Demon Road

  “But the Devil, you see, the Devil has no time for God’s plans. The Devil and that Shining Demon of his are there to stir things up. Gregory made that deal and I’m glad he did it, because poor Jacob did not deserve what God was doing to him. I’m glad my son did what he did, even though he damned himself by doing it.”

  “What did the Shining Demon want in return?”

  “Souls,” said Althea. “What does he ever want? Souls, souls and more souls – the more innocent, the better. But my son is smarter than the Shining Demon. Jacob was healed, and Gregory disappeared without having to shed one single drop of blood. The Shining Demon doesn’t know where to even look. So I doubt you’ll be able to find him, if you don’t mind me saying.”

  “You don’t have any idea where he is?”

  “I don’t,” said Althea. “Gregory probably thinks it’s safer that way – safer for him and safer for me.”

  “What about your grandson?”

  Althea shook her head. “Jacob doesn’t know. Don’t think he does, anyway.”

  “Could we talk to him?”

  “I don’t have a phone number for him, I’m afraid. He lives in Cricket Hill, that’s in Colorado. Burkitt Road, I think. I might be wrong.”

  “He doesn’t stay in touch?”

  Althea smiled. “Young people have their own lives to lead, as you well know. No one has any responsibility to call me, or even write. Do you call your grandparents?”

  “I, um, I never had any.”

  Althea patted her hand. “That’s a shame. I have a feeling you’d have made a good granddaughter. What about your friend?”

  “Glen? No, his family isn’t anything to brag about, either.”

  “Well then,” said Althea, “it’s a good thing he has you and Milo, isn’t it?”

  “I guess.”

  Althea smiled. “Go on, now. Let an old woman get her rest.”

  Amber left the room, closing the door gently. She went to the bathroom, then made herself a sandwich in the kitchen. She made one for Glen, too, and took it to him. The living room was empty.

  “Glen?” she called.

  She searched the house, growing more and more panicked. Finally, she went to the window, looked in the direction Glen had been looking when he’d heard those whispers calling to him. In a darkened area across town, a single house was lit up.

  Taking a heavy crucifix from Althea’s wall, Amber followed him out into the night.

  AMBER WALKED QUICKLY, sticking to the shadows, the crucifix clutched tightly in her hand. The streets were unnaturally quiet, the entire town of Cascade Falls holding its breath for morning. But morning was a long way off.

  Halfway across town, Amber saw her first moving car of the night. She ducked behind a fence, scampered sideways, peering out through the leaves of a manicured hedge.

  The car passed slowly, and so close that Amber got a good look at both Grant and Kirsty.

  Her breath caught in her throat.

  No demon horns for her parents’ old friends. They looked perfectly normal, sitting there, scanning their surroundings like hawks, searching for prey. Amber had an irrational urge to stand up, let them see her.

  She resisted.

  The car moved on and Amber thought about what she’d seen. She thought about their faces. Calm but eager. Patient but excited. They knew she was close and they knew they were closing in. The urge to stand up faded quickly, replaced by a hatred so deep she now had to stop herself from screaming curses at them. Her heart pounded ever harder in her chest and she shifted without meaning to. This time there was no pain to accompany the transformation.

  When the car had turned the corner, Amber moved on, still in her demon form, crossing the road quickly and slipping into shadow once again.

  She got to the Varga Hotel without encountering anyone else, and skirted it. An image flashed into her head of vampires crawling all over the outside walls like flies on a rotting piece of meat, but so far there was nothing unusual – or unnatural – to be seen. She carried on through the darkened neighbourhood, to the only house with lights on.

  Keeping to the shadows, she circled it, then crossed the road, and ducked down behind some bushes. She waited, making sure she hadn’t been seen, then peeked back across the road at the front door, which gaped open like a hungry mouth.

  Something bad had happened.

  She bit her lip, feeling her sharp teeth. If there were vampires in there, she had the crucifix. If her parents were in there, the crucifix wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference and she’d be walking to her death.

  But she didn’t have a choice. Glen was in that house, she just knew it, and she wasn’t going to leave him behind – not if she could help it.

  Keeping low, she jogged back across the road, straightening up as she approached the door. At the last moment, she reverted to her normal appearance – if she was wrong and everything was fine, she didn’t want to give the owner of the house a heart attack.

  Amber climbed the two small steps, pushed the door open the rest of the way, and, holding the crucifix out before her, she walked in.

  The hall corridor was long and narrow, at the end of which was a door with a large partition of clouded glass. A doorway to her left led into a living room that was well maintained but barely lived in. Another doorway to her right opened on to a neat, bookshelf-lined study. She passed a small table on which sat a type of phone she’d only seen pictures of, the kind with a rotary dial. There was a bedroom on her left. A bathroom on her right.

  The house was quiet and well lit. No shadows moved beyond the clouded glass ahead.

  Amber stopped and listened. She counted to ten and, when she still didn’t hear anything, she turned the handle and nudged the door. It swung open gently into a second living room, one that showed definite signs of having being lived in. The TV set in the corner, the logs beside the fireplace, the magazines and books scattered around on the various items of furniture – this was the room the owner of the house spent most of his time in.

