Black Magic Bayou (22 page)

How could these idiots be having a party when there was literally a spider-faced, demonic hell spawn six feet above their heads?

Kids these days.

Grumbling under my breath, I weaved my way through the crowded dance floor, interrupting at least one would-be orgy with four co-eds aggressively grinding against each other, several articles of clothing long gone.

As soon as I passed, two of them were already making out again while groping for the other members of the group.

A chill crept up my spine and clenched around the back of my neck like an icy fist. I knew co-eds could be a little free and easy with their sexuality, but wasn’t a public foursome pushing the envelope a bit?

I stopped Wilder with a gentle squeeze of his wrist and scanned the groups on the dance floor.

A couple had gone down to the carpet, and the boy was fumbling his hand under the girl’s skirt, her eyes closed in an apparent state of euphoria as she clawed at his back.

Clawed and clawed until tiny red spots of blood soaked into the back of his T-shirt. She moaned and writhed as he found the right spot with his questing digits.

The girl opened her eyes, and I gasped audibly.

Her eyes were completely black, from pupil to iris to whites.

“Fuck,” I said.

Another cursory glance of the living room showed me that people weren’t just grinding to the music. Half the couples around us were actively engaged in full-on penetrative sex.

“
Fuck
.”

A girl wearing a cat costume pawed at me. “You wanna?”

I smacked her hand off my shoulder. “No. And you don’t either. Go home.”

She stuck her tongue out at me. “What about him?” Her eyes were all for Wilder. I’d like to say this was the first time a woman had tried to steal him from me while I was standing right beside him, but it actually seemed to happen whenever we went out anywhere where alcohol and party girls were combined.

He
was
beautiful. I couldn’t blame them for trying.

On the other hand, “He belongs to me.” I snarled at her, showing teeth. I hadn’t
planned
to respond that way, but my body reacted on its own, like something had come over me that wasn’t quite
me
.

I blanched.

Nope. This was all wrong. The creeping sensation of thoughts that were mine but also
not
mine made my skin crawl. I wanted to slap the girl for even suggesting she might be able to take Wilder from me. I imagined myself clawing her eyes out and ripping open the soft flesh of her belly.

What was happening here?

The flirty girl got distracted when a guy dressed like Zorro walked up to her and lifted her into his arms. As she wrapped her legs around his waist, the new couple vanished into another room, swallowed up by even more churning, writhing flesh.

I thought we were walking into a sorority house, but this was more like a scene out of
Caligula
. At first I’d assumed it was regular Greek party shenanigans, but the more I took in the sights before me, the more I realized what I was seeing was deeply and entirely wrong, no matter how you looked at it.

Worse still, we’d been in the house less than five minutes, and it was already getting to me. Whatever kind of magic was worming its way through this place, it was dark and powerful. Strong enough I hadn’t even felt it come for me.

I prayed my protection spell would be adequate to keep this from getting to Wilder.

We had to find Tansy and get out of here
fast
. Once I was free of the house’s pull, I could figure out how to undo what was effecting these kids, but until then, we needed a single-minded focus and to get the heck out of dodge ASAP.

We would need to split up after all.

“Can you look for her down here?” I shouted at him. “I’ll check upstairs.”

Upstairs. Where Gamigan was waiting.

Wilder’s expression showed me how much he loved this suggestion, but I shook my head when he was about to verbalize his complaints. “Something weird is happening here, Wilder, and we need to get her and leave fast. Like super fast. I don’t like what I’m feeling.”

He grimaced, then nodded. “Yeah. I can feel it.”

I sucked a breath in through my nostrils, scanning the room. The smell of sex wafted up among the other scents, and it was enough to drive more of the dancers into torrid embraces. Things were going to get substantially more pornographic before this was all said and done.

“I’m going to do a quick check, okay? Peek into the bedrooms and see if she’s up there. If you find her first, grab her and leave. Text me. Don’t look for me, just take her and get free of the house.”

