Keep Me Close Read online

  “Leave?” Vinny gasped. “When you guys are all still here? When Emma is here? I’m not running away like a wuss. And besides,” she added, “if there’s something scary around, doesn’t it make sense to stick close to an actual demon hunter in case things get bad?”

  Dom frowned. “Or you could be out of actual danger by leaving. You can take Emma with you, if you want. You can go to Seattle for a few days. Why don’t we see if Emma will do that?”

  God, how had he missed it? This house wasn’t haunted by a ghost. After Vinny’s brief glimpse into the otherworlds, it was now clear that whatever was causing trouble had to be a different—and more powerful—type of supernasty.

  To find it and identify it, Dom had to shift strategy.

  Now that he knew about the security cameras, Dom had an idea. He thought he might be able to view some footage to find out if they showed any evidence of a supernasty hanging out in the house.

  He said, “I gotta go take care of something. Will you be okay on your own?”

  She looked surprised, but said, “Yeah, of course.”

  After getting her to promise she’d find him if something else bad happened, Dom left her on the terrace where they’d eaten dinner the first night.

  He went in search of Jonas, and found him pacing in a circle in a small room on the first floor, which appeared to be an office. Jonas was on his phone, yapping to someone on the other end, exchanging clipped phrases and looking annoyed.

  When he saw Dom in the doorway, he said, “Call you back,” and quickly turned off the phone.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” Dom began.

  “Just yelling at lawyers. Some of these assholes forget they’re working for me.”

  Dom didn’t try to hide his reaction.

  Jonas huffed out a breath. “You can say it. You think I haven’t heard it all before? You think I’m shallow. Some bonehead who got lucky and doesn’t deserve what he got.” He sounded both defensive and proud.

  Yup, Dom thought. Basically.

  “Well, I worked. We all worked. Yes, I got a break. But I made sacrifices too.”

  “What kind of sacrifices?”

  “Life sacrifices. Shitty living, weeks on tour, long days, lots of owing favors and reminding people who owed me favors. This is a tough business.” Jonas let out a breath. “Maybe not as tough as ghosthunting, but don’t judge me.”

  “I didn’t come here to judge you. I came to tell you something.”

  Got news?” Jonas asked hopefully.

  “Yes and no. I figured something out, but it’s not the end of the problem.”

  “Go on.”

  “So,” Dom said. “What would you say if I told you that the house isn’t haunted by a ghost?”

  “Um…you’re saying you can’t find anything?” Jonas looked crestfallen.

  “No. I’m saying that instead of a ghost, you’ve got a demon. Or something like it.”

  Jonas expression shifted to alarm.

  “Any chance you know something about that?” Dom pressed.

  “What would I know about a demon?” Jonas asked. He wouldn’t meet Dom’s eyes.

  “Some demons are good at looking like normal people—for a while anyway. Do you remember any interaction with a stranger that was a bit…odd? Or someone who came to the house that you don’t remember seeing leave the house? Does anyone besides you and Emma have access to the property?”

  “No,” Jonas said. “At least, no one can get in without us knowing about it.”

  “And the doors to the house are alarmed, I assume.”

  “Absolutely. Doors, windows, everything. Not to mention the cameras. I’d know if someone snuck in.”

  Dom frowned. So much for that avenue. “I want to look at your security feed.”

  “The cameras? Why? Demons don’t sit around getting filmed, do they?”

  “Not exactly, but there’s a chance that the cameras will show something useful. I might be able to pin the disturbance down to a specific room or object. That will help a lot. Where’s the control panel for the security cameras?”

  “Uh…not here.”

  Lying. Dom wasn’t psychic, and he didn’t need to be to know that the guy was lying.

  “Where?” he asked, to play along.

  “Security firm,” Jonas said. “Everything just goes to them.”

  Which didn’t jibe at all with Jonas’s comment that he knew if anyone had come onto the property.

  “So there’s no place in the house with all that info?” Dom asked, very deliberately.

  “No. Sorry.”

