Heaven.”
One bite of the pizza and my eyes flew open in surprise before I closed them to better focus on the taste.
“Another of my uncles owns the pizza shop,” Rory said. “He uses this special cheese and a homemade sauce.”
“I could eat this every single day.”
He shrugged. “Sometimes we do. I never order the veggie pizza, but my uncle sends it along with the rest. Guess he hopes I’ll eat it. Sarah likes it okay, but it’s usually Brock who eats it.”
“He’s the one who made coffee before, right? With the really big shoulders?” I took another bite, enjoyed the chewy cheese.
Rory nodded. “He doesn’t eat meat.”
“Then maybe your uncle sends the veggie for him.”
“Nah, he eats it because we mostly don’t. His favorite is the cheese and broccoli pizza.” He shuddered and reached out to get another piece of the pepperoni. “That one is in the box at the bottom. You’re welcome to it too.”
Broccoli pizza made me want to hurl. “Thanks for this, by the way. I’ll chip in.” I ate two more pieces before I finally got up to inspect my costume for the concert. It was wrapped in a dry cleaner bag with a big red rooster on it. Odd mascot for a cleaners.
When I pulled the thin fabric off, I couldn’t stop the gasp that escaped my mouth.
Blythe squealed. “Oh, Beri, that is going to look so good on you!”
It wasn’t a skirt. Not entirely. There were slim black velvet pants that didn’t have anything special about them other than the wonderful length. The top of the outfit was something else. Soft black velvet with corset style lacing in the back. There was a central panel of burgundy taffeta underneath the silk cords. The front had antique-silver hooks and the sleeves were fitted with sections that would come together around my thumb and third finger. At the elbow, black velvet fell open to drape the sleeves. The attached hood, also in velvet, had a thin silk lining of burgundy to match the panel on the back. The bottom of the shirt would drape over the sides of my hips.
“Did you rent this?” I glanced over my shoulder at Sarah.
She shook her head. “We had to buy them, but the store owner gave me a trade-out.”
“What kind of trade-out?” The girl was seriously pretty—the bleached, spiky hair suited her elfish features and made her brown eyes look huge and dark.
She looked up at me, frowned. “Not that kind. Ew. He needs some computer security stuff done. I’m kind of known for that stuff around here.”
“We all do computer work in town. She makes more than the rest of us,” Rory added.
“I’ll pay for these. No arguments. You can charge him for your work.” I touched the fabric, stunned over how much I wanted to put it on. Right then.
“The hood is called a Scottish widow. I thought it would help with your…” She waived her hand at my hat. “Though if I had hair like yours, I wouldn’t hide it.”
“It glows, Sarah.” Rory’s fingers flew across his keyboard, his gaze locked on whatever caused bright reflections in his eyes. “Hard for Beri to blend in with what she does.”
Blythe looked at me, lifted her eyebrow in a perfect parody of Phro. I turned, eyed Rory, crossed my arms. “What do you mean what I do?”
He nodded at Sarah and she got up and walked into the back room just as she had the last time I was here. She came back out pretty fast and handed me a folder. I opened it, shock slamming into my chest when I saw the first picture. It was kind of blurry, but there was no mistaking me, or the dweller demon I was fighting. Someone in the hospital the day I’d fought my first one had been well enough to take a picture with their phone.
I held my breath, plopped my butt onto the seat behind me and spread out the other items in the folder. There were printouts from blogs. One had an image of me lugging a huge animal carrier. The blogger had written I worked for the animal control department. I remembered that run. I had told people that story because it gave me an excuse to trap this awful creature called a splinter cat who’d been following me for weeks. Its main food was bees so I became its best friend, but it also liked to ram its head into trees. I hadn’t slept for a week because of all the night ramming, so I’d trapped the thing. But my hat had come off and whoever took the picture had caught my hair glowing in the sun.
There were two more pictures. One caught me walking out of the ocean in my plain black bathing suit, my arms raised to slick my wet hair back. That one made me blush, so I shoved it to the bottom. The last one had caught me on a stakeout. In my old Chevy—the truck I’d had before I bought the Jeep.
My blood ran cold.
“Who took these? I don’t understand.”
The front door opened, sending in a blast of cold air. Brock and Tea Bag and the brunette girl who’d first seen the Kuru-Pira came in. Brock nodded at Blythe and me before heading to the food. He opened the only box that had been shut and promptly swallowed down half a broccoli pizza. I couldn’t help but grimace. I like broccoli a lot—just not on my junk food. The other two kids each grabbed a slice and plopped in front of computers.
Looking at Rory, I held up the image of me fighting the demon. “Explain how you have these.”
“Remember how I told you this used to be a cafe but now it’s just a hangout?”
I nodded.
“We stopped opening to the public because we started up a network. For the Preserve.”
“What network and I remember your uncle mentioning the Preserve. What is it?”
Rory pulled out the chair next to his and patted it. “Might as well sit down and prepare to be awed.”
I grabbed one more slice of pizza, because I was still feeling kind of hollow from the concert, and sat next to him. “Awe me.”
“So, we”—he waved his hand around the room—“noticed strange news clippings popping up then disappearing right after all those people woke up from the SS. You remember the Somatic Slumber, don’t you? Dumbest name for a coma ever, but you know about that, right?”
I glanced at Blythe over my shoulder. Like it was a time I’d ever forget. These kids would probably love to hear what I knew about the Somatic Slumber. That’s what the news called the comas that people went into before I fought the Dweller on the Threshold. He’d been sending demons from his hell dimension through those people. I still had nightmares about them because Elsa had been in one of the comas.
Rory opened a file on his computer and pointed. “There was a Bigfoot sighting here. The next day, the story was gone. Within days, we came across six more breaking-news pieces that all came down in under twenty-four hours.”
