Free Devil's Business by Caitlin Kittredge

snapping at your heels.
    Sprinklers hissed on as he and Pete crested the walk, wafting the scent of something sweet and earthbound through the air. The Case house wasn’t a screaming void like the Herreras’, but there was a dome of oppressive air over the low, rambling stucco palace, a prick of chill in the warm night that warned anyone with a modicum of talent to turn the fuck around and run.
    Pete wriggled her shoulders inside her cotton jacket. “Spooky, isn’t it?” she said.
    “That’s one word for it,” Jack said. He tried the key, and after a bit of a struggle the door popped open. The air inside was stale, recycled by central air. The crime scene cleaners had done a good job of scrubbing blood out of the marble entry, but it wavered as silver film on Jack’s sight, luminous over the walls and floors.
    He let the silver streaks guide them, through a media room with a giant blank screen taking up an entire wall, and into a kitchen roughly the size of two of his flat back to back. The pain and misery were much more ingrained here, in the walls and wood and bones of the house. Nobody who lived here would ever feel truly settled again.
    The largest streak of psychic residue lay across the counters and floor, a great swath where Mrs. Case had met her end.
    “There’s the pet door,” Pete said. The door led to a patio, which ended at a swimming pool lit from beneath the water. With Jack’s sight, the water turned black and bottomless, the light shading to orange and then red. A trail wandered from the back fence, across the patio, to the door, and when he looked it was gone.
    Jack blinked. Something that could erase its psychic trail—that sounded like the sort of thing Belial was after. He took a breath in, and let his sight open up, and allowed the oppressive atmosphere of the murder house to overwhelm him.
    He saw the blood, saw the wavering lines of pain from where the Case woman and her child had lain in their last moments, but he shoved it aside like cobwebs. The trail wavered, through the pet door and across the tiles, stopping over the silvery pool of spectral blood.
    It blinked in and out, a line of white little more than smoke, curling and wavering back on itself. Jack tried to focus his eyes, but doing so produced the familiar spike between his eyes. Look too hard, and the sight would pulverize the parts of his brain that he cared about, leaving him a turnip with interesting dreams.
    Just a little more, he begged. The smoke wafted over the back wall of the Case house, down into the light-studded blackness of a canyon. Jack heard a faint whisper, nothing he could make out, and then his sight flared, the smoke twirling into a spiral, swirling around him and down his throat, choking him.
    He came back to himself to find that his nose was dripping blood, gleaming black droplets on the Cases’ countertop. Pete sighed and wiped it up with her sleeve. “You think you could manage not to leave your DNA all over everything, genius?”
    “Sorry,” he muttered. For the moment, he left aside thinking about what could set a trap for any psychic who might try to follow it, keep it on for years after the fact, and burn out every trace of its presence. Right then, breathing was enough of a headache. “You were right,” he told Pete.
    “What is it?” Pete said. Jack thought about the smoke, trailing through his sinuses, burning with that ashes-and-dust scent that he recognized from his dreams. The scent of the wind in Hell. Belial’s missing nightmare was definitely the nasty git who’d hacked up the Case family.
    Jack rubbed his forehead. His headache in the morning was going to be a thing of epics. “Something that doesn’t appreciate me sniffing after it, that much is certain.”
    The creature had done a good job—it had left only a burn scar on the Black around the Case house. Nothing Jack could probe further, unless he relished his brain leaking out. But it hadn’t disappeared into thin air. It was