mortar, and used my lighter to burn them. They smoldered, but wouldn’t hold a flame. It would have to be enough. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.
I put the jar of burnt herbs outside my front door. I covered every window, I turned on every light. I took the largest knife from the block in the kitchen and sat on the couch, heart pounding, trying to catch my breath as Cheesecake stared nervously at the door.
Eventually, I heard the crickets start up their song again. The tightness seemed to go out of the air, whatever pressure had been squeezing my lungs was gone. Cheesecake curled up on the couch beside me and began to groom, pulling twigs from his fur. I was light-headed with exhaustion and sick with worry, but if Cheesecake didn’t sense danger anymore, then I assumed Leon must have chased the monsters off at last.
This was all too dangerously real. All these years of seeking the paranormal, and suddenly I was in the thick of it. Suddenly there were demons, monsters, and magical books, and I was witnessing it.
Not just witnessing it, I was getting intimate with it.
Closing my eyes, I could feel Leon’s tongue on me again. It was so wrong that it felt right. I’d fucked an inhuman being, a monster. I’d looked at him with his claws and sharp teeth, I’d seen the blood smeared across his body, and I’d wanted him. I’d begged him for it.
As I curled up on the couch, my knife close at hand, I kept hoping I’d hear Leon call my name outside. He was an asshole, but I felt safer with him near me. Even though he’d told me protection came at a price, he’d already protected me, for nothing. He’d even protected my pet. I had a hard time believing someone willing to risk injury to save an animal could be evil.
But I couldn’t accept his bargain. Stories throughout history warned of the dangers of giving in to a demon’s temptation, and selling my soul for protection would surely come with a catastrophic price. I may have fucked up my integrity as a paranormal investigator, but at least I knew better than to sell my soul.
How much of what Leon had told me was I supposed to believe? He claimed there were Gods, he claimed Kent Hadleigh was a magician leading some kind of human sacrifice cult. Magic, murder, and monsters – all this, hidden in quiet, charming Abelaum?
The Abelaum of my childhood had felt like a fairy kingdom. But the Abelaum I’d returned to felt like the fairy kingdom had been taken over by Maleficent, filling it with thorns and darkness.
I lay down on the couch, hugging a pillow for comfort. I doubted I would get much sleep, but my eyes were aching and my body felt heavy. I had to try to rest. Whatever nightmares I had couldn’t get any weirder than reality.
I woke up late.
I jolted up from the couch, my heart pounding as memories of the previous night returned. Leon, the monsters, Cheesecake, the grimoire — I rubbed a hand over my face, dreading that I had to try to make it through classes that day.
I had to get a shower; my legs were sticky, my panties abandoned somewhere back in the cemetery. I realized how achingly sore I was as I washed. I had hickeys across my throat and shoulders, even my thighs. Then there were the scratches, the little cuts from his claws. They were tender under my fingers, but I couldn’t stop touching them. The memories of his cock throbbing inside me as he came got me so distracted that by the time I got out of the shower, there was no way I wasn’t going to be late to my first class.
Luckily, Cheesecake seemed no worse off from his ordeal. He rubbed around my feet, mewling hungrily until I put some kibble in his bowl.
“No crisis of reality for you, huh?” I said, pouring my coffee into a to-go mug. “No surprise to you at all that the woods are infested with monsters?”
I finally took Leon’s advice that day and drove to campus. Finding and then paying for parking made me even later, and I got a glare and shake of the head from my professor when I crept into my first class. I set my laptop to record the lecture, because there was no way I was going to absorb any of the information. I