  “Worth a shot.” Dom left the office and immediately sent out a mental call to Piewicket.

  Shortly after, the cat appeared, a dead mouse in her mouth. She dropped the mouse at his feet.

  “Hey, thanks.” Dom nudged the little brown mouse with his foot. “You going to eat that?”

  Naturally. What did you want?

  “The owner of this place denies there’s a way to watch the security camera feeds in the house. I think he’s lying. I did my best to put the idea in his head, and I think he’ll go to the place soon. Tonight or tomorrow.” It was basic psychology. People trying to hide things had a tendency to go directly to them, even when common sense suggested it was a stupid thing to do.

  And you want me to stalk him, so he can lead me to his den.

  “Yes. Except the den is filled with information, not snacks for you. Sorry.”

  You will reward me later?

  “All the cuddles you want,” he promised. “Or fish.”

  Both.

  “Deal. Please go hunt him, okay?”

  Piewicket ate the mouse first. Cats had priorities.

  While waiting for Pie to return with news, Dom decided to be conspicuous about not following Jonas around. Instead, he helped Emma and Vinny move a few pieces of art Emma had purchased but hadn’t yet unpacked. Dom hadn’t realized that all the stuff hanging on the walls was actual art—as in, original works worth thousands of dollars each. And Emma was the person who selected it all, according to Vinny. “She’s got a good eye for this kind of thing,” she concluded.

  “And Vin would know,” Emma chimed in.

  Vinny’s expression darkened momentarily, and Dom figured it had something to do with her upper-crust childhood. But he didn’t want to push for more details. He was just happy that Vinny seemed recovered after her accidental stroll into the otherworlds.

  Jonas didn’t show his face more than a couple times. When he skipped dinner, saying he had work to do, Emma rolled her eyes. “Musicians!”

  That evening, Dom made a call to his brother. Lex sounded sleepy, and Dom remembered it was later there.

  “What’s up?” Lex asked. “How’s the ghostbusting?”

  “Well, I’m pretty sure it’s a demon, not a ghost,” Dom explained. “So that changes things.”

  “Whoa.” Lex suddenly sounded much more awake. “How do you know?”

  Dom told about Vinny’s encounter in the otherworlds, and Lex predictably interjected, “Wait, this person just strolled into the otherworlds, no problem? No practice?”

  “She says no, and I believe her. So it must be the environment itself that caused it—it basically invited her right in.”

  “That’s not good,” Lex muttered. Dom guessed he was scribbling down notes in his ever-present notebook. “I’ll do a lookup on demons that can open paths to their worlds. You know this means it’s a pretty nasty supernasty, right?”

  “I figured,” Dom said dryly. “There’s something else.”

  “Lord, what?”

  “Vin—the person who walked into the otherworld—she described seeing energy lines while she was in there. And she said that she’s seen those lines before. Or sensed them. She’s done it most of her life. She described them as threads, but the way she talks about them going between people, how some are light and some are heavy…” Dom trailed off, sure that Lex already knew what he was thinking.

  “She can sense
ley lines and ties, just naturally?” Lex asked excitedly. “I remember how tough those were to see, even when I knew where to look. That’s so cool!”

  “It is not cool when one of those lines might lead a demon straight to her,” Dom said, thinking Lex wasn’t seeing the main point here. He remembered the first full day he’d been here, when the supernasty had snuck up on him in the attic and sent him into that vision of falling through twisting lines, and his sense that some of the lines led to the house. “We’ve been approaching this problem as a haunting focusing on the location, because that’s what the client said it was. But I think that whatever it is—demon, probably—it wants a person. Not a place.”

  “I get it,” Lex said. “Now that you’re sure it’s a demon, we’ll figure out what’s what. Keep an eye on her, and I’ll let you know as soon as we find something. Lily can help, so it’ll go fast. Meantime, can Pie seal up that door to the otherworld?”

  “I’ll ask. She’s already doing some spying for me, though.”

