Hell Is Coming (The Watcher's Series Book 1) (2 page)

I shook my head. “You’re insane taking those things. They’re dangerous.”

He gave me a look that said I was one to talk, the person who used to gulp down pills like candy all day long. He refrained from taking the moral high-ground with me. Josh was considerate that way. “Relax, I won’t be abusing them.” He smiled out the window at a pretty blonde girl. The girl smiled back, flattered by the attention. So she should be. My brother was a good looking guy. His brown eyes and almost permanent brooding expression made him seem mysterious. Girls lapped it up. His muscular cage-fighter’s body usually sealed the deal.

Even though we were twins we weren’t identical. I had the same brown eyes, only they didn’t have quite the same hypnotic power as his. He had more practice in that department than I did. We also both had dark hair and olive skin, although his hair, besides being shorter than mine, was almost jet black. My hair was dark, but not that dark. We looked enough alike to pass as twins though.

Overall, Josh stood out more than I did. Don’t get me wrong, I could pull off the hot chick look when I wanted to. Most of the time, I preferred a downplayed appearance that didn’t attract too much attention. Blending into the background was something I’d learned to do over the years. I just found it easier that way. Josh took the opposite approach. He cultivated a bad boy exterior so people left him alone, especially back in high school where the potential for getting walked over was so much higher. Other guys respected him, or feared him enough to keep their mouths shut. The ones who didn’t quickly regretted it. Most girls loved his tough guy image though. Very few people got to see the warm and caring guy underneath. “I can’t believe you’re on steroids,” I said as we waited for the light to change. “Are you going to get like,‘Roid rage’ or whatever now? I’m not sure I could live with someone who punched holes in the walls when they got upset over nothing.”

“Get a grip.” Josh banged both hands on the steering wheel in a rhythmical beat. “I only rage in the cage, baby!” He laughed at his own silliness.

“I only rage in the cage!” I mimicked in a deep gruff voice and started laughing. “Dufus.”

“Good looking though.”

“Only in your dreams, brother.”

“Screw you.”

“And you.”

I looked out the window and saw some kid—maybe sixteen, dressed in faded black jeans and with long greasy hair falling over a scuffed leather jacket—sprinting down an alley. Thief? Gangbanger? Druggy? Whoever it was they looked seriously freaked out, like they were running from something bad. The kid looked behind him as he bolted out of the alley and ran straight into the side of Josh’s car with a loud thud that made me jump. I flinched as the kid looked in at me. His grubby face looked terrified.

“What the fuck?” Josh exclaimed at the kid, who peeled himself off the hood and ran off again, nearly crashing into another car as he fled across the street before disappearing up another alley.

I wanted to ask what the hell that was about when another kid ran in front of the car just as Josh was about drive off. I jolted back into the seat as he slammed on the brakes. A kid in a dirty gray hoody was staring in at us. His eyes were completely black, like he had eight balls in his sockets. A sinister grin spread across the kid’s face as he slammed the hood with both hands before running off, vanishing into the same alley as the other kid.

“Seriously! What the fuck!” Josh looked exasperated as he put the car into drive.

“What the hell was that?” I asked.

“Assholes, that’s what.”

I frowned at him. “You didn’t notice anything weird about that last guy?”

“Like what?” A deep scowl was on his face and his hands gripped the steering wheel tight. I wasn’t sure if he was pissed off that someone had ran into his car or if he was just annoyed by the slow moving traffic.

“I don’t know, his eyes maybe?”

The weird look again. “What about his eyes?”

He obviously didn’t see. Or he wasn’t saying. “Nothing. Doesn’t matter.”

Neither of us said a word the rest of the way home.

Diane lived on the outskirts of the city in a small wood paneled house built during some post-war boom. I wasn’t looking forward to telling her we’d found an apartment and that Josh and I would be moving out at the end of the week. Diane had been good to us, and while nothing or no one would ever make me have any faith in the foster care system, Diane came pretty close.

