Page 96 of Aberrant Monsters
I tried to catch his eye, but his attention was fixed over my head on Quentin and Uncle Fred.
“It’s dying,” Telarion said. “August hemorrhaged it.Youcan finish it off. She doesnotgo back inside. Get another rift walker to do it, do you hear me? I have to feed.”
He left without goodbye, which wasn’t unusual, but there wasn’t even a glance in my direction.
My doubts at what I’d seen in his eyes vanished.
I hadn’t imagined it. It was there. He felt it too.
Question was, what did we do about it?
twenty-four
Archie drove us home while Quentin waited for the other handlers and their rift walkers. It would take a couple to finish off the eldritch in the house.
“So our client was kinda right,” Archie said. “Ghosts didn’t kill her son. The eldritch thing did.”
“Its feeding caused the heart attack,” Nandi said.
“I’ve been thinking about this,” Archie said. “Maybe the thing was feeding off the minerals in their blood. Like iron, maybe?”
“Yes,” Uncle Fred said. “A sudden severe iron deficiency can cause death.”
“But the other renters were fine,” Nandi pointed out.
I cast my mind back over the interviews because something about her comment bugged me. Wait a second. “The other renters were all non-human. Our client’s son was pure human.”
“As were the four people found dead in the two-mile radius we were scouting,” Archie said.
“It fits,” Nandi added. “And it was feeding off the ghosts too and then Telarion as well.”
“It would have killed him.”
“Why so aggressive with Telarion and the ghosts?” Archie pondered out loud.
“I don’t know.” I sucked on my bottom lip. “Maybe whatever it could get from them was too tempting. Enough for it to lose control and just gorge itself?” The memory of the crimson power as it had coursed into me filled my body with longing and left my throat dry. “Yeah, I think it must have found them too tempting to control itself.”
It probably understood that the ghosts and Telarion were fair game, but the regular people weren’t. Or maybe it was pacing itself. We’d never have all the answers, and I had my own shit to worry about, like the fact I’d siphoned off an eldritch.
“They call it a mimic,” Uncle Fred said.
I looked over to find him holding my crypto guide.
“Look.” He held it out to me and shined his phone torch on it. “The picture is of a gelatinous blob. But read what it says.”
This eldritch will remain in a see-through gelatinous form until it finds a satisfactory inanimate host to occupy.
There was a note scrawled in italics.
Only two have been found thus far. One took over a camper van, the other a post box.
Places that it could have people to siphon from. The ghosts in the Huntingdon house had never been a problem. The problems began when they unwittingly brought the mimic creature home and it took root, attacking the ghosts, increasing activity, leading to the Huntingdons putting the house up for weekend rentals while they made the best of a shit situation.
“We’re home,” Nandi said as we pulled up outside the little black castle.
“You need soup,” Uncle Fred said. “And hunks of buttered toast.” He pinched my chin. “You’re too pale.”
I wasn’t about to argue with him.
