An Invocation of Monsters (The Void Book 2), page 1
An Invocation of Monsters
The Void Book 2
Cate Corvin
Copyright © 2023 by Cate Corvin
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Contents
1. Elle
2. Elle
3. Elle
4. Elle
5. Toth
6. Elle
7. Elle
8. Elle
9. Elle
10. Elle
11. Elle
12. Elle
13. Elle
14. Elle
15. Kiraxis
16. Elle
17. Elle
18. Elle
19. Elle
20. Elle
21. Elle
22. Drazan
23. Elle
24. Elle
25. Elle
26. Elle
27. Elle
28. Elle
29. Elle
30. Elle
31. Drazan
32. Elle
33. Elle
34. Elle
35. Kiraxis
36. Elle
37. Elle
38. Elle
39. Elle
40. Toth
41. Elle
42. Elle
About the Author
1
Elle
Not for the first time, I wondered if I’d majorly screwed up by accepting an invitation from a couple of total weirdos.
Maybe it was all just some sort of elaborate kidnapping or trafficking hoax. I leaned against the side of my beaten-up Crown Vic, a bursting-at-the-seams duffel bag at my feet, and raised an eyebrow at the sheer quantity of wilderness stretching out before me.
They had refused to give me an address. The tiny town of Dunwich, sandwiched at the mouth of a massive, forested valley, was the end of the line for me.
I had been instructed to park here on the outskirts of the forest and wait for transportation to Deepwater Lodge, my final destination.
Yeah. The whole thing was definitely shady.
And way too intriguing to pass up.
During my mother’s funeral service six months ago, two people claiming to be old friends of hers had approached me.
A man and a woman, wearing black suits that looked ill-fitted on their rather emaciated frames. They’d looked almost like identical twins, possessing the same suntanned skin, curly ash-blonde hair, and wide blue eyes.
Wide, rather crazed blue eyes. A shiver trailed down my spine as I recalled the hungry look in the woman’s gaze when she saw me.
Then she’d seen my cousin, Juno, coming towards us, and shoved a sealed envelope into my hands before the pair vanished.
The contents of the letter, read in private later that night, had floored me.
I’d always loved my mother… and I’d always been aware of her shortcomings. Gillian Gray had been a vain, rather selfish woman, but despite that, she was my mother and I adored her, so I could forgive those things.
There had been a brief moment in my life when I’d wondered if I might not harbor the tiniest seed of hate for her—when Juno, freshly bereaved of her own parents, had come to live with us.
I’d hero-worshipped my older cousin with a fervor that astounded Gillian.
Juno had been so cool, and what made her even cooler was that she didn’t even know it; somehow she made sitting around with her nose in a book about Victorian occultism seem like such a romantic, Goth thing to do.
But I’d overheard my mother complaining to my father one night about what a pain it was to handle a traumatized teenage girl, and how much she hated paying for her therapy, and that tiny pinch of hate had sparked to life.
That was when I first began to really notice my mother’s selfishness.
If Juno’s therapy appointments interfered with my immaculate mother’s nail appointments, there would be tiny, unhappy grooves carved around the corners of Gillian’s mouth that day.
If Juno needed new clothes and it cut into Gillian’s highlights budget, my mother would have a flinty gleam in her eye when she looked at Juno for the rest of that week.
Despite that, I still loved her. We all have our flaws.
But every summer, my mother disappeared for a month. I’d always thought that my looks-conscious mother had gone to a day-spa, where she could pretend she didn’t have a daughter or her sister’s ward or a grueling real estate job.
The letter had instead revealed that Gillian spent that month, every summer, in a lodge in these deep, dark backwoods. Not at a day spa, but as the best friend of those wild-eyed people who’d shown up at her funeral—and I was invited to come see exactly what she’d been up to.
I couldn’t imagine Gillian, with her French manicures and silk blouses and WASP-y book club dinner parties, being friends with them.
Something crinkled in my hand. Without thinking about it, I’d eased the letter from my pocket for the hundredth or so time.
The paper was already soft and worn from how many times I’d folded and unfolded it, or run my fingers over the spidery writing.
The Wendigo Society.
I hadn’t found so much as a peep about them online. Whatever they were, it was locked down tight. Still, it was hard to imagine her as part of a secret cult…
Okay, so my mother had been really into astrology. She’d religiously read her horoscope every day during breakfast.
And she’d liked to collect crystals, too. She kept a line of amethyst chips on her office windowsill, claiming they helped her maintain the patience to not kill difficult clients.
And maybe more than a few times I’d found strange runes and symbols scribbled in unlikely areas, like on the corner of a house sale sign she really hoped would go through or in the soil of her Damask rose garden.
