Demonhold, or, Blight of the Deadly Demons: Sunspinners, #2

By Phoebe Matthews

Demonhold, or Blight of the Deadly Demons, is the second book in the Sunspinners series. A new wave of demons add kidnapping, pestilence and murder to the sunspinners’ disasters. Elaine’s new man is not amused.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Phoebe Matthews
• Release date: Mar 26, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386354338

Phoebe Matthews

Phoebe Matthews is currently writing three urban fantasy series. Her novels have been published by Avon, Dark Quest, Dell, Holt, LostLoves, Putnam, Silhouette, and Scholastic.

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Table of Contents

Demonhold

END

Demonhold

or

Blight of the Deadly Demons

Sunspinners Series, Book 2

Phoebe Matthews

LostLoves Books

Copyright © by Phoebe Matthews

Cover Design Copyright © by LostLoves Books

This is a work of fiction. With the exception of well-known historical personages, any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author.

On a Seattle street -

Hands like grappling hooks grabbed me. They lifted me in the air and then I was flying down the street carried aloft. Tree branches blurred above me. That awful smell enveloped me and I couldn’t even get off a good scream. Worse, I could hardly breathe. I could hear high-pitched sounds and hisses, nothing familiar. My vision was so distorted by panic, the world blurred. It felt as though a tornado surrounded me, spun around me, lifted me, shot upward, plummeted downward, in a whirl of night sky and slashes of light and wet pavement.

Police sirens wailed. Were they coming to save me? They swerved away and faded.

I worked at quick breaths through my mouth. I could taste the smell but it wasn’t quite as overpowering. My eyes and maybe my brain began to focus.

Whatever the creature was that carried me, it moved by leaping. It swung me down from overhead, nausea time, and caught me under its arm like a package, with my feet forward and my head hanging back and down.

Every time the thing leaped up in an arc and then did a fast landing before its next leap, my head did a fast dip toward hard pavement. A few inches lower and my skull would split open. I tried to stiffen my neck to hold my head up. That was impossible. I tried to focus my eyes and immediately regretted that major error because what I saw below me hitting the rain-slick pavement were running feet, long-toed, a sheath of wrinkles, oily, gray-brown, tipped with claws.

Then we went flying up in the air and I twisted in its grip and saw the giant red cranes of the port in the near distance and how had we traveled so far in so little time?

I tried to move, shake, kick, anything to loosen its hold. A crash to the pavement had to be better than my screaming terror. We cut down alleys and between buildings, following a route out of sight of traffic. Cars and horns and sirens shrieked in the distance, noises that usually annoy but now I wanted to join them.

Instead we swerved from the street. Hard fingers dug into my ribs until it felt like my bones would start cracking. The thing dragged me behind a hedge and pushed me down onto damp ground. The smell of earth was a short relief from the demon stench.

We huddled in a street underpass. Cars roared overhead. I had no idea of our location other than that we were headed south toward an industrial district. Wherever we were, there were shrubs. Greenery grows so easily in Seattle’s damp climate that when a city maintenance crew sticks teeny seedlings in open spots, they shoot up overnight into enormous hedges. Wet leaves soaked their dampness through my jeans. No point screaming. The demon might decide to put its filthy fingers across my mouth. Besides, it took all my strength to gasp in a breath. Not nearly enough air for a scream.

Sirens, lights, police cars, a fire engine, all shooting past on the other side of the hedge, whirling colored lights filled the darkness, reflecting off the rain. So much noise wiped out other thoughts. Sudden silence, darkness, and an empty street. If any small creatures lived here, they must have recognized a predator because there wasn’t so much as a leaf rustle. I turned my neck to look up and wished I hadn’t. Large flat eyes stared at me, unblinking.

Its voice scraped between a gurgle and a whistle. If you want to live, follow instructions.

––––––––

CHAPTER 1

Five live-in relatives, a demon curse and two failed marriages later, my life was not improving. Once again I got tossed a death threat and it all started the morning Charley went with me to the grocery store.

