Born Again Read online

  “Be careful,” April called after him. She rose too and passed by Ben on her way to the metal box in the middle of the living room. For a minute, he’d forgotten all about the furious demon just sitting quietly inside its new crystal home.

  When she glanced at him, they didn’t have to say out loud that it probably wasn’t a good thing someone had been watching them. The kind of stuff they were doing—anything having to do with demons and spells and just barely saving people from demonic appetites—wasn’t exactly thought of as heroic work. Or the pastimes of sane people. The last time Ben had tried to tell anyone about the existence of demons and the things he’d seen in that abandoned house as a kid, he’d been “the crazy boy” for the next four years at least. Most likely, a few people still thought that of him. Fortunately, none of them were in this room.

  “Yeah,” he said, agreeing with that look April shot him and saying it out loud for them both. Peter slipped out the front door, April bent to gingerly pick up the box, and Ben stepped away from the couch. This time, he did squat down in front of the twins, who still hadn’t moved from where they sat in stunned disbelief. “One more thing,” he told them, keeping his voice low so April wouldn’t hear. “I have a message from Melanie.”

  One of the twins glared at him. “Our mom’s dead, asshole.”

  Ben took a deep breath. “I know. I’m sorry. But I…” He paused when April walked past them to retrieve the pillow from where she’d kicked it across the living room. Why she felt the need to clean up now—and in someone else’s apartment—he’d never understand. “Just trust me, okay? She… she appeared to me.”

  ‘In a vision,’ Ian added with a healthy dose of mockery.

  Ben just shook his head. “She wanted me to tell you that she’ll always love you.”

  “Oh, yeah. That totally proves you talked to our dead mother,” the other twin muttered.

  “Which one of you is James?” The twins’ mouths dropped open in unison, and the one who’d just spoken pointed at his brother. James slowly raised his hand. “So then you’re Trevor.” Trevor nodded, his face losing all color. “So, James, she also wanted me to tell you that you need to move out of this apartment and marry that girl already.”

  James’ open mouth curled into a genuine grin. Trevor looked back and forth between Ben and his brother, then scowled. “What the hell, man?” he asked his twin.

  James smirked at him for a second before punching Trevor in the arm. “Thank you,” he told Ben, who puffed a breath through his lips, feeling super ridiculous, and nodded once.

  “Ben?” Peter’s voice rose from out in the hallway. He sounded a little anxious, but that was pretty much Peter’s natural state.

  “Yup.” Ben slapped his knees. “Time to go.” He stood and found April watching him with a curious frown, like she’d heard part of the conversation but couldn’t figure out what it meant. Trying to avoid any questions, Ben brushed it off, and that seemed to be enough for her. They walked together through the front door, the metal box in April’s hands and the volatile, gift-wrapped demon trapped inside it.

  She shut the door behind them, and they found Peter standing beside the apartment door. His normally pasty skin—so unnaturally contrasted by his dark hair—looked more ghostly white than usual.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Ben asked. And then he noticed the guy standing directly behind his friend. He would have thought it just a little creepy if Peter hadn’t been frozen stiff, his eyes popping out of his head, while the guy behind him pressed a long, barrel-shaped object through the pocket of his zipped-up hoodie and against Peter’s back. Not a little creepy. Terrifying.

  Peter’s throat gurgled when he gulped. “Ben.” His voice broke too, but Ben couldn’t blame him for that.

  “Whoa, hey,” Ben said, slowly raising his hands and hoping this guy had enough reason in him to be talked calmly away from shooting his best friend. Or any of them.

  “Ben, is that a gun?” Peter squeaked. “It feels like a gun.”

  “Hold on a sec, man,” Ben told the stranger. He felt April step behind him and clutch his arm with one hand—almost as tightly as she had the night they banished the Guardian. The guy holding Peter hostage didn’t look like a maniac. No wild eyes, no darting glances, no sweaty brow. He just frowned condescendingly at Ben and April, like he’d caught them enjoying a nerdy moment or something. “What do you want?”

