The Devil's Demeanor (42 page)

Erin looked at the shoulder wound, already
bleeding through the shirt. He needed proper aid. They both needed to get out
of the house, or call for help. Erin searched for her cell phone but couldn’t
find it. She tried the landline on Jordan’s father’s desk, but there was a busy
signal. Another phone must have fallen off the hook.

She looked to the office door, still blocked
by the file cabinet. She didn’t want to risk moving it, because it would be
hell putting it back if Conner showed up again. That only left the fireplace.

The partition was easy to open and close.
She could crawl out, grab the kit and her phone, and then be back before anyone
noticed. Jordan wasn’t awake to discourage her, and she was slightly
disappointed by that because she didn’t really want to go outside. She was too
scared.

She had to get help, though. Jordan’s
parents wouldn’t be back for hours, and she didn’t think Jordan could wait that
long.

She decided.

She reached for the lock in the fireplace
partition.

She opened it a few inches.

Conner was right there, on hands and knees
in the fireplace, his bright eyes glazing.

Erin screamed and closed the partition,
locking it quickly. Her breath came in such fierce gasps she feared she’d pass
out.

Conner had been there the whole time.

*
 
*
 
*

Don lay exhausted next to Monica on the
sweaty bed. He could barely catch his breath and was pleased to see she was in
the same situation. He smiled; she smiled back. That smile, however, wasn’t the
same he was used to. It seemed cold, somehow.

“Are you okay, honey?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“I love you.”

“I know.”

Don’s grin faded. “Why do you keep saying
that? Don’t you love me too?” He tried to make it sound playful, didn’t want to
sound like he was whining, but wasn’t sure if he’d succeeded.

“I’m sure Monica loves you,” said Monica,
“but I shouldn’t speak for her.”

Don stared at his wife for a moment, trying
to make sense of the words.

And then it hit him.

He jumped from the bed, away from the
now-grinning Monica. If the smile had been cold, this grin was even worse.

“Who are you?” Don asked.

“Who do you think?”

He stood there, next to the bed, in all his
naked glory, his body freezing now. He didn’t know where to look, what to say.
He hopped from one foot to the other, looking as if to prepare for flight.
“Which one of you goddammed creatures is in my wife?”

Monica tilted her head back and laughed. And
then she looked at him again and said, “My name is Carutha. We just spoke in
the cavern.”

“Get out of my wife!”

“No thanks.”

“Did you enjoy getting fucked, you little
bastard?”

“It was quite an experience, one I wouldn’t
mind having again. Come here, loverboy.”

She reached out her arms to Don, but he
backed away.

“You all want our lives, is that it? That’s
what I was told. Why my family?”

Monica shrugged her shoulder, the sheet
slowly lowering from her breasts. “Because you are our only links. Why start
from the beginning when the groundwork has already been laid?”

“You mean what your brother started?”

“Yes.”

“I won’t let you do this to us. You won’t
have our lives. That’s just a fact.”

Monica lost the grin and stared at Don. His
blood ran cold. “What are you going to do to stop us? Are you going to kill our
hosts? Your wife and children?”

Children?

“That’s right,” said Monica, recognizing the
look on his face. “We’ll have your children soon. That’s why I agreed to come
here with you, so you couldn’t stop what is happening at this very moment.”

“What’s happening?” Don forced himself to
ask.

“One of your children is about to kill
someone. Once he does, he’ll be ours forever. Your race is slippery, our holds
on you very tentative. That pesky love does manage to break our holds every now
and then, but once we take full control, like I have of your wife, we can never
be removed so easily again.”

“My wife?” Don couldn’t breathe. “Who did
she kill? She didn’t kill anyone.” He tried to convince himself of this.

That grin was back. “Your father.”

A sharp pain in Don’s chest nearly struck
him to the floor. No. It couldn’t be true. He stood by the bed, shaking. The
room took on a terrible smell, like rotten meat and ammonia, but he wasn’t sure
if it was real or imagined. He also didn’t know if he was really seeing his
wife’s face grow pale and dry before his very eyes. It looked like it was being
vacuumed.

