Demonic Dates by Kat Simons

Author:Kat Simons
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: T&D Publishing

Chapter

Five

The first thing Lexie noticed was the fire in the fireplace. An actual fire burned in a stone fireplace at the opposite end of a large, open room. There was no wood under the fire. It burned on top of a metal grate, dancing in its red and orange and yellow light. Without any visible source of fuel. Smoke rose up a chimney that may or may not have actually led outside.

“The chimney?” she asked, her voice very quiet.

“Blocked off. Long time ago. Didn’t do a thing to stop the fire.”

Yet no smoke filled the room. And the whole place hadn’t burned down. Which it probably should have. If that was a normal fire.

“How long?” she asked, her voice still barely a breath.

He didn’t ask what she meant. “Since she was killed. Or so the lore goes. That fire has never gone out, even after the chimney was blocked and the wood that had originally fed it burned up.”

“Not once? In more than three hundred years?”

“Not once. In more than three hundred years.”

“That’s…”

“Bad. Scary. Weird. Terrifying.”

“All of the above,” she said.

“Yup,” Miles said.

Keeping the shield firmly in front of her and Miles, Lexie finally took in the rest of the room.

A single open space. Hardwood floors that were rough but remarkably dust free. No rugs or anything to soften the floors. A single wooden bed up against one wall, a straw stuffed mattress and a homespun blanket across it. A wooden trunk at the base of the bed. A table and shelves near the fireplace for preparing and cooking food. There were still bottles of herbs up on the shelves, and a few that look to be distillations of some kind. But given the three hundred year old fire, Lexie had no desire to explore what was inside those bottles after all this time.

Her nose twitched, as if anticipating very bad smells from the bottles, even though the cabin itself didn’t have a very strong odor—at least not that she could pick up. No strong dust or dirt smells. No sulfur like in other parts of the house. Nothing came from the fire. A faint sort of mustiness, maybe? She was so bad with smells. It wasn’t like being in a preserved museum room, though. There wasn’t a smell of “old” here. Which was as strange as the fire.

A door opposite the bed and another at the back of the house probably led to either closets or another room. Though she thought the back door might also have once led out of the cottage. She could imagine an herb and vegetable garden just out that door, the image leaping into her mind as if she’d seen it before. A place once circled by trees, enough space behind to grow the things a witch would need to heal and help her community.

All the things that would later be used against her by religious fanatics.

The fire cast dancing yellow shadows around the room. With the windows blocked, knowing there was construction overhead,

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