  He’d spent his last few moments in here as well.

  His body lay crumpled beside the old sofa, his head twisted all the way round. His death had been quick – or at least it looked that way. small mercies. Amber wondered if there would be anyone left in this town to gossip about it after tonight.

  The living room connected to the kitchen. Amber crossed the carpeted floor silently. She got to the doorway and peeked inside, and a mournful weight dropped from her chest to her belly. Glen lay on the table, arms and legs flung wide, his eyes open and blinking. Dozens of small wounds punctured his body in perfect sets of two, and from those wounds trickled what little blood he had left. His skin was so pale. He looked empty. On the cusp of death.

  His eyes flickered to her. He opened his mouth to moan, and all that escaped was a breath. A finger moved, and that’s all he could manage.

  A vampire stepped into the kitchen from the utility room ahead. She was middle-aged and as pale as Glen. She smiled at Amber, revealing her fangs.

  Amber moved backwards out of the kitchen. The doors connecting the living room to the two main bedrooms were now open. Vampires stood there, watching her hungrily.

  She backed up to the door with the clouded glass. They followed. Eight of them. She held up the crucifix. A look of physical pain passed over the vampires’ faces. One of them actually recoiled, as if from a great heat. They hissed in anger.

  The middle-aged woman was the bravest. With every step she took, Amber shrank back. The woman’s eyes were astonishing. They blazed. Amber couldn’t look away.

  “Put down the cross,” the woman said.

  Her voice melted in Amber’s head. The words sang. They tugged at every small corner of her mind, and brought with them a pleasing, numbing warmth.

  Amber’s arm dipped.

  “Put it down,” said the woman. “We won’t hurt you.”

  Amber wanted to. She wanted to so badly. She didn’t like holding the crucifix like this. She didn
’t want to hurt the woman’s feelings. But the other vampires, she didn’t like them. They scared her. Especially the way they were moving closer, their smiles spreading. In a matter of moments, one of them would be close enough to bat her arm down, maybe knock the crucifix from her hand altogether.

  Would that be so bad? Maybe not. Maybe she should let them.

  The woman’s blazing eyes flickered briefly to the lowering crucifix, and Amber could think clearly again.

  She bared her teeth, which became fangs, and her skin turned red and her muscles got bigger and her limbs lengthened and her horns grew and now it was the vampires who shrank back, their eyes wide as she stood before them, beautiful and terrible and snarling.

  The middle-aged woman gaped. “What are you?”

  Amber simply snarled, and stepped backwards into the corridor. Her free hand closed round the handle, and she slowly shut the door between them.

  She backed off faster along the hallway. Shadows moved into the light beyond the clouded glass and bunched up, forming a solid mass. Amber reached the front door, put her foot out on to the first step.

  The clouded glass shattered as the vampires came through. Amber spun, leaped off the steps and ran. They came after her, a cackling, spitting mass of bodies. She got to the street as a hand grabbed her shoulder and she shoved the crucifix behind her and heard a scream and the hand fell away as she ran on. They were in the air now, dark shapes flitting through the night sky. One of them swooped for her and she ducked, went stumbling. She jumped a low fence and ran through a backyard. The sudden fluttering of clothes from above and she felt a hand grasping at her hair, barely missing as it passed.

  She ran to the next house, didn’t slow down as she neared the front door. There was a whoosh of air behind her, and she just knew it was the middle-aged woman, the one with the honeyed voice. She leaped, putting her shoulder to the door, and it splintered and she went sprawling inside. She scrambled up. The door hung off its hinges, but the doorway itself was clear. They couldn’t come in without an invitation.

  She turned, saw a figure on the stairs, saw something glinting in the dark, and she dived to the ground as the shotgun blast filled the house. Then she was up, snatching the gun from the hands of its owner.

  “What the hell?” she screamed.

  The owner, a chunky guy in his forties with a bathrobe tied loosely over his boxers and T-shirt, held up his hands immediately. “Please!” he cried. “Don’t hurt us! Just leave! God, please!”

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” she snapped.

  He got a good look at her, he must have, because his face went slack. “Oh God … you’re the Devil …”

  “I’m not the Devil,” she said. “My name’s Amber. I’m not going to hurt you.”

  “Please,” he sobbed. “Spare my family.”

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” she repeated, louder this time. “You know what’s going on, right? You know about all this craziness?”

  He nodded quickly. “The … the things. The …”

  “Go on. You can say it.”

  He swallowed thickly. “The vampires.”

  “There you go,” said Amber. “Cascade Falls is overrun by vampires, right? Do I look like a vampire to you?”

  “You look like the Devil.”

  “Still not a vampire, though. And I’m not going to hurt you or your family. Listen, they can’t get in unless you invite them, all right? So you’re perfectly safe.”

  “Are you going to eat us?”

  “No,” she said irritably. “I’m not going to eat you. Just do what I say and you’ll live, got it?”

  He nodded slowly. His eyes were moving now, darting to the front door as his thought processes came back online.

  She handed him back his shotgun. “I’m going to trust you not to shoot me, okay?”

