A Darker Past (The Darker Agency #2)(18)
“I thought you had better taste in music.” He gestured into the main room, toward the laptop on my desk, where “Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked” drifted softly from Sirius Radio’s Octane channel.
“I do. Just because you don’t like anything other than classical… I know you’ve been away for a while, but the world’s changed and it’s got a lot of cool things going on.”
“The dying elephants aren’t a cool thing,” he said wryly.
“It’s Cage the Elephant, actually.”
I’d pulled up music videos on YouTube after getting bored. It took all of about ten minutes, and Lukas, with his stuffy work ethics, had been appalled. “It’s a song about doing illegal things.”
“The meaning is deeper than that. It’s saying that there’s always something to do. Always bills to be paid, chores to tackle. Yadda, yadda.” I rolled my eyes and flipped on the small television on the counter next to the fridge.
“Do us both a favor. Never listen to rap. Your head would explode.” I flipped the channel again. Those stupid Law and Order shows were on every damn station. Game shows. Talk shows. Court shows.
The phone on Mom’s desk started to ring, stopping the argument cold. I stretched across, knocking the receiver off its stand, then pulled it closer by dragging Mom’s calendar along the desk. She would call it lazy. I called it creative. “Darker Agency.”
“We didn’t find much at Town Hall. In fact”—Mom’s voice floated through the receiver. Even though the connection was horrible, I could hear the taint of annoyance—“we didn’t find anything, actually. There wasn’t even any glass.”
“It’s definitely there… The frame for the mirror was huge.” There’d been a pile of glass when we left. “Maybe you just didn’t see it in all the wreckage?”
A horn blared, and Dad mumbled a string of colorful words, presumably from the driver’s seat.
“That’s what I’m telling you. There was no wreckage. The place was spotless. Like nothing went down.”
An uneasy knot twisted in my stomach. “Um, that’s odd…”
“A little too odd. Your father sensed witch magic, so he and I are going to head over to the Belfairs’. Cassidy might have some insight.”
“Good luck.” Cassidy Belfair was the least helpful person on the planet. She also wasn’t a fan of the Darkers.
“In the meantime, I just got a call from Paulson. We have a problem at the lake.” Paulson, necromancer extraordinaire. He tended to keep an eye on the comings and goings on in Penance through the help of the dead, and called us whenever something potentially bad was going down. “I need you and Lukas to do a quick takedown.”
Chapter Seven
The smell was starting to get to me. Pickle juice and rotting fish baking to perfection on the dashboard of a car in mid-July. It overwhelmed the smell of the bleach I’d poured in a circle a few feet from the lake, next to the tree.
I’d been excited at the prospect of going out on a takedown of my own. Well, I was, until I found out what Mom had set us up against. While taking a walk, Paulson had spotted a smelly swamp thing-like monster lumbering around Dobbs Park Lake. He’d called Mom’s cell, and she’d sent Lukas and me to deal with it, stating that it was to give him more practice in the field. I knew that was a steaming load of harpy crap. This was payback for me letting Smokey, my demon doggie, into her room. He’d left a present in her bed. A human femur. She didn’t quite understand that it was an expression of love. Granted, it was morbid, icky love, but still. Love.
Smokey style.
“Over there!” I screamed, waving like a lunatic at Lukas, who was running across the field.
Lukas kited the Dirt demon in a wide circle around the lake with one hand clamped across his nose and mouth. He skidded to a stop in the slightly overgrown grass, pivoted, and changed direction on a dime. I had to give the boy props. He was crazy agile.
“Over there is neither left nor right,” he yelled from behind his hand.
All we had to do was get the thing inside the bleach circle I’d poured and get clear. “Bring it over to the tree.”
I tossed the Clorox bottle aside and started running, jabbing a finger at the large pine tree to the right of the lake. Aside from being stinky and fairly gruesome looking, Dirt demons were a pain in the ass to bring down. The usual quartz powder cocktail and flick of a lighter wouldn’t do the trick. They needed a little more purifying than that.
The thing grunted and lumbered forward, unnaturally long arms swinging toward Lukas. They made a sort of squishing sound as it moved. Mom always said it was the sound more than the smell that turned her stomach. I didn’t agree. The stench was enough to induce yakking. Lukas sidestepped the demon’s reach and sprinted for the tree line. The thing followed.
Unfortunately, this particular Dirt demon was smart. Well, as smart as a walking pile of festering mud and gunk could be. It must have caught a whiff of the cleaner, because it pulled up a few yards short of the circle and whirled on me. A hacking sound, followed by a sick kind of slurping, and the thing spit a glob of foul smelling black mucus in my direction.
“Craps,” I cursed and danced to the right, skirting the globule without landing on my butt. I was thankful. The Dirt demon?