As I got out of the car I happened to look down the quiet street and I noticed a man standing by the corner about six houses down. Dressed in dark clothes, the man was just staring up the street for no apparent reason. If it wasn’t for the fact that my stomach lurched when I saw him I would have thought the man was just waiting for someone, but there was something off about him. My instincts were confirmed when the man smiled up at me and his eyes seemed to glow a deep orange. My stomach churned again.

Another demon—and in the street where I lived.

This one seemed different somehow. It was his
presence
. I can hardly describe how it made me feel. Usually when I saw a demon they ignored me or didn’t realize I could see them. This one
knew
I knew what he was,
knew
I could feel him. His presence reached into me like icy fingers, turning me cold and sick to my stomach, freezing me to the spot. The next thing I knew I was in some black abyss with the sounds of tortured screams all around me, terrible awful sounds of people being tortured in unspeakable ways, and in the background, permeating everything, was the horrible presence. It was pure evil made manifest. Then before I could even scream I was back in the street again like nothing had happened. The demon was still there, still smiling up at me.

When Josh finally emerged from the car, I ran to him. “What’s up?” Josh asked. “You look spooked. Again.”

“Down the street,” I said, my body still shaking with fear after experiencing the black abyss, which I felt sure was Hell. What other place could inspire such sickening terror? “That man there.”

That demon.

Josh followed my gaze to the man down the street. I noticed the demon’s eyes had stopped glowing. “It’s just some weird dude. Forget him. Come on.”

Josh didn’t seem concerned. He walked up to the house and I quickly followed after him. As I went up the drive I looked down the street again and the demon was gone.

Inside the house, Diane was cooking dinner. She was a woman in her fifties who never had any children of her own, and she had been married once until her husband died. With her long silver hair and warm, caring blue eyes, she was a gentle woman, always ready with a sympathetic ear and some sage advice whenever you needed it. She helped me a lot when we came to live with her, got me off the drugs, showed me I was worth more than I thought I was, which given the state I was in back then, wasn’t an easy task.

“Dinner’s almost ready,” Diane said as I headed up the stairs. “Don’t be long up there.”

“I won’t,” I said. “Josh has something to tell you, by the way.”

Josh shot me a look from the living room and I smiled back apologetically. I was being a coward, leaving it up to him to break the news, but I couldn’t face the inevitable tears Diane would shed so I went straight to my room.

Josh took the bigger room when we moved into the house so I was left with the smaller of the two. Due to the lack of space the room was always cluttered. I had drawings and paintings tacked all over the walls which had the effect of closing the room in, making it seem even smaller, not to mention darker. Piles of books and objects related to the occult—black candles, various spell ingredients in glass jars, a human skull and other items that I hardly looked at—took up what little floor space there was, making the room feel more like a lair than a bedroom.

I went and lay on my unmade bed, my eyes flitting over the drawings and paintings on the walls—the fantastical landscapes, the warrior women with swords, the strange made up creatures. Fantasy art was my thing, my escape. I had a talent for creating it, but I never really took it seriously until Diane encouraged me to. My old high school art teacher, Mr. Sanders, kind of took me under his wing as well, providing me with art supplies, making sure I had enough of a portfolio so I could apply to art college. I was looking forward to going, as long as I got in. As long as I got a handle on the whole demon thing. If experiences like the one that happened with the demon on the street outside kept happening, that wouldn’t be anytime soon.

I still hadn’t told Josh anything about the demons. Neither did I want too. Josh wasn’t actually at home the night the demon took my mother and killed my father. He was on his first ever sleepover at a friend’s house so he saw nothing of what I experienced. Neither could he quite believe anything I tried to tell him about the circumstances surrounding that night. He saw all the occult stuff as my way of coping, I suppose. He believed the official police story that my father had been murdered, possibly by our mother, possibly not. That part was still inconclusive. The cops could never figure out if my mother ran away or was taken.

I knew the truth, but no one wanted to listen to a grieving seven-year-old girl.

So I learned to keep what I knew to myself.

After years of anguished obsession, I put it all aside, finally accepting that my parents were gone and there was nothing I could do about it.

Until I saw the monsters, demons from what I could gather. What was I supposed to make of that? Was I supposed to ignore the fact that I was seeing inhuman faces everywhere I went? How could I? I knew in my bones there was a connection between that and my parent’s demise. I just wasn’t sure what it was yet.

