“Just do as he asks,” Kipp replied, calm as he always was in a stressful situation. “Who knows what voodoo shit he’s up to, but…” He glanced over at Dane who ran around the outside of the house depositing the salt on the windowsills. He finally turned to me. “It must be important.”
I shrugged, thinking along the same lines considering Dane acted like a crazy man. He’d always been so composed. I opened the drawstring on the bag and hurried around to the back of the house. I lined the doorway with the salt, and then repeated the process at the front door. By the time I sealed the bag, Dane had joined us.
He heaved a sigh, sounding breathless. “Now it can’t escape.”
“Escape from what?” Both Kipp and I asked together.
“I doubt my order will be enough to keep it locked down. The salt binds it to the house. It won’t be able to leave, for now, until it gets smart and figures a way out. That gives us time to determine how to deal with it.”
Fear shook me to my bones, but why that was hadn’t registered in my mind. “I’ll give it to ya, the man was scary as hell. But besides the fact that he up and vanished, which I can’t for the life of me figure out, he didn’t look like he was going to harm us.”
Dane raised his eyebrow. “He didn’t harm us because I lit the fumitory. The smoke drives it away. It’s not a ghost problem you have here in Memphis.” His gaze was serious in a way I’d never seen from him and void of all emotion. “You, Tess Jennings, have a demon.”
Chapter Ten
I waited for him to say more that somehow rejected what I heard. Dane didn’t and merely stared at me with a blank expression. “There’s a…” I gestured toward the house. “Demon in there?”
Dane nodded, his gaze thoroughly chastising me. “I would think a woman such as you, who sees and talks with ghosts wouldn’t be so surprised that evil can exist.”
“Just because I see ghosts doesn’t mean I know anything about demons,” I retorted. “I’ve never seen one before, and I sure as hell
didn’t know they were real.”
His look went right through me, as if he was indeed surprised I hadn’t known this. “That’s because there aren’t many of them. But I assure you, they do exist.”
I didn’t doubt him. What I’d seen in that room hadn’t been a normal man. Even if I wanted to believe that such evil didn’t exist, the feel of that man’s presence, the scent of him, the sheer fear I experienced, shed any doubt in my mind.
“Have you ever seen anything like this before?” Kipp asked.
I repeated Kipp’s question to Dane, and he shrugged. “Like I said, I can’t see ghosts or demons for that matter, but I’ve seen someone possessed by a demon before. It was a twenty-year-old woman in North Carolina some years ago who killed a man by snapping his neck.”
I blinked. “How would she have the strength to do that?”
Dane stared at me knowingly. “Anyone possessed with a demon will gain their strength. Years of history have shown similar stories of killers, even teenagers, who have killed with remarkable strength.”
“Fuck,” I whispered.
Kipp nodded in agreement.
I realized what Holly asked of me was now impossible. “I take it he won’t want to just leave if I ask him to, right?”
Dane chuckled darkly. “Doubtful.”
I looked at Kipp. For the first time he didn’t stare at Dane with contempt. He appeared thoughtful. I wanted to refuse Holly’s request. But Kipp’s gaze told me he didn’t. “What are you thinking?”
“He knows more about this,” Kipp replied, finally looking at me. “Press him.”
I didn’t need Kipp to tell me as much, but I didn’t want to know the answer. Sure, I’d signed up to help ghosts, but this wasn’t a ghost. This was as a spawn of Satan. Before I obliged Kipp, I had questions of my own. “Since it won’t leave if we ask it to, is there a way to get rid of it?”
“There are always ways to send evil back to Hell.”
Had anything ever sounded so ridiculous? I tried to wrap my mind around such logic, but failed miserably. “Demons really do live in Hell?”
The side of Dane’s mouth arched. “Where else would they live?”
“I have no idea,” I countered. “I’m still trying to believe this is all happening and I’m somehow involved.”
Kipp laughed.