Accidentally Demonic Read online

  Casey gulped. All of that fierce bravado she’d been spewing earlier went the way of leg warmers and she decided to beg. For mercy. Because the “fishing for her tonsils” part of Nina’s statement was just this side of heinous. “I’m so sorry, Nina. Oh, my God. I don’t know—I don’t understand how . . . I—”

  “Yeah, we know. You don’t know. Seems that’s the ongoing theme for tonight.” Wanda slung her leg over Nina and rose to cock her head at Casey, planting her hands on her hips in her big-sister way. The one where she silently demanded an explanation without actually asking for one.

  Which brought Casey again to the thought she’d had earlier. Was she just bat-shit crazy, or was levitating a class she’d missed at the Y—like yoga or Pilates? Was it all the rage and she just wasn’t aware of it because all she did was chase after two airheads day and night? Why wasn’t anyone freaked out? In fact, why wasn’t she freaked out? Why didn’t hovering ten feet above the room, pressed nearly flush to the ceiling, feel like she was doing nothing short of a Houdini-ish act?

  Yet Wanda wasn’t much impressed. On the contrary, she appeared rather irritated. Nay, she was annoyed. Casey knew Wanda, and her expression said she was aggravated that Casey had the audacity to be on the ceiling, and it was becoming damned inconvenient. “Okay, enough of this. Get down here now, Casey.” She pointed to the spot on the floor by her feet. “So we can discuss whateverthehell this is.”

  Discuss. How rational. How did one even begin to discuss the notion that she was mushed against the ceiling with no outside influences—like recreational pharms? “Wanda?”

  “Yes, Casey?”

  “I had a thought.”

  “And that is?”

  “My thought is this—is it me, or is the fact that I’m hovering up against my ceiling just a smidge alarming—especially when not one of you seems too troubled by my sudden predilection for feats attempted only by David Copperfield. Add to that the fact that you all but ordered me to ‘get down here’ as if you’d ordered me to do something ordinary like go to my room, and I think it’s time for me to render your mental stability questionable.”

  Wanda’s cheeks puffed outward in a breath of exasperation. “Just get down here, for Christ’s sake, Casey.”

  Casey took another hard swallow, rubbing a hand over her grainy eyes while keeping the other planted with a firm palm against the ceiling. “Just so we’re clear, Wanda. I don’t know how I got up here. I can promise you, I have no idea how to get down.”

  Marty reentered the room from the kitchen with Shark safely ensconced in his bowl again and shot Wanda another of those secretive looks. “Here.” She handed Wanda some pantyhose.

  Wanda’s right eyebrow arched upward. “What are these for?”

  “I found them in your panty drawer, Casey. Forgive the intrusion, but in case you haven’t noticed, Wanda, she’s floating—or whatever, and call me crazy, but it appears as though she’s not exactly the grand master at it.”

  Exactly! Floating.

  “And some fine silk hosiery’s going to help that how, numbskull?” Nina asked. Clearly recovered from her blaze filled battle, she came to stand near Marty with her arms crossed over her chest.

  Marty shrugged her shoulders. “I thought maybe we could tether her to a chair or something until we figure this out. You know, like a helium balloon. Pantyhose are pretty strong, and this pair does have the reinforced-cotton crotch . . .”

  Not typically prone to histrionics, and exceptionally skilled in the art of calm, even Casey started to experience the beginnings of sheer terror rise like a killer wave along her spine. She’d gone all Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and her sister and her friends were concocting DIY ways to tie her to a chair with nylons with nary so much as a raised eyebrow.

  Wanda slapped Marty on the back, smiling with warmth. “Good idea. Casey, honey?”

  Casey fought to unstick her lips from the ceiling. “Uh-huh?”

  “Got a ladder?”

  “Only a stepstool. In the closet by my bedroom.”

  Wanda was instantly all business. “Nina, grab it, please.”

  Casey heard the shuffling of feet and the scrape of the metal legs on her stepstool when Wanda positioned it beneath her, but she’d closed her eyes due to the onset of the potential to blow chunks as her predicament settled deeper in her brain.

  The air below her stirred. “Give me your hand, Case,” Wanda demanded in the same no-nonsense tone she’d taken earlier.

