Page 6

J olting awake suddenly, Evan sucked in a lungful of wheezing air like he’d been strangled by invisible hands and held under a barrel of ice water. A faint voice echoed in his head before fading away.

What… What happened? Where am I? Whose voice was that?

Blinking at his surroundings, then at the darkening evening sky outside the window, Evan concluded that the dull and cold space was his own bedroom.

But it felt as though, just moments ago, he had been somewhere else. Somewhere warm. Was he dreaming?

If he was, it surely was a strangely vivid dream. He was floating in a dark void while whispers and warm currents of air assaulted him from all directions. What’s worse, those warm currents would occasionally turn into warm fingers, stroking his bare skin.

Yes, bare. Because he was naked.

Levitating naked in a black hole while some perverse ghost felt up his body.

Iconic.

As Evan cringed through his post-dreaming gloom, something grazed his feet, and he jerked upright into a sitting position. He threw off the covers only to discover Misty curled between his legs. Two golden eyes blinked at him.

A breath rushed out of him as Evan flopped back on the bed, groaning against the aches in various parts of his body. It felt like he’d wrestled a dozen men, blindfolded with his hands bound.

How was he in bed? What had happened to him?

Draping an arm over his eyes, Evan searched his hazy memory but could only recall heat. Scorching heat. The scent of burning wood and…damp earth?

Confusion clouded his senses as he sat up again. Misty padded up his leg, stretching across his lap before curling there into a fur ball. Strangely, her ever-soothing purring was not working on Evan at all.

Everything was blurry in his head. Probably because of the morning… evening haze. But he didn’t remember the last time he’d been so disoriented after an exorcism.

Just as Evan was about to fall back into bed, something clattered outside his room. Specifically, outside the front door. Reflexively, his ears shifted into high alert, his brain fully awake now.

If it was Tiago or his men, they’d just barge in, and Evan rarely got visitors from town, at least not after sunset. They said it was dangerous visiting an exorcist’s home after dusk. Evan had no idea what they thought an exorcist would be doing in the evening, but it was definitely not what they were imagining.

Stepping down from the bed, Evan kissed the top of Misty’s head. “Stay here.”

The rustling continued as he exited his bedroom and closed in on the front door. Tiptoeing his way forward, Evan leaned in, pushing his overgrown bangs away to peek through the peephole.

Click.

The door swung open.

Evan’s eyes widened as the hardwood rushed towards his face, aiming straight for his perfect nose—

Suddenly, his feet lifted off the ground.

He floated a few inches up into the air as if an invisible hand had grabbed him by the back of his t-shirt and tugged him back.

Like a puppy plucked up by the scruff, he was dropped a safe distance away from the door.

Evan stumbled into the nearest wall. Blinked. Completely dumbfounded.

Huh?

Aaron’s frowning face emerged through the door. As soon as he spotted Evan plastered to the wall like a fly, he grinned.

“Oh, you’re awake.”

With his mouth agape and eyes wide as saucers, Evan was almost comical to look at. His body was frozen against the wall like a lizard who’d just lost his tail.

Something…had just grabbed him.

Had he stumbled on his own? Had he gone dizzy?

No. He was pulled back.

Evan gingerly turned his head, sweeping a quick glance around the house. No shadows or spirits hovered around him. Not even a trace of spiritual energy in the air. Not unusual.

Other than the fact that he was a literal ghost eradicator, spirits were also wary of this particular house because of the protection talisman hanging above the front door. There was no way a spirit could break into his house from any direction as long as that iron-clad barrier remained.

Was he just being paranoid?

“Hey, you okay?” Aaron helped him straighten up from the wall. “How are you feeling?”

Evan scratched his hair. “Confused.”

Leading him into the living room, Aaron placed a small carry bag on the coffee table. “I guess that’s because you’ve been asleep for two days.”

“Two days?” That explained the aching muscles. His body took longer to recuperate this time. Evan’s brows dipped as Aaron took out a container from the carry bag. “I can’t remember what happened…”

“At Greene Mansion?” They sat on the carpet around the coffee table as Aaron asked, “You don’t remember?”

“Greene Mans—”

As if struck by lightning, Evan’s vision went white. Memories flashed into his head with a brutal force. Too fast. Too strong.

He dropped his head into his hands, dizzy and utterly horrified.

Oh, shit. Shit, shit, shit .

The array room, the golden mirror, Bruce and his men…the red silhouette.

Scarlet eyes.

Something had escaped from that room that night. Something Evan himself had accidentally set free. The force of that sinister energy, its killing intent, those scattered bodies…

A weight dropped into his stomach.

What have I done?

“When you suddenly disappeared, I searched every corner of the mansion for you with the others,” Aaron said, a frown evident in his voice. “But after a while, they disappeared too. Took me forever just to look through the ground floor, and by the time I made it upstairs…the fire had already spread.”

