Page 65 of Housesitter

Easy chuckled. “Don’t try and teach your grandfather to suck eggs, boy,” he said. “You can’t steal a soul from something that doesn’t have one. Might as well try and compel the kettle. Besides, with what I slipped you, I doubt you’d be able to steal candy from a baby right now.”

His footsteps sounded heavy and hard on the floor as he moved around. They echoed.

Shepherd squirmed around to look in the direction of the voices. His wrists were shackled to a block of granite that had been in the garden last time Shepherd had seen it. He was able to twist his hands around the loop sunk into it to get up onto his knees.

He was naked, but that was to be expected.

You made dinner for someone, you unwrapped it before you put it on the plate. That was just manners.

Kel was tied to a chair on the other side of the hole in the ground. His hair was matted to his forehead, and his lip was split. Blood scabbed on his chin and dripped down onto his shirt.

“Let him go,” Kel begged. “He’s nothing to do with this.”

Easy came back out of the shadows. A heavy black robe hung from his shoulders, the edges frayed where it dragged on the ground. He looked thicker across the shoulders than he had before, and his polished black loafers had been replaced with polished black hooves.

“I mean, if that’s what you want,” Easy said. He flicked his robe back and crouched down in front of Kel. Taloned fingers gripped Kel’s chin, slicing through the skin. “But if he’d not come back, who do you think I was going to send to Hell as my proxy? So, do you want me to let him go? Think about—”

“Yes,” Kel interrupted. He looked nearly as surprised as Easy, but then he set his jaw and glared at his grandfather. “Just…tell Ruby I fucked off.”

Easy let go of Kel’s jaw and rubbed his fingers together, like he’d somehow got sentiment on them.

“So, just to be clear, you’d rather I kill you?”

Kel glanced over toward Shepherd. Their eyes met, and Kel twisted his mouth in a wry smile, then flicked his attention back to Easy.

“Might be the drugs,” he acknowledged. “But yeah. Unless there’s another option, let him go.”

Easy sucked his teeth and then patted Kel’s cheek affectionately. Hard enough to jolt Kel’s face to the side, blood dripping from his nose, but still warm for what Easy was.

“...I would,” he said. “But he’s already naked and anointed, so…”

That explained the wet ass. It was…

“Did you piss on me?” Shepherd asked.

Easy scrambled back to his feet…hooves…and turned to look at Shepherd. His face, still angular and bony, hadn’t changed, but when he opened his mouth, the tongue that flicked between his teeth was split.

“Don’t worry,” he said with a smirk. “It’s sterile.”

“Still gross,” Shepherd said.

Easy cocked his head to the side. “You’re very…lucid,” he said. He reached out and grabbed Kel’s head, fingers dug down through red hair as he wobbled his head around. “More than my boy here, and he’s got demon blood. You sure you’re human?”

“USDA-approved,” Shepherd said.

Easy stared at him. He looked puzzled. Either he didn’t get the joke, or he could smell that it wasn’t exactly a lie. It hadn’t been the USDA, but there had been a grading designation.

Whatever it was, Easy shrugged his unease off. He let go of Kel’s head and reached out to lift one of the sticking knives from the rack on the wall. A quick test against the pad of his thumb drew black, sticky blood and a ‘heh’ of approval from him.

“You do keep a nice home,” he complimented Shepherd as he sucked the blood out of the wound. “It might be your last good review, but I will tell Renfield’s that you gave five-star service.”

He wiped the knife on his robe and started to stalk around the worn edge of the well. His hooves clopped ominously off the old stone flags.

Clopped?

Shepherd hesitated for a beat as he tried to think of a more…ominous…descriptor. Then he shoved it aside for later. He looked across the dark pit at Kel. People had been trying to sacrifice him for years. No one had ever tried to protect him before.

Even the FBI raid had been incidental, about the fraud, not the murders.