Not Quite Human

Chapter 23

Blackwoods was an excellent location if you were scouting for a classic horror film and didn't want to spend much on set dressing. The place had a personality of its own — one that had taken a specific and personal dislike to Neil.
A branch caught him across the face for the fifth time. He spat out a leaf.
Lesson thoroughly learned. Next time Damien told him to stay behind, he was staying behind. He could have spent this evening chatting with Mrs. Twinkie Toes, who had an inexhaustible supply of stories — including the one about adding frogs to her husband's broth after he'd gone on one too many man of the house speeches, and the separate, more alarming incident involving a mysterious large toe bone she'd found in the garden during a particularly bad argument. He hadn't asked what had happened to the toe's original owner. He'd decided he didn't need to know.
He tripped on a root and went down face-first into the mud.
Nerezza laughed.
Neil groaned, face down in something wet and deeply unpleasant, clothes now a comprehensive shade of brown. He was also, he noted with some bitterness, the only one in the group the forest seemed to have any opinion about. Everyone else was moving through Blackwoods without incident. He peeled himself up. Nerezza did something with a spell that left him clean but oddly stiff around the jaw, which he decided to accept without comment.
Andrew stopped walking.
He pointed at a building in the distance — far enough that it was barely visible through the trees. Unremarkable, from the outside. Normal-looking, even, which somehow made it worse — a normal house in the middle of Blackwoods had the same uncanny quality as a gingerbread cottage. Damien told Neil and Andrew to stay where they were, wait, and absolutely not wander off.
Neil huffed. He wasn't that reckless.
He stayed where he was told.
The outside of the building was ordinary. The inside was not.
The moment Nerezza and Damien crossed the threshold, the air changed — heavy and dark in a way that had nothing to do with the light. The floor was scattered with the remnants of old kills, rotten and half-decomposed. A summoning circle had been drawn in the centre of the room. The smell was significant. Nerezza wrinkled her nose. The man clearly had no interest in tidying up. Not that it mattered much now — he'd be part of the mess himself soon enough.
She smiled at the thought.
The man announced himself by dropping something heavy on the floor and stepping into the room. He was pudgy and broad-faced, with the particular expression of someone who had spent years frightening people smaller than him and had started to believe that made him dangerous. He threw a Decaedium spell at them immediately — a freezing spell, meant to immobilise — presumably planning to kill them once they couldn't fight back.
The spell bounced back.
Alaster's doing. He was many things, but his reputation as a mirror demon wasn't decorative — deflection was his speciality, and it made him very nearly impossible to land a hit on. The man's haughty expression was now frozen, literally, on his face.
"Can we keep his teeth in a jar when we're done?" Alaster asked, in the particular wheedling tone he used when he wanted something. "They're very nice. All white and sparkly. Please, Nerz."
Damien's face went slightly green.
Nerezza chuckled and dragged the frozen man to a chair.
She used twine flames to secure him — relatively harmless in isolation, but excruciatingly painful the moment they made contact with blood, which was easy enough to arrange. A few cuts in the right places would be sufficient.
He woke to his own screaming — or perhaps the screaming started first and woke him. Nerezza found she didn't particularly care about the order of events. The screaming was pleasant either way. Less pleasant was when he stopped, jaw locked, gritting through the pain rather than giving her the satisfaction. She could respect the stubbornness, in a clinical sort of way. It didn't change anything.
She let him see the knife. His face went pale.
She brought it close to his eye, held it there just long enough, then drew it slowly across to his ear — a neat, deliberate curve — and pressed. She left just enough flesh intact to keep the ear attached, then stepped back and twirled the knife idly. She wondered if sound still worked through an ear in that condition. Probably not. Though he was screaming loud enough that it might not matter.
Damien cleared his throat.
Right. Useful information first, recreation after. A man who died of shock before talking was a dead end, and dead ends were not what they needed right now.
Nerezza moved to his left side, took a fistful of his hair, and pulled his head back. She leaned close to his good ear.
"You know what we want," she said quietly. The knife was still in her hand. The glint in her eye was not.