“This isn’t personal, Donovan,” said his
wife. “Your family was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. You’re merely
a marriage of convenience.”

Don shook his head. “I won’t let you take my
family.”

“I’m afraid you don’t have a choice, honey.”

She leaped from the bed so fast Don could
barely react. He instinctively grabbed a lamp from beside the bed and smashed
it into her face while she was still in midair. They collided and fell to the
floor, with Monica on top of him. Bits of shattered lamp lay about them.

Don pushed his unconscious wife off of him
and jumped to his feet. His heart was still racing, but he didn’t have time to
think about what had just happened. He had to warn his children.

He grabbed his cell phone and called home.

He immediately got a busy signal.

Since the boys’ phones seemed to be turned
off, he could think of no other way to get a hold of them quickly. He had to
get home.

*
 
*
 
*

Diedre finally found a pay phone a
comfortable distance away from the restaurant and didn’t see any traffic
cameras close enough to get a good view of her. Either way, she made sure to
face the wall with the phone as she approached, despite the fact it made her
walk funny.

Before she could dial the police, however,
she noticed a curious sight.

Donovan Scott was hurrying out of a hotel a
block away from her. He looked terribly nervous, darting his eyes from left to
right as he ran for a parking garage at the end of the block.

Diedre hung up the phone and followed.

Erin sat and watched Jordan continue to
bleed. She sat helpless, not knowing what to do. She didn’t know if Conner was
still crouched on the other side of the partition, but she’d never heard him
leave so she assumed he was still there.

She looked around the office, hoping to find
something that would help them. She saw nothing but piles of manuscripts, a
computer and a useless phone.

The computer.

Erin booted it up. She’d forgotten that she
could send text messages from the cell provider’s Web page. She’d done it
before for fun years ago when she’d gotten her first cell phone, just to see
how it worked. She could even read the replies from the page.

Who should she text, though?

She mulled that over while she waited for
the computer to boot up. Once it did, she tried to connect to the Internet.

It wouldn’t connect.

She tried again. Still no connection.

She looked down at the taskbar and saw the
computer wasn’t getting a wireless signal. Something was wrong with the router,
she bet. Conner may have smashed it. Was he
that
smart, to think of it
before she did? Was he smart enough, in his condition, to make any sort of
strategic plans?

Apparently so.

There was absolutely no way for her to call
for help from this study. She had to get outside, to her phone. Or even to a
neighbor’s house, if she could. The front door was just outside, to the left,
no more than thirty feet away.

She looked at Jordan’s wrapped shoulder and
saw blood oozing through the T-shirt. She had to get him help. Getting to the
first-aid kit didn’t seem as important as getting actual help to either come to
the house or take Jordan to the hospital.

She feared leaving him alone, however. If
she left through the fireplace, she wouldn’t be able to lock it from the
outside. Even if she did manage to escape the house, nothing would stop Conner
from crawling through and killing his cousin. But she couldn’t very well wake
Jordan and tell him to lock up after her. He would never let her go, would
instead insist upon going himself while
she
waited.

They could both go. If they could just get
outside....

Something caught Erin’s attention. It
sounded like a ring tone, and it was very familiar.

It was her phone, and someone was calling
her. The ring sounded very close, like it was just on the other side of the
partition. The phone must have fallen out as she was crawling through the
fireplace.

Either that, or this was some kind of trap.
Conner may have been trying to lure her out. Or at least trying to get her to
open the partition.

She wished there was a way to see outside
without opening the only thing that kept them safe. She studied the steel
partition for any holes or cracks. She found a hole the size of a dime near the
bottom and on the left. She peered through. She couldn’t see much, but she did
see one of the couches.

She didn’t see Conner.

The phone suddenly stopped ringing, but not
before she found it laying between the two couches, directly in front of the
fireplace.

