Page 4

T wo days later at Greene Mansion, an hour before midnight, Evan discovered the reason why his left eye had been twitching constantly.

Bruce and his three minions stood at the darkened porch of the mansion, glaring daggers at Evan. The candles he’d lit around the hall lent a dramatic glow to their contorted faces, highlighting their invisible enthusiasm and palpable disgust as they stared at Evan. No matter how much he searched his memory, Evan couldn’t recall asking the lot of gentlemen to hang out with him in a haunted mansion.

He glanced at Aaron, who seemed just as confused on the phone with Mrs. Greene, his brows furrowed and shoulders tense.

“Why are we doing this again?” One of Bruce’s minions scratched his unruly beard, narrowed eyes darting around the property with a mixture of dread and distaste. “I heard this place is haunted.”

As if on cue, leaves rustled behind them, a distant howl of a beast making the group flinch. In the way their legs trembled under them, one would have misunderstood that they were terrified.

Bruce scoffed, swirling the toothpick between his clenched teeth. “Haunted, my ass.”

“Someone died in here!” the bearded man grunted.

“I heard his blood was sucked dry.”

“A vampire—”

“Is it really haunted?” One of the men poked his head around Bruce, glaring at Evan like he was the one who’d invited the ghosts to dine with them.

Annoying bastards .

“ Very haunted,” Evan said, accentuating every word. “Even I don’t know what’s haunting this place.” With that, he turned around, several pairs of eyes bulging behind him as he casually walked away. As he approached, Aaron ran an irritated hand through his dusty brown hair, cursing someone under his breath.

“Well?” Evan folded his arms across his chest. “What went wrong now?”

Aaron sighed. “It seems Mrs. Greene hired them for us.”

Evan blinked, then reached up to rub his throbbing temple. When he’d asked the couple to hire a few men, maybe he should have added “reliable” and “volunteering” men. Men who didn’t want to kill him at first sight.

What made it even more absurd was the fact that Bruce and his minions worked full-time for Tiago’s private corporation. They couldn’t be simply hired for running errands.

Which meant this was Tiago’s doing. Sticking his nose exactly where it didn’t belong: in Evan’s business.

Now Evan was stuck in a haunted mansion with men who passionately hated him and would probably be utterly useless. In fact, he had a nasty feeling they were going to screw things up before the night was over.

Rubbing his temple raw, Evan groaned through the rising headache. “I can handle this on my own. Send them back.”

“It'll take forever with just the two of us,” Aaron argued.

“Better forever than never.”

The risk of failing this exorcism was more severe than just Evan’s body being found sucked clean of blood and flesh. It could lead to everyone in there losing their lives. Worse, the evil that was tied down on this property could escape and wreak havoc in the town.

How many lives would that take?

“I’ll look for some other people,” Aaron’s fingers moved furiously over his phone screen, then abruptly halted. “Shit!”

“What now ?”

“No, no, no. Please don’t die,” Aaron slapped his phone against his palm so hard that Evan almost winced for the phone. “I’m pretty sure I charged it. Dammit.”

Dead phone. Typical.

Evan’s eyes wandered upstairs. It was the effect of so much concentrated malice in this place. He knew it would happen, so he didn’t—

“Give me your phone,” Aaron stretched out a hand towards him.

Evan shrugged. “Don’t have it.”

Aaron blinked, a confused smile creeping up his face. “What do you mean don’t have it ?”

“Electronic gadgets falter or stop working in a place so heavily haunted, you know that.”

“I do —” Aaron sucked in a sharp breath, trying his very best not to combust, then spoke calmly. “Remember how we talked about staying in contact throughout the exorcism? It’s dangerous in here. How am I supposed to look for you if you get lost in one of the bazillion hallways in here?”

“Then just call out to me as loud as you can,” Through years of secluded meditation, Evan’s five senses had sharpened to an almost superhuman level. He pulled the coat taut around himself, pushing his bangs out of his eyes. “Stop stressing and send those pricks back.”

