Ghoulies Abroad, Julie Steimle [libby ebook reader .TXT] 📗

in the Company were long gone wrong. After all, Rick suspected they CIA had also orchestrated President Kennedy’s assassination—among other things.

But Rick said, “You mean, making deals with demons here.”

Tom cringed, nodding.

“And they don’t want you near here because you have a conscience,” Rick said.

 Tom’s head sideways nodded with a shoulder shrug.

“Ok, part of a conscience,” Rick amended.

Chuckling, Tom shook his head. “No. I think it is because I have connections with you that they want me far away. Because you are my conscience.”

Rick glanced to the monk, doubting that. “I thought Matt was—”

Laughing, Tom then looked around for the others again. “I stand correcte…” His eyes caught on something. “No way.”

“Wait!” the monk called out.

But Tom launched into the air with a springing leap, going invisible.

People screamed.

“Yougui!” Several people pointed toward where he had gone.

“What did he see?” Rick asked.

The monk grabbed Rick’s arm, hissing in his ear, “Don’t believe everything that you see. The trap is not over yet.”

What he could see? Rick could only see a crowd of people. He couldn’t see his friends anymore. And that, he realized was bad.

“We need to find the others,” Rick murmured.

“Can you sniff them out?” the monk asked.

Drawing in a deep breath, Rick immediately coughed then sneezed. He vigorously shook his head. “Nope. Too much garlic on the air.”

“Then stick with me.” The monk quickly led the way.

Following close to him, Rick thought there was no reason why he wouldn’t stick with his only protection. Tom was too blasted distracted to help now. The question was, what drew Tom away?

*

Andrew Cartwright had followed a feeling. Rick was with Tom, or so he thought, though Tom seemed unusually dark at the moment. Whenever Tom got that agitated, it only seemed that Rick could get him out of it.

It was a funny relationship they had, one which Matthew Calamori had tried to explain once or twice as a brotherly envy/adoration relationship. Tom obviously envied Rick for his wealth and general well-liked personality, but he also was excruciatingly protective of him. And yet, Andy wasn’t sure about Tom this time around. Something felt wrong. He was about to talk to Tom about it when he got swept in the crowd and he had to dive into a less busy ally between shops. Now he didn’t know where anybody was.

But then his hand started to burn, and he followed it. Dispatching demons in an alley was better than going after them in a public area either way. But this felt like a trap—especially now that he could not see the others. For good reason there was a saying among the Seven: their strength was in their unity.

“Andy!” a girl called out. The voice, he recognized.

His face felt hot. Turning, his eyes fixing on the source. There she was.

Jessica.

He jogged over to her. “You came! How did you get here?”

She smiled, her brown eyes sparkling as she shrugged. “Oh… you know. We do have another friend with an airplane.”

Laughing Andy reached out to grab her hands—and yet the heat in his hand surged painfully. He grasped his wrist and clenched his fist.

“What’s wrong?” she asked looking genuinely concerned, reaching out to his face and gently touching it.

His eyes lifted her to hands. He pulled back quick, staring. Andy immediately drew his sword. “You are not Jessica!” His mind went back to Tom with Rick. That wasn’t Tom either. “Howie!”

She reached for him. “Andy? What are you—?”

He slashed the surprised demon through as ‘she’ was midway in reaching out for him with clawed hands. Offended that it had taken the form of his girlfriend, he slashed again. The demon who looked like Jessica let out an unearthly shriek which nearly split through his eardrum. Her shape barely melted into its true demon form as Andy whipped around to get back to his friend fast.

Five people stood in his way. Pointing and screaming, they raised their voices in horrified alarm. If it weren’t for the burning in his hand, Andy would have thought they were all normal humans horrified at seeing a murder—even if the killed was now looking more and more like the demon it was. Unfortunately, he could not tell which ones were humans either.

He ran to get through them.

Several got in his way to stop him.

He had no time to think it through. Hacking through those who grabbed at him with his bloody sword, Andy left alone those that got out of his way. Screams filled the alley.

And more screams followed in his wake… as those he had cut also grew swiftly grotesque in their deaths.

Andy continued on, sheathing his sword when he broke into the large crowd again.

“Howie!” he called into the mob of tar-black heads, looking for the one with rust brown hair.

*

“Where did they go?” James stared back at the crowd they had come through. “I swear they were right behind us.”

Daniel hung his head back, groaning. Times like these, he wished people would just keep up.

As they waited for the others, they watched different tourist groups pass by. There was one group from Japan. And another looked and sounded decidedly German. When the Canadian group of teens and college exchange students strolled through, James decided they should just head back the way they had come. Daniel almost agreed. The only reason he did not was that he could feel they were surrounded by dangerous supernatural beings and he had the impression they would separate him from James quick enough.

“You seem to know your way around,” a tall, extremely well built woman of Mediterranean features approached Daniel with a smile. “Do you know how I can get to Shuijie?”

Daniel’s jaw nearly dropped open. This woman was like Selena Davenport combined with his deepest fantasies of women from the other world. The woman appeared to be in her forties with that strong cougar confidence about her, flirting with her eyes.

