“Get this.” Priest tore a glazed doughnut in half and shoved it in his mouth. “There’s an old magic shop in town. Some weird guy owned it. The waitress at the diner said he was always traveling and bringing back all kinds of bizarre junk for his store.”
Alara scrunched up her nose. “I hate magicians. They’re just a step above mimes and clowns.”
Priest finished off the other half of the doughnut. “You’re not the only one. They found the shop owner dead in the store two weeks ago. When we asked how he died, she just kept saying it was too horrible to talk about.”
“That’s helpful.” Alara took a doughnut out of the box, careful not to touch the pink cardboard. “Did the waitress mention a box?”
Priest shook his head. “No. But she did say it took a while before his body was discovered.”
She perked up. “That’s weird.”
“Not really,” Lukas said. “No one ever went in the store because the place smelled like cat piss.”
“It could be a coincidence,” I said.
Jared tossed an untouched doughnut back in the box. “He didn’t have any cats.”
CHAPTER 22
The Box
A thick layer of dust coated the shop windows, which displayed a collection of unmagical-looking items: cheap black top hats and polyester capes, a corroded birdcage with a fake dove inside, silver linking rings, and a wooden ventriloquist’s dummy. Yellow police tape ran across the door, where a plastic sign was flipped to CLOSED.
Breaking and entering in the middle of the day was risky, but every choice we made now felt like a risk. Jared parked in the back alley, hoping no one would see us, while Priest picked the lock with a piece of wire rigged specifically for the purpose.
The door swung open, and the nauseating stench of ammonia hit us.
Alara gagged. “You’ve gotta be kidding. I’m not going in there without a gas mask.”
“Your call.” Jared walked inside. The dusty haze of daylight followed him, revealing dozens of overflowing boxes, crates, and metal storage shelves.
Priest flipped a switch and fluorescent lights above us illuminated an enormous storage room filled with even more junk. “This guy was a total hoarder.”
The whole place felt like the inside of Pandora’s box, something best left undisturbed.
I touched the handle of the nail gun tucked in the back of my jeans for reassurance. “This doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d have a wine cabinet.”
Lukas tipped over a trash can full of dismembered doll parts, the tiny flesh-colored arms and legs sticking out of the top. “It can be any kind of box.”
“Someone get a reading. I can’t stand this much longer,” Alara mumbled, her nose buried in the crook of her arm. It hadn’t taken her long to reconsider her position on urine-infested magic shops.
I reached for an EMF and my elbow hit something hard.
A huge vanishing cabinet with a crimson door loomed behind me. Inside, a painting of a snake twisted around bits of broken mirror and colored glass glued along the walls, its mouth open and ready to strike.
“Guys… this is a lot bigger than a wine cabinet.”
Priest and Jared walked toward me, Priest’s eyes glued to his EMF. “Hopefully, whatever’s living in there isn’t. The needle’s going crazy.”
Jared’s eyes locked on mine, and my heart sped up. Until his expression changed, and I realized he wasn’t looking at me anymore.
He was looking behind me.
“Kennedy, move!” he shouted.
A rush of cold air burst from the box, knocking me over. It swept past me and stopped in front of Alara—the torso of a man with bare milk-white skin marred by black bruises. But this thing wasn’t a man. Its head was shaved and the vertebrae in its spinal column strained against the skin as if it was a size too small.
But where the bones ended, so did the human form—and its waist disappeared into a thick blur of white smoke.
I forced my legs to move, stumbling over the clutter.
The dybbuk whipped around, following the sound. I pressed my hand against my mouth, stifling a scream as I stared into the blackened recesses where its eyes should’ve been.
It reached for Alara. Her body rose off the floor as if the dybbuk was using some kind of telekinetic power to control it. She screamed, and the force slammed her against the wall. Alara’s head banged against the concrete, and she slid to the floor without a sound.