A box of crackers fell off of a grocery shelf all by itself, flipped over once, then slid across the aisle until it stopped in front of my cart. I bent down, picked it up, tossed it in the cart and then pulled out my cell phone. Thank God for cell phones. My mother had been forced to walk around talking to herself and knowing that everyone thought she was demented.

Flipping the phone open without turning it on, I held it to my ear and said, Charley, if you want something, say so. Stop knocking stuff off the shelves.

No one so much as glanced at me. Half of the other people in the aisle were talking to their phones.

In my other ear a voice said clearly, Elaine, don’t forget the brie. And you were going to walk right past the crackers. What was I to do, sweetie, shout at you?

Not unless you can make yourself sound like the store’s intercom. As soon as I said it, I regretted it.

There were footsteps, then a noisy vibration from the metal store shelves. I wiped my sweating palms on my cutoffs. Grocery shopping was such a bitch. From somewhere above me, a loud robotic voice did a staticky noise before enunciating slowly, Shoppers, listen up! Our own bitterblack chocolate layer cake is in the bakery on aisle 4. Take one home today. Take an extra to put in your freezer.   

Yeah, yeah, I muttered and stuffed the phone back in my shoulder bag.

In front of me a man stumbled sideways as a half dozen cereal boxes fell off a top shelf and shot past him. He grabbed at his cart handle for balance, then looked around quickly. The woman in front of him shuddered and stared at her hand, as though she felt something strange (warm flesh?) brush against it.

I turned my cart and headed for aisle 4. A brie, two cakes and a bunch of stuff later, I shuffled my way through the line and made small talk with the checker about, oh yes, company coming, to explain my overflowing cart.

After unloading the cart into my hatchback and sliding into the driver’s seat, I tossed my shoulder bag on the floor behind the seat. I would have rolled down the window to get a little air but damn, my keys were in the purse and the windows don’t open without the key in the ignition.

It required that upside-down backwards maneuver to reach past the center console and grab my purse from the floor. I dug out my keys, started the car, drove out of the lot, and not until I hit the main road and turned toward home did I feel calm enough to say, not scream,  Charley, you gotta quit tagging along!

From the front passenger side of the car a pleasant male voice said, I couldn’t sleep and it’s such a bore with no one to talk to, and besides, I knew you’d forget the brie, sweetie.

Reaching over and punching him was out of the question. He wasn’t visible but I knew he was naked. Oh sure, he’d think it was pretty funny, my fist jamming into his bare flesh, maybe hit someplace I didn’t mean to touch. There is something about invisible that is a real turnoff, which is why I didn’t bother to ask what body part he had slid past that woman’s hand in the grocery.

Sure, it required visible me to lug the grocery bags from the driveway and across the lawn and up the outside steps to the front hall of my large brick house. At least I didn’t have to wrestle with keys. Charley reached around me, opened the door, and held it open for me, all moves that wouldn’t be noticed by any neighbor who happened to glance our direction.

Once inside, all lugging and putting away in the kitchen got left to the copilot. My office was down the hallway toward the back of the house, empty, my domain, so that was where I went to escape.    

As I clicked open my e-mail, my cell phone rang. Good timing, who needs self-pity? Royal here.

My glance ran down the list of e-mail entries. Nothing from Mother, not that there ever was, but oh yes, three from SNorris.

Ah, not your answering machine. Good. Elaine, I need you  here now.

I spun around in my desk chair, tilted back and rested my heels on my desk. That gave me breathing time to avoid exploding, because I really did not need my boss, Devon Chevel, yeah, that Chevel, as in Chevel Creative, in my weekend. Devon had no awareness of personal space.  Possibly he didn’t see others as persons, merely as machine parts in his business? Machine parts have no life outside the job and available to work at any time. He paid for his stupidity, paid in extremely high salaries, otherwise we all would have quit. Instead I drew lines, rather like baselines on a ball field, because guys who don’t understand people do, however, understand game boundaries.

Through the window I could see the tree-high rhododendrons that ringed the back yard, blocking out the neighbors. Big noisy things, red and magenta, the rhodies, not the neighbors. I never much cared for rhodies but there they were and it would take years to start over with laurel and get it to the same height.

