I persevered, apparently in the belief that evil liked to lie low and hide in darkness and misery. Or in a place that stank like an oil well. Which had nothing to do with wills and a lot to do with my opinion of Gloria.
The stairs led to a small concrete bunker. One wall held an old wooden door. Like Alice, I couldn’t resist opening it. On the other side, it was more coal cellar than basement. I stepped onto the hard-packed earth and gazed blindly into the dark. Gravel had been ground into the dirt, but I was glad I’d donned athletic shoes for this search.
I groped around for a switch to illuminate the vast space I couldn’t see in just the stair light. Before I located what I sought, I heard a squeak and a flutter of wings, and something brushed my hair.
I went all girly and shrieked. Generally, I’m not afraid of rats or bats or I wouldn’t have been down there. But despite all my other paranoid premonitions, I hadn’t expected critters beneath a mansion, and this one startled the shit out of me.
I would have shut up faster, except a rush of more wings and weird squeaks flew past me, straight up to the house through the door I’d left open. So I kept shrieking and ducking while all hell swooped over my head.
“It’s a damned cave down here!” Leo shouted a million years later, his heavy boots racing downward through the cloud of flying vermin.
Ludicrously, he held an umbrella. My hero!
In their haste to escape, the bats flooded the stairwell, miraculously missing walls and ceiling and flowing like water into the kitchen.
“Not normal,” Paddy commented laconically once Leo and I returned to the kitchen. The room swirled with a black cloud of bats attempting to escape. We kept our backs to the walls and gazed around in awe. “Probably need to trap them.”
While I was being terrorized in the cellar, Andre, predictably, had produced both an automatic pistol and a coal shovel to take a battle stance in a cloud of creepies. I should have known he had been carrying concealed to Gloria’s booby trap. “A touch of PTSD, Andre?” I called. “Just a little overreaction?”
Squealing black uglies swooped all around him, swiping the kitchen ceiling and walls. Andre stood on the granite island, alternately swinging and shooting at the creatures like an old-time Western gunfighter. Except he’d probably have needed two guns for that.
He ignored me and knocked two bats out of the air with one shot. The man was good.
“Cellar might be safer,” I said wryly, dodging ricocheting bullets and bat bodies.
Someone had sensibly shut the door to the rest of the house. I noticed Max’s team wasn’t in here fighting flying vermin. Of course, neither was Frank.
“Open the windows!” Leo shouted. “Let them fly out.”
Seemed sensible to me, better than shooting the critters. But Paddy grabbed a lacy tablecloth from a drawer and stood blocking the back door, netting anything that came near him.
“Not normal,” he repeated. “Andre, drop the damned gun so the rest of us can trap them.”
One of Andre’s victims fell at my feet. Paddy was right. The creatures weren’t normal. This one had a face.
I shuddered and forced myself to study the oddly rounded eyes, snub nose, hairless cheeks, and tiny fangs. Contrary to my cowardly behavior, I knew a little something about bats. Occasionally, living in barns and abandoned structures with my tree-hugging mother could be very instructive. Bats are actually mammals. There are infinite varieties of bats. I didn’t remember any of them having red eyes and humanoid faces. This dead one had the same black-rat appearance Gloria had taken on after she’d met her just reward.
“Demon bats,” I muttered, not daring to say it aloud. Trapping them might be as dangerous as shooting them, I concluded. Creatures from hell were more my line of work than Paddy’s.
Which meant this was my problem, naturally. I was still debating this Saturn/Satan dichotomy, but good or bad, I couldn’t let a thousand miniature Hells Angels loose into the world. I just didn’t know if I could actually send a bat to Hades or if I would be punished or rewarded for trying.
But if they were demons . . . I should try. The image of demonic bats escaping into the world on my watch easily raised my blood pressure to that level of rage where I saw red and could curse anything. Fortunately, for a change, I hadn’t reached my usual state of incoherency.
“Saturn, damn these infernal creatures back to the hell from whence they came,” I intoned under my breath, legalizing my normal, furious curses for the sake of clarity and on the off chance I was wrong about their origins. And stupidly trusting that none of the people in the room came from hell.
Of course, I had utterly no idea if I was serving justice by frying bats in eternal fires, but if there was any chance these really were demons or imps from Hades or whatever, I wouldn’t let my friends be bitten by them. My posse might be a little oddball, but they were my friends. Demons were not.
The first victim of my curse fell and smacked Andre on the head.
“What the fuck?” He dodged and glared malevolently at the ceiling, firing off another round or two before realizing he was caught in a dead-bat downpour.
I guessed that confirmed the origin of the critters and that hell existed. Ouch.
“It’s raining bats!” Leo shouted, ducking under the umbrella with me. “What the devil is going on?” That was pretty strong language for Leo.
I didn’t want to explain that I was what was going on here. So I just asked innocently, “Maybe exposure to sunlight kills them?”
Not that anyone cared what was killing them.
Paddy darted back to the pantry. Andre swung his coal shovel like a baseball bat, apparently venting one whale of a lot of suppressed hostility by using furballs for targets. He was losing his sickly pallor and was almost back to his real self. Charming.
Within minutes, the floor was flooded with snarling, dying demonic bats. Even naïve Leo stared at the ugly creatures in horror. I assumed he hadn’t heard my curse or he would probably have been staring at me like that.
I’d killed a horde of bats. I was feeling pretty queasy, too. I’d actually killed them. Cursed them. I wasn’t just Saturn’s daughter—I was some kind of blamed witch. At least my curse about infernal creatures hadn’t sent me to hell. I’d better watch my language even closer than I’d thought. I wanted to emit a damn right about now, but bit my tongue.
“Gate to hell,” Paddy muttered, emerging from the pantry as the waterfall of bats dried up. “She opened it.”
Leo and Andre stared at him as if they were contemplating straitjackets. Me, I wanted to ask—before or after she died? Instead, I kicked a path through the oddly crunchy shells to the kitchen sink, where I methodically soaped my hands and arms.
“I didn’t open any gates,” I informed them, just in case there was any mistaking that pronoun. “It was already open when I got down there.”
Andre and Leo turned their stares to me. I shrugged it off. Andre knew I wasn’t normal. Leo sometimes suspected it, but I’d spent years learning to be a respectable lawyer, and I kind of liked to keep authority figures thinking that’s what I was.
Paddy shrugged. “Burn ’em.” He opened the rear entrance to an enormous screened porch complete with outdoor kitchen and gestured at the giant gas grill.
After my experience with Max’s freaky gas, you couldn’t have paid me to go near that grill. For all I knew, gas pipes were lines straight to the underworld. I aimed for a chiminea outside on the tiled terrace. Gathering some kindling, I set it smoking. I’d have preferred a flamethrower.