Page 13 of An Inheritance of Monsters

“Oh, but she is.” The master of this team seemed to be trying to use a soft, silky voice… and he sounded more idiotic than villainous. “She has to sleep sometime.”

I slipped out of their closet, no longer interested in their human machinations. Although I wouldn’t mind the master of that group being the one marked for blood.

The next closet belonged to the older male. He laid on his bed, frowning up at the ceiling and speaking into one of the little boxes the humans called ‘recorders’.

“There is a definite… well,sinisterair about this place, but there are many instances of recorded phenomena being later attributed to infrasound… perhaps if she allowed us into the cellar, I could perform a more thorough examination…”

I snorted laughter again under my breath. He would never be permitted in the cellar.

But the man sat up, his frown replaced with fear.

Staring directly at the closet I hid in. My brief exhalation had been too loud.

He shuffled off the bed and across the room, brow creased suspiciously as he reached for the handle.

I pressed into the shadows, creeping through the cracks in the walls and floorboards. The man opened the closet on nothing but ordinary shadows.

He let out a short laugh and swung the door shut. “It seems that the atmosphere of this place is even getting to me. Ridiculous.”

The last room occupied by a male found me staring at the back of a young, lanky man, who was himself staring at several screens. I was entranced by the moving footage: it was Juno, her blue and peach hair swept back in a torrent by the ocean wind.

Juno walking up the grand staircase.

Juno facing the camera, smiling at something before bursting into laughter.

The sound of her voice, even distilled by human technology, made something tighten in my gut.

But the young man was clicking rapidly through the pictures. “Dios mío, Juno, that coat adds ten pounds,” he groaned, dropping his forehead in his hands. “Ugh, I will set that thing on fire before you wear it on camera again.”

The sound of her name in another male’s mouth made me want to snarl.

I stared at the picture of Juno standing on the dock by the idol. She looked beautiful. I saw nothing wrong with the coat she liked.

But the human males held no more interest for me, even if this one was looking at the lovely creature who had arrived this morning. It took more effort than I liked to leave his closet and the pictures behind.

But she would return from the Void soon, and my investigation was not yet done.

I stopped in the room of the girl named Rosalie, peering through the crack in the door. Her room was dark, an invitation to all monsters of the Void, and yet… none were here.

Her sleeping form lay in the bed, snoring softly and completely undisturbed.

Next was the room of the blonde woman. Sierra.

She’d covered the dresser with a variety of crystals, and a deck of gold-embossed cards lay spread out on the tea table. The thick scent of incense filled the air.

She wasn’t sleeping yet. She sat cross-legged in the middle of the room, her hands palms-up on her knees while she muttered something under her breath.

I left her closet behind, bored by her chanting. The woman had no aura at all.

The one occupied by the so-called spirit medium drove me away before I materialized in it fully. Her room had a psychic reek of decay that filled my head like a swarm of stinging wasps.

But the last closet I visited… that was the one that called to me, like a twisting knot lay in my gut.

I feltcompelledto visit this closet, the one that had been my refuge for most of the day.

The room smelled like her: peppery violets. As I peered through the gap in her closet door, I spied six pairs of scarlet eyes blinking in the dark beneath her bed, each belonging to the same monster.

Rask had wasted no time in taking up residence near her.

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