A Wolf at the Door

The source of the rage-inducing spell wasn’t hard to find, once I got a moment to focus. The faint hint of sulfur lead me back to the buffet table and the cans of flaming Sterno. Someone—our mashable friend if I had to guess—had placed little wooden coins in the blue flames. Most of them were destroyed already, but I managed to find one that was only half charred. On it, a demonic sigil had been etched. It was half erased by the chemical flame, but I could still feel the prickle of magic as I swiped my thumb over it. With the design altered by the burning wood, it was harmless now, but I stuck it in my pocket anyway. It was too dangerous to just leave things like that lying around.

15

Hospitals look very different when you’re not the one in the bed. The chairs are uncomfortable, the vending machines are full of stale food, and I’m pretty sure that time passes there according to no known law of physics. It might have even been running backward, and wouldn’t that be helpful? Rewind the evening and start over?

Bobby apparently didn’t have any next of kin to call, and Gretchen refused to leave until she knew if he was going to be all right. So we sat in the waiting room, watching white coats come and go, surrounded by some of the other party casualties. Someone brought Tai an ice pack for his head, once he’d made it very clear he wasn’t leaving Gretchen’s side, and after I snarled at a few of the nurses, they steered wide around me too. I guess I looked bad, but none of the blood was mine, I swear.

The most interesting event was the moment they wheeled Alec through the emergency room doors. Alec, the party host, whose head was notably not pulped beyond recognition, though he had a couple of black eyes and some swelling going on.

Sneaky thing that I was, I managed to overhear the paramedics as they handed him over to the attending physician. “Found him stuffed in a closet, beat to crap. Freakin’ crazy rich people. Probably had the whole party hopped up on something.”

They weren’t wrong, exactly. The whole party had been hopped up on something, but it was nothing that would show up in a drug test. I flipped the warped piece of wood over the back of my knuckles as I pondered it. Where did you get this, hm?

Alec—the real Alec—had been beaten and stuffed in a closet so Not-Alec could take his place. That I was pretty sure of. Impossible to know if that had happened during the party, or long before any guests arrived, but the idea had led me to several conclusions.

One—I was pretty sure Not-Alec and the centurion were one and the same creature. So, while the thought of only one enemy was comforting, the thought of an enemy that could change shapes was not. I needed to find out how to detect it sooner, since it seemed to be getting better at taking human form.

Two—My hands were covered in dried blood—Bobby’s, I was sure—but they were also covered in a layer of gray…something. It flaked off as it dried, turning to powder, just like the muck on my hands at the movie lot. I wasn’t sure what it was. It didn’t smell like anything, and tasted faintly like chalk (yes, I know that tasting it wasn’t smart, but…you do what you gotta). I saved some of it in a folded piece of paper for examination later. Whatever it was, it was connected to the creature.

Three—It wasn’t a demon. The mace would have sent him scrambling. It wasn’t one of the Yeti’s zombie pets. The blessed pentacle would have seared it like a hot brand. As the centurion, it hadn’t spoken, but as Alec it had. Unless that had been Real-Alec, instead of Not-Alec, and…a person could hemorrhage something trying to follow all the twists and turns.

When I’d touched it, there was no spark of magic, nothing I could sense. No cloves, no sulfur. Almost like it was as dull and neutral as I myself was. Inert. So it couldn’t have created the little riot-inducing coins. Not on its own, anyway. It had to have help. Something controlling it, or at least partnered with it. Something that had known, long before we arrived, that Gretchen would be at that party.

I scribbled all my thoughts down on a yellow legal pad that I’d stolen from the nurses’ station, scratching out false starts and dead ends with enough force to rip through three layers of paper. Anyone who found it would think they were the ramblings of a madman, but I had to do something to organize the buzzing in my head. I still felt like there was something missing. I had all the pieces, but they just weren’t connecting in a way that would point a big flashy arrow at the bad guy.

On the other side of the room, Gretchen shook a doctor’s hand, then came back to her seat, gathering up her purse. “Bobby’s sleeping, and probably will be for quite a while. They think he’ll be all right, but they’re still not sure what internal injuries he has. Something about watching him for crush syndrome or something. The doctor says we should go home and get a little rest, come back in a few hours.”