  The guy narrowed his eyes and pursed his lips, like he was pretending to think about it. His gray beanie covered everything but a little tuft of blond hair peeking out over his forehead. “I saw what you guys did,” he said. “All of it.” And no, he didn’t sound like a lunatic, either. That just made the whole thing even more bizarre.

  “Okay,” Ben said slowly. “So you know that we didn’t hurt anyone. And you know we don’t have money or anything super valuable on us.” He felt like he was failing in this impromptu hostage negation. That part wasn’t in the job description—even though he’d pretty much made up this job himself. And it didn’t pay.

  “Except for that box,” the stranger said, nodding at April.

  She clenched Ben’s arm even tighter, and he tried not to wince. “That’s… not exactly worth stealing,” Ben said, and despite the seriousness of the situation, he laughed. “Not unless you like biting off more than you can chew.”

  ‘Really, Ben?’ Ian whispered, which was dumb because nobody else could hear him. ‘You’re taunting the guy with a gun?’

  Crap. Right. That was definitely the wrong way to do this. Don’t get cocky, Ben.

  “I disagree,” the guy replied. “I think what you guys are keeping in there might be worth a lot to the right people.”

  Anything you can do about this?

  ‘Not really my area of expertise,’ Ian replied. ‘We could go with the green fire again—’

  Nope. Screw that. This was definitely outside the realm of spirits and supernatural forces, now. And Ben’s hands had just started to feel normal again.

  “Don’t give it to him,” Peter squawked, and Ben couldn’t tell if it was in fear of what the stranger might do or just Peter’s ridiculously stubborn attachments to his own engineering designs.

  The guy pressed his gun harder against Peter’s back, and Ben picked up the telltale wheeze signaling the beginning of one of Peter’s frequent and annoyingly inconvenient asthma attacks. “I don’t want to take it from you. I don’t want to give it to anyone else.”

  “Then what?” Ben asked. Peter’s breathing had shortened now in very little time, and he stared at Ben with wide eyes. “Look, he’s having an asthma attack. At least let him grab his inhaler.”

  The guy put a hand on Peter’s shoulder. “I want in.”

  “What?” Ben and April said in unison. Peter might have too, if he could breathe.

  “I want to do this with you guys. You know, part of the team.” The guy’s little shrug did not suit how dire things had gotten for Peter now.

  “Let him get his inhaler, man,” Ben said, gesturing toward the wheezing Peter. It was getting bad.

  “Welcome me to the club,” the stranger said, his calculated grin almost terrifying.

  “Are you serious?” This guy would hold somebody at gunpoint just to be a part of what Ben and his friends were doing with demons and boxes? Never mind that he looked completely in control of his wits; the man’s terms made him a lunatic.

  “Fine.” April’s voice trembled a little. “Just let him go.”

  That snapped Ben out of his disbelief. “Sure, man. You want in to help us, cool. Just let Peter go, yeah?”

  Grinning, the stranger whisked the barrel of his gun away from Peter’s back and raised both arms a little, stepping back. While one hand held the gun through his hoodie pocket, the other was thankfully empty. “Glad we agree.”

  Peter lurched forward and fumbled in his jacket pocket for his emergency inhaler, starting to look a little grayish at the lips. One puffs, two puffs, and he held his breath, sinking to the
floor against the wall of the hallway. April knelt beside him more for emotional support than anything else. What else could she do? A brief flash of gratitude hit Ben; it seemed his best friend and his maybe-in-the-future girlfriend had gotten over the awkward strain Peter had fueled between them since the day Ben told April everything about their past.

  And now Ben wanted to beat this douchebag with a gun to a pulp. But there was the gun.

  The guy’s smile wavered just a little when he watched Peter gulping down air now that the asthma medication had opened up his airway. “Is that for real?” he asked Ben.

  “What do you think?” Ben spat. The stranger just lifted an eyebrow, apparently only now recognizing the consequences of pressing loaded weapons into someone else’s back. “We had our talk, man. Can you get rid of the gun?”

  The guy spread his arms again. “You mean this gun?” Then he pulled his hand out of the pocket of his hoodie with a bright glint of steel.

