“Lock it?”
“Yeah, you know, that thing you turn that keeps the door from opening without a key. Remember what your mother always said.”
“Ripped underwear attracts careless drivers?”
“I was thinking more of ‘try a simple solution before looking toward more exotic possibilities.’”
“Warding the door is hardly exotic.”
“Locking it’s simpler.”
“True enough.” The tumblers fell into place with a satisfying clunk. Picking up a pair of imp traps, she followed the cat upstairs.
“A question, she occurs to me.” Floating just below the ceiling, Jacques watched Claire set the second trap beside the pink-and-gray-striped hatbox. “What will you do with an imp if you catch one?”
“I’ll neutralize it.”
“What does that mean, neutralize?”
“Imps are little pieces of evil; what do you think it means?” Precariously balanced on a pile of old furniture, Claire extended her right leg and probed for the first step down.
“A little more to your left,” Jacques told her.
She moved her foot.
“Your other left,” he pointed out as she fell. “Are you hurt, cherie?” he called when the noise had stopped but a rising cloud of dust still obscured the landing site.
Shoving a zippered canvas bag filled with musty fabric off her face, Claire sucked a shallow, dust-laden breath through her teeth, then took inventory. Her left elbow hurt a lot, and she seemed to have landed on something that squashed. “Where’s Austin?”
“Right here.” He leaped up into her line of sight, balancing effortlessly on a teetering commode. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re just saying that, aren’t you?” Jacques drifted toward her, wearing an expression of poignant concern. “I wish I had hands to help you up, arms to carry you, to comfort, lips to kiss away the hurt.”
His eyes were dark, and Claire found herself thinking of Sasha Moore. “I wish you did, too.”
“You could make it so.”
Austin snorted. “Does she look like Jean Luc Picard?”
“Who?”
The cat sighed. “I have so much to teach you, Grasshopper.”
“What?”
Reflecting how nothing could spoil the moment like a cat, Claire got her legs free, rolled onto her side, and noticed, right at eye level, a stack of ten-inch baseboards. As far as she could tell, given her position, they’d been taken from the wall in ten- or twelve-foot lengths. “This is great!”
“Falling?”
“Baseboards.” Scrambling to her feet, she retrieved her flashlight from a pile of old Reader’s Digest Condensed Books—part of the obligatory attic door—and headed for the stairs. “They were probably taken off when they replaced the plaster and lathe with drywall. Come on. I’ve got to measure the walls in the dining room because I think baseboards go on before the wallpaper.”
Happily working out a renovation schedule that would keep Dean busy for the next six or seven lifetimes, Claire raced down the attic stairs, along the third floor hall, and down to the second floor where she stopped cold. There was a man at the other end of the hall; at the door to room four.
Instinct overwhelmed cognitive function and she ran toward him. “Hey!”
When he spun around, she saw it was the deliveryman—no big surprise—and that he was picking the lock.
So much for the simple solutions. “Get away from there!”
“Don’t try and stop me.” The clichéd warning made his voice sound harsher than it had, the voice of a man barely clinging to sanity.
One hand searching her clothing for a thread, Claire reached for power, touched seepage, and hesitated.
The intruder dove toward her, grabbed her upper arms, and threw her against the wall. He was stronger, much stronger than he looked; madness lending strength.
“Why?” he demanded, smashing her head against the wall on every other word. “Why are you protecting that undead, bloodsucking, soulless creature?”
Limp in his grasp, unable to concentrate enough to use even the seepage, Claire was only vaguely aware of being dragged toward the storage cupboard. Through a gray haze and strangely shifting world view, she saw Jacques swoop down from the ceiling, shrieking and howling and having no effect at all.
Oh, swell, she thought, as the cupboard door swung open. He believes in vampires but not in ghosts. A heartbeat later, the implications of that sank in and she began to struggle weakly.
She hit the floor beside the mop bucket, barely managing to keep her head from bouncing, and collapsed entirely when a heart-stopping screech set the bottles of cleanser vibrating.
A deeper howl of pain rose over the noise the cat was making; then, just as Claire attempted to sit up again, the door slammed shut and Austin landed on the one thing guaranteed to break his fall.
For a moment, the need to breathe outweighed other considerations; then, lying in the dark listening to Austin hiss and spit, she grabbed for the first power she could reach and used it to clear her head. Sucking up seepage had just become a minor problem. “I understand how you feel, Austin, but shut up. We haven’t time for this.”
A whiskered face pressed into her cheek. “Are you all right?”
“No. But I’m fixing it.” Anger burned away the damage, power riding in on her rage to replace what she spent. At the moment, it didn’t matter where that power came from. With all body parts more-or-less back under her control, she stood and flung herself at the door. The impact hurt—a lot—and bounced her onto her butt. The door didn’t budge.
He’d done something to hold it in place.
“Calm down!” the cat snarled. “You nearly landed on top of me!”
“Calm?” Claire struggled back onto her feet. “What do you think a murder in this building will do to the pentagram’s seals?” Breathing deeply, once, twice, she placed her hands on the wood and blew the door off its hinges.
Staggering slightly, she raced down the hall, through Jacques, and into room four.
He was standing over the bed, a sharpened stake in an upraised hand.
There was no seepage left, blowing the door had wiped it clean. Sagging against the wall, Claire reached into the possibilities, knowing she wouldn’t be in time.
A black-and-white streak landed on his back as the stake came down.
Pulling Austin clear with one hand, Claire tossed her bit of thread with the other. As the deliveryman stiffened, she shoved him behind her to fall, shrieking, wrapped in invisible bonds, onto the floor of the outer room.
The stake protruded from Sasha Moore’s chest just below the collarbone. At first, in the forty-watt glow of the bedside lamp, Claire thought it was all over, then she realized that he’d missed the heart by three full inches. Either he had a poor understanding of biology or Austin’s leap had misdirected the blow.
“She is Nosferatu! She must die!” The crazed voice echoed in the closed room. “Those who protect her have made a covenant with evil!”
“Hey! Don’t tell me about evil,” Claire snapped at him over her shoulder. “I’m a trained professional.” She spread her fingers and one of the bonds expanded to cover his mouth.
His tail still twice its normal size, Austin panted as he looked from the stake to Claire. “Now what?”
“Now we pull it out.” There was a pop of displaced air as the first-aid kit from the kitchen appeared on the bedside table. “And we bandage the wound and see what happens when she wakes up.”
“I’m guessing she’ll be hungry.”
Claire glanced toward the man thrashing impotently about and grunting in. inarticulate rage. “I think we can find her a bite of something.”
AT THIS RATE, THE DAMPENING FIELD WILL NEVER GO DOWN. SHE BARELY CLEARED THE WAY FOR FURTHER SEEPAGE. THE COUSIN DID MUCH MORE DAMAGE WITH HIS TOYS AND DIVERSIONS.
PATIENCE.