Fine. So it was actually fairly easy, in retrospect, to acknowledge that my buttoned-up mother had been into some weird shit on the side.
The question was: why hide it?
And who the hell were these people she had been friends with since college?
It hadn’t taken much to convince me to accept the invitation. Both of my parents had passed on; the sale of my childhood home had gone through last month, leaving me with quite a bit of ‘fuck you’ money in the bank.
I never wanted to return to live in Innsmouth. Visiting Deepwater Lodge seemed like the first logical step of escaping the small coastal town; I’d find out what my mother had gotten up to, and then… I’d move on.
Of course I’d have to return to Innsmouth at some point to visit my cousin, but… the whole world was ahead of me. I was free.
Technically, that should have made me very happy.
But it didn’t.
I sighed, refolded the letter, and shoved it back in my pocket, glancing back at the town I’d been instructed to wait in.
The town of Dunwich had a tiny population, and absolutely nobody seemed to have a problem with me parking in the tiny lot next to the forest. I’d been waiting for half an hour; by now, somebody should’ve said something.
But the few people I saw said nothing at all. In fact, once my presence here registered with them, they didn’t even look at me.
I crossed my arms over my chest and watched a woman emerge from a tiny grocery store, laden with several shopping bags.
She met my eyes with an almost startled expression, as though surprised to see me looking back at her… then she deliberately turned her head away and scurried to a car that was even more beaten-down than mine.
I quickly revisited my theory that the Wendigo Society was actually a group of human traffickers or possibly serial killers and maybe the people of Dunwich were just turning a blind eye to it, but… it didn’t fit.
My mother was many things, but a serial killer was not one of them. She got faint at the sight of blood, and no self-respecting serial killer would enter the profession with that kind of attitude.
Maybe these people were paid to look the other way.
I considered stopping into the grocery store to ask questions under the pretense of grabbing a Diet Coke for the drive, but at that moment the roar of a motor tore through the air behind me.
I whirled around just as a pale blue truck rumbled from the road in the woods, mud splattered on its sides and cracks spider-webbing the windshield.
It drew to a rather abrupt halt in front of me and my car.
I’d expected to see one of the older people who had introduced themselves at my mother’s funeral behind the wheel, perhaps bursting to regale me with tales of my mother’s wayward college youth.
Instead, the Wendigo Society had sent… a teenage boy.
He clambered out of the cab, and I did my best to wipe the sudden scowl off my face. At least they’d sent someone for me at all.
“Um.. hello?” he said hopefully. “Are you Elle Gray?”
I deducted five points from his intelligence for that one. Did they get so many people waiting here for them that he actually had to ask?
“That’s me.” I glanced over his shoulder, but the cab was empty except for the kid.
Maybe ‘kid’ was being a little condescending of me; he was at least eighteen or nineteen, but tall for his age, and gangly. He had dark blond hair and pale blue eyes, and was dressed in a white polo and cream-colored shorts. His sneakers were blindingly white, too.
Okay, I needed to work on being less bitchy. I was only twenty, so it wasn’t like I could claim the wisdom of the elders over him. He just looked particularly young and somehow soft.
Then I realized he was looking me over with the exact same mix of apprehension and confusion.
I had red hair, a natural vivid crimson that Mom had always told me must be a genetic fluke, and steel-gray eyes. Unlike the kid, I wore black from head to toe: Docs, ripped jeans, a pair of soft, thin leather gloves, and a worn Metallica t-shirt.
“You’re Gillian Gray’s daughter?” he asked, frowning harder.
What was he expecting, exactly?
Maybe it was my nerves, but his skepticism kind of pissed me off all over again.
“Were you expecting some prep school princess?” I didn’t mean to snap it, but having this teenager look at me like he disapproved was a bit much. “Yes, I’m Elle, Gillian’s daughter.”
“I was expecting… never mind.” He came over, extending a hand. “I’m Kase Hickman. The truck is mine and they weren’t sure how much you were planning to bring with you, so I was sent to pick you up.”
Kase tried on a smile that might’ve been as blinding as his shoes in other circumstances, but there was still a bit of wariness and confusion in his gaze as I took his hand and shook it twice, firmly.
He raised an eyebrow at the feeling of my glove against his skin.
“Does the Wendig—”
“Shh!” He made a jerking movement, like he meant to slap his hand over my mouth to keep the words in. Fortunately for him, he stopped himself, but his gaze jerked towards the main street of Dunwich for a moment. “We don’t talk about that here.”
Weirder and weirder.
“My bad.” I tried to smile back, but the muscles of my lips felt tight. “I’ll just grab my bag and we can go.”
I picked up my heavy duffel and strode to the other side of the truck, shoving it into the backseat. I carefully tucked my car keys away in a pocket before climbing up into the passenger’s seat.