  Ben cursed and ducked toward April and Peter. April pressed herself against the wall and shouted something he couldn’t understand. He didn’t quite comprehend why his gut reaction was to put himself between her and the bullet he knew was coming for one of them, but it sure left a better impression than running away down the hall by himself.

  In place of the cracking gunshot he expected—despite the fact that he’d never heard a gun fired and didn’t know what it might sound like in the narrow, carpeted hallway of the apartment complex—a slow hiss and crackle rose from the stranger with their lives in his hands. Then Ben looked up and saw white smoke where the guy’s head should have been. It rose up toward the ceiling and dispersed.

  The gunman put his lips around the vape again, took another hissing pull, and exhaled another giant cloud. “You should see your faces right now.” He smirked.

  “What?” April trembled in Ben’s arms. Peter was completely silent.

  “What the hell?” Ben shouted. He slid away from April and sat back on the floor, feeling like he’d just been pushed out a window.

  “You guys don’t watch action movies?” The guy was pretty much laughing at them now, waving his silver vape in the air. “Fake weapon hidden in a pocket? Jesus, you guys are so serious.”

  Peter finally moved, pushing himself up against the wall and onto his feet. The grayish color in his lips and cheeks had returned to their normal clammy paleness. He glared at the guy who’d held him hostage with a smoking device.

  “Oh, come on,” the stranger groaned. “Just a little bit of fun. You just dealt with something a lot worse in there.” He gestured toward the apartment they’d just left, which was thankfully still silent with the door still closed.

  Peter took one more puff of his inhaler, then dropped it. It bounced on the carpet, and when Ben looked back up at his friend, Peter was stalking back toward the stranger, his fists tightly clenched. The last thing he expected to see was Peter winding back his fist to land it squarely against the other guy’s jaw.

  “Peter!” April shrieked—it was either a reprimand or an encouragement—after the slap of knuckles hitting flesh.

  The stranger reeled, blinked quickly, and raised his own fist in reflex.

  “No, no, don’t!” Ben shouted.

  Too late. The guy’s fist crashed into Peter’s face, more or less lifting Peter off his feet and sending him to the ground like a felled tree.

  “You moron!” Ben wasn’t quite sure if he said it to Peter or the other guy. Maybe both of them. He scrambled toward his punched-out friend and groaned. Peter’s eyes fluttered as the blood poured from his nose in a steady stream down the side of his face.

  “You saw him hit me first, didn’t you?” The other guy rubbed his jaw but didn’t move to help. Big surprise.

  Ben hesitated only a little at the sight of all Peter’s blood, but he sucked it up and pinched the bridge of his friend’s nose. “Help me sit him up,” he told April.

  She didn’t need to be told twice. Together, they got a completely dazed Peter up against the wall of the hallway again and tilted his head forward so he wouldn’t choke. Ben kept his fingers on his friend’s nose, positive Peter couldn’t have managed it himself, anyway. He’d given Peter a nosebleed himself not too long ago, when the guy had tried to wake him up from a nightmare and instead got a wailing fist to the face. Ben had felt bad about that one, but this was even worse. There was so much blood.

  “You need to go,” April said to the stranger. Ben was so focused on watching Peter, he didn’t see what she looked like. But the icy threat in her voice pretty much terrified him.

  “It’s a bloody nose,” the other guy said. “I didn’t actually shoot him.”

  “He’s a hemophiliac,” Ben shouted, then looked up long enough to stare daggers at the guy. “A papercut could kill him.” Okay, that was a gross exaggeration, but he made allowances for his rage toward this douchebag.

  Comprehension dawned pretty quickly on the jerkwad’s face, and that stupid smile disappeared. “Oh.” He reached into his pocket again, replacing the vape in his hand with a thick wad of folded paper towels. Then he stepped toward the trio focused on Peter’s nosebleed, tearing off pieces of paper towel and twisting them into two thick columns. “Use this.”

  “We don’t need anything from you,” April replied harshly. “Definitely not your help. You’ve done enough.” The harsh malice Ben had never heard in her voice until today knotted something in his gut, but he didn’t want to look away from the guy offering paper towels to see how she was doing.