  “Keep us updated. I’m going to make some coffee.” Lex hung up. Dom knew his little brother would be up all night. Though easy-going by nature, he was tenacious when he was given a problem to solve.

  * * * *

  Piewicket was not to be found the whole night. Dom had no idea if she slept at all, or where she was. But in the morning, she leapt up onto his bed.

  Cuddles?

  He reached out to pet her. “Find anything out?”

  Late at night, when all were sleeping, he went to a room in the level below ground, at the very end of the passage. He spent a few hours there, staring at pictures of the house and those in it. He did not see me.

  “Well done.”

  Salmon is an acceptable reward.

  “We’re in the right area of the country for that. Let me see what I can do.”

  Dom almost fell asleep again—a purring cat on your chest tended to do that—but the sounds of an argument downstairs got him moving.

  When he got downstairs, he overheard Emma saying, “Why is my lawyer calling me with papers to sign?” She was glaring at Jonas. “We agreed on the payment structures for the royalties from those songs. What’s changed?”

  Jonas shook his head in exaggerated annoyance. “God, you’ll get a higher percentage after this. What’s your problem?”

  “My problem is that you’re not telling me why.”

  “Don’t worry about it! Jesus.” Jonas looked to Vinny, who stood close to Emma. “Vin, explain to my wife that more money is better than less money.”

  “It isn’t always,” Vinny responded evenly. The day before, Dom would have missed the heavier meaning her words. Now that he’d heard a little bit about her past, her attitude made much more sense.

  At that, Jonas just turned on his heel and left the room, unwilling to face two women who didn’t agree with him.

  “Um, is there coffee?” Dom asked. Whatever was going on, it had nothing to do with his job.

  “You bet,” Emma said. “Full pot in the kitchen. Help yourself.”

  Dom caught Vinny’s eyes and smiled. She grinned back, but stayed with Emma, who’d gone back to frowning at the paperwork in her hands.

  Dom drank two cups of coffee. Then he went in search of wherever the security camera feed ended up.

  He found it in a closet-sized room in the basement, not far down the hall from the now-deserted recording studio. Dom wondered briefly where Jonas was and if he’d come back down to work on his song, but pushed the worry aside. After all, Jonas did hire him to fix his problem. And that meant looking at some video.

  Even though demons and other paranormal forces tended to muck up any attempts to record them, sometimes those same acts could be useful indications of their presence, if you knew what to look for. Dom could check for odd blips, static, errors with the time stamps—all hints of demons’ innate ability to thwart modern technology.

  Unlike the rest of the house, this room was painted utilitarian grey and had no windows. It was all business. He sat down at the computer, ready to work. He wasn’t a hacker by any means, but when his client didn’t want to be forthcoming, Dom had to get creative.

  The screen prompted him to enter a password. He hit enter, hoping that Jonas bypassed that little bit of security.

  Nope. The prompt appeared again.

  “Okay. What’s your password, egomaniac?”

  What did Vinny say the name of Jonas’s band was? Oh, yeah. Dom typed Mercury in the field. Accepted.

  “In one,” Dom muttered. Of course the band that made Jonas rich would be his password.

  The files were ordered by date, so Dom started looking at the most recent files.

  “Music room: V.” Did the V stand for Vinny? He clicked. A video feed from the day before popped up, showing the exact time he and Vinny had been making out. The camera had been in a perfect position to capture Vinny during the encounter. Yeesh. If she hadn’t noticed the recording light, that video could have gotten NSFW very fast.

  Which brought up the question of why it was recording at all. Motion sensors might automatically cause it to record. Or, someone chose to hit record, which was a lot creepier.

  He saw a folder marked “Blue Room.” The bedroom Vinny had been given was called the blue room. He clicked and saw a number of files, all within the last two days. Clicking one at random, he watched as a video started playing. It showed Vinny’s room, and there was Vinny entering the frame, evidently walking in from the bathroom, because she was wrapped only in a towel.

  Well, that was not cool.

  He remembered how insistent Jonas had been that Vinny get the blue room. Apparently, that was so Jonas could get video of her. Vinny would go through the roof if she ever found that out.