  Fist clenched, Casey forced her right hand to dangle while the nails on her left hand scraped against the ceiling, unsuccessfully attempting to grip a surface that just couldn’t be latched onto. Wanda secured the pantyhose around Casey’s wrist and began to tug, but her body seemed intent on staying rooted to the ceiling.

  “Nina!” Marty shouted. “Grab Wanda around the waist to keep her feet on the stool and I’ll do the same with you.”

  Casey heard a grumble that was all Nina, but she must’ve complied because the shift of her weightless body began to reposition itself.

  “Watch your head, Casey.” Wanda grunted with a yank that almost dislocated her shoulder. Casey bit the inside of her mouth to keep from crying out, and suddenly, she was seeing the world the way it was intended.

  The way normal people who didn’t levitate saw it.

  Right side up.

  Her head bobbled for a moment until she righted herself, while Wanda and Nina stretched one leg of her pantyhose to its limit, securing it to the leg of her La-Z-Boy recliner.

  Wanda brushed her hands together in an act of completion. “Now, that’s much better, don’t you think, Case?”

  Probably almost anything was better than being smashed on your ceiling. “Yes, thank you.” In a lifetime, how often did one thank another for keeping them from floating away?

  Nina, Marty, and Wanda plopped on the couch facing the recliner with synchronized huffs. Wanda, sitting between her two friends, crossed her legs and leaned back to look up at Casey, who dangled like a human marionette. “So. Maybe you have something to tell me,” she coaxed in a gooey- sweet tone Casey identified from their childhood. The tone she’d used when Casey had stolen Wanda’s Barbie doll’s shoes and threatened to swallow them if she didn’t let her play with the golden-haired doll.

  Casey’s mouth fell open while the left half of her body strained against the nylons and fought to tip her back upward. Something to tell her? Her? She wasn’t sure what she couldn’t believe more. The idea that she was tied to a recliner—or the thought that not one of these women was having an apoplectic fit and calling her the live edition of The Exorcist. Still, she hung on to her calm. “Okay. This has gone kinda kooky for me. So I’m just going to make a few points that seem obvious to only me, but not before I tell you one more time I don’t know what’s going on, Wanda. I don’t know how I ended up in jail after threatening to sacrifice a sheep’s heart—”

  “An undercover cop’s heart in a sacrifice that involved sheep,” Nina corrected with a narrow-eyed snort.

  A prick of irritation fluttered square in Casey’s belly, but she beat it back down. She handled the paparazzi all the time for Lola and Lita, she could definitely keep her cool with a “poke at you with a stick” novice like Nina. It took a lot more than a wisecrack to trip her trigger. Well, except for earlier tonight, but she was determined not to let that become a factor right now. “Right. I don’t know how that happened, Wanda, because I swear to you on my life I don’t remember it. I swear it. And I don’t know what just happened. I don’t know why I can shoot fireballs from my fingertips or why I can float—am floating—levitating—whatever this is. The only thing I do know is this—you’re all sitting on my couch, looking up at me while I’m suspended midair and acting like I’m doing something average, dare I say, normal. So my question is this—and I have to tell you, I’d really appreciate an answer, because I think I’m just a butterfly net and tranquilizer gun shy of losing my mind here—why am I the only one in the room who f
inds fingertip-shooting fireballs and levitation just this side of insane?” Casey took a deep breath, pressing her free hand to her chest to quell a heartbeat that was rapidly becoming jittery.

  The three women looked at one another again, and their eyes held the same secretive glint they had each time Casey proposed the idea that they were whacked for not losing a nut over what was happening right in front of them.

  Marty rolled her tongue in her cheek as though she were pondering something, then slapped her hands on her thighs. “It’s like this—”

  Wanda clamped a hand over Marty’s lips with a clap of flesh against flesh, but Nina pulled at her sister’s fingers, dragging them from Marty’s mouth. “She has to find out sometime, Wanda. She’s your sister, for crap’s sake. I think it’s pretty obvious some freaky-deaky shit’s going down that we don’t have the skills to handle. She needs to know.”

  Casey bobbed to and fro like a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, confused. What did she need to know and how did it relate to what was happening to her? Instead of wondering, she decided against her better judgment to ask. So she asked, “What exactly do I need to know?”

