The Fell Read online

  Once Peter flopped himself into the metal chair with a long, drawn-out sigh, Anita seemed to take it as her cue to continue. “We’ve known about you for the last eleven years, Ben,” she said, then nodded briefly toward Peter; Ben could only assume the guy was still staring at the floor instead. “About both of you. The Sectarian Circle keeps close tabs on all happenings around the world categorized as paranormal. We always have. Of course, we paid just a bit more attention to the experiences you both had on Wry Road eleven years ago, though none of our people were in Maine at the time, so we couldn’t conduct a thorough investigation before… well, before the rest of the world had already written their version of the story.”

  Ben’s heart stopped for a minute, and then it felt like someone was slashing at his guts. “Wait. You knew about that night before it was all over the news?” Anita dipped her head in acknowledgement. Ben blinked at her, then glanced at Rufus and Richard in turn. “And you just sat there and let the rest happen however it was going to happen?” Another bout of rage and resentment boiled inside him, fueled by the fact that nobody had an answer for that as quickly as he wanted one. “So, what? You all just thought it was a good idea to let two kids flail around after something like that? We almost died in that house! We watched our friends murder each other, and nobody believed us. They thought we did it. Then they just thought we were crazy. I was—”

  He stopped himself and swallowed, still after all these years not quite able to talk about the years of psych evaluations, the full pharmacy shoved down his throat, the labels and the stigma and the constant reminder of all the things his town of Oakview and the world in general had said about him and Peter. Eventually, Peter had drifted out of the limelight, because he’d kept his mouth shut and moved on. But Ben hadn’t been able to do that, no matter how hard he’d tried. Because the voices wouldn’t leave him alone. Because he’d become a spirit-realm portal eleven years ago, and nobody had been able to tell him a single thing about what he was experiencing or why it ate away at his life while the drugs ate away at his sense of self until he finally just gave up and scrapped it all. It had worked out all right for a while. Then again, it had landed him right here in this underground lab, staring at three assholes who said they were part of a secret demon-hunting society but hadn’t lifted a goddamn finger to help him at all.

  “Did it ever occur to you to at least find me and tell me I wasn’t insane?” He couldn’t quit grinding his teeth even when he asked them this.

  Rufus shook his head. “We don’t operate that way, Ben—”

  “It was my life,” Ben shouted. “Not an operation.”

  “The Sectarian Circle does not directly involve its members in normal civilian lives,” Richard Monday added, “no matter the size and scope of their interaction with the Fell.”

  “Normal? You think all that was normal? Why the hell am I sitting here right now?” Ben yelled. He felt April’s hand on his thigh, which at any other time might have made him a lot more excited and maybe a little confused. Now, it felt like the only lifeline he had, and he grabbed her hand. She didn’t let go, despite how hard he knew he squeezed her fingers.

  “Because you involved yourself, Benjamin,” Richard Monday replied, his voice still lifeless, boring, insulting everything Ben had endured to apparently get to this point, of all things in his life.

  “We’ve kept our eye on you since the episode in that abandoned house,” Anita said. She obviously tried to settle Ben with her own version of a calming voice, but it only pissed him off even more. “The Sectarian Circle likes to document the lives of survivors and the families of any casualties. For posterity.”

  “Without actually stepping in to help,” Ben hissed.

  “That’s messed up,” Chase added. Okay, they could be on the same side right now.

  “With situations like yours, Ben, that’s just the way things have always been done,” Rufus added. “We can empathize with your situation and how events unfolded for you after that night—”

  “That’s bullshit. You have no idea what I’ve been through.” Then he remembered that in one way or another, Peter, April, and Chase had all had some kind of nasty ingredient from the spirit realm flavor their own lives. “What any of us have been through.”

  Rufus cleared his throat and blinked. “You’re entitled to your opinions, Ben. That doesn’t change the Sectarian Circle’s purpose and its role in the world.”

  “Mostly,” Anita added, “that is to observe. We step in on a small scale only when it’s necessary.”

  ‘Small scale?’ Ian said, sounding just as furious and mind-boggled as Ben felt. ‘Ask them if they think the Guardian is small scale. Ask them if they think thirty-thousand years without dying is small scale.’

  Yeah, that was exactly what Ben had been thinking. “That’s the worst possible way of describing it.”

  “That’s how this works,” Rufus said, his smile completely gone now.

  “I did find it interesting,” Anita continued, tilting her head, “that the two young men who’d gone through such an ordeal as children and still remained friends enough to attend the same university together would each ask for the same book on remedial demonology without the other’s knowledge. That was when we turned a more discerning eye, you might say, to what you two were getting yourselves into.”

  “What we were getting ourselves into?”

  Everyone gathered around the table, including Ben, turned to stare at Peter. He sat in the metal chair with his legs splayed on either side of it, slumping back against it with his arms folded. Of course, he didn’t look at Ben, and he didn’t even seem remotely bothered by the fact that he had all six pairs of eyes fixed firmly on him. Yeah, one way to get everyone’s attention was to butt into a conversation he obviously didn’t want to be a part of.

