Page 50 of Monstrous Travels as Wicked as Sin

Percy took Joe’s face in his hands, desperately trying to calm the movement of his spasming body. “Please don’t do this. Fight it. Get it out!” Hopelessly, he slapped his hand against the unresponsive cheek. “Joe! Wake up!”

Joe stilled, eyes closed. Calm, deathly immobile, frozen in place despite the banging and the howling and the screeching of furniture and the groaning of the very walls all about them.

“Joe!” Percy shouted.

His eyes snapped open. “It’s coming.”

Percy’s strong hand took Joe by the throat and slammed him down on the floor, the furious growl from his lips hot on Joe’s. “Get out of him, or I’ll kill you with my bare hands.”

The bookcase flung into a wall in the other room. The echo of wood cracking rang down the hall. With an enormous crash, the staircase fell in, as though a giant invisible foot had rammed down hard in the centre.

But all Percy saw was Joe’s face that now, he knew, was no longer Joe’s face. The expression was entirely wrong. The body, the movement, the very breath, all wrong and not Joe. And worse than all of it was the foul threat that slipped out of Joe’s beautiful mouth, completely unperturbed. “Kill him, then. I could use the company around here.”

Whatever the thing was—and Percy didn’t believe for a second it was the ghost of a teenage girl—it had defeated him in ten well-chosen words.

Percy’s pale and trembling hand released its lethal grip, and he turned his gaze to the moving shadows in the hall. His handreached for Joe’s and pulled him to his feet. “Run.” But he didn’t quite trust the thing to do it, so with his dagger in one hand and his other arm linked through Joe’s, he ran, and he pulled Joe’s body with him. Through the lounge, through the entranceway, through the door and down the stairs, then through the barren and parched yard to the wall, where he shoved Joe ahead of him. “Climb. Get out of here, then leave his body.”

Without a word of argument, without even a look, the thing clambered over the table and chair and into the tree, just as nimbly as Joe would have. Percy followed close on his heels, but as he breached the wall, Joe’s feet hit the ground. He took off out of the woods, Percy’s boot slipped on a carpet of moss in his pursuit, and he fell hard on his shoulder. “Fuck!” Springing to his feet, he chased after him as he made for the lake. He sprinted in a single-minded hunt, faster than he ever had before, closer, closer, and with his whole being intent on catching up, he flung himself against Joe’s back, knocking the body to the muddy, pebbly bank in one violent collision. He wrenched Joe’s shoulder over, slammed his back to the ground, and straddled his strong torso, pinning his arms down. “You’re out. You’re free. Leave him now, or I swear I’ll find a way to make you regret it.”

Joe’s brown eyes studied Percy. They stared in the way one does when one’s gathering intelligence. Expressionless. Deep. Too deep. So deep into Percy and his soul that Percy was sure it could see how hopelessly terrified he was. How easily and completely conquered he was. He put on a good show but in truth he hadn’t the vaguest idea what he might do. He didn’t even know what he was up against. He was all alone on a lakeside by a haunted mansion with no one to help and the love of his life beneath his hands, real and tangible, and so far away from him he may as well have been dead already.

The crushing realisation brought Percy near to collapse, the fight the only thing holding him up.

Then the air was almost completely knocked out of him when the thing said, “Very well.”

“What?” he whispered.

Joe’s body went limp, and he sank a little deeper into the mud.

“Joe? Joe!” Percy’s knees crunched down into the wet gravel. He wrapped his arms around Joe, and pulled him to his chest, cradling him on the bank. “Joe? Wake up. Please.”

A soft groan. A soft groan and a sign of life that Percy felt through the tender flesh of his arms into the depth of his heart. “Joe?”

With a thick, gravelly voice, “Percy?”

Percy placed gentle fingers on his cool, clammy cheek. “Oh, my love, is it you? Are you there?”

“What…” Joe’s bewildered hand settled at his temple, and his cloudy gaze focused on Percy. He dropped his arms to the ground and sat up, taking in his surroundings. “How did we get out here?”

“You don’t remember?”

“No. There was…” He glanced back towards the black mansion. “We were doing the séance, and I…” His pretty mouth fell open, his eyes widened, and, “Oh.”

“You absolute bastard!” Percy shoved him off and climbed to his feet, making furiously for the inn.

“But— Percy! Wait!” Joe was after him, but in a half second Percy spun around.

“You fucking shit! ‘Take my head!’ That’s what you said. You said I should take your head if you ever got possessed again, and you went and fucking did it without so much as a word of discussion. You fucking— Fuck!” Joe stumbled back with the violent kiss Percy pressed against him, then Percy was gone again, wrenching a cigarette out of his pocket, lighting it, and snapping in a whirlwind of smoke, “If you ever pull that shitagain, you’re dumped. I’ll break up with you on the spot. I’ll dump you, and I’ll leave you to your fate, and?—”

Joe’s hand caught his and wrenched him back around and into another kiss. Percy’s eyes remained tight shut through it, and tight shut after, the cold wind of the lake and the taste of Joe and the feeling of being all-consumingly bereft not washing away with any of it.

“I’m sorry,” said Joe.

Percy looked at him. At the living, guilty, hopeful eyes that he adored with every fibre of his being. “You’re too good. You can’t be trusted, and I’m never working with you again.”

“Okay,” said Joe. “That’s fair. But will you make me another steak?”

“No,” Percy grumbled, turning his back again, trudging in a slightly more sedate, if still incandescent manner, as he puffed on his cigarette. “You can have the bad Scottish food from now on. Because that’s what you deserve. Fish heads for every meal until we leave. Which will be tomorrow, as it goes. And I’m never doing crimes with you again. Judas.”

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