Evan blinked up. “Fire?”

“Yep,” Aaron served a bowl of chicken soup and placed it in front of Evan. “You were lying out cold near the hallway when I found you. By the time I carried you out and got my phone to work so I could call for help, the fire had spread across most of the mansion. And the rest, by the time help arrived.”

“Fuck…” Evan slapped a hand against his forehead.

Aaron sighed, crossing his arms over the coffee table with a sympathetic smile. “Yeah, the whole place burnt down to a crisp.”

Evan briefly wondered about the reactions of the Greene couple upon witnessing the charred remains of their ancestral home.

It had to be that thing’s doing, using the chaos of the fire as an escape. Perhaps it was tied down to the mansion and not just the mirror, and once the mansion caught on fire, it was set free.

“Wait,” Evan jerked upright. “What about the payment?”

“Well, I wasn’t quite sure what the hell had happened. Still, I confirmed that the accident had happened during the exorcism. But there was property damage, so…the pay was cut.”

“How much?”

Aaron’s lips thinned. “Half of it.”

Great.

Evan slammed a fist down on the coffee table with a curse. At the end of the day, all that left eye-twitching hadn’t been a false premonition. He had ended up losing money after all.

But cutting the payment in half ? Damned Greene assholes. Evan knew it sounded too good when they promised such a huge sum. The mansion was beyond repair anyway, but they still used the fire as an excuse to take away half of his payment. The payment for which he had risked his life.

As a tired breath left his lips, his bangs softly danced against his forehead, fluttering in the wind, almost as if invisible fingers had caressed them out of his face.

Evan side-eyed the closed windows, then the unmoving fan blades above. A wave of chills spread up his arms before he shook it off.

Paranoia…probably.

“So, did you complete the exorcism?” Aaron asked. “What exactly happened upstairs that set the whole place on fire?”

With a tired huff, Evan pinched the bridge of his nose as he tried to rearrange the jumbled events in his head in order of their occurrence. A part of his memory, a tiny part, was still hazy.

“I went to inspect the…suspicious room on the first floor. Found the source of the dark energy in a mirror with a…containment array,” Evan tilted his head up, searching his memory. “While I was inspecting it, Bruce and his men charged in and—”

“Wait, they found you? So they hadn’t fled the mansion like I’d told the authorities?”

Evan’s throat closed up, eyes narrowing at the dull, dark ceiling of his living room. There was no use in speaking about what Bruce and his men had tried to do to him. It wasn’t something new. And if they weren’t found, their shriveled bodies were probably consumed by the fire.

A sick sort of satisfaction laced through Evan’s chest before he mentally slapped his morals into place.

He straightened and dipped his spoon in the soup. After a beat of silence, he muttered. “They are dead.”

Aaron’s gaze bore into the side of Evan’s face as he quietly took in the information. He wasn’t particularly fond of that lot of people either.

Seeing how Evan showed no signs of elaborating on the topic, he knew better than to press. “I see.”

Evan kept his eyes fixated on the soup. When Aaron didn’t push him for an explanation, a soft sigh left his lips. “I didn’t kill them.”

“Obviously. For all your tough-guy act, you couldn’t swat a fly if your life depended on it,” Aaron muttered, rising to his feet and disappearing into the kitchen.

Evan snorted.

That—right there—was one of the reasons he still kept that idiot around.

Aaron belonged to that rare breed of people who wouldn’t judge a friend for failing to do the right thing, but also wouldn’t judge that friend for doing something wrong either.

Not that Evan believed he’d done something wrong. He’d tried to warn Bruce and his men, even while they were trying to shove their hands down his pants.

Their deaths weren’t on him. The true culprit was their own ignorance.

And a red silhouette.

After arguing back and forth about it with his own conscience, Evan found little to no reassurance over the guilt that would occasionally resurface inside him.

With no appetite in sight, he pushed around the cubes of meat and leaves in the soup, aimlessly stirring through its contents. It was obviously made by Rhea.

After every exorcism, Evan visited her shop to regain his stamina with her special chicken soup.

Whatever secret recipe—or spell—she used, the soup worked like a rejuvenating syrup straight to the soul. And right now, he needed it badly. That thing in the mirror room had almost sucked his core of spiritual energy dry.

Evan’s shoulders slumped as he stared at the soup.

Aaron emerged from the kitchen and placed a glass of chocolate milk beside the soup bowl. “That’ll probably spark an appetite.”

A glint sparked in Evan’s lifeless eyes. He grabbed the glass, stars bursting in his irises as he chugged down half of it in one go. Then said, giddily, “Thanks.”

Oh, how little it took to cheer up a fool with a sweet tooth.

Aaron’s phone buzzed in his pocket just as he was chuckling at Evan. With a quick excuse, he stepped outside.

