Chapter Fourteen
“That damned devil butted horns with the wrong Scharfrichter this time,” I said a little over an hour later while sitting on the counter next to the sink in Aunt Zoe’s safe and warm yellow kitchen.
A long hot shower and several pieces of reheated pizza had been good post-traumatic stress therapy, but the glass of lemonade spiked with a double shot of tequila in my hand was a surefire remedy for quelling any remaining near-death jitters. I took a sip of the sweet yet sharp happy juice, glancing up at the ceiling. Addy and Kelly were upstairs playing in Addy’s room while Layne was busy in the living room watching a documentary on mythological monsters throughout history.
Oh, the irony. If Layne hung out with me, I could introduce him to some nasty creatures face to face. Maybe next time I should call a time-out in the midst of running for my life and see if I could get an autograph for my kid.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Aunt Zoe asked me. She was sitting at the table next to Natalie. Her face reminded me of the weather—a mix of dark, angry clouds with more trouble on the way in the forecast.
Natalie sat back in her chair, crossing her arms. “It means we’re going to kick some lidérc ass real soon, right, Madam Executioner? Hey, how about we throw Rex in the ring with you two while we’re at it? You can use him as a human shield during the brawl. Kill two leeches with one mace.”
“Take the ‘we’ out of that whole notion, Beals,” Cooper said from the other side of the sink where he was drying the dishes that Doc was washing.
“You’re not the boss of me, law dog,” she shot back, softening her words with a wink when he frowned at her.
“That damned mule-headed woman will be the death of me,” Cooper grumbled to Doc, drying the plate with enough intensity to rub the finishing glaze off the dish.
Natalie scoffed. “You ain’t seen nothing yet. ‘Stubborn’ is my middle name. Just ask Vi.”
“I thought your middle name was ‘Hell-raiser,’ ” I said, lifting my glass to her and her spunk in a mock toast.
Doc turned my way after he pulled the stopper from the sink drain and grabbed a towel to dry his hands. His eyes had the same haunted look as when I’d returned from my game of tag with the lidérc and its creepy pals.
I raised my glass to him, too—my hero. If it hadn’t been for his directives and the stairway door he’d opened to get me the hell out of that trap, I might not be sitting here.
Doc took the glass from me and downed a big mouthful before handing it back. “That was too close, Killer.”
He’d said the same thing back in Jerry’s office after hugging me so tightly that I could hardly breathe.
“I agree, but now we know what we’re dealing with when it comes to the lidérc.” I set the glass down on the counter and returned to Aunt Zoe. “To answer your question, I mean the Hungarian bastard won’t fool me again like that.”
“What makes you so certain?” she asked. “A lidérc is a deadly foe. Our family history has proven this.” She shook her head. “I think you should talk to Dominick and tell him you’re not going to catch his damned pet.”
“Absolutely not.” I didn’t even hesitate with that reply.
Doc grunted, leaving my side to go to the refrigerator.
“This is too big for you, baby girl,” she said. “We don’t know how to kill it, let alone catch it.”
“Not yet,” I clarified, “but tonight gave me some things to think about on that front.”
Now that my stomach was full and I had a couple of shots of courage in me thanks to Mexico’s wonderful blue agave plant, I was able to look back at what had happened earlier with less fear and more scrutiny.
“That’s my girl,” Natalie said, her eyes lit up with a take-no-prisoners gleam that I’d seen there many times before, especially when my sister, aka the Bitch from Hell, was in town. “What do you think the lidérc meant when it told you that it had played with your kind before?”
While we’d chowed down some pizza, I’d filled everyone in on what had happened in my wacky world during the séance from when I’d first pictured the candle flame until I’d opened my eyes and found myself back in Jerry’s office. Since I’d started my tale, there’d been a lot of shared frowns and worried brows, except for Natalie, who’d just looked pissed off throughout the story.
“If I were to guess,” I remarked, leaning back against the cupboard door behind me, “I’d say it probably attached to a previous Executioner when her guard was down.”
“And then what?”
Then what? Oh yeah, I’d forgotten that Natalie hadn’t been with us on New Year’s Eve when we’d read in one of my family history volumes how some of my ancestors had tried to take on a lidérc and failed catastrophically.
We’d learned that night how it was impossible for the Hungarian devils to latch onto an Executioner for any length of time—unlike with human hosts—due to some sort of self-destruct wiring in our genetic makeup that spurred a disturbingly speedy and horrifically violent death … for the Executioner, not the lidérc.
Within an hour of the lidérc infestation, one Executioner’s skin had blistered and turned black. By the end of the day, she’d burned alive from the inside out. A second example had told the story of the first Executioner’s twin, who had tracked down and tried to slay the same lidérc that had killed her sister. When she found it, the devil had managed to attach to her, too. Shortly thereafter, she’d stabbed her own eyes out and then tried to claw the skin off her face.
According to Aunt Zoe, who had been reading to us about the demise of the twins that night, there was a
