Trust me, you don’t want to be here when they do.”
“Demons! Are you listening to yourself?”
“I know it sounds crazy.”
“It doesn’t just sound crazy. It is crazy.”
“It’s the truth. You heard the whispering. You breathed their air and it made you sick.”
She stared at him wide-eyed and began shaking her head back and forth. “No. It’s. Not. Now get out.”
* * *
How could Shay have been so stupid? She knew better than to invite a stranger into her home. But she’d been distracted by his good looks and tempted by his cold hard cash. Idiot. Never before had a smooth-talking handsome man fooled her, and the one time one had....
And then she noticed the pictures that were missing off her kitchen wall and her fingers froze at her sides. “What have you done with my photos?”
He held up her tote bag. “I packed them. We’re taking them with us. You shouldn’t need them to prove who you are, but it wouldn’t hurt. Bring your papers, too—birth certificate, driver’s license and anything that might have this symbol on it.” He pulled up his sleeve and showed her a tattoo on his forearm of a large swirling circle with five claws sticking out from the sides.
Shay gasped as her knees weakened. Coffee forgotten, she dropped into a chair at the table. The tattoo was exactly like the one her father had worn. Her hand fluttered to her neck, to the amulet hidden beneath her shirt as she recalled her father’s words the night he’d given it to her.
You’re a big girl now, Shay. Big enough to wear a big girl’s necklace. Do you see this symbol? Her dad had swung the obsidian amulet in front of her. This is a symbol of a very special place. A place where your daddy came from. If anyone ever comes to you and they have a symbol like this, you must trust them. You must go with them. Never take it off. Promise me, pumpkin?
All these years and she’d kept her word. She’d never taken it off. And now someone who had a symbol just like hers was here.
You must trust them.
But how could she?
“I’m sorry I don’t have time to explain everything that is happening to you. Please trust me when I tell you that you are in danger. We both are. What happened in town today was just the beginning. We have to get out of here. We have to get you back to The Colony where you will be safe.”
“Why?” She didn’t understand. How could she? “Why this colony? Where is it?”
“The demons can’t sense us there. It’s protected.”
Shay stood on shaky legs. “And you’re saying that once I go there...” She couldn’t finish the words.
“You might be able to leave. Like I can, but only for short periods of time. Most choose not to.”
Unbidden tears filled her eyes. She didn’t know why. She didn’t believe him. She didn’t have to listen to him, even if she could still hear her father’s voice echoing in her mind. But it wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true. “This was my grandmother’s home. It’s my home. Buddy and I love it here. We can’t just leave. We won’t leave.”
Jason sat back in his chair and took a deep breath. “What has been happening to you, the colors you’ve been seeing—”
A chill swept over and wrapped around her. How could he know about that?
“Have you started to hear the buzzing yet?”
She stared at him, unable to move. To breathe. Was it possible that he was telling her the truth? How else could he know these things?
“It’s part of the change. Your body is transforming, and that transformation is what is attracting the demons. Soon it will draw the Gauliacho, too. They’ll come through the walls, through the cracks. We can’t be here when that happens. Please, Shay, pack what you absolutely must have and do it quickly. We have to go.”
She shook her head. “Maybe you know some things about me that you shouldn’t know, but that doesn’t mean I am going to give up my home and run away with you. I don’t know anything about you. I don’t believe what you’re saying. I just... I won’t go.”
Silence thickened the air between them and she was finding it hard to pull in a breath. He was angry, she could see it in the bunching of his muscles, could hear it in the sharp intake of his ragged breath.
“I don’t think you understand,” he started again, his face tense, his eyes dark. Energy pulsed around him, making him look bigger than he was, stronger, more lethal.
How could she have invited him into her home? Why hadn’t she seen this side of him? How big he was? How dangerous? And yet, he had the tattoo. And she had the echoes of her father’s words playing around the edges of her mind. You can trust them.
“I...I just can’t run off with a perfect stranger,” she said again, though she wasn’t sure if she was saying it for his benefit or for hers. No sooner had the words left her mouth than a rumbling shook the kitchen. A long crack split the wall where her family’s pictures had once hung, forming a long gaping fracture.
Jason stood so fast his chair crashed to the floor behind him. “You have no choice, Shay. We have to go. They’re coming! Hurry!”
Fueled by his fear, and her own, she ran to her room at the back of the house and pulled a duffel down from her closet. What was happening? She didn’t know, and yet she started throwing things into the bag without much thought of what she was grabbing until it was overflowing. How could she choose in a matter of seconds which items of her life to take with her and which to leave behind?
She stopped, took a deep breath then picked up the duffel and dumped it upside down, shaking the contents onto the bed. She started again: her two favorite pairs of Levi’s, her favorite sweater, socks, underwear, boots, a long-sleeved T-shirt, the book she was reading, her jewelry—not because she owned a lot of nice pieces but because most of what she did own had once belonged to her mother—a spool of yarn, her crochet needles.
“How are we doing?” Jason asked, appearing in the doorway; his eyes, wide with urgency, fell on the half-crocheted scarf in her hand as he shifted back and forth on his heels in his impatience to hurry her.
“Almost done.” She grabbed some shorts and T-shirts and shoved them into the duffel, then ran into the bathroom and seized all her toiletries, sweeping them into a makeup bag, then hurried into the living room. She stood in the middle of the room staring at the brocade sofa, the soft leather wing chair that she loved. The antique sideboard filled with porcelain and crystal, her memories, her family’s heirlooms, whether they were valuable or not, how could she leave them all behind?
Tears welled in her eyes and she collapsed onto the sofa. What was she doing? She dropped her head into her hands and tried to catch her breath and still her racing heart. This was crazy. He was crazy and somehow he’d sucked her into his delusion.
But as she sat there, listening to her heart thud in her chest and trying to get ahold of herself, she heard faint whispers filling the air. Like before, in the apartment, they seemed to be coming from the wall. From the crack. Slowly, she rose off the sofa and walked over to the deep fissure in the wall. The same wall that had been a supporting structure for this house for the past sixty years and suddenly it was broken.
And emitting a foul-smelling gas. She placed her hand over her nose and mouth and leaned in closer. They are doorways leading to a demon dimension. Jason’s words filled her head and quickened her heart. But that was crazy! There was no such thing as a demon dimension. She leaned in closer, listening, and then she heard it again, the whispering that had filled the room with a strange rhythm that was almost a chant. The one word she could grasp clearly.
Abomination.
Chills scurried madly down her arms and across the back of her neck. But it wasn’t just the chills;