I pulled a sketch book from under my bed. It was filled with drawings of the monster faces I had seen over the past few months. I flicked through the sketch book, glancing over faces with  glowing eyes, strange protruding bone structures and horns jutting out from skulls and other weird places. One sketch showed a man—a priest if I remember correctly—with three horns sticking out of his chin, the outside two curved like elephant tusks. Another sketch was of a woman, beautiful as I remember, until her face transformed into something that resembled a rat, complete with two long incisors that reached past her chin. Yet another sketch showed the scariest face I’d seen yet. It was a child, no older than seven or eight, who I saw in a school playground one day. The little boy saw me and smiled, his face transforming before my eyes into something horrible that had snake-like creatures writhing from his cheeks and a bigger snake with two heads that slithered out of his forehead and wrapped itself around his skull. It took me days to get over that one.

All of them reminded me of the monster that took my mother.

To put it mildly, my life resembled a horror movie.

I slid the sketch book back under the bed away from Diane’s prying eyes. I was to meet my best friend Kasey in an hour. She had agreed to ride along with me to visit my childhood home, despite saying I was crazy for wanting to go there and dig up the past again.

I changed out of the slacks and blouse I wore for the apartment viewing and pulled on an old pair of jeans and a sweater along with a well-worn green army coat. I was a functional dresser. The word stylish was rarely a part of my vocabulary, except maybe when I went on dates, which wasn’t often, and even then I rarely glammed myself up. The boys didn’t mind, as long as they got what they wanted at the end of the night. I know how that sounds, but I didn’t go in for relationships. Fuck that noise. Casual sex was enough for me.

Downstairs, Josh and Diane were at the kitchen table eating pasta so I joined them. “I’m going to miss your cooking,” I said to Diane, who had an air of melancholy about her thanks to Josh informing her we’d be moving out.

“You can come here anytime you want for a good meal,” Diane said, a fawning smile on her face. “In fact, I expect you to come back often.”

“We will,” Josh said. “I’ll make sure of it, don’t worry.”

“Of course we will,” I said, nodding before looking at Josh. “I need to borrow your car.”

“Why?”

“I told Kasey I’d take her for a drive.”

“I’m not sure I want her stinking up my car.” He shoveled pasta into his mouth like he hadn’t eaten in days. “She doesn’t wash.”

“She lives on the streets. Stop being a shithead and give her a break.”

“You don’t even have a license.”

“So?”

“So what if you get pulled over?”

“I won’t.” I held out my hand. “Keys.”

“Leia, honey,” Diane said. “I know you’re not dumb, so why would you drive without a liscense? What if something happens and you get into an accident?”

“Yeah, Leia,” Josh said. “Why would you be so dumb?” There was a glint in his eye when he said that.

I made a face at him to silence him. “You don’t have to worry, Diane. I won’t be gone long. Besides, I’m a good driver. I’ll be fine.” I held my hand out to Josh while I ignored Diane’s disapproving look. “Keys please.”

Josh shook his head and threw the car keys on to the table. “Don’t mess up my ride,” he warned.

“Or what?” I stood up having hardly eaten any of Diane’s pasta. I can’t eat when I’ve got stuff on my mind. “You know I can kick your ass.”

He shook his head again. “Just be careful. And I need it back by seven, I’m going out later.”

“I’ll be back by then.”

“You’ve hardly eaten anything,” Diane said.

“Save it for me. I’ll finish it later.” That was a lie and Diane knew it. She nodded anyway.

“Tell Kasey I said hello. And please be careful driving.”

“I will,” I said, heading out of the house. “Later.”

Chapter 2

Kasey was waiting for me on the corner of Green Street, outside the derelict building that she called home most nights. She was wearing her usual black leather jacket with dark hoody underneath, black jeans and black boots that had seen better days. Kasey herself looked like she had seen better days, but then not having a real place to live would do that to a person. I didn’t know how she did it. As much as I hated some of the foster homes I stayed in over the years, I could never quite bring myself to do what Kasey did, just bail and go live rough on the streets. Kasey’s situation had been worse than any I’d ever been in though.