Hell Is Coming (The Watcher's Series Book 1) Read Free

house, Diane was cooking dinner. She was a woman in her fifties who never had any children of her own, and she had been married once until her husband died. With her long silver hair and warm, caring blue eyes, she was a gentle woman, always ready with a sympathetic ear and some sage advice whenever you needed it. She helped me a lot when we came to live with her, got me off the drugs, showed me I was worth more than I thought I was, which given the state I was in back then, wasn’t an easy task.
    “Dinner’s almost ready,” Diane said as I headed up the stairs. “Don’t be long up there.”
    “I won’t,” I said. “Josh has something to tell you, by the way.”
    Josh shot me a look from the living room and I smiled back apologetically. I was being a coward, leaving it up to him to break the news, but I couldn’t face the inevitable tears Diane would shed so I went straight to my room.
    Josh took the bigger room when we moved into the house so I was left with the smaller of the two. Due to the lack of space the room was always cluttered. I had drawings and paintings tacked all over the walls which had the effect of closing the room in, making it seem even smaller, not to mention darker. Piles of books and objects related to the occult—black candles, various spell ingredients in glass jars, a human skull and other items that I hardly looked at—took up what little floor space there was, making the room feel more like a lair than a bedroom.
    I went and lay on my unmade bed, my eyes flitting over the drawings and paintings on the walls—the fantastical landscapes, the warrior women with swords, the strange made up creatures. Fantasy art was my thing, my escape. I had a talent for creating it, but I never really took it seriously until Diane encouraged me to. My old high school art teacher, Mr. Sanders, kind of took me under his wing as well, providing me with art supplies, making sure I had enough of a portfolio so I could apply to art college. I was looking forward to going, as long as I got in. As long as I got a handle on the whole demon thing. If experiences like the one that happened with the demon on the street outside kept happening, that wouldn’t be anytime soon.
    I still hadn’t told Josh anything about the demons. Neither did I want too. Josh wasn’t actually at home the night the demon took my mother and killed my father. He was on his first ever sleepover at a friend’s house so he saw nothing of what I experienced. Neither could he quite believe anything I tried to tell him about the circumstances surrounding that night. He saw all the occult stuff as my way of coping, I suppose. He believed the official police story that my father had been murdered, possibly by our mother, possibly not. That part was still inconclusive. The cops could never figure out if my mother ran away or was taken.
    I knew the truth, but no one wanted to listen to a grieving seven-year-old girl.
    So I learned to keep what I knew to myself.
    After years of anguished obsession, I put it all aside, finally accepting that my parents were gone and there was nothing I could do about it.
    Until I saw the monsters, demons from what I could gather. What was I supposed to make of that? Was I supposed to ignore the fact that I was seeing inhuman faces everywhere I went? How could I? I knew in my bones there was a connection between that and my parent’s demise. I just wasn’t sure what it was yet.
    I pulled a sketch book from under my bed. It was filled with drawings of the monster faces I had seen over the past few months. I flicked through the sketch book, glancing over faces with  glowing eyes, strange protruding bone structures and horns jutting out from skulls and other weird places. One sketch showed a man—a priest if I remember correctly—with three horns sticking out of his chin, the outside two curved like elephant tusks. Another sketch was of a woman, beautiful as I remember, until her face transformed into something