“What pricks?”

Evan’s shoulders tensed as Bruce’s voice boomed from behind. When he spun around, the four men came into view, their agitated bodies huddled together. All but one.

“You weren’t referring to us , were you?” Bruce stepped forward, crowding Evan as he held his breath, hating the thick scent of Bruce’s leather jacket.

That smell—no, stench —made Evan feel like he was breathing next to the skin of a dead animal.

Surprise, that was basically what leather was.

A vein throbbed in Evan’s forehead. “I don’t know. Do people usually refer to you lot as pricks?”

Anger flared in Bruce’s eyes.

“You little shit!” He bared his chipped yellow teeth, hand flying out and coming down so fast that Evan almost—

Aaron caught that hand.

— almost sent an energy blast straight to his crotch.

“Now, now, there’s no need to talk with fists,” Aaron was equally tall and built like the rest but contrastingly bright and polite. He flashed a handsome smile at a frowning, pig-faced Bruce. “Isn’t it best if we get this over with soon so we can all go home, hm?”

Bruce’s minions glanced at each other, then hauled Bruce back, begging him to calm down. While they placated the wild pig, Aaron turned to Evan, his smile faltering slightly. Momentarily, something simmered in his dark blue eyes. Something Evan often caught Aaron suppressing.

Anger.

Aaron couldn’t drop his salesman persona because of some rude customers, but those pricks customers were doing a great job at provoking him. Perhaps they weren’t aware that the quiet ones were the scariest when they finally snapped.

“Let’s start already,” Aaron took out bundles of dried Noctis from Evan’s backpack, a slight furrow between his brows. “Just like usual, right?”

Evan nodded. “In every corner.”

Spirits and malicious energies lurked in the corners of the room where light was scarce and shadows abundant. Burning Noctis in every corner would repel the spirits and force them out. That was exactly what Evan wanted. To drive them out of the mansion so he could take care of the thing upstairs.

During his survey of the mansion earlier, Evan had found a peculiar door on the first floor, at the end of the long, narrow hallway. Approaching it was nearly impossible because of the thick black mist crowding its entrance.

That had to be the room where the cursed item—or whatever was attracting these resentful spirits—was.

“Do you know what you’re dealing with here?” Aaron asked, face taut as he came back after distributing dried Noctis to the men who reluctantly snatched it from his hands. Anxiousness radiated from his rigid shoulders and crept up Evan’s skin.

Evan twisted the ring on his finger, faint uncertainty rising inside him. “It’s not like anything I’ve ever come across. But I guess there’s a first for everything.”

There was also a last.

“That’s not very reassuring,” Aaron returned the backpack to Evan, eyes narrowed in seriousness. “I’ll take the guys and smoke up all the corners. It shouldn’t take long with the extra hands. You better not wander about by yourself.”

As usual, he saw right through Evan. Regardless, Evan dipped his chin.

Aaron’s eyebrows furrowed. “Don’t move.”

“I won’t.”

But of course, he moved.

As soon as the men were out of sight, Evan took out a flashlight and a bundle of Noctis, making his way to the first floor. There was no way in hell he was taking Aaron with him when he was unsure how dangerous the situation could get upstairs.

As he climbed the stairs, blue light flared in his irises, his core of spiritual energy thrumming.

Every exorcist had a distinct method of exorcism. Some trapped spirits in a mirror cast with a spell then shattered the mirror to exorcise them. Some used the sacred river water to burn the spirits out of existence. Evan’s method wasn’t as dramatic or cruel.

It was, in fact, very simple.

Touch.

All he had to do was expose his core of spiritual energy, then make physical contact with the spirit or cursed object to exorcise it. A method of exorcism unique to the Blackwood bloodline.

Most exorcists avoided direct physical contact with spirits. One or two might be manageable, but depending on the spirit's age and possible resentment it might carry, direct contact could take a toll on the exorcist. Or worse, leave them wide open to possession.