Erin backed away and leaned against the
desk. She knew she had to risk getting help, for both her sake and Jordan’s.

A grumbling noise came from somewhere in the
living room.

She ran back to the hole and saw immediately
that the dining table had been dragged in front of the front door. Conner
clearly didn’t want an easy escape, but had he heard the phone ringing a moment
ago? He must have.

Erin looked to where it had been and was
glad to see it still there, between the couches. She looked around the office
for a weapon, in case she ran into Conner while reaching for the phone. Going
through the desk, she found a letter opener in the top drawer. She wielded it
like a knife, getting the feel of it. It whistled through the air in a
satisfactory way.

She turned back to the partition, checked
through the hole to see the coast clear, quietly unlatched it, and slid it open
a few inches.

Nothing jumped at her this time.

She sighed with relief and started crawling
out, getting her hands dirty in the ash of past fires. Her jeans were smudged
as well, but she found herself not caring a bit. Her heart was beating too
fast, sweat coating her forehead and running into her eyes. As soon as she was
out, she crouched and made her way to the cell phone.

Or to where it had been. It was no longer
there.

She paused, her legs aching from the
crouching walk. She merely stared at the spot where her phone had been, and
then looked around to make sure it wasn’t somewhere else. She was certain she
had the correct spot, however. Right between the two couches, which faced each
other. It had been right there.

The ring tone began again, but this time it
was farther away.

She gasped, startled. It sounded like it was
coming from the den on the right. Conner had heard the phone, had even seen it,
and was now toying with her. She wasn’t going to play his game.

She started toward the front door. Though it
would take a few seconds, she could push the table away far enough to get outside.
She knew there was another door in the kitchen and one down in the den that led
to the backyard. As she got closer to the front door, she saw ahead into the
kitchen. The table in there had been pressed against that door as well. When
she got parallel to the den steps, she saw the back-porch door wide open.

How dumb did Conner think she was?

Her phone, which had been ringing the whole
time, finally stopped. It had been coming from the den, just as she suspected.
Gripping the letter opener, she continued to the front door. She grabbed a
corner of the table and tried to slide it away from the door. It was much
heavier than she’d expected.

The tone began again, this time from a
different location.

Erin spun around. It sounded like it was
coming from the kitchen, which was now to her left. She couldn’t see inside
from where she now stood, though she was still directly in front of the den.
And that open door leading to the backyard. She really wanted to dart down
those steps and race out that door. She knew Conner knew she wanted to do that.
He was either in the kitchen now, or had placed her phone there to make her
think he was.

He was really messing with her head now.

She simply stood there, her hip pressed
against the table. It was painful, though oddly comforting as well. The phone
stopped ringing. He must have gone to the options menu to test the ring tones
she had stored in her phone. Of course, he would have to have the phone with
him in order to do that. He couldn’t just set it down and expect it to ring on
its own whenever he wanted.

She stood and waited a moment longer.

The phone rang again, this time from
upstairs. How had he gotten up there from the kitchen?

She found herself not really caring. She
pushed herself from the table and raced down the steps, into the den.

She was in the den. She didn’t bother
looking around to see if anyone was in there. She only had eyes for the back
door.

She could see the patio, illuminated by the
moon.

She could see the dark trees beyond the
patio. She would never again set foot in those woods. As soon as she got
outside, she would head right. Mr. Leper had lived in the house on that left,
so she saw no reason to go that way.

She was almost to the door. Almost. Almost.

She not only made it to the door, but she
made it outside. She turned right, hearing the loud patter her feet made on the
wooden floor. There were no steps on this side of the deck, so she had to go
under the arm rail. She hopped down onto the grass.

She reached the chain-link fence. She almost
collapsed with grief.

The fence was over seven feet tall, and the
links were very small.
 
She couldn’t
climb this.

She had to go out the other side, where
there was a door in the fence.

She took a deep breath, already feeling like
she’d wasted valuable time. She should have known the door was on the other
side. She’d gone through it before.