  Peter snorted. “You think we asked for any of this?”

  “Mr. Cameron—”

  “My name’s Peter!” He tossed a hand toward them. “Your name’s Richard, and nobody calls him Benjamin. Ever. How is it so hard to get this shit right?”

  Richard Monday only pressed his lips together, making Ben think that even if the man wanted to say ‘Peter’ instead, he looked pretty incapable of physically forming the word.

  “Peter,” Rufus said instead, “you asked for this when you and Ben decided to go back to that house and face one of the most dangerous and malignant forces the Fell has to offer.”

  “Oh, so you know how messed up the Guardian is?” Ben shouted. “And you still didn’t step in when we went back?”

  “Like I said, Ben, we watched you more intently,” Anita said, still never raising her voice or looking in the least bit upset. It was a heck of a change from her perpetual scowl at the library whenever he’d seen her there. “It’s a useless drain on our resources to get involved and potentially reveal ourselves every time a presence from the Fell and a human interact with each other. The four of you aren’t the only ones playing with sigils and incantations.”

  “Playing!” Peter shouted.

  “Can’t anybody just call them demons, already?” Chase offered with a grunt.

  “We could have died again,” Ben yelled.

  But Rufus chose only to respond to Ben. “But you didn’t,” he said.

  Ben took a deep breath and felt his eye twitching. “Only because Ian was there to get us out.”

  ‘Thank you, Ben.’

  Yeah, well, Ben had never said he blamed Ian for keeping them alive.

  Richard nodded. “And that, Benjamin—”

  “Jesus,” Peter hissed.

  Their host merely pressed his lips together. “That is the reason we agreed unanimously to intervene on your behalf.”

  “Tell me how, exactly, you intervened on our behalf,” Ben growled. “All you did was leave creepy packages outside Peter’s apartment with zero explanation of how to actually use them.”

  “But you figured it out, didn’t you?” Rufus said.

  Barely. And really,
April had been the one to realize what both the poorly built cabinet and the voodoo-looking wooden doll might actually do. The rest was basically left up to chance, which almost hadn’t been on their side, and it looked like it definitely wasn’t now. He’d been so stupid to think that accepting Richard’s invitation here would have actually made anything better. Still, he squeezed April’s hand on his thigh, and she squeezed back.

  “So, what?” Peter said from his singular chair. “You asked us here just to tell us congratulations for not getting ourselves killed? And to pat yourselves on the back for doing as little as humanly possible to help?”

  Richard Monday scowled at him. “I sent one invitation to—”

  “We had to make sure you four, as a team,” Rufus said, cutting Richard off completely, “could handle yourselves. We weren’t entirely sure of that when you just kept jumping into the fire over and over again, but you did make it out. That’s why you’re here.”

  “Think of it as a test,” Anita added. “You passed.”

  “No thanks,” Peter muttered.

  “A test for what?” Ben asked.

  Richard Monday frowned down at him from where he stood by the table. “I imagine that’s quite obvious at this point.”

  Ben’s sneer felt lethal on his own face. “Pretend I don’t know anything.”

  Rufus took a deep breath. “We want you to join us, Ben. We’ve seen the way you and your passenger—”

  “His name’s Ian.”

  “Of course. Excuse me. The way you and Ian have worked together against every presence you’ve faced from within the Fell is in and of itself extraordinary. As far as the history of the Sectarian Circle goes, we’ve never seen anything more than a simple possession of a passenger inside a human host. What you and Ian have accomplished is something else entirely.”

  ‘Simple?’ Ian said. ‘Yeah, possession is so simple.’

  Ben tended to agree with him; the college kid at that frat party a few months ago had clearly been possessed when he set the house on fire and bashed his own brains against the wall. That hadn’t been very simple.

  “Great,” he said. “You still haven’t given me a good reason for doing anything with you beyond the fact that I’m some rare new discovery you want to add to your collection. Or his.” Ben nodded at Richard Monday, who of course didn’t react at all.

  “What you and Ian can already do together,” Rufus said slowly, “is astounding. The things you’ll be able to do with the Sectarian Circle’s full support and funding are greater than you could possibly imagine. You obviously want to help people like yourself, Ben, who have been or will be unwittingly involved with or affected by the Fell in one way or another. You can do a lot of good.” He paused for a minute to look at Anita, who just shrugged. “And we could use your unique perspective, with Ian, for helping the people of this world on a much larger scale.”

  “How much larger does it get than fighting demons?” Ben didn’t quite understand where they were going with this, and apparently, he still wouldn’t today.

  “That’s something we won’t be able to show you until you accept our offer and agree to become a part of the Sectarian Circle.”

  ‘That’s the worst deal I’ve ever heard,’ Ian quipped.

  Yes. Yes it was. “You’re not helping your case very much.”

  “Still,” Rufus replied, “that decision does need to be made. Maybe not today. I’m getting the feeling you might like some time to process.” Then the man’s boisterously huge laughter returned, which still felt like he was making fun of Ben. At this point, Ben almost expected it.

