Page 46 of Monstrous Travels as Wicked as Sin

“Lerwick. We’ll have to go in immediately?—”

“We can’t.” Joe turned, casting disgusted eyes over the pentagram, the chains, and the shackles. “How many girls? She’s filled the roof with them. She needs to pay for this. And— Percy, you said, that smell….” Joe searched the silent walls. “Where are the rest of the bodies?”

He was right. Just like he always was. Percy absolutely would burn the place to the ground, but to delete all the evidence of the horror… Joe was, unfortunately, completely right. “Maybe we can poison it.”

“We can.” The pair thought for a time. “It can’t be too hard to get blood from a butcher?—”

“I’m not convinced it likes blood from a butcher.”

“No.” Joe wrinkled his nose and mouth at the slobbering pink mass, still searching over the floor, the growl behind it blowing gusts of bad air over their boots. “No, I’m not convinced it does either.”

“We’ll figure something out.” Percy accompanied the words with a scrunch of his fist that flexed the fine veins in his beautiful wrists, that drew Joe’s eyes, and gave him an inkling of what he was thinking.

Joe grabbed his hand. “Not your blood. Not ever.” And he retained the hand against his chest as he led Percy back to the door of the room. “I think we have two options. This chamber needs to be sealed again, for obvious reasons, unless we can take care of this whole mess before anyone else comes. So we can search the entire mansion and try to find another way into that compartment with that—” He glared across the room. “With that beast, whatever it is. And see if we can find these bodies, which, I don’t know, are they in there with it? Or are they somewhere else? Andthat—searching for this scent of dead—that is going to take a long time, because we still haven’t found any clues in this entire house, but…” He tightened his grip on Percy’s hand. “Percy, I think there’s one way we can be sure, quickly, where the bodies are.”

Percy trusted and valued Joe’s common sense and intelligence immeasurably, so of course he asked, “And that is?”

Percy was therefore horrified and flabbergasted when Joe replied, “A séance.”

Staring at his beloved with humour in his eyes, for it must have been a bad joke, “Have you gone completely mad?”

With a slight jut of his lower lip, “I don’t think so.”

Percy’s intonation switched to clipped with the realisation that Joe was perfectly serious. “I’m sorry, but I had assumed you wanted to survive the night.”

“One might say that’s a little melodramatic?—”

“The house of death,” Percy announced through gritted teeth. “The house that was boarded up for one hundred and thirty years because of the evil here. The house of the massacres. The house where a ghost has been throwing things at us since we walked in the door?—”

“Yes, exactly!” Joe shouted so loud he drew a howl from the beast, and both he and Percy took an involuntary step away from the thing. “Exactly,” he stage-whispered. “Something—someone—wants to communicate with us. It might be one of the girls.”

“It might be dozens of the girls, mad from months of imprisonment and torture, all at once, wanting to break through and take their revenge on the first person they come across. Or it might be some evil lord from three hundred years ago who brought this beast here in the first place. Is that really who you want to have a sit down with?”

Joe gave a small shrug. “It’s worth a shot, isn’t it?”

“No, it’s not.”

Percy broke from the conversation and was halfway up the stairs before Joe caught him, placing a stalling hand on his arm. “It’s not like we haven’t done this before. It’s just a séance.”

Percy spun around, furious. “Need I remind you of the mess you got into when Eve and Anna did their little séance and you ended up possessed?”

“Eve and Anna,” Joe waggled a finger at him for emphasis, “are shit at doing séances. Not like you and me.”

“You’ve never done a séance with me in your life,” Percy rebuffed, feeling a touch of pride that he refused to let show at Joe’s implied compliment. Damn right he was better at séances than his handsome brother.

Joe stepped up level with Percy, intertwining their fingers. “But I know you’d be great at it. We can do this. We can find the bodies, kill that thing, and end this. Today. There will be awarrant out for her arrest by breakfast tomorrow, and she won’t touch anyone else.”

“She won’t anyway,” Percy argued, a little petulantly. “She’s living in hotels. Leo updates me every time she moves. We’re keeping tabs on her.”

“For how long? For all you know, she might be planning to come back here tomorrow. To feed that—that whatever it is, with more victims. And then what does she intend to do with it?” Upon Joe voicing that worrying notion, both looked back at the long tongue still lapping at the dried blood of dead teenagers. As though he needed to add a little more to drive his point home, “It’s clearly supernatural, or it would be dead by now. We’re the only people who can fix this. We need to finish it. Right now.”

“Fine.” Percy took a step closer to Joe, their lips almost touching. “But at the first sign of trouble, we pull out. Promise me.”

Joe’s gleeful smile did not quell Percy’s concerns. “Yes!” He slapped a kiss on Percy’s lips, bounded up the stairs, and disappeared through the hole in the wall.

Percy sighed just as heavily as his feet hit the filthy stairs, and he called, “I never picked you for a séance-lover.”

Joe poked his head back around the corner. “What could go wrong? They’re just kids.” And he was gone to search for candles or something.

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