“Oh please…” James moaned and waved his hand in front of his buddy’s eyes. “Your weakness for older women is pathetic.”

“Technically,” Daniel hissed so she could not hear, “I am older than her.”

Moaning, James would have responded, but the attractive young woman traveling with the mature lady reached out to him also. “We are lost. Can you help us?”

Both young men nodded.

*

A horse. Eddie stared after it.

This was not New York City. There was no carriage. This was not Canada or Texas. But there, standing in the crowded alley with people staring at it, was a white and gray speckled appaloosa with gorgeous skin and flanks.

Eddie approached it, thinking some demons were extremely stupid.

*

Daniel never though he would draw his sword on a woman—but since his hand burned when she smiled at him, he knew it was too good to be true. It was even worse when the cute gal with her was trying to use her surprisingly claw-like fingernails to cut James a new hole for his throat, and James was forced to behead her.

All the real tourists screamed, scattering.

And the police were called.

The demons around them swelled, pointing fingers rather than running like normal human beings. Blast those Canadians. Daniel knew they weren’t quite right. They had been saying ‘eh’ too much, talked only about hockey, and maple syrup and Strange Brew—which on the whole seemed a bit too cliché though it was always what came to his mind whenever he first thought about Canada.

Then the police came, with guns.

That was usually the start of really bad day.

So when Eddie rode up on a wild appaloosa with morphing spot patterns, snakish tails, and nearly dragonish claws, having the time of his life jerking the beast around with a manmade halter, they were glad to see him.

“I’d say hop on but—” Eddie jumped off, lopping off the ‘steed’s’ head with his sharp broadsword. “It’s pretty much done for.”

“Glad you found us,” James said, slapping him on the shoulder while stepping around the demon corpse. They then looked to the police who were staring in horror at the bizarre inhuman bodies now at their feet. “We have a predicament.”

“I have a trick,” Daniel said, lifting a finger. He then pointed to a huge incense urn in the center of the walkway. It had several candles and tons of incense ash in it. He tossed in a red ball. Eddie and James automatically ducked, thinking it was a cherry bomb. But when it struck the metal pan, it puffed like ash into the pile, making a small cloud. With a smirk, Daniel snapped his fingers and a spark cracked at the tips. The ash fluffed in the air lit, fooming out into a huge gray and pink cloud. Daniel grabbed them both and ducked to the brick walkway.

And for good reason. The police fired into the smoke where they had been. The three knights of the Seven army crawled through legs under the huge smoke cloud into a nearby shop. Sheathing their swords, they cut through into the back alley.

“We need costumes now,” Daniel said, grabbing someone’s ratty Mao era coat and throwing it over Eddie’s backpack and jacket. He grabbed a rag and wrapped it around his own head like an Arab. With his trim goatee, he astonishingly looked a different ethnicity. The other two rushed behind him as he hurried ahead. James dug into his own bag, taking out his rain jacket and throwing it over everything he wore. They went back into the crowd another way to look for Rick. Something had been wrong with that Tom, they realized. Now they had proof.

*

“No way are you here,” Tom said when he stared at Selena Davenport who was standing right in front of him with a group of posh ladies on tour. Selena’s eyes were wan on him though, gazing at him as if she didn’t want to see him at all. Rude, but very much like her when she was in a bad mood.

“I’m on vacation,” she said.

Yet Tom gazed over her head at the vacant space. “Damn, you do a good Selena though. The right attitude. Even the correct tone of voice.”

She rolled her eyes, staring back at him.

“But the real Selena is a great deal more deadly than you,” Tom continued.

Two demons grabbed him from behind.

“Thomas Brown, you were warned to stay away from Jiangsu,” the one on his right said. “You understand, you will be punished. It is the demon code.”

“Ha.” Tom snorted, looking to him. “Code. Right…. Dude, even the Unseelie Court has only one code—which I have already broken plenty of times.”

They punched him in the stomach.

“Don’t make Queen Maeve angry,” Tom wheezed out.

Another slapped him. Grabbing his hair, they jerked his head back. 

“Our boss wants to eat your heart,” one of them said. “It will give him more power.”

Snorting, shaking his head under their grip, Tom remained amused. “What? That Demon King of Confusion? I don’t care about him. I don’t even care about the pathetic triad boss that’s working with you morons. I just want to kick in the face of the CIA agents working with you.”

They yanked him back harder.

“Pathetic triad?” he heard someone murmur in offense. And their imps went wild, chattering all they wanted to do to Tom for insulting their boss. Humans were nearby. He had gotten close to the source. Unfortunately this probably also meant he was so fired.

“You won’t be so smug when they gut you, and remove your horns,” the demon growled.

“I don’t have horns,” Tom cackled. His smile curled up on one side. “And I don’t have time for this.”

He went invisible and immaterial immediately, slipping out of the jacket he was wearing. He could have done it earlier, but he liked the effect it had on the crowd of demons and thugs as none of them could do it. He had enough information to go on from overhearing all their imps, and he needed to get back to the group. Though Rick had the monk, even he might not be enough.

Tom launched through the ceiling and ran atop the roofs