  He did, though, feel Peter’s blood pooling in his palm and spilling over to drip onto his friend’s lap. April was pissed off, and rightfully so, but they did actually need a little bit of help. He reached up with his free hand for the twisted paper towels. He didn’t say thank you. “If you want to be useful, get him some ice.”

  The guy with a terrible sense of humor glanced from Ben to Peter, seemingly ignoring April altogether, and nodded. Then he turned to head back down the hall and stopped two apartments down to open the door and disappear inside another apartment.

  He lived here? Ben had no idea why that surprised him so much. Maybe he’d expected the guy to have stalked them for a while. But that image of this jerk fit a lot more when they’d thought he had a gun. It did make a lot more sense that this guy had noticed something weird going on down the hall, seen his neighbors’ open door, and figured he’d take a good, long look at what the heck was going on in there. Ben imagined the guy had seen more than he’d bargained for, and his first inclination had been to terrify and bully them into letting him join them. Great guy. Outstanding character. Full of crap.

  Ben pressed one of the rolled tissue paper tubes into Peter’s hand. His friend now seemed to have regained some of his awareness; Peter grabbed the paper towel, and Ben let go of his friend’s nose just long enough for the guy to stuff one roll up one nostril, then the other. Then Peter leaned forward again, holding his bulging nose, and let out a heavy sigh.

  “Ben,” April muttered, “we’re not actually going to let that guy just tag along, are we?”

  He did finally turn to look at her—the glisten of her wide blue eyes, the angry flush in her cheeks, the few strands of hair that had slipped from her blonde ponytail and now clung to a little bit of sweat on her forehead. They’d all been jerked around, from fighting a demon and almost failing to save Melanie’s sons to relief that it was over to the sickening thought that one of them would be shot—and then the furious humiliation of having been dragged through the end of it by one idiot with a sadistic streak. Still, April looked a thousand times better wearing those emotions than Ben ever could. Her anger made her gorgeous, and he couldn’t decide if the anxiety in his stomach came from his appreciation of that beauty or from a sudden fear of ever having that anger truly directed at him.

  Ben shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  She frowned and leaned away from him. “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

  Okay, so he was probably closer to b
eing the target of her anger than he wanted. But he couldn’t just not answer her. “At this point, I have a feeling he’d do something a lot worse than this if we told him no.”

  “It’ll be worse with him,” she countered. “The guy’s obviously insane, Ben. Who does this? We should be telling him to go f—”

  “I punched him,” Peter said, lifting his head with wide eyes to stare at the other end of the wall. He looked like he’d just woken up, and his eyes slowly drifted to fall on Ben and April as he turned his head. “I’ve never punched someone before.”

  Despite himself—and the tension of having to deal with all this right after going up against another demon—Ben chuckled and gave Peter’s shoulder a good squeeze. “I know, Pete,” he said. “Not gonna lie, I wanted to do the same thing. You beat me to it.”

  “Weird, right?” A lopsided smile broke through the wadded paper towel in Peter’s swollen nose and his bloodstained fingers.

  “It was a good hit.”

  “You guys are ridiculous,” April said. Normally, she’d shake her head and roll her eyes and move on to the next thing. This time, though, she sounded about ready to slap them both. “That guy’s nuts. I don’t want anything to do with him. If you think he could do a lot worse, we should leave before he comes back. It’s not like he knows how to find us.”

  And of course, the minute she said it, the apartment door down the hall opened again, and out stepped the guy none of them really wanted to see. April snapped her mouth closed like someone had forced it shut and seethed quietly.

  “Here,” the guy said, offering a bag of frozen peas while he pressed a plastic snack bag filled with ice cubes to his own jaw. Ben all but snatched it from him and handed the bag to Peter, who grunted with the peas now against the face but seemed otherwise recovering. The guy’s eyes shifted back and forth among the trio sitting on the floor, then he said, “I’m Chase.”

  The hallway was completely silent as they all stared at him. Was he seriously trying to pull a meet and greet now? “Great,” Ben replied, not bothering at all to hide his angry sarcasm. No way was he going to start introducing all of them right here in this hallway.