“Coffee?” Kyle asked when she emerged from her fortress of solitude and walked the five-ish steps to her kitchen.
“Part of a complete breakfast.” She popped a pod into the coffeemaker, pressed the start button, then gave her personal assistant all of her attention. Or, well, most of it. Some of it still lingered on He Who Must Not Be Named. She pressed her fingernails into her palms as punishment.
Kyle consulted the clipboard she’d never seen him without. The one he perpetually scribbled on. But he never seemed to flip the page or run out of ink, so what, exactly, he consulted was anyone’s guess. She’d always wanted to ask how a clipboard and pen had ended up in the afterworld with him, but Kyle was a talker. She didn’t know if she was ready for that conversation. Mostly because it could last for hours.
“Okay,” he said, pointing at…no clue. “Besides Mrs. Rodriguez downstairs, Mrs. Harmon called and would like an emergency reading this morning.”
By called, he meant that Mrs. Harmon had left a message on the machine, an ancient piece of technology she only kept around so Kyle could hear the incoming messages and report back to her if anything needed her immediate attention. Like, you know, a paying client.
Amber tried not to cringe. She failed. While Mrs. Harmon was her best-paying client, besides the Bristol and Partners Law Firm, the woman was also quite gullible. She’d been taken to the cleaners by countless charlatans and compared their readings to Amber’s, questioning everything Amber told her.
One delightful piece of work named Starchild had garnered a special kind of hatred from Amber—an emotion she rarely entertained. She’d considered sending Kyle over to haunt her, but the charlatan would only use it as a ploy to get more clients. She would say she’d been contacted by the dead and was helping one of them go into the light. She would bask in the attention. She would probably even start a GoFundMe page for the departed’s family. Aka, her pockets.
But enough about her. Today was a new day. Amber shook out of her thoughts and gave her messy studio a quick spruce, picking up cast-off articles of clothing, straightening books, and carrying a couple of cups to the kitchen. Then she turned back for a final inspection. The studio above her office wasn’t much, but it was hers, and that was saying a lot in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
She popped the lid on her travel mug and turned to Kyle. “Okay, let’s meet Mrs. Rodriguez, shall we?”
Chapter Two
Welcome to Madrid
Madrid has no town drunk.
We all take turns.
—Welcome sign
It was a risk, coming back to New Mexico after so many years away, but the demon Quentin Rutherford was tracking didn’t seem to give a rat’s ass. Based on news stories, eyewitness accounts, and the compass, a weapon the Vatican guard had given him, the asshole he’d been tracking for a month had set up shop in the small town of Madrid. Which was weird.
The town was a seat of mystical energy. It sat between Albuquerque and Santa Fe on a stretch of road called the Turquoise Trail. It was an old mining town turned ghost town turned hippie commune turned popular art colony. When he arrived, Quentin’s skin fairly tingled with the energies swirling about the place. Like the wind before a dirt storm in the desert, hot and full of static electricity.
Still, last he’d heard, Amber was in New York. She’d gone to college there, a fancy one named Vassar. He didn’t know much about colleges other than the one he attended for a whole year: Gallaudet University in Washington DC. He was there when all of his troubles began.
Well, more of the same troubles, but things escalated rapidly one fateful weekend, and his life had never been the same. His relationship with the elfin queen—his descriptor—had never been the same. The fact that he thought about her every day, craved her every day, meant nothing. He’d hurt her. Physically. Emotionally. Psychologically. There was no going back. And in all the years since, in all the towns and all the bars and all the women, he’d never met anyone who compared to the ethereal creature known as Amber Kowalski.
Ethereal. That was his new favorite word. He’d written it down in his notebook like he did all of the English words he wanted to remember. English was bothersome and clunky and didn’t make sense, but that word sounded pretty. And the sign for it was almost as beautiful as Amber was. A befitting tribute to all that she was. All that she is.
“If you don’t stop thinking about her, you’re going to get us killed.”
Quentin shook out of his thoughts, mentally flipped off the entity hitching a ride, and pulled his pickup off the main road that snaked through the tiny town. Madrid was a paradise for the chaotic-minded and a nightmare for anyone with OCD. Quentin leaned toward the latter. The town made him uncomfortable. Like his skin didn’t fit right. And yet, the hodge-podge of mismatched buildings and displays was somehow alluring.
Brightly colored buildings dotted a sparse landscape. Most of the houses in town had been built for the miners in the twenties and thirties. They were small and tightly packed. The artists had transformed the town into a multi-colored expression of pageantry and wonder, like Alice in Wonderland.
Artisans traded their wares, but Quentin mostly cared about food—he was hungry—and the dead people—of which there were now three. Three dead people in less than a week in a town of two hundred? Barring a major accident, a plague, or a serial killer, it wasn’t likely. Not in Madrid, pronounced Mad-rid, according to his source. This had to be the demon’s latest stop. The demon he’d been tracking for a month. He kept missing the otherworldly being by a day or two. Hours even. Every time Quentin got to a hotspot, at least two people were dead, and the demon was gone.
And the activity was all over the place. The compass verified what Quentin and his guest already knew. The demon showed up, killed a few people, then left. To say that the activity was unusual would be an understatement. Demons craved stability. They possessed for a reason. They wanted to set up shop, kick off their shoes, and stay awhile.
Then there were those who would tear a straight path through a given area, leaving trauma and carnage in their wake. Again, this one didn’t do that. It would be in New Jersey one day, Oregon the next, then show up days later in North Carolina. There was no pattern to its activity. No method to its madness. And that made tracking it a bitch.
When the compass, along with whatever natural-born talent Quentin had inside him, had tracked it to New Mexico, Quentin’s pulse sped up with the possibility of seeing her again. It had yet to slow down.
It was bound to happen eventually. He would have had to come home at some point. The only home he’d ever known, anyway. At first, he’d taken solace in the fact that Amber was in New York. Now, he missed her more than ever, and a small part of him hoped she’d come home to visit her mom and stepdad. He just wanted to see her face. To touch her hair. To kiss her full mouth. But again, as hearing people would say: That ship had sailed.
“You’re doing it again,” Rune said.
Rune, the demon inside him—and, no, not metaphorically—had possessed him while Quentin was in college. Rune was an old demon living in the bowels of the dorm. Quentin had felt him the day he moved in. During his second semester, he and a few friends, who’d sworn the dorm was haunted, took a trip to the nether regions beneath their rooms, and Quentin had come face-to-face with the ancient demon.