  Wanda grimaced, passing Nina a stern look. “This isn’t the kind of information you just dump on someone, Nina. You can’t just hammer them over the head with it. There has to be a subtle entry to telling someone about . . . us. A buffer of some kind.”

  If she hadn’t been intrigued before when no one batted an eye at her setting Nina’s hair on fire with the point of her finger, she was certainly all in now. Though she didn’t say as much for fear they’d clam back up. Who were these women and what had they done to her sister? Wanda wasn’t anything like she’d once been. Nothing like it.

  She was edgy, and seemingly unafraid of much these days. Casey knew so little about her sister’s friends other than the passing comments Wanda had made in their phone calls that lasted no more than mere moments. And that made her sad that she was the shittiest sister ever and worried all at once about exactly whom Nina and Marty really were.

  Nina rolled her eyes, pushing a lock of her now- damp hair behind her ear. “Oh, and how we told Lou was subtle, Wanda? Jesus Christ in a miniskirt—you almost gave her a fucking heart attack when she caught you fangs deep in Heath’s—”

  “Nina!” Wanda yelped, yanking Nina’s freshly burned hair. “Shut it.”

  Casey’s head fell back on her shoulders. Levitation. Fireballs. And now fangs. Hookay. Full-on disturbing had arrived. And who was Lou?

  “Oh, please, Wanda. Lou survived it, and she’s no spring chicken.” Nina gazed up at Casey, drifting back and forth with an invisible breeze, jaw nearly unhinged, and cackled. “Casey’s young, aren’t ya, Case? Her heart can stand hearing about us.”

  Us. What was this “us” they spoke of? Like they were some sort of cult. And seriously, what could they possibly tell her that was any worse than what was already occurring? As Casey swayed, not just her discomfort but her fear mounted.

  Marty shook her blond head. “You know how much I love to agree with Nina, Wanda—like, never—but she’s right. So either you do it or I will—or, God forbid, big of mouth will.” She pointed a finger at Nina. “I get the feeling it’d probably be a whole lot less stressful for Casey if you did the talking here.”

  Casey had to remind herself again—she wasn’t prone to histrionics, nor was she the kind of girl who panicked in an emergency. She dealt with emergencies, scandals, tabloids, and paparazzi almost every day. She was paid to keep her wits about her at all times and never create a scene, not to mention minimize the ones the girls continually made all on their own. And she’d done that up until now—she hadn’t panicked once. Not when Nina was a bonfire on her floor because her own fingers had apparently turned into Bic lighters, and not even when she’d risen like a phoenix to the highest high of her apartment ceilings.

  But that was all over now. As was evidenced by her rising tone. “What the hell are you all talking about? Somebody just tell me what’s going on and what it has to do with me being tied to a chair with pantyhose!”

  Wanda’s face grew pensive. “I wish you could sit down for this.”

  Yeah. Casey looked down at Wanda, straining against the nylon tied to her wrist to stay upright. “Uh, me, too.”

  Her sister’s fingers went to her temple, massaging the area between her eyes.

  Nina sat back into the couch and snickered.

  Marty bit her lip.

  “What?” Casey almost screamed the question.

  “Okay, it’s like this, honey. We’re not freaked out by—by—by whatever this is because when I tell you we’ve seen some stuff over the past couple of years that’d curl your eyelashes, I’m not kidding.”

  Nina chuckled, making the hair on the back of Casey’s neck rise up and tickle her like soft tentacles. Her heart began to pound as her mind raced—but she still didn’t get it. “So explain, please. Just tell me whatever it is.”

  Wanda rolled her head on her neck and cracked her knuckles. “What’s happening to you has to be something paranormal. We know that because we’ve experienced the paranormal.”

  “Have we ever,” Marty muttered, tucking her chin to her chest with a yawn.

  Okay, that, she could almost wrap her brain around. “Are we talking ghosts here?” Maybe Nina and Marty were part of some ghost-hunting club and Wanda had taken an interest in it and joined a group they were both in?

  “Well, not yet, but I wouldn’t rule that shit out.” Nina’s comment was dry.

  Wanda flicked Nina’s thigh with her finger. “Not ghosts, Casey. Do you know anything about vampires and werewolves?”