The moment the door shut behind him, the temperature dropped. Slightly, but noticeably. Like a blanket that’d been protectively hovering over Evan was suddenly ripped away.

Had Aaron’s presence always carried such warmth? If it did, this was the first time Evan had noticed it.

Clasping the spoon again with a determination to take a sip, Evan brought it up to his lips when his eyes landed on the faint red mark circling his empty index finger.

Clank!

The spoon clattered back into the bowl as his grip loosened.

Right. That thing had destroyed Crimson Eye that night, right in front of Evan’s eyes.

Evan’s jaws clenched, fingers curling into a fist. More than the fact that he wouldn’t be able to perform any exorcisms without the ring, anger blazed and licked his insides because Crimson Eye had belonged to his mother. The last string tying him to her.

If only he’d been more careful. If only he hadn’t been so stubborn about doing everything on his own.

If only he’d run that day when she’d asked him to…

Dropping his head against the table with a thud , Evan grunted.

He wasn’t even strong enough to confront that thing that’d escaped the mirror. Some great exorcist he was. Hell, he should’ve been glad that he made it out in one piece. The sight of Bruce and his men’s fleshless corpses still haunted a dark portion of his mind.

But how had Evan ended up in the hallway? The last thing he remembered was passing out in the mirror room that was at the very end of that hallway. Had he perhaps dragged himself out when the fire started? How did that fire even start?

Thud. Thud. Thud.

Evan bumped his head on the table, trying to recall the faded bits of his memory. With every thud, the bowl of soup and glass jumped on the table until finally the glass of chocolate milk decided to take a tumble.

Evan jumped at the startling crash as the glass shattered on the floor, chocolate milk splashing everywhere on the carpet and his shorts.

Seriously?

Dishes found on extra discount at wholesale markets were always a scam in quality. The table wasn’t even that high that the glass fell to its demise.

Evan’s brows furrowed as he glanced down, but the frown quickly dropped from his face, replaced by a feeling he couldn’t name. He blinked furiously, then opened his eyes wide, trying to make sense of what the fuck he was seeing.

Four pointy shards of glass hovered a few inches off the floor, suspended in air, unmoving. They were frozen right beside his foot, an inch away from piercing his skin. If they hadn’t stopped like they had, Evan would have had some pretty nasty wounds on his foot right now.

But what the hell happened to gravity?

“Evan? What was that noise?” Aaron’s voice screeched from outside the front door.

And just like that, not following the law of gravity by any extent, the glass pieces silently dropped to the floor.

A dry gulp and two long inhales later, Evan replied in a strained voice, “Nothing.”

Earlier, when Aaron had suddenly opened the door, it should’ve slammed right into Evan’s face. But it hadn’t. And now, the shards of glass should’ve pierced his foot. They hadn’t.

Both times, something had interfered with the natural course of those actions. Was it…protecting him?

No. It was making its presence known. Trying to warn him, perhaps.

For the first time in a long while, Evan felt his core of spiritual energy flickering like a dancing flame, fueled by his anxiousness. He didn’t remember the last time an exorcism had left him in such a dire state. The cherry on top was that this exorcism hadn’t even been successful; a dark blob on his perfect record.

Evan Blackwood had failed to carry out an exorcism.

If the word spread, his reputation would be dragged through dogshit.

And as if that wasn’t enough, something had followed him into his house, which was extremely funny considering the talisman hanging above his main door would’ve restricted anything nonhuman.

Evan dropped his gaze, senses perked. If he concentrated hard enough, he could feel the sudden temperature shifts, the mysterious breeze making his bangs flutter. And a foreign presence in the room that didn’t belong there.

But there were no lingering traces of energy residue in the air that a normal spirit or ghost would inevitably leave in its wake. And Evan had only encountered a foreign force strong enough to completely cover its tracks once in his life.

Two days back, at Greene Mansion.

So that thing had followed him into his house.

Of course it had. With Evan’s shitty luck, it was a miracle he hadn’t been possessed already. After all, Crimson Eye was no longer on his finger to protect him.

Evan glanced out of the window at the dark clouds hovering in the evening sky. His nose tickled with a faint, distant smell of moisture. A downpour was coming. Perhaps a storm. Which meant it would get dark soon.

Which also meant he had to drive Aaron out and away from his house before the storm. If Evan was going to die fighting this thing, he didn’t want a spectator.

Watching someone you love die in front of you wasn’t something that ached for a while, then faded away. It was an open wound one would carry for the rest of their life, unable to forget or heal from.

Evan knew that feeling like the back of his hand.

Five minutes later, Aaron entered the room, and Evan stretched his arms overhead, pushing the empty bowl of soup aside.

“I think I’m gonna turn in for the night,” Evan said, stepping around the pile of glass pieces he’d gathered in a corner.

Aaron was flabbergasted. “Again?”

“What do you mean again ?”