In Evan’s case, however, considering the contact didn’t overwhelm him to death, he could recuperate his lost energy through a widely used method: sleep.

He was sixteen when he first learned his touch could exorcise spirits. A truly bittersweet moment.

Bitter—because the first spirit he’d accidentally exorcised had been a classmate. A sweet boy he used to nod at in the school hallway before Evan dropped out. A kid whose name he couldn't remember.

And when Evan reached out to him in the streets one day, not realizing he was a spirit, the kid’s soul flickered out of existence at his touch.

Sweet—because amidst the guilt, Evan realized something else. He had a gift. One he thought he'd failed to inherit from the Blackwoods.

He found another gig to stack alongside his three part-time jobs. Another way to survive.

A gig. That was all it was supposed to be.

As a high school drop-out who functioned daily on three hours of sleep and carried the burden of his father’s debt, while also providing for his sister’s education, Evan welcomed any quick-cash jobs he could find. But before he could help it, he was neck-deep in books about exorcism and ghosts.

After his mother’s death, it was Rhea who’d raised Evan more than his father. She was his mother's mentor, or at least that's what Evan believed for some reason.

And with her guidance, Evan learned how to control his core of spiritual energy. The spirits and shadows he’d always pretended not to see were all he sought after that. He taught himself how to cast protection barriers—a Blackwood trait—and use his spiritual energy to cleanse and exorcise. All the while, Rhea buzzed in his ear about how he was not even half as good as his mother because Evan was prone to laziness.

He couldn’t disagree. Mercy Blackwood was one of the best exorcists in the entire Blackwood bloodline.

Ten years and hundreds of exorcisms later, Evan became who they now referred to as the “infamous exorcist of Emberlyn.” Infamous because some believed helping people should be a deed rewarded with blessings and smiles, while Evan preferred cash or checks.

If he could simply exorcise spirits with a touch, charging people was selfish, they said.

Never mind the numerous times he’d been accidentally possessed during exorcisms. Forget the things he’d done to himself under the influence of those spirits. That could all be healed with “blessings and smiles” right?

Bull-fucking-shit. If not for his mother’s ring, Crimson Eye, Evan would not have made it alive this far without getting possessed and jumping off a cliff. In that order.

Hence, for all the troubles he went through, charging people a few bucks was hardly preposterous in Evan’s dictionary.

At the top of the stairs, Evan lit a bundle of dried Noctis, turned on his flashlight, and entered the dark hallway, waving the cleansing smoke around him. The air turned thicker as he passed by doors lined on each side, shadows dancing around him in the glare of the flashlight. Resentment and hunger seeped from those shadows, directed towards where Evan was heading—the door at the end of the hallway.

One might think after so many years of being in this profession, Evan would’ve grown indifferent. But every time he undertook a new case, unaware of what he was dealing with, he was always curious about one thing.

Would this be his last case?

And every time the answer was no , it made Evan feel as though he was being driven into a particular destination that he was yet to discover. A moment that would flip his life on its head.

Stopping at the end of the hallway, three feet away from the mysterious door, Evan blew the Noctis through the dense black mist. As soon as the two smokes mingled, one black and the other white, a faint sizzling noise echoed in the empty hallway. There was only one bundle of Noctis and such a dense mist of resentful spirits. As expected, the white smoke faded, unable to penetrate the thick black fog.

Evan had to reach into it.

Ugh, if I touch worms or spiders, I’m gonna throw up.

He chanted a quiet spell for protection. Brushing his fingertips against each other, he cast a light barrier over his hand, raising it all the way up to his right shoulder until the whole arm radiated a soft blue light.

One couldn’t be too cautious while reaching inside a void of black mist in a haunted mansion.

As his glowing hand slid through the mist, something creaked ahead of him.

Evan froze.

With a whoosh the black mist parted clean from the middle like it’d been sliced with a blade, revealing a huge wooden door cracked open on the other side.

The horde of malicious spirits was making way for him.

Hiss.