Kase pulled the truck around in a wide circle.
“You’re not going to blindfold me?” I asked, and the kid gave me another startled look.
“What? Why would I do that?”
“Well, they did refuse to give me an address and made me park out here and wait for a ride. I figured if the Society was going to go all top-secret on me, there would be blindfolds involved, and maybe you’d drive around in circles for a while so I’d become disoriented and never be able to find my way back…”
Kase looked like he was beginning to regret taking the job. I was finally starting to enjoy myself.
“It’s not that,” he said, the truck roaring into the woods. I glanced out the window at a gnarled tree that looked like it was slowly trying to bend itself in half. “It’s… kind of hard to explain, actually? You’ll understand when we get there.”
Oooookay.
An awkward silence fell between us for the next fifteen minutes, until I couldn’t stand it anymore.
“Have you ever actually met my mother?” God, I sucked at small-talk. Of course he’d met her already if she was here every summer.
To my surprise, the blinding smile lit Kase’s face again, like a ray of pure sunlight streamed into the truck and bathed him with brilliance.
He looked like… a kid in love. Alarm pulsed through me.
Oh, no. Jesus, no.
Please God, let my mother not have been a cougar.
“I’ve met her,” he said softly. “She was the one.”
Inwardly I sobbed.
“The messiah of a new age.”
Oh, even worse. A cougar messiah.
“The Mother of the Open Door.”
Kase was no longer even looking at the road, staring at me with a wide, exalted gaze. I braced myself for us to crash into a tree at any moment.
“She opened the way and passed beyond the doors. She spoke with the Things Beyond,” he whispered, cords standing out in his throat. “They touched her and gave her their magic. She was our most sacred vessel for their power.”
I was filled with a sudden horror and relief as I understood.
Relief that his fervor wasn’t sexual.
Horror that my mother had secretly spent her life trying to unlock the keys to magical power with a group of her old college friends, like they were in The Craft or something.
All I could imagine was a group of washed-up, aging Wiccans, making blood sacrifices of pet bunnies in the woods so they could create more accurate horoscopes.
The thing was, I already had that kind of power.
And it hadn’t been able to save her.
2
Elle
Before I could ask exactly what he meant by his rambling, Kase gripped the wheel with both hands.
“Alright, hold on!”
I looked up in time to see a massive ivory arch in the middle of the forest—it stretched over the road, an incongruous creation built of horns and bones—and then we were passing under it. My ears popped.
Immediately I felt like I’d taken a sledgehammer to the head. I might even have screamed out loud, but the burst of pain in my skull drowned out my awareness of everything else. It fizzed through my nerves, my limbs on fire—
And just as abruptly, it was gone.
I was gasping, digging my fingers into my thighs so hard I felt my own nails through my gloves. A bubble of nausea rose in me, and Kase pulled the truck to a rumbling halt.
“I’m sorry to be a dick about this, but if you’re going to throw up, could you do it outside the truck?” he asked. He looked a little pale, but none the worse for wear.
“What the fuck was that?” I gasped, then wrenched the door open and practically fell out of the truck.
I didn’t throw up. It took some pacing back and forth, breathing deeply and massaging my temples, but eventually I managed to swallow down the acrid taste in the back of my throat.
I peered back at the arch while I paced. It was twelve feet high, the ivory of the hundreds of bones gleaming in the dappled sun.
When I climbed back into the truck, Kase had regained some of his color.
“That’s why we don’t let newcomers drive in,” he said, flinching a little under my glare. “You get used to it eventually, but for your first time, you definitely don’t want to be driving when it hits. I’m so sorry, it’s usually not that bad. You got hit pretty hard.”
“Exactly what was it, though?” My hands were shaking. I knotted them in my lap, taking another deep breath and swallowing hard to settle my stomach.
Kase’s mouth twisted in a frown. “That’s another thing that’s hard to explain. Mary and Joseph will be able to tell you about it.”
“Just tell me right now—are there going to be any more surprises that feel like getting hit by a train?”
“No.” The truck started rolling forward again, Kase’s eyes fixed on the forest outside. I had the odd feeling he was deliberately avoiding my gaze. “That was it.”
It wasn’t too late to turn back.
But when I opened my mouth to tell Kase to turn the damn truck around, no words came out.
None of this made sense, but I had to know what my mother had done. What secrets she’d been hiding my entire life.
Because they might explain what was wrong with me.
I tugged one of my gloves off and pressed my fingers to the headache lingering at my temples. Almost immediately, the pain receded.
My touch could heal… to an extent.
Against a headache? No problem. A cut? Like applying superglue, only faster and cleaner.
