Page 2 of Drawn to the Demon Duke
And that’s when I catch sight of the mailman walking jauntily toward my front door, and I’m suddenly doingbetter.
“Mindy? I gotta go.”
“Su—”
“Mailman’s at the door.” I wait for theknock, grinning when I hear it. “I should answer it.”
“Don’t you want to say ‘hi’ to Amy?”
I love my niece. I really do. She’s a precocious, sweet eight-year-old who is the spitting image of us Benoit women. Even though Mindy is Mindy Dillon now after marrying Dan, the Benoit genes rang true in her little girl. Amy has our same dark eyes and dark brown hair, and an expression that says she’s always a little dreamy. The hardest part of moving out was not being able to see her every day, but I needed to do it.
I needed to work towardmyfuture.
“Tell her I love her, would you, Min? And I’ll call back after aerobics. ‘Kay? Love you!”
Unraveling myself from the twist of the phone cord, I place the handle on the receiver on the wall before Mindy can respond. Then, trying to fight against my giddy hope in case I’m wrong, I hurry for the door.
For weeks now, I’ve gotten an irrational thrill every single time my mail was delivered. I’m so, so close… all I needed wasa little reassurance that I’m on the right track, but it’s been ages since I wrote my letter, requesting a response. I’m too stubborn to believe that he won’t write back. After all, over the years, I’ve written countless letters—to priests and scholars, self-proclaimed witches and some Satanists—and nearly all of them answered me and my questions.
The way I see it, if the books in the library can’t help me, there has to be someone who can. Once I had my own place, I signed up for every magazine on the occult that I could. Between them and the phone book, there were so many experts I could write to, and now that I’m so friggin’ close…
I yank the door open to find that Fenton is still waiting on the porch, a letter in hand.
“For you, Ms. Susanna. Found it stuck at the bottom of my bag. Thought I should deliver it in case it’s important. Like the gas bill, you know?”
Oh, please don’t be my gas bill… “Thank you, Fenton. I really appreciate it.”
I hold out my hand.
He hesitates, and if his eyes travel the length of my tight leggings, I pretend not to notice.
Fenton clears his throat. “Anyway, I was thinking… if you’re not doing anything tonight, maybe I could take you out. There’s this great bowling alley that opened up on the other end of my route?—”
“Maybe some other time,” I tell him, hoping I’m not being too brusque. I give my ankle a shake, only realizing that my attempt to draw attention to my leg warmer only made it so that he could openly ogle my lower leg. “Got aerobics tonight.”
He nods. “Gotta jazzercise. I understand.”
Right. “So… my letter?”
Fenton blinks, then starts, as though remembering the reason he used to come back to my house after he finished hisroute while I was at work. “Oh, yes. Of course.” He holds it out. “Here you go.”
I all but snatch it from his grip. “Thanks, Fenton. See you around!”
“Ms. Su?—”
Just like I did with Mindy, I end the conversation before he can continue. In this case, I wave again, flash him a smile, then close the door in his face.
I forget all about Fenton once I flip the letter and see the name scrawled in script on the upper left corner. Mr. Ed Woodrow.
Yes!
Ed Woodrow is the leading demonologist and paranormal expert on the East Coast. He, along with his wife and partner, Lucy, are renowned for visiting haunted houses, but that’s not all. With the Satanic Panic on late night news and the front page of all the papers, Mr. Woodrow’s gone on lecturing tours, discussing that the barbaric Satanic rituals invented by the press aren’t real—but that demons and ghosts and poltergeists are.
Up until two years ago, I would’ve claimed that none of it was. But after more than a decade of codebreaking and working toward translating an alien language that doesn’t exist in any of the library books I’ve checked out—and that number is in thehundreds—I finally figured it out. I found the key to understanding the book when I realized that while some of the words were derived from romance languages, all the way back to Latin, the rest were basically gibberish. They made no sense, and if they made no sense, I didn’t need to know what they said.
Between the Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese dictionaries I bought at B. Dalton’s, I was able to find a matching translation for approximately eighty percent of the words in my book.
TheGrimoire du Sombra.