  While he took his sweet time glaring at the three Sectarian Circle members only half answering any of his questions in an even remotely satisfying way—though they’d really only managed to exacerbate Ben’s frustration—April took the opportunity to ask, “What’s the Fell?”

  “Ah, Miss Balcom,” Richard said, nodding once, “that is an excellent question.”

  As always, April was there to ask the questions Ben never even considered. Yeah, he’d heard these people mention ‘the Fell’ in this conversation, but he’d been too worked up to focus on a phrase they tossed around like confetti. But April hadn’t just had her past unraveled in front of her to find out she’d been watched for half her life and still never helped, reassured, or at least told that everything would be okay. So it made sense that she still had enough composure to question the details. Ben just puffed out a sigh.

  “I believe you referred to it earlier as the spirit realm, Benjamin,” Richard added. “The place from which these forces occasionally… break free.” Ben definitely caught the warning—or maybe concerned—glance Rufus shot up at the man standing beside him. “The place to which we strive to return these forces. To keep them from seeping again into our world, if we can.”

  ‘And the spirits,’ Ian added. ‘They know about the spirits there, right?’

  “The same place where people’s spirits end up when they have unfinished business, right?” Ben felt ridiculous saying the whole ‘unfinished business’ bit out loud. It was way too overused, but there was literally no better way to say it.

  Richard Monday’s brows furrowed, and he blinked at Ben. “That is as yet unconfirmed, Benjamin. And the Sectarian Circle does not take a stance on what may or may not happen to humans after death.”

  That didn’t sound good.

  “Because of the religious aspect?” April asked. “Or because you only deal with demons?”

  Anita leaned back in her chair, Rufus rubbed his hands together and set them in his lap, and Richard slowly turned his head before dragging his attention from Ben to April. “I highly doubt that makes a difference, Miss Balcom.”

  “Have you ever seen a deceased person’s spirit that hasn’t moved on?” April glared at Richard, tilting her head in that viciously calculating way Ben had always been just a little afraid to confront. “I mean the ones that have been stuck in the spirit realm for a long, long time. The ones desperate to complete something they couldn’t in life. Desperate to help their loved ones who are still alive and don’t understand the dangers coming for them from the Fell.”

  Ben turned his head just a little to look at her. He could only see the side of her face, but even that side looked furious. Her words made him automatically think of the twins, James and Trevor, who they’d just barely managed to save from the super greedy demon trying to force their dead mother’s spirit into being its eternal companion.

  ‘That still creeps me out,’ Ian said.

  It was a pretty gruesome thought, yeah. That demon was the first they’d banished into a stone after dealing with the Guardian—the night Chase had forced himself into their little group like a splinter. Even if April was referring to the twins’ mother Melanie and how determined the woman, as a spirit, had been to save her sons, Ben couldn’t help but think that the girl sitting next to him was talking about a whole lot more than just the one terrified spirit. He just had no idea what that might be.

  “Personally, Miss Balcom,” Richard said, “only a few. And those were malicious spirits causing quite a bit of trouble all on their own. Much like the one you four encountered with a specific taste for feline flesh.”

  Ben couldn’t help the grimace as the memory of that disgusting little interlude rose again in his mind—cat guts and blood and fur and gurgling mewls. That ghost had been eating stray cats alive, which was bad enough. Yeah, Richard Monday had also anonymously left them one of those creepy wooden dolls, which April had used to somehow banish the crazy guy’s spirit to … wherever it might have gone. But just because the Sectarian Circle had given them a weirdly unexpected tool to help with that one, it didn’t mean they knew what they were doing when it came to spirits. Or maybe they didn’t know as much as they pretended, and Ben realized this was what April was trying to figure out.

  “And the harmless ones?” she asked.

  “That’s something we can talk about later,” Rufus said, “if Ben decides he�
��d like to join us and those details have been hashed out.” For the first time, the short man in the tweed jacket looked just a little uncomfortable.

  April looked at Ben with wide eyes and what looked like a growing urge to murder someone.

  “So the only person who matters here is Ben,” Peter said from his chair-island. Ben just closed his eyes and tried to keep himself together. Because that was exactly what he was wondering, and he didn’t like it, either.

  “My apologies, Mi—” Richard Monday stopped himself and sighed through his nose. “Do you also have another consciousness sharing your body and lending you extraordinary capabilities that may be of some use to us?”

  ‘Holy crap. Richard Monday just discovered sarcasm.’

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Peter mumbled.

  “Then why did that letter say we were welcome to come here with him?” April asked.

  “We hoped it would provide Benjamin with a larger measure of comfort if he were to accept the invitation in the presence of his companions.”

  Companions. For real? The guy might as well have just said, ‘Bring a security blanket if you think it’ll make you freak out less.’

  “Let’s take this hypothetically,” April said. “If Ben decides to join your society, what happens to us?”

  Good question, because it could go either way—capture and release, or one of those ‘you know about us, so now we have to kill you’ type deals.

  “That is entirely up to you, Miss Balcom,” Richard replied.