  “Or were-vamps, for that matter?” Marty chimed in.

  Were-whos? “I’m almost afraid to answer that.”

  “Vampires and werewolves. A were-vamp is half vampire, half werewolf,” Wanda supplied.

  Good to know. She’d just tuck that away for later use. Until then . . . “How do vampires and werewolves that’re half vampires explain why you three don’t seem at all surprised I’m being kept in check with a pair of pantyhose?”

  Wanda popped her lips, giving Casey a hesitant look. “Okay, no more soft shoe. We’re not surprised by your fireballs and levitation because, well, we’ve seen stuff—experienced stuff—in the past couple of years that makes what you’re going through seem like an afternoon at a day spa.”

  Her mind swirled.

  “Hey, Casey?” Nina called up to her.

  “Uh-huh?”

  “Gird your loins.”

  She swallowed—hard. “Girded.”

  “So, when I say we’ve experienced things, they’re the kind of things that at first you won’t believe. You’ll go through a range of emotions most likely beginning with denial, then disbelief, and then fear. . . .” Wanda winced, then confirmed her assessment with a nod. “Yes, fear. It’s sort of like the five stages of grief minus the bargaining stage because believe me when I tell you, you won’t want to swing a deal with us . . . though I can definitely see depression happening.” Wanda shook her head again with a wry look.

  “Never mind. Anyway, we have proof. We can prove to you what we’re saying is true—”

  “Oh, dude—can I be the one to show her the proof?” Nina interrupted, her tone very clearly riddled with maniacal glee.

  Wanda narrowed her eyes at her friend. “No, you absolutely cannot.You’re just being spiteful and despite the fact that Casey set you on fire, I won’t let you exact revenge. Not on my watch.”

  Nina flipped her palm up in Wanda’s face. “You’re always harshin’ my vibe, Wanda. She did set my fucking hair on fire. I owe her one.”

  Wanda ignored Nina, gazing back up at a bewildered Casey. “Where was I?”

  “Grief,” Casey reminded her. “The five stages.”

  “Right. Well, then I suppose you’ll be angry that I didn’t tell you, but it’s not like I haven’t tried. You’re about as easy to get in touch with as a Tibetan monk.”


  Casey didn’t know much about these stages, but laying on the guilt must be one of them.

  “And then there’s acceptance. Which”—her sister swept her hand around the room—“is what we’ve all come to. We’re all very happy.”

  Centered. Stay centered. Casey reprimanded the half of her that wanted to punch Wanda and her butt- ass long-winded explanation in the head. And clunking her sister over the head had absolutely nothing to do with her prior, uncontrolled anger. Even Job would consider bodily harm as a mandatory point of action at this juncture. “Wanda?”

  “I’m lingering?”

  Casey puffed a long- held breath from between her lips, leaning to the left to counterbalance the constant tug of gravity. “Yes, and I’m being truthful when I tell you, I’m tenuous at best.”

  “Sorry. Okay, so here we go. Ready?”

  No. “Yes.”

  “I’m not the person you once knew. Not mentally and most especially not physically . . .”

  At the word physically Casey instantly eyed Wanda’s breasts. Implants? No, definitely not. Then what? What, what, whaaaaaat?

  “I’m not the same because I’m a were-vamp. Half werewolf, half vampire. I shift into what humans call werewolves, and I have fangs. And how all those things happened has a very long story behind it. Oh, and for the record, Nina’s just a vampire, and Marty’s only a werewolf. But I’m a were- vamp. Two for the price—”

  “Wanda?”

  Wanda exhaled. “Yes, Marty?”

  “Rambling.”

  “Stopping.”

  A small giggle-snort erupted from Casey’s mouth before she could stop it. Well, that explained everything. Just everything. Of course that was why Wanda wasn’t disturbed by fireballs and floating. She was a were- vamp. All good were-vamps surely must be trained or at least have born witness to the art of fireball lobbing. “You’re fucking crazy,” Casey said before she could censor her almost always carefully planned words. Chalk it up to exhaustion, the mortifying notion that she’d been in the actual pokey—not the kind you see on TV in Prison Break, but the real thing—and it made for a combo pack of wildly swinging emotions she could no longer squash.