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Chapter Four

Maeve

I was so shocked by the words spilling from Conor’s mouth that I couldn’t make myself move. Not only did this whole thing about cultists make a scary amount of sense, but cold horror washed over me as I realized this man wasn’t interested in me.

He was only interested in my connection to the McCrum legend.

“G–get out,” I finally managed when he dipped down for another kiss.

I tried to push him away but he gripped my wrists, painfully tight. “Come on. Ya invited me here fer a tour and I intend to get one. Now be a good host and open yer legs.”

He gripped my knees and pried my thighs apart, ignoring my attempts to shove him away.

He wedged himself between my legs as he held them open by force. He was still as hard as a rock. His cock seemed to grow the harder I fought.

“Y—you sick fuck!”

“Call me whatever ya want. Ya don’t fool me. Ya said so yerself. Yer lonely, and need someone to talk to. No need to talk to the shop, ya got me.”

This creep wasn’t going to let up. I stopped struggling and he laughed. “That’s a good girl. Now, how do you want it?”

A sudden calmness swept over me as an idea bloomed in the forefront of my mind. “Can you go down on me?”

I half expected Conor to say no. Obviously, he was a selfish lover, considering he wasn’t familiar with the word “no.”

So a heady combination of shock, disgust and relief washed through me as he got on his knees and lifted my tartan skirt. He was too busy pulling my panties down my legs to notice me lean back on the counter and reach for the old revolver my grandfather kept stashed beneath the register.

It didn’t work. Maybe if it had he would still be alive.

But Conor wouldn’t know that it was broken, or that it wasn’t even loaded. I took aim at his head and made a show of cocking the hammer. At the lock click of metal, Conor glanced up from my thighs.

If this wasn’t such a scary situation, I would have laughed at the sheer terror on his face. Good. I never wanted him to forget the terror he felt in this moment, staring down the barrel of my gun.

“What the feck is that for?”

“Oh, so you’re not only a disgusting twit, but you’re stupid too? Haven’t you heard? I’m descended from a long and distinguished line of people who’ve made their living killing monsters. In today’s world, that means you.”

The man slowly raised his hands in the air and got up from the floor. “I’ll just go then. I didn’t mean anything by it. I was just—just faffin’ around.”

“Well faff somewhere else, you bastard.”

Muffled voices from upstairs had me freezing in place.

Someone’s inside the building!

A second voice joined the first, and from the sound of footsteps of creaky wood, they were coming down the stairs.

Deciding these strangers were probably a bigger threat than Conor, I aimed my gun at the stairs.

My heart stopped in my chest when they appeared. Tall, covered head to toe in black, with masks covering their features. They were both armed and had their guns trained on me and Conor.

They weren’t at all put off by the revolver in my hand.

“Well if it isn’t the little granddaughter. You’ve grown,” one of the men cackled.

“I don’t know who you are or what you want…” I couldn’t stop my hands from shaking, but I managed to keep my voice steady. “But if you don’t leave right now, I’ll shoot.”

“I don’t think you will, girl. Not unless your grandpa got that gun fixed since the last time we were here. And considering the state we left him in, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that he hasn’t had a chance yet.”

They were here before? My heart sank from my chest and dropped straight to the floor.

These were the men who killed my grandparents.

“Where’s the evil eye?” the taller of the two men demanded.

They knew about the topaz. They didn’t look like cultists, but they definitely weren’t the average burglar either.

“First one to tell us gets to live.”

Conor flinched as if he’d been physically struck, while I didn’t so much as bat an eyelash.

Threatening me with death when I’d already seen so much of it—and in my darker moments, yearned for it —did nothing to pull a reaction from me.

“Have fun tearing this whole place apart. You’ll be looking for weeks,” I snarled.

“We can make her talk,” one of them hissed beneath his breath to his companion. His whisper was purposefully loud, probably hoping to scare me into submission.

The second gunman eyed me, probably seeing something in my face that gave way to the fact that I wouldn’t crack. He turned his attention to Conor. “What about you? Where is the evil eye?”

“I’ve never been here before. She’s the McCrum, not me.” The red-headed creep shot me an accusatory glare, as if this was all my fault. As if I’d lured him here. “I have nothing to do with any of this!”

Conor flung himself into the labyrinth of antiques, gunning for the exit. One of the cultists ran after him.

Using the distraction, I hurled my grandpa’s broken revolver at the second gunman. He swung around, eyes widening as the gun hurtled toward his head. He shot at me, but in the chaos, he missed. The bullet ricocheted off the wall over my head.

I don’t know what compelled me to look away from the armed man. Whatever the reason, my head whipped around to see the bullet had gone through the kitten painting. The hole in the canvas glowed ominously, like the topaz beneath had been blown open and whatever inside was burning up.

There was no time to investigate.

When the gunman crumpled to the ground, blood spilling onto the floor from his fresh head wound where my revolver made contact, I grabbed his gun and shot into the maze of furniture.