“Why is this a big deal? Sounds normal to me.”
“It’s the coming down parts that bother us. I mean, who cares about a silly Bigfoot sighting, right? When I tried to pull up the cache, there was nothing. Luckily, Sarah had copied the entire file and saved it. She does that. She also prints out everything and puts them in file cabinets in the back. She’s got a thing about organization.”
“Comes in handy, doesn’t it?” snapped Sarah.
“Do you have a picture of the Bigfoot?” I asked.
He scrolled.
I squinted at the grainy image. “Looks like a monkey.”
“See this?” Rory pointed.
Horror froze my lungs when I saw its hand was wrapped around a leg. A human leg. One that looked small in comparison and one that wasn’t attached to a body.
“We think it’s a mono grande. Nobody has ever been able to prove their existence, but someone wanted that picture taken down fast and knew enough to erase its presence completely from the Net. We noticed a pattern of this happening and started saving any strange news clips that came up. The good ones all started disappearing.”
“So that’s how you found the ones of me? A couple of those were from before the SS.”
“Actually, a friend of mine in Florida sent those. He was the one who accidentally found that picture of you fighting a demon. Is that in a hospital?”
“It was.”
“Anyway, he sent that and we got curious, so we started digging. There isn’t much out there about you.”
“There shouldn’t be anything about me. I’m just an investigator.”
“Who fights demons,” Brock cut in. “It’s wicked.”
“What did you mean by good clips disappearing?” I asked Rory.
He showed me a picture of a part-woman, part-beast with wings and fangs. “We think this is an aswang.” He pulled up another image of a news story. “No picture here, but a group of people were found in the woods outside a town and they were all sick. None of the doctors could figure out why. One of them said they saw a weird thing that walked and talked but it had a beard made of vines.”
“A leshy,” I whispered. I’d hunted one of them down before. It got away from me because it could grow tall or shrink, and it had made itself so small I couldn’t find it.
“There have always been crazy stories, but someone or something out there is trying to minimize the recent surge in them. We think there was some kind of dimensional shift, that something happened.”
“So, you closed down this cafe so you guys can do what? Look for this stuff on the Internet?”
“Pretty much. We don’t have the skills to go out and hunt these things down, but we found two things around here and my uncles do have those skills. My family owns a bunch of land that’s set apart from everything. My uncles built a couple of enclosures out there and Uncle Gale started calling it the Preserve. But all this started out as a game, and then turned into more.”
“How do you pay for all this?”
“We have different jobs, but my uncle owns this building. He gets more than enough rent from all the other shops, so he doesn’t charge us. We pool our money to take care of the utilities.”
“What about school?”
“Brock, Sarah, Tea Bag and Skyler”—he pointed to the girl with black hair—“they all go to high school. I graduated last year.”
“No college plans?”
“Oh he has them,” Sarah broke in. “He just hasn’t decided which one. He can pretty much pick whichever one he wants.”
Rory shrugged. “No I can’t.” Something in his expression clued me in that this wasn’t a subject he wanted to talk about. “I’m not ready to move yet. I like it here.” He pulled up a couple more images. I noticed he carefully didn’t look at Sarah, who was still scowling at him.
“So what do you plan to do with all this information you’re gathering?” I asked.
They were quiet for a long time, then Phro started laughing. I jerked because I hadn’t even noticed her appear. “Don’t you see, Beri? You swept in, fought a Kuru whatever and turned into their warrior. They’re hoping you’ll be the person who takes care of these problems. I bet they had that file on you before they ever spotted you at the car wash.”
“She has a point, Beri.” Blythe, who’d obviously forgotten the kids couldn’t hear Phro, came over to look at the image Rory had left up on the screen. “Oh, I know what that is. It’s a medusa.”
Rory, after eyeing Blythe with a confused expression, shook his head. “Medusa was the name of a real creature who was killed. This is a gorgon, which is what Medusa was.”
Goose bumps came up on my arms as I stared at the tall creature with a hood very similar to the Scottish widow’s hood I’d be wearing to the next concert. Small eyes glowed from under it—too many pairs to count. But the face in the middle of them had been caught perfectly. Square jaw, thin lips. “It’s a male. I thought gorgons were all female, and I thought there were just three.”
“Sarah is researching this one now. We think maybe one of them had a kid, but why is he here? Now?” Rory folded his arms, leaned back in the chair. “This one is really bothering us because if the rumors are true, who knows what kind of damage he can do? There aren’t any stories of people being turned to stone in that area, but there is another new illness—one that makes the skin harden.”
Castor and I had both seen things sneaking out of the open portal. I was going to have to track these things down. And right here, right now, my gut was telling me that I
had
seen Fred that first day here, that he
had
led me here and, more than likely, it was because of these kids. What they were doing could help me find them all—every creature who had escaped.
And where was my spirit guide now? “I don’t suppose I could talk Brock into making some coffee, could I?”
Brock stood, smiled and walked behind the counter. I got up and strode to the window. Outside, one car drove slowly past, then parked. A woman and two little kids got out and held hands as they walked into one of the other shops in the strip mall.
Blythe came to stand beside me. “We have to get to Sophie, Beri,” she whispered and, thankfully, it wasn’t her normally loud stage kind. “I need my powers back so we can go after all these things.”
I stared down at her, my mind going over how we could do this. I’d planned to take paying jobs, but nobody was going to pay us to do all this. Nikolos was loaded—none of us would ever need to work again if I used the money he’d left me. But I couldn’t. If he decided to fund this operation once I got him back, that would be a different thing. I rubbed my temples and tried to figure out the best way to handle this.