Demon Night

arching above his head. She’d touched them—soft down had covered a heavy frame of bone and muscle; the flight feathers had been like silk. And though she longed to run her hands over them again, now it struck her as shameful that she’d done it without permission…and possibly blasphemous that she’d touched them at all.
    And she wasn’t even sure what she was blaspheming.
    She tucked her hands into her coat pockets. More than touching—she’d stolen a kiss from him. Thought of doing things a lot less innocent than that.
    The alarm light switched from red to green. Ethan studied the security panel as if he expected it to give up a secret, then finally turned toward her.
    His eyes narrowed. “Whatever you’re thinking that put that fire in your cheeks, you unthink it. I got a pile of mattress stuffing on my back, but it don’t mean I’m wearing a halo.”
    His reading her so easily only made her embarrassment worse, but she said in the strongest voice she could muster, “Okay.”
    The sound in the room was strange; large and open, with vaulted ceilings lined with beams—their voices should have echoed, come back hollow. Instead the tones remained full without bouncing back. Perhaps the amount of wood and the thick rugs softened the echo, or they’d placed sound dampeners in the walls, like the shell of a concert hall.
    The furnishings were light in color and sparse; paintings filled the walls, but it was too dark to see details on the canvases.
    Ethan was looking, too, but whatever he saw on one wall made him smile a little. It turned into a grimace when his wings vanished. He cocked his right elbow and rotated his shoulder in a wide circle before holding out his hand to her again.
    “I’ve got to go back, Charlie, see what I can about the demon and anything he left behind.”
    Charlie swallowed hard. “All right.”
    His palm enfolded hers, and she realized how cold her hands were from the flight and the unheated house. “You’ll be fine here. Take a look at this.” He led her to the door, placed his fingers about halfway up the frame. “You see these markings?”
    It was dim enough in the room that she couldn’t see anything, but when she trailed her fingertips down the wood, she could feel the scratches on the smooth surface—and remembered how Ethan had scraped something into the phone booth. “So, these will keep vampires out—unless they’re invited in?”
    Had she accidentally invited one into the booth?
    “An invitation doesn’t mean anything,” Ethan said. He let go of her hand, and a dagger flashed in his. “It’s a spell. You put your blood on each one of these symbols—there’s three of them—from top to bottom, like this.” He stabbed the pad of his thumb, touched it to the frame three times.
    Charlie’s breath caught. The house had been quiet, but now it was silent; she hadn’t been listening to the lake, the wind, but she heard their absence better than she had their lapping and sighing.
    “This one’s on a main entrance, so it locks down the entire house. There ain’t nothing that can get in, not demon or vampire or human—and you’ve got nothing to worry about but an earthquake or fire.”
    “But—”
    Ethan wiped at the frame with his sleeve, and the sound slipped back in.
    Charlie’s lips parted in realization. “Oh.”
    His smile edged just a bit higher on the right side when he looked down at her. “I ought to have warned you.”
    She almost said, That’s okay , but then she remembered the vampire’s face and his fang-filled grin. “You should have,” she agreed, and watched him poke his thumb again. “Will my blood do that?”
    “Yes. But if your blood activates the spell, I can’t get back in. The spell will stay up for as long as a person’s alive inside—but only the one who cast it can go in and out. So if you go out while I’m gone, you’ll be able to get back in, but the spell won’t be around the house anymore—you got that?” At her nod, he continued, “You won’t be able to call anyone or communicate through the shield it creates. Nothing gets through; not television, not e-mail, not radio.”
    “Nothing at all?” Charlie frowned, wondering why that tripped a memory for her.
    Ethan shook his head. “I could stand outside the window and write a note on a paper, but you wouldn’t be able to read it. You’d see it, but couldn’t understand it.”
    “Oh. Well, that’s normal for me.” She gave up trying to remember