I didn’t ask him if he understood. I phrased it as a command and left it like that. This was the exact and only type of situation where I would throw my Alpha weight in his face, because we didn’t have the luxury of time anymore.

“Okay.” Wilder gave my hand one final squeeze, and something about the look he gave me damn near gutted me. I was planning to be gone five minutes tops, but he had the expression of a man who was trying to memorize a face he might be seeing for the last time. Not the best vote of confidence to part ways on.

I let go of him and elbowed my way back towards the front entrance where the stairs to the second floor were located. People were everywhere now, some dancing, more on the floor, others up against the walls. I didn’t let my gaze stay any one place too long, knowing I wasn’t going to like what I saw if I took the chance to decipher what each tangle of skin and limbs really were.

Every once in awhile, though, I’d make eye contact with someone inadvertently. Their features would be twisted into masks of pure pleasure, but their eyes were dark black, as if they’d been covered in thick smoke.

They’d stare and stare, and behind the smiles something deeply unpleasant lingered. Something helpless.

I jogged up the stairs two at a time, getting to the second floor and finding a slight reprieve from the throbbing bass. The music was still loud up here, but it no longer felt like someone was trying to jam a hot iron into my brain through my ears.

Without the music to mask the other sounds I was able to hear more moans, these ones borderline comical they were so loud. Someone was screaming in a way that had nothing to do with fear.

All the bedroom doors were closed, and the hall light had been shut off, leaving the entire corridor cloaked in darkness except for the strobes bouncing off the walls from the main floor. Each time a bit of light snuck up, it was like a ghost flitting across the ceiling and vanishing again before it was able to take form

I swallowed a huge lump of uncertainty that had wedged itself in my throat and allowed myself one small, shuddering sigh to acknowledge this was scary as hell, and I honestly didn’t know if I had what it took to get through it.

I took one step down the hall, and suddenly all the moaning stopped, leaving only the sound of the bass and my own throbbing heartbeat. All the rest was silence, and its onset left me feeling even more freaked out than the obscene sexual noises had.

I stopped and listened, breathed, waited.

Downstairs, people were shouting, laughing, such boisterously alive war cries of youth. Now it felt like I was the only thing with a pulse on the second floor, when a moment earlier it had sounded like an Old West brothel during the gold rush.

Approaching the first door, I felt the lump of fear rising back to its home in my esophagus. There would be no chasing it away now. The icy hand of uncertainty that had gripped me downstairs had returned as well, tightening around my neck with each new step I took.

Go back. Go back. Runrunrunrunrunrun.

I couldn’t tell if these were my own thoughts or an actual psychic warning.

I grabbed the door handle of the first bedroom and pushed it open. It yielded easily with no lock in place.

I took one look at what was inside the bedroom and shut the door again, holding it closed tightly with the knob in both hands as I tried desperately to catch my breath.

A group of twentysomethings had been naked together in bed, but unlike the mess of humping bodies downstairs, they had all melded together. Literally. Arms were fused to torsos, legs were joined double at the knee, a woman’s mouth was moving noiselessly out of the middle of a man’s chest.

The freakish living human quilt hadn’t been what made me shut the door.

It was the naked girl on the ceiling with her head on backwards, tendrils of sweat-dampened hair trailing down from where her face should have been as she stared up at the ceiling, perched like a pale human crab next to the light fixture.

My hand was shaking so hard I thought I might crush the doorknob and inadvertently release the catch.

I let go and recoiled two steps, trying to think of a spell. Any spell. Something to make me disappear, something to seal a lock.
Anything
.

I edged towards the stairs, ready to say fuck it and get the hell out of here with some sliver of my sanity still in check. Screw this place. Screw Tansy, and Cash, and whatever fucked-up nonsense was happening in the Delta Phi house. This was so far out of my league I didn’t even know what playbook we were using anymore.

Keeping one eye on the bedroom door, I felt for the top step with my toes.

Creeeeeeak.

I froze, daring not move an inch. I couldn’t bring myself to look. The door in front of me was still shut tight. The other doors along the wall remained closed as well, probably housing their own horror shows.

