Page 2 of An Invocation of Monsters

And she’d liked to collect crystals, too. She kept a line of amethyst chips on her office windowsill, claiming they helped her maintain the patience to not kill difficult clients.

And maybe more than a few times I’d found strange runes and symbols scribbled in unlikely areas, like on the corner of a house sale sign she really hoped would go through or in the soil of her Damask rose garden.

Fine. So it was actually fairly easy, in retrospect, to acknowledge that my buttoned-up mother had been into some weird shit on the side.

The question was: why hide it?

And who the hell were these people she had been friends with since college?

It hadn’t taken much to convince me to accept the invitation. Both of my parents had passed on; the sale of my childhood home had gone through last month, leaving me with quite a bit of ‘fuck you’ money in the bank.

I never wanted to return to live in Innsmouth. Visiting Deepwater Lodge seemed like the first logical step of escaping the small coastal town; I’d find out what my mother had gotten up to, and then… I’d move on.

Of course I’d have to return to Innsmouth at some point to visit my cousin, but… the whole world was ahead of me. I was free.

Technically, that should have made me very happy.

But it didn’t.

I sighed, refolded the letter, and shoved it back in my pocket, glancing back at the town I’d been instructed to wait in.

The town of Dunwich had a tiny population, and absolutely nobody seemed to have a problem with me parking in the tiny lot next to the forest. I’d been waiting for half an hour; by now, somebody should’ve said something.

But the few people I saw said nothing at all. In fact, once my presence here registered with them, they didn’t even look at me.

I crossed my arms over my chest and watched a woman emerge from a tiny grocery store, laden with several shopping bags.

She met my eyes with an almost startled expression, as though surprised to see me looking back at her… then she deliberately turned her head away and scurried to a car that was even more beaten-down than mine.

I quickly revisited my theory that the Wendigo Society was actually a group of human traffickers or possibly serial killers and maybe the people of Dunwich were just turning a blind eye to it, but… it didn’t fit.

My mother was many things, but a serial killer was not one of them. She got faint at the sight of blood, and no self-respecting serial killer would enter the profession with that kind of attitude.

Maybe these people were paid to look the other way.

I considered stopping into the grocery store to ask questions under the pretense of grabbing a Diet Coke for the drive, but at that moment the roar of a motor tore through the air behind me.

I whirled around just as a pale blue truck rumbled from the road in the woods, mud splattered on its sides and cracks spider-webbing the windshield.

It drew to a rather abrupt halt in front of me and my car.

I’d expected to see one of the older people who had introduced themselves at my mother’s funeral behind the wheel, perhaps bursting to regale me with tales of my mother’s wayward college youth.

Instead, the Wendigo Society had sent… a teenage boy.

He clambered out of the cab, and I did my best to wipe the sudden scowl off my face. At least they’d sent someone for me at all.

“Um.. hello?” he said hopefully. “Are you Elle Gray?”

I deducted five points from his intelligence for that one. Did they get so many people waiting here for them that he actually had to ask?

“That’s me.” I glanced over his shoulder, but the cab was empty except for the kid.

Maybe ‘kid’ was being a little condescending of me; he was at least eighteen or nineteen, but tall for his age, and gangly. He had dark blond hair and pale blue eyes, and was dressed in a white polo and cream-colored shorts. His sneakers were blindingly white, too.

Okay, I needed to work on being less bitchy. I was only twenty, so it wasn’t like I could claim the wisdom of the elders over him. He just looked particularly young and somehow soft.

Then I realized he was looking me over with the exact same mix of apprehension and confusion.

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