Jared ran toward her. The dybbuk ripped him off his feet, using the same supernatural power that had allowed it to lift Alara without touching her, and hurled him into the metal shelves.
“Screw this.” Lukas aimed and fired round after round of liquid salt. The bullets passed right through the dybbuk’s pale torso and dropped to the floor.
I scrambled around the edge of the room toward Alara. She had managed to sit up, but she was still disoriented when I reached her.
“Are you okay?”
“It’s so strong.” Panic clung to her voice—the fearless girl I found so intimidating suddenly replaced by one as vulnerable as the rest of us.
Lukas and Priest knelt next to Jared, who lay on the floor amid a sea of severed doll limbs.
He’s not moving.
There was only one way to help him. “Alara, how do we stop it?”
She stared at me blankly.
I grabbed her shoulders. “How do we destroy it?”
The dybbuk laughed, and the menacing sound echoed through the room.
It focused on Lukas and Priest, and their bodies rose in the air simultaneously. They hovered above the floor for a moment before their backs smacked against the wall, halfway between the floor and the ceiling. Their bodies slid the rest of the way up the wall, shoulders and elbows cracking against the corners of the metal shelves.
“Alara, tell me what to do,” I pleaded.
Her eyes darted from the dybbuk back to me. “We have to bind that thing inside the cabinet and burn it.”
“How?”
Alara blinked hard. “A binding symbol.”
“Like the one from your journal?” I remembered it perfectly.
She nodded. “The Wall is the easiest. But I can’t draw it without my journal, and it won’t bind that thing unless the symbol looks exactly the same.”
Boxes crashed to the floor as Lukas dropped onto the concrete not far from where his brother’s body lay, crumpled unconscious. Lukas struggled to sit up, but he looked unsteady.
“Screw you.” Priest thrashed wildly, still pinned halfway up the wall.
The dybbuk threw its pale head back and demonic laughter filled the air like a thousand pins pricking my skin.
“I can do it,” I said automatically. “I remember what it looks like.”
Alara shook her head. “If you make a mistake—”
The symbol formed in my mind as clearly as if I was still staring at the page. “I have a photographic memory. I won’t make a mistake.”
“You’re serious?”
I nodded. “Completely.”
Alara slid the black marker out of her tool belt and handed it to me. “I’m going to distract it, but you’ll have to work fast. Then I’ll find a way to lure it into the box.”
The dybbuk stepped in front of the wall where Priest was pinned. It let Priest fall and jerked his body back and forth across the floor like a rag doll without so much as a touch.
I ran for the cabinet.
I stepped inside and my eyes burned from the stench of ammonia. The snake’s open mouth was only inches away from me, shards of mirror forming perfect fangs. And something else—two round pieces of green glass edged in silver stared back from the centers of its eyes.
Tiny splinters pushed their way underneath my nails as I worked one free. In the dim light, it looked exactly like the disk from inside the doll. Unfortunately, so did the other one. I slipped them both in my pocket and glanced behind me.
Alara opened the plastic bottle of holy water holstered on her
belt, and dumped it over her head.
This was her plan?
I closed the cabinet door, pitching myself into darkness. Within seconds, panic set in and it felt like I was five years old again, hiding in the tiny crawl space in my mother’s closet. Waiting for her to come back.
I can’t stay in here.
My pulse thundered in my ears, but another sound was louder—a crash.
Was it Priest this time? Or Lukas or Alara? I pictured Jared lying on the floor, and my heart ached. What if he needed a doctor?
What if…
A tiny crack between the hinges threw a slice of light across my boots, but there wasn’t enough room for me to bend down and draw the symbol on the floor. I was going to have to do it on the ceiling, which meant sketching blind.
How would I know if I made a mistake?
“Priest? Lukas? You okay?” Alara shouted, her voice muffled by the layer of wood between us.
“Yeah.”
“Get Jared out of here,” she said.
“We’re not leaving you guys.” Lukas sounded as determined as she did.