  Dom closed the file before the video hit the point when the towel came off. He clicked on the next one. Vinny sleeping on the bed. She didn’t wear much, though the bed sheets hid most of her body. She tossed and turned a lot, Dom saw as he hit the 8x button to speed it up. Why the hell did Jonas need footage of Vinny sleeping? Aside from being really stalkerish, it also seemed pointless. The next file was just single images. Still Vinny sleeping, but these were pulled from the video feed at a point where the bed sheet had come down to expose her breasts.

  So Jonas looked through the whole feed to grab images of Vinny to jerk off to.

  Angry, Dom deleted the images before realizing that they might actually be helpful if he needed to convince Vin that her supposed friend had a serious boundary problem.

  There were more videos. He didn’t want to, but he quickly scanned the rest, just to make sure there wasn’t something horrible on any of them.

  They were mostly boring. Aside from invading Vinny’s privacy, the videos were nothing to get worked up about. Nothing showed anything she had to be ashamed of. A few were crappier than the others, blurry and grainy for a few minutes, but still viewable.

  Dom got to the end, and wrestled with whether to delete them now, or wait. He didn’t like the idea of the files existing. But what if he needed them to show Vinny later?

  “Damn.” He had to keep them there for a little while.

  He scanned the rest of the folders. Nothing spying on Emma. Nothing spying on Jonas. Nothing on Dom either, though he did see that his guest room had a camera in it. He noted the image and guessed where the camera must be installed, in a high corner of the room. He’d block the lens the first chance he got.

  Curious, he switched over to the live feed, which skipped to a new camera view every thirty seconds. There were a ton of cameras set up throughout the house and grounds, especially at the doorways and the entrances to the property. Jonas was paranoid as well as pervy.

  The video jumped and went staticky for a second, then settled.

  “Jesus Christ.” Dom sat up. He’d been so angry about the videos of Vinny that he forgot he was looking for footage like this. Footage with flaws.

  There was a supernatural presence in the house. Right now.

&nb
sp; Noting the room that the footage showed—the piano room, in fact—Dom jumped out of the chair and ran up to the first floor.

  The piano room was empty when he got there, but he was alert, and the whiff of tar and brimstone was real.

  This house wasn’t being haunted by a ghost. It was inhabited by a demon. Somehow, it had found a way through the otherworld to this house. Vinny hadn’t just got unlucky in her first foray with opening her eyes to the otherworlds. That thing was close in the otherworld because it was here in the real world too, or at least very, very close. The borders between the worlds could be as thin as a soap bubble sometimes.

  And soap bubbles broke easily.

  He took a few breaths. Knowing it was a demon changed his whole approach. First, he had to get Vinny and Emma out of the way. Jonas too. The house was too dangerous for regular people to be hanging around.

  Plus there was that whole spying thing. Extra motivation to get Vinny out of here.

  Chapter 20

  Jonas was out of his mind.

  Vinny watched her friend, who was slouched across the long leather sofa in the great room. His expensive clothes were rumpled and streaked with…something, and his head fell back onto the back of the sofa, his mouth open as he stared at the ceiling.

  “Jonas. Jonas Belling!” Getting no response, Vinny leaned forward and grabbed his shoulder. He moaned and slid to the right.

  “It won’t do anything,” Emma said, standing at Vinny’s side. “He’s completely gone right now.”

  “What’s he on?”

  “Hell if I know. He picks up these whack designer drugs when he goes to LA, and then waits till he’s home with me to try them out!” Emma’s voice rose to a wail by the end, her fists clenched as she considered her husband.

  “Safety first, I guess,” Vinny muttered.

  “It’s not funny!”

  “I’m not laughing.” Vinny reached for Emma’s arm. She’d been so fixated on finding evidence of Jonas’s philandering, she’d underestimated the other route to Emma’s independence. All Emma had to do was to use the drug angle. She’d get a quick, easy divorce in no time.

  “How long will this go on?” she asked, pointing to Jonas.