  He hesitated, then took the weapon. “Thank you.”

  “I’m going to leave the first chance I get,” she said. “If I can, I’ll draw them away from you and your family. You want my advice? Get out of town first thing tomorrow.”

  “Yeah,” he said shakily. “Yeah.”

  “I’m going to check the back,” she said, “and see if I can get out there. Anyone even approaches that door, you blast them, understood?”

  He nodded, and she patted his shoulder.

  “You’re all going to be okay,” she said. “I promise.”

  She hurried into the dark kitchen, found the back door with the key still in the lock. She opened it, but didn’t step out. She leaned, looking upwards. No sign of them.

  She heard voices elsewhere in the house. She didn’t want to freak out the guy’s wife, but she really had no choice. She went back into the hallway.

  He wasn’t talking to his wife. He was talking to a vampire, standing just outside the front door. The shotgun dangled in his hand. From here, Amber could see the vampire’s blazing eyes.

  The owner of the house stepped back. “Please,” he said dully, “come in.”

  THE VAMPIRE WAS ON the man in an instant, mouth clamped round his jugular, and the other vampires poured in through the door. They half ran, half flew up the stairs, giggling in their anticipation. The screams of the family shook Amber out of her paralysis.

  She turned and ran.

  The town was a dark, jangled blur. She jumped walls and plunged through bushes. She trampled flowers and ducked under branches. She ran on road and lawn and sidewalk. The more she ran, the faster she ran. The oxygen she sucked in added fuel to her legs. She jumped over the hood of a parked car without touching it and smashed through a fence without feeling it.

  She had reached Althea’s house before she even looked back to see if they were following. They weren’t.

  She reverted to normal and nearly collapsed. Her muscles burned and she gasped for breath. Althea’s door opened and Milo hurried out, took her arm and dragged her inside.

  “Where the hell were you?” he asked as he closed the door behind her.

  Veronica stood up from the sofa when she saw Amber. She was pale, and her clothes were dirty and her knee was bleeding.

  But Amber didn’t care about her. “Glen,” she said. “They’ve got Glen.”

  Milo hesitated, and Amber sank into his chest and he hugged her.

  She cried.

  AMBER SLEPT AND DREAMED of dead things.

  She awoke to sunlight and faint voices, coming from somewhere in the house. Calm voices. Quiet. She got up, and dressed by the window. From her vantage point on the hill, she had a pretty good view over the town. From here, Cascade Falls looked peaceful, the kind of peaceful only found in graveyards.

  A car moved a few streets over, slipping in and out of view at a leisurely pace. Then it was gone.

  She knew that car. She had travelled in it practically every day for the last three years, ever since her parents had bought it.

  There was more movement, from another part of town. Two people walking. She squinted. Alastair she recognised immediately. The other person was momentarily obscured by a tree. Imelda emerged and Amber bit her lip to stop the sob from escaping.

  She watched them walk up to a house. They shifted, their red skin and horns impressive even from this distance. Alastair kicked down the front door, and they strolled in.

  Amber stood at the window, frowning.

  Finally, there was movement, Alastair dragging someone out of the house. He turned and threw the body on to the front lawn, and the moment sunlight hit him the man burst into flames. Amber couldn’t hear his screams, but she could see Alastair laughing as he flailed. Imelda walked by Alastair and the burning vampire without looking at either of them, and went to the next house. Alastair reluctantly followed.

  The burning vampire finally lay still, and the fire consumed him, flaring so brightly Amber had to look away. When the flames died, there were no remains left behind.

  Imelda kicked in the door of the next house, and led the way in.

  Door to door, killing the vampires
that lay inside, searching for Amber. At the rate they were moving it’d take them until the afternoon to reach the hill – but they were coming.

  Althea got the hell out of Cascade Falls by midday. They loaded up Veronica’s car with her belongings and Veronica got behind the wheel. She hadn’t said much the previous night. Amber knew that she had been running from vampires when Milo found her, and that was it. She had a look in her eyes, though – haunted. She was a different person from the woman who’d sat with them at dinner. Milo kissed her, and they said goodbye, and Althea waved at Amber as they drove quickly away.

  “You liked her, huh?” said Amber to Milo.

  He looked at her, and didn’t answer.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  Milo shrugged, and went back inside. Amber followed.

  They watched from a window as Alastair and Imelda dragged vampires out into the sun. They were getting close.

  Amber’s parents passed the house. Amber started to duck down, but Milo grabbed her, held her in place.

  “Movement attracts the eye,” he said.

  Her parents drove by without noticing them.

  They couldn’t see where Grant and Kirsty were.

  “We have to leave,” said Milo. “We go now and we have a few hours’ head start. Maybe even a full day. Amber? What do you think?”

  “We’re going to leave Glen?” she asked quietly.

  “There’s nothing we can do for him now.”

  “We don’t know that he’s dead.”

  “You said he looked—”

  “I know what I said,” she snapped. “But I don’t know for sure, do I?”

  Milo let the silence settle for a few moments.

  “We’re not vampire killers,” he said.

  “I didn’t say anything about—”