Erin didn’t want to crawl onto the deck
again just to get to the other side, so she went around it, giving it as wide a
berth as she could. She looked into the house as she did and saw no one. She
looked up briefly to see Jordan’s bedroom window wide open. She prayed Jordan
was still okay. She hadn’t planned on being away from him this long.

She ran around the deck and reached the door
in the fence. She opened it, not caring how much noise she made, and was now in
the carport. Since there was no car, she ran straight through.

A hand reached out of the kitchen door,
grabbed her hair, and pulled her back into the house. She dropped the letter
opener.

She fell to the floor and saw her attacker
closing the door behind them. It was Conner, of course, and he looked and
smelled terrible. His eyes looked glossy, his skin tight and dried out. The
smell was of ammonia and decay.

He took a step toward her and with one hand
managed to slide the breakfast table back into place before the door. He was
breathing heavily. You would expect him to grin evilly after all the deception
he put into this chase, but he didn’t seem to care one way or another.

He looked regretful. “Sorry for toying with
you,” he said in a voice that wasn’t his. “I decided not to have Conner kill
you after all. It was a long debate with my brothers, but we think you’ll serve
a better purpose.”

Erin could see it in the twist of his lips
and the pulling in of his eyebrows that two different personalities were
struggling for control of Conner. He didn’t want to hurt her. She could see it.
Something was driving him to do this, though, something he couldn’t fight.

“What now?” she asked Conner. “You put me
through all of this for a reason. What are you going to do to me?”

He tilted his head to the side, pondering
the question. “We must reproduce.”

As quick as lightning, he jumped on top of
her and began unbuttoning her pants. She screamed and tried to push his hands
away from her zipper, but they were like claws. She felt the hard knuckles, the
fingernails scratching her skin. She screamed again as she realized what he was
attempting to do.

He was going to rape her.

She kicked and screamed, but he wrapped his
legs around hers to hold them still. He unbuttoned her pants, unzipped them.

Erin closed her eyes, not wanting to see any
more.

And then, Conner’s weight was gone. She
heard him crash against the floor. She opened her eyes and saw him lying a few
feet away, holding his face. Blood dripped down from his left temple.

Erin looked behind her to see Jordan
standing there, holding a baseball bat. He was now using it as a cane to hold
himself up. He looked exhausted. Erin got to her feet and helped him out of the
kitchen and down into the den.

The back door was now closed and the couch
placed in front of it. Conner had been really fast. Erin tried to push it but
it was too heavy, and Jordan was too weak to help.

“Come on,” he said as he took her hand and
ushered her up the living room steps just as something darted down the kitchen
steps and into the den, just missing them. Once in the living room, Jordan
pulled her toward the staircase.

“Where are we going?” she asked as they
headed upstairs.

Conner hopped up into the living room on all
fours just then. Erin screamed as she helped Jordan onto the second floor. They
ran down the long hall with Conner right on their heels.

They charged into Jordan’s room and closed
the door in his face.

*
 
*
 
*

Diedre continued following Don as he raced
down the freeway, away from downtown. He was clearly in a hurry, but was he
racing to something or away from it? Why had he been at the hotel in the first
place? Perhaps he’d seen another prostitute.

Diedre tried not to make it too obvious she
was following him. He was going over ninety miles an hour, and though not many
other people were going as fast, she didn’t want to lose sight of him. Two cars
going that same speed were anything but subtle. She prayed she didn’t get
pulled over by the cops.

She felt a little regret for taking off on
Roderick but she would explain and apologize later. She was thankful she’d
brought her own car, otherwise she would have missed out on this golden
opportunity. Donovan Scott was up to something tonight, and she was going to
find out what.

*
 
*
 
*

“Why did we come up here?” Erin asked Jordan
as they barricaded the door with his desk chair against the doorknob.

“Because,” he
said as he closed his window, “I’m afraid of what will happen if he goes
outside.”