It’s Saturday, Devon. The weekend, I said while I opened the first SNorris. Hey, lady, how’s tonight looking? :-)

We have a client coming in who wants face to face, Devon said.

So face to face him.

I need your input, he said, which was true, he did, because his web designs were overblown, crowded, confusing. Somewhere in the mists of time Devon must have had clarity or he could not have built the business to its current success, but he’d lost it and relied on myself and three other web designers plus staff to keep him rich.

How big? I asked and opened the second SNorris. ***!!! Got a job tonight. Would I be happier unemployed? :-(

I could imagine Devon standing at his desk in his neatly pressed slacks and Mariner jacket, running his fingers through his thinning hair, his long narrow face angry. He really hated my attitude. The only thing he hated more was the thought of losing my skills.

The client is a consulting firm looking for an informative site that screams class, major player.

I am not asking the size of the client, Devon. What’s my bonus? I clicked open the third SNorris. Face time today maybe? :-o

Face time with Sam Norris sounded a lot more exciting than face to face time with a client. I could hang up right now, phone Sam and see if we could coordinate our schedules.

Bonus? Devon squawked.

When you interrupt my Saturday I want tickets for tomorrow, Devon, and I don’t mean company tickets, I mean your tickets. It was mean of me but if he desperately needed me, his own personal third row behind home plate seats were a reasonable request, one that would separate idle commands from necessity.

There was a very long pause but greed won. Yes, all right, be here in an hour.

I smirked at my reflection in the computer screen, almost as vague as Charley in the shadowed hallway. My hair is thick and that’s the best that can be said for it. A fairly talented and very pricey hairdresser keeps it a shade lighter than brown and streaked with sunny blond bits. Probably there is a name for that particular hair coloring but I am a website designer, not a beautician.

And this is Seattle and I grew up here. Tans are admired, a sign of a recent vacation to a sunny locale, but heavy make-up means newcomer. The constant rain tends to cause mascara to run. I try not to think about what it does to ornate hair styles. I’m a basic jeans-and-sweatshirt Seattlite.

And why did I want two tickets to the Mariners? Umm. My highly agile and overworked thumb punched in a number on the phone in my palm.

It rang. And rang. And then this low sexy voice asked me to leave a message and I did, reminding him that they had garlic fries at the stadium. I was in mid-sentence when the doorbell chimed.

Never a quitter, I completed the invitation and hung up, then hurried through the house. Footsteps pattered above me in the upstairs hall but the sound didn’t tempt me to glance upstairs because frankly, what appears in muted daytime light is creepy.

CHAPTER 2

Standing on the porch on the other side of the screen door was the very guy I had phoned, wearing his smiley face.

Couldn’t wait for an answer?

Sam Norris grinned. Hey, Elaine, got a minute?

Face time is a minute? I said, thinking of that last e-mail.

Sam Norris was new in my life, a guy I’d met recently and wouldn’t mind knowing a lot longer. My luck with men is abysmal, because any life that includes two failed marriages can only be described as abysmal, but I keep hoping. I opened the screen door and let him follow me into the entry hall past the huddle of grocery bags that Charley was supposed to take into the kitchen. The help around my place does not line up and salute.

That’s about all the time I have. Sorry. I have to go over to the office. Wait here a sec, Sam.

Want me to carry your groceries into the kitchen?

Nah, leave them, I said and left him in the hallway while I turned into my bedroom, also on the first floor. I wasn’t insane enough to have a room upstairs.

With the door open so I could talk to him, I pulled off my cut-offs and wriggled into jeans that had somehow shrunk and made me fight with the zipper before it closed.

Pulling my Mariner shirt over my head, I called out, Want to drive me over and drop me off? We can talk on the way.

That’s good. He sounded much closer than the front hall.

I clawed at my sweatshirt, trying to get the neckline below my eyes, finally managed, poked my head out, yanked at the hem to work it down to my waist, and glared at him.   

He leaned against the door frame of my bedroom and who knew