He shut the door and I let out a long sigh. “Yeah, this is going to be fun.” I made my way around the house, touching the brick here and there. I even pulled out the handbook on bodyguarding that Eammon had given me, but there wasn’t much in it that wasn’t common sense. The tall, narrow windows were on every side of the house, and there was another door at the back. I ran my hand over it, feeling the wood, and then noticed a ding in the upper panel.

I squinted and peered closer at it. A bullet hole? We hadn’t covered it in training, but I’d seen my fair share of cop shows. I pulled a nail file and tissue from my bag and pried the bullet bits out of the door and wrapped them in the thin paper. Maybe not the best forensics, but it was worth keeping. Maybe Eric wasn’t wrong about people stalking him.

Or whatever he thought was going on.

Hell, maybe he’d put the bullet holes there himself to get people to believe his story.

I walked around the house a couple of times, going farther out with each loop. On the last pass, when I was easily a hundred feet out and searching the ground for I-had-no-idea-what, something caught my eye. Not much of anything, just a piece of metal, but it was partially buried in the ground and not rusted, which in this environment meant it was fresh. I pushed the metal with the toe of one boot and it pulled out of the loose soil.

The first link in a series of chains that pulled farther and farther out.

It looked just like the chains on the demon at Crash’s. Was it possible that its buddies were following me? The chains grew cold as I held them, until they iced over and started sticking to parts of my skin. I dropped them to the ground, and they slithered back under the dirt like a snake.

“Not weird, not weird at all.” I opened my bag and peered in there. I had that clearing powder from Bob-John; maybe this was a good time to use it. It was supposed to clear away negative energy and if those chains were attached to another demon, I’d say that was about as negative as you could get. I opened the rhinestone-encrusted box and began sprinkling the white powder that smelled like sage on the ground.