The Crowsbrook Demons

Chapter 4

Sarah stared at the girl, and then started walking again.

"I'm going home," she said. "Get out of my way." She could feel the panic rising again. She was losing her touch. First the conversation with Jake in the shop, and now this. But this was

much worse. This—

This was outing the family business. She hoped that telling the teenager to piss off would be enough.

It wasn't. The girl started following her.

"Who are you?"

"None of your business." Sarah was beginning to get irritated. It was bad that she'd been seen—what kid takes a shortcut through a graveyard at eleven o'clock on a school night?—and she just wanted to get back to the cottage and think.

Probably some teenage freak who thinks she's a vampire. She snorted internally.

Don't worry about the kid. Eleanor's voice. A little dreamwork will take care of it. Give her nightmares for a week and she'll just assume it was something she ate and won't know what was real and what was her imagination. Because those types have a hell of an imagination.

But Eleanor wasn't here. The girl grabbed Sarah's arm.

"Look," she said, "what you did back there just isn't—"

"No, you look," said Sarah sharply. She stopped and turned to look the girl in the face for the first time. "What I do is my business, not yours. And I don't have to explain it to any random Twilight fan with an incense burner and an industrial supply of eyeliner in her handbag. Go home. Go to bed. Forget you ever saw me. You won't see me again."

Well, that was a bit of a risk, in a village this small. But it was pretty dark. She'd only counted one street light in the village so far and the moon had ducked behind a thick layer of cloud.

"I'm not like that." Dear gods, was the kid starting up again? "I know people like that. I know people who would give their right arms and their crystal collection to see what I've just seen. But I'm not one of those people. I'm a scientist."

"You can't be a scientist. You're fifteen."

"I'm seventeen."

"You're annoying me either way." They were heading toward the village square now.

"I don't want to tell," said the girl, quietly. "I just want to know."

Sarah covered her face with her hands. This was the worst-case scenario. She'd blown her cover completely.

• • •

"So how did you do it?" Jez asked, when they were back at Sarah's cottage. Jez hadn't taken her coat off; she was sitting in the elderly, lace-covered armchair hunched over in her overcoat and socks. She was still shaking.

It was a trick. It had to have been a trick. No one could talk to the dead and get a response. Dead people—she had to stop herself thinking the word ghosts—didn't get up and walk around, in any form. It was biologically impossible. She had listed the many reasons why in her head on the way to

the cottage. No heartbeat. No circulation. No neural activity. Decomposition. She stopped when she realized that cataloguing it was ridiculous.

"It doesn't matter how I did it." Sarah's voice jerked her back into the present. Her syllables were terse. Whoever this woman was, noted Jez, she didn't talk much.

She decided to try to be friendly. "I don't know your name. You didn't tell me. I'm Jez, by the way."

Sarah glared at her. "Sarah," she said. "Don't tell a soul."