Spencer manfully ignored the way his cock twitched with interest. “I—”
The lights in the hotel room flickered, bulbs dimming down to pinpricks before brightening again. Spencer stared at the desk lamp, squinting against the brightness that abruptly sputtered again. Then the lightbulb in the floor lamp burst, glass falling to the floor as an unearthly chill flowed through the room.
Spencer swore, pushing past Takoma, and stalked toward the window. He yanked back one of the heavy curtains, peering out at Downtown Seattle. The city was lit up, clearly not suffering from a power outage of any sort. That was one concern assuaged. His other wasn’t so easily discarded. Frost painted the edges of the window, the glass cold when he touched it.
Move!
Spencer twisted out of the way of the desk chair that suddenly lifted off the floor and slammed into the spot where he’d been standing. The window cracked but didn’t break, lines in the glass spreading away from the point of impact.
“Fatima,” Spencer snapped as he turned on his feet.
She didn’t look at him, all her attention on the air between them and the hotel room door, hackles raised, the furious yowl emanating from her deeper than her small body should’ve been capable of producing.
Poltergeist, Fatima said.A strong one.
Spencer slid his sight sideways, getting a quick flash of a jaggedly shaped orb of energy that existed in that creeping far edge of the veil. He conjured up a mageglobe, magic pouring out of his soul into the spherical shape pressed against the palm of his hand, dark green magic providing light to see by when the rest of the bulbs in the hotel room lamps shattered.
That orb of energy flew backward, passing through the closed door, leaving sparks of energy in his sight that disappeared when he reverted back to normal vision. The hotel room was dark save for his mageglobe. The cold remained though, which meant the poltergeist hadn’t fled the area completely.
“What is it?” Takoma asked.
“Poltergeist,” Spencer said shortly. “You can’t tear out its throat, so stay behind me.”
He yanked open the hotel room door and stepped into a hallway that bled, the floor wet with it. The walls pulsed like they contained a heart behind the drywall and paint. The cold point was bitter out there, his breath puffing out between his lips in a cloud. Fatima yowled again, prowling forward toward the origin point of the cold, that prickling feeling of malevolent energy that made the hair on the back of Spencer’s neck stand on end.
“Fatima,” he said.
She paused, lashing her tail from side to side, but held position. Takoma stepped up beside him, reaching out to touch the beating wall. Spencer reacted without thinking and smacked the master vampire’s hand down. Takoma gave him an amused smile. “Can you see this?”
“Yeah. Not typical of a poltergeist, so don’t fucking touch it.”
“It’s an illusion.”
“Maybe it is, and maybe it’s a bleed over from a different place beyond the veil.”
Takoma snapped his fangs together in response but didn’t reach for the wall again.
Fatima growled a warning. The hotel lights above flickered, sputtering in the way that meant the electricity was faulty, but it had nothing to do with the wiring. Then the lights shattered, one by one, in quick succession, plunging the hallway into a darkness lit only by Spencer’s magic.
“What if it’s a demon?”
Spencer grimaced. “It’s a possibility.”
The thing with poltergeists was that they were angry spirits typically tied to a location by way of strong emotion and the echoes of how they died. Spencer knew people died in hotels all the time, but he hadn’t sensed anything like this poltergeist when he’d checked in. Even if he hadn’t felt it, Fatima would have.
Which meant the poltergeist had either traveled through the veil just now or traveled from somewhereelse. Neither option was comforting.
Spencer slid his sight sideways again, tapping into the connection he had with Fatima to settle his vision. The beating walls and the bloody floor wavered into the normalcy of a dark hallway lit by his magic and the glow at the end from the poltergeist. Spencer stared at where that cold orb of energy roiled, its power spreading like rot through their immediate area, all icy, cruel intent. When he glanced at Takoma, the master vampire was a void to his sight, no soul hiding in his cold, undead body.
Fatima stalked forward, the outline of her corporeal form blurring as she bridged the distance between the real world and the edges of the veil, a perpetual conduit for the dead. Spencer’s magic could cross the divide through her, but he’d never be able to cross the veil on his own. He followed in her wake, pouring magic into his mageglobe, the reversion spell a familiar one at his fingertips.
Casting a spirit or demon out of this plane or a mortal body took effort, but Spencer’s magic was geared to do just that. Demons were harder to exorcise and send back to whatever hell they’d crawled out of, but they weren’t impossible to deal with. The older and stronger the demon in a possession was, the more of an effort Spencer had to put into breaking souls to exorcise them. Wandering spirits were different. They were usually easier to send back, but something told him this one would be a headache.
The poltergeist pulsed at the end of the hallway, the shape of it twisting in on itself. The cold grew worse, burrowing into Spencer’s bones, scraping against the shields he’d drawn up around his soul, as if it was searching for something. Which was—odd.
“Huh,” he said.
“Care to elaborate?” Takoma asked.
