Page 92 of Aberrant Monsters
He looked up as I entered. “She’s just been sick.” He pointed to a pile of vomit on the carpet.
I knelt in front of her. “Nandi, babe. What happened?”
She looked up at me with wide, haunted eyes. “They’re sick. The ghosts are sick. Something’s been feeding on them. August, there’s something else in the house.”
Oh, crap. “I think the eldritch is here. There’s residue on the car in the garage and it leads to the door into the house then up to the ceiling before vanishing.”
She took a shaky breath and stood. “We have to find it.”
Find it and capture it, except I wasn’t prepared. “I didn’t bring my rift walker pack.”
I pulled my phone out of my pocket and dialed Quentin. The phone rang for ages but he didn’t answer. I cut the call and dialed my uncle.
Uncle Fred answered on the second ring. “August? Is everything okay?”
Stay calm, August. “Are you at home? Is Quentin there?”
“No, sweetheart, I’m out with a friend. What’s wrong?” His tone switched to super alert. “What’s happened?”
“I need Quentin. I need my rift walker pack. We’re at Huntingdon Manor and I’m pretty sure the eldritch we’ve been tracking is here.”
I heard another voice in the background, the hum of conversation, and then the scrape of a chair. “I’m headed home now. I’ll grab the pack and Quentin and we’ll be with you as soon as we can.” He hung up and I tucked the phone back into my pocket.
“We should leave,” Archie said. “Wait for your rift walker pack to get here.”
Nandi clutched her head and cried out. “No. Stop it.”
I wrapped my arms around her as if I could stave off the specter attack by the mere force of my presence. “What’s happening? What are they doing?”
“They won’t let us leave. Not until we help them. August, they’re in so much pain. Prisoners in this house. They’ve been trying to reach out to people for months. Trying to get help but no one can hear them.”
“You think the eldritch is causing this?” Archie asked. “Feeding on them somehow.”
Nandi looked across the room, and I followed her gaze but couldn’t see anything but a shimmer in the air.
“It’s been feeding on the visitors too,” Nandi said. “Making them weak and tired, but it takes something else from the ghosts, a different energy that allows them to exist.”
“Dark energy, dark matter,” Archie said. “I’ve read about it. There’s a theory that souls are created from dark energy and that it’s released when the physical body dies.”
“So our eldritch is feeding off the ghosts, off the dark matter, but what about the humans?” Nandi asked.
I cast my mind back to the interviews with the other visitors. “They all said they were exhausted afterward, that they’d slept but didn’t feel like they had.”
“Because they were somehow being fed off of,” Archie said. “But how? What would cause a heart attack?”
“We can worry about that once we have this eldritch under control.”Telarion. I called out to him in my mind. We needed to get Nandi out of here. I tried to help her stand. “We need to get you outside.”
She gagged and pulled away from me. “I’m gonna be sick.”
Theywere doing this to her. The sick ghosts were making her feel this way, making her stay. Anger surged up inside me. “Stop it. Stop it now. If you want our help, then let her fucking go. Let her go and I swear I’ll make your pain stop.”
Telarion, where are you?
Nandi sagged against me. “They let go. I’m good. I’m okay.”
I passed her to Archie. “Get her outside.”
“Where are you going?” Archie asked.
