Everyone is grazing out at the back of the pasture again, and sunlight streams down on me. It’ll be a somewhat decent day for early March, though I won’t be able to enjoy any of the sunshine until I’ve cleared my name and we’ve caught the demon.
“Morning,” Laney says when I come into the kitchen, stepping out of my boots. “I would have helped you take care of the horses, you know. I miss Mystery and I’m dying to meet the donkeys.”
“You ride?” Sam asks, sipping coffee as she scrolls through something on Ethan’s computer.
“I do. I’m nowhere as good as Anora but give me a calm horse and a trail and I’m in my element.”
“Maybe you two can ride,” Ethan suggests. He’s standing at the stove, making scrambled eggs. This time, when I watch him cook and find him so fucking hot, nothing tries to slurp up that energy.
“Yeah, I’d love that!” Laney nods enthusiastically. “But I’m guessing that has to wait until after this demon is caught.”
“Definitely.”
A timer goes off and Nik gets a fresh batch of muffins from the oven. It’s a bit of chaos for the next few minutes, but then we all gather around the dining room table, plates full. A tense silence falls over us as we eat, and I know I’m not the only one feeling like this is the calm before the storm.
Everyone pitches in to clear the table and clean up the kitchen, and then it’s back to the dining room. Ethan and Harrison are already going through print outs of everything Julia sent . I’m internally cringing as they hang each paper up using Scotch tape on the vintage wallpaper. We don’t have any painters tape, and if this helps catch our killer, I’ll happily re-wallpaper in the future.
“I got some new info from Jules,” Ethan tells us, coming back from the library, having gotten a few new pages from the printer. “Miles Dumont is our first victim. He was found dead in his office six weeks ago. Cause of death was originally ruled accidental, but his children requested the investigation be opened and it’s now being seen as a possible murder, though his office building has pretty impressive security.”
He tapes the paper to the wall above the others. “He died from blunt force trauma to the back of the head. While sitting at his desk and was on a Zoom call that blacked out moments before the official TOD. His office door was locked, and security footage shows that no one entered or left his office the hour before he died.”
“Let me guess,” Sam starts, flipping through my Book of Shadows. “He was actually scared to death.”
“Yep. The second investigation found that a heart attack was the actual cause of death and the detective assigned to his case is facing a lawsuit. The ME is a bit stumped on this one as well. Because reports are showing that the heart attack and the head injury happened at the same time.”
“Was he a hunter?” I ask.
“Far from it,” Ethan says. “He worked at an auction house, authenticating historic objects. The guy was wheelchair bound after a car accident twenty years ago.”
“And our second victim,” Harrison continues. “Is Eva Martin. We think she could have been a hunter, but not with the Order.” Ethan nods and Harrison goes on. “She was an avid hiker and lived in North Carolina until she moved here recently for work, some sort of freelance photography. She was found in an alley near the Mag-Mile and was mauled by bears. Not apparently, but actually mauled by bears. Investigators found clumps of fur at the scene that was ID’d by DNA as black bear fur. The cops kept her death from the news and animal control was on high alert for the next week, but no one ever reported a bear sighting.”
We keep going through the victims, until we have nine identified. Julia was right to say there’s definitely a pattern of weird deaths every three days. We’re missing a few files that I’m sure Julia will be able to dig up if she has enough time.
“The hiker was killed by bears in the middle of Chicago,” I start, looking over the papers. “The teacher was shot in her apartment but no bullets or gunpowder was found, and the boy who was scared to swim drowned in a bedroom. The fears are on point, and the victims are seeming more and more random at this point.”
“You said you were looking for a Freddy Krueger demon. He’s not, uh, based on truth, is he?” Laney asks nervously.
“As far as I know, he’s not,” I say, but look at Ethan and Sam to see if they’ve heard of anything. “But demons feeding on pain and fear are very real.”
“Great.” Her hands have been on the demonic encyclopedia this whole time, but she hasn’t opened it. Laney is the kind of person who watches horror movies with the lights on. Looking through the book for the monster behind the murders is beyond her comfort zone, that’s for sure. “You don’t have a magical version of really strong coffee, do you?”