With a gun in one hand, I used my other to grab my phone out of the back pocket of my jeans. With shaky fingers, I punched 999 into the dial pad.

Before I could hit send, the building jerked violently, and I dropped to the ground. My phone and the gun slid out of reach under a cluster of junk. Disoriented, I jumped to my feet, looking around wildly.

The entire building was quaking so hard, the floorboards shook and the nails holding them down rattled loose, while shelves overflowing with figurines and other antiques toppled over in an explosion of glass and porcelain.

A vicious shiver skipped up my back. This was no earthquake. A foreboding sensation, deep under my skin, told me it was something far more dangerous.

An unholy scream ripped my attention away from that voice in the back of my head telling me things that made no logical sense.

Thanks to the piles of junk, I couldn’t see the source of the scream.

Was it Conor? Was it the gunman? Whoever it was, he was running with an urgency that told me someone— something —was chasing him.

My heart pounded in rhythm with the frantic beat his feet made against the old floorboards. Then, he must have tripped. There was a curse, followed by the clatter of something heavy and fragile.

His string of curses was interrupted by another scream. The sound sent a chill straight to my marrow. Then, a pinched yelp and the crunch of bone as a torrent of blood and bits of flesh exploded onto the ceiling.

My hand slapped over my mouth to stifle a scream of my own.

A bullet wasn’t responsible for that kind of carnage.

I knew the labyrinth of antiques like the back of my hand, and could navigate the aisles with my eyes closed. But the mysterious quake had shifted everything, throwing off my sense of direction. I had to look up and use the signs pointing toward the exit.

The arrow dangling over my head, now covered in specks of blood and brain matter, pointed me to the front door.

I stepped over broken pieces of furniture and traversed piles of toppled bookcases, hope lifting my chest when the front door came into view. It came crashing down to the pit of my gut when the second gunman—the one I’d knocked out—rounded the corner, blocking my path to the door.

“There you are, bitch! Give us the topaz!”

Taking a step back, my head swung around in search of a weapon. There was nothing but smashed china and antique tchotchkes. Shit luck. But, what else was new?

The intruder was wearing a half mask, but his evil grin shone bright in his eyes.

“The McCrum’s magic really has run dry through the generations, hasn’t it? Your family used to be powerful monster hunters. Now look at you. Cornered like a helpless animal.”

He took another step toward me, close enough now that I could smell the blood dripping down his temple. He reached for me, and I raised my hands to defend myself. He wouldn’t be the first creep I’d had to fend off tonight.

The blow never landed.

A porcelain doll flew at him, like someone had flung it. At first I thought it might have been Conor, growing some balls to help me out. But then a collector’s plate on the wall was ripped from its display hook and smashed into the man’s head. Then a lamp and a dozen more objects followed.

No one was throwing them. The antiques were moving on their own!

The man covered his head with his arms and stumbled for the door.

He reached for the knob, but his fingers never made contact.

A floorboard ripped up from its nails and smashed through his chest. Blood splattered the stained glass clover on the door, the eye nestled in the center of the leaves looking at the man with blank indifference.

He crumpled to the floor, lifeless.

The beat of my heart turned into a brain-obliteration roar in my ears.

It was the building. The building attacked the cultist.

Before I could do anything else, there was a sound of cracking glass again. On the next frantic beat of my heart, a flash of amber light illuminated the wreckage, and the building shook again.

The antiques, the furniture, the wall hangings—everything—began to vanish into thin air. The floorboards and the nails holding them down disappeared next. Then the roof and walls.

One moment, I was standing in my antique shop and the next, I was outside. Like the building had never been there to begin with.

The corpses of the two cultists flopped to the Earth, and as my apartment upstairs disappeared, my clothes, my drawing pencils, and other various possessions rained from the sky.

Gilly landed on her feet and zipped off into the alley behind Mrs. O’Neill’s store.

The desk Conor had been cowering beneath was gone in a blink. The red-head looked around the street, wide-eyed and half out of his mind. We made eye contact for a second before he shot off into the night.

As the final traces of McCrum’s Curios and Antiques vanished right before my eyes, the topaz remained in the air. As if it had been the thing holding up the shop rather than the other way around.

It was cracked, with the bullet still embedded in the stone.

The silhouette of a ridiculously large man began to shimmer around the topaz, slowly taking shape. He had flaming locks of copper hair, with smoldering tips that crackled and smoked. The glow of his hair chased away the murk of night.

He was insanely tall, with a muscular frame donned in a duster jacket that fell to the tops of his heavy leather boots.

The jacket was made of a hodgepodge of materials, with leather and floral patterns I’d seen before.

A moment later, it hit me. His jacket was made from the upholstery of various pieces around the shop.

The man was standing with his back to me but even from this vantage I could see the gold and jewels draping his brawny frame.

Everything in McCrum’s had disappeared, and in its place stood this stranger who’d appeared from the topaz.

My precious antique shop, my only home, had turned into a giant monstrous man.