Evan glanced down. The dried Noctis bundle clasped between his fingers slowly crumbled away into nothing. His eyebrow quirked. There was still five minutes’ worth of smoke left in it.

Dusting his hands of the ash, Evan raised his eyes to the door. With the hand covered with the light barrier, Evan pushed the door open, struggling slightly with its jammed hinges. It was pretty obvious the door hadn’t been opened in years, if not decades, perhaps centuries.

Forcing open a gap enough for him to squeeze through, Evan stepped inside the dim room, shining the flashlight over the interior.

A startled gasp left his mouth.

The flashlight glare hit the wall and reflected back at him. Anywhere Evan pointed it, the light bounced back in his face. Because every square inch of all four walls was covered in mirrors.

No windows. One door. And mirrors. Several, countless mirrors of various sizes and shapes.

What the hell…

Dust and a strange smell he couldn’t explain flooded Evan’s nostrils as he stepped further into the room, catching his own figure reflecting from the mirrors across from him. A square panel of glass in the slanted ceiling allowed the moonlight to shine into the room.

In an array of magical formation that Evan had only ever read about, the moonlight from above hit one faraway mirror. The reflected ray from that mirror in turn hit another, then another until every reflective surface in the room was casting a beam of white light. These crisscrossing rays of moonlight met at the center of the mirror room where, sat a giant, oval piece of furniture, draped in a white sheet.

Evan could already guess what that was.

Unease crawled up his spine, circling tight around his neck like a noose. Instincts urged him to step back. Not because the air was thick with malice or resentment or something dangerous. No, it was, in fact, the lack of anything at all in the air.

The room was warm and empty and…quiet.

Dead quiet.

Never had Evan encountered such a haunted space before. No whispers or drop in the temperature or sudden gusts of wind. All those malicious spirits and shadows hovering in the hallway had failed to follow him inside.

Why?

Spirits didn’t have physical form, so locked doors or walls with steel reinforcements were barely a problem. Then what was the reason they’d simply vanished as soon as the door opened? Were they afraid of something?

Wait. That’s not my business. I am here for something else.

Evan’s gaze cut to the draped oval piece at the center of the room, its pristine white sheets void of even a speck of dust. The way all the mirrors were facing this object…it had to be some kind of a containment array to suppress whatever was behind the white sheet.

Whoever had locked that thing away in this room didn’t want it to escape.

That had to be the source of the cursed energy that was attracting the spirits into the mansion. But why was there not a single trace of malice on the object? According to Evan’s knowledge, the room should’ve been engulfed in suffocating dark energy emitted by the cursed object.

Was the containment spell so strong that not even a smidge of the energy could escape? If so, then the caster must’ve been someone powerful.

Throughout ancient times, mirrors were used in magic and exorcism, with good and bad intentions. But one thing common in both practices was its use for trapping spirits in the mirror realm, where time didn’t exist and a soul would be stuck living the same moment over and over again until released…or until the mirror was shattered and the spirit inside dissipated.

The hair at Evan’s nape spiked as a drop of cold sweat trickled down. Gingerly covering the distance, he reached for the white sheet, the light barrier glowing brighter than usual over his hand.

A slight tug on the cloth and it unfolded, revealing another oval mirror, bigger than any in the room, almost as tall as Evan.

Bigger and…stranger.

Strange because there was no reflection in it. The flashlight didn’t bounce back as Evan directed it towards the mirror. Instead, it seemed to swallow all light that fell onto the surface like a black hole.

Evan tilted his head, examining the mirror from a hand’s distance. Its surface was spotless, frame golden with miniature intricate designs. Thick golden chains coiled around the frame, not a trace of rust to be found.

It was indeed a bit strange, but other than lacking the basic function of what a mirror was supposed to do—show a reflection—there was nothing unusual. At least nothing Evan could immediately sense.

Could it be that the old weird Mr. Greene had been a collector of antique mirrors? Or maybe Evan was reading too much into something that wasn’t there?