moment later, the shower started up and I couldn’t help but wonder if he was going to make it a cold one.
I quickly got dressed in a loose-fitting shirt and jeans. Something about visiting with Ethan’s demon made me want to dress in my leather, but I knew it would be a bad idea. I’d much rather be able to move without pain than to look good for a creature I wasn’t so sure I really wanted to meet.
I was downstairs again before Ethan’s shower was done. As soon as the water shut off, I poured him a cup of coffee and took it to the table. I was pretty sure he took it straight black but brought out the sugar bowl anyway. I’d never seen him put anything into the coffee, but then again, I never really paid close enough attention to know for sure.
Ethan came downstairs a few minutes later. His hair was still damp, and the collar of his T-shirt was wet. He looked as nervous as I felt.
“Thanks,” he said as I handed him his mug. He took a sip and started for the stairs without paying the sugar bowl a glance.
I followed him down into the basement. He stopped at the door to his lab and just stared at it. He took another drink of his coffee, seemed to savor it, and then set the mug down on the table beside the door.
“So this is it,” he said.
“This isn’t such a big deal,” I said, though I wasn’t convinced of that myself.
He smiled. “If you say so.”
He pulled a key from his pocket and inserted it into the lock. The doorknob fell open, revealing a fingerprint reader. I stared at it, surprised. I’d seen him go into the lab before but never realized he had installed a reader there too. I really needed to start paying better attention to what went on in my own house.
Ethan looked back at me, his hand hovering over the reader as if blocking off my view. “Are you sure?” he said. “This could be ... unsettling.”
“You were the one who said I should meet him.”
Ethan shrugged. “Yeah, but I never thought you’d actually do it. It’s like, you know, that whole I ask, you reject, we move on as we were kind of thing. I never expected you to take me up on it.”
I rolled my eyes. “Open it.”
He gave a nervous laugh and turned back to the door. I could tell he wasn’t comfortable with letting me in, even if he had invited me. This had been his private sanctuary for years. How many times had he summoned that demon down there? How many times before I knew him? I was about to come face-to-face with a part of Ethan I’d never known existed until recently.
He pressed his thumb to the reader and the door clicked open. He led the way down into his lab.
The lab, unlike his bedroom, was clean and well maintained. Shelves lined one wall, holding various objects in jars and boxes. I couldn’t tell what any of them were. The boxes were closed and the jars had been painted black. I probably didn’t want to know what they contained.
A table much like what I used to hold my weapons upstairs stood across the room, and a workbench stood beside it. There were papers piled on one corner, and one of my recently used swords lay in the middle of the table. The walls behind the table held more partially finished weapons on hooks. I’d never seen one of my swords before it had been completed.
I looked around, expecting there to be a furnace or something, but as far as I could tell, there was no source of heat in the lab. He made my swords and knives down here, not to mention the silver bullets I used. There should have been some source of heat. It made me wonder how much of a hand Ethan really had in the creation of the weapons.
Finally, my eyes rested on the circle in the middle of the room. It looked to be made of silver, though I couldn’t be sure unless I touched it. It took up a good portion of the room. There was nothing touching the circle, wasn’t anything anywhere close to it other than a single recliner that sat within its confines. It looked well used.
“Nice place,” I said, my skin crawling. This reminded me way too much of an evil scientist’s lab in