Creeeak.

The soft whine of unoiled hinges stopped, and I glanced, darting my eyes the smallest fraction of an inch towards the end of the hall. I knew what I’d see, knew it deep in the petrified recesses of my soul, knew it in my quivering gut. But I looked anyway.

The locked door to Laura and Heidi’s room was open. Whether it had just happened, or I’d been too distracted to notice, I wasn’t sure, but I knew what it meant.

Gamigan was free.

“
Get out of the house
.” Even screaming it at the top of my lungs no one seemed to hear what I was saying. The music played on, the party continued with its mess of drinking and dancing and fucking. I was taking the steps down two and three at a time, sidestepping to avoid the jumble of people who had made their way as far as the half-point landing on the stairs. “
Go
.”

“
Wilder
.” We could worry about the others later. Right now all I cared about was finding Wilder and getting the two of us as far from this place as humanly possible.

Through the house’s open front door I could see his motorcycle parked on the curb waiting for us. How could salvation be so close and so very, very far away?

Somehow the crowd seemed to have doubled in size in the few minutes I’d been upstairs, and even more people were coming across the front lawn, ready to join the fun.

He was calling to them. Gamigan was doing something to draw them in, and once it had them here, it was manipulating their minds and destroying them with the same uninhibited desire it was creating inside them.

No one ever said demons were nice guys, but this was all kinds of fucked up. Was its goal to turn everyone into a version of the thing I’d seen upstairs?

The strobes flashed, and shadows skittered across the ceiling, but this time I was watching them carefully, tracking each sudden motion. It was here somewhere, and the minute I stopped being prepared was when this would all go to shit.

I fumbled in my pocket for my phone, hoping Wilder might feel his buzz since he couldn’t hear me yell. I found an open place against the wall where I could keep one eye on the ceiling and went to unlock my screen, but found the phone was already ringing.

Cash.

I swiped to ignore it, but before I was able to get a text message open, he was calling me again.

“I don’t have time for this,” I snapped into the mouthpiece.

A beat. “Are you at a party?”

Jay-Z was rapping about having ninety-nine problems, and I was thinking Jay and I might want to swap trouble-lists one day.

Ninety-nine problems sounded like a bargain.

“Oh yeah, I’m having the time of my life.”

“Tansy was hoping—”

“I’m going to stop you right there, because I have a thing or two I’d like to discuss with
her
when she has a moment to spare.”

“Why do you sound so pissed off?” His reply was peevish in and of itself.

“Are you kidding me?” I sucked in a breath and prepared to read him the riot act, when I spotted her.

Tansy stood in the middle of the living room, staring right at me. She looked polished and poised, like she’d just rolled out of a Lilly Pulitzer store and was on her way to the annual Stepford Wives convention in Connecticut.

The gyrating partiers were spread out around her, maintaining an untouched circle on the dance floor, and as she moved, so did they, parting like a fleshy Red Sea in her wake.

My brain was screaming at me to run, but I already had my back against the wall. There was nowhere else to go.

“She must have wanted to talk to me pretty damn bad, because she couldn’t wait for you to pass on the message. I see her now. I’ll just talk to her myself.” Talk to. Punch in the face. Both sounded like good options.

“What are you talking about?” Cash asked. “She’s right here. Hold on, let me get her.”

I went stock-still, experiencing the sensation of being totally shell-shocked. “Cash, what did you say?”

“I said I’ll get her.”

“Who?”

Now he sounded extra annoyed. “Tansy. I just told you.”

Tansy. Tansy who was staring at me, moving ever closer with slow, meaningful steps. She had a smirk on her lips that reminded me of a cat right before it pounced on a bird.

“I—”

I didn’t get the chance to finish my sentence.

A hand clapped over my mouth, and I was yanked backwards through the wall.

I wrenched myself free from whoever was holding me and whipped around with a loud snarl. My fist was raised, ready to do some serious damage.