Fade
Author: Daniel Humphreys
Date: 2017-03-02 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Urban Fantasy; Fantasy; Paranormal; Horror; Fiction; Supernatural; Science Fiction
Description: Son of a WitchFamily drama is bad enough without adding magic and human sacrifice. Ten years ago, Paxton Locke’s mother killed his father in a mysterious ritual that – thankfully – went incomplete. Now, Paxton makes his living as a roving paranormal investigator, banishing spirits while Mother languishes in jail.When a terrified ghost warns him of a dangerous, newly-freed entity, Paxton faces a fight far beyond simple exorcism. In a battle for his very soul, will he be able to endure – or simply fade away?
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services

Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Author's Note

About The Author

Fade

Daniel Humphreys

Copyright © 2017 Daniel Humphreys
www.daniel-humphreys.net

Twitter: @NerdKing52

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

ISBN: 1542571545

ISBN-13: 978-1542571548

Cover art by damonza.com

First Printing March 2017

For Jackson and Carleigh.

May you always see the magic in the world.

Prologue

It’s a long story. But hey, it doesn’t look like we’re going anywhere soon, right?

This is how it started.

Chapter 1

I knew this job was going to be a freebie as soon as I pulled up to the front of the house.

In my line of work, there are two types of customers — the ones who actually have problems and the ones who are flat-out crazy. Unfortunately, the vast majority of my clientele consists of the latter. I don’t usually feel bad about taking their money. If it wasn’t me, it would be someone else. The folks crazy enough to think they need me when they don’t can usually afford to be stupid.

That doesn’t mean that they’re any easier to deal with — I charge accordingly. Call it what you will. I look at it as a stupidity tax, like cigarettes or lottery tickets.

As I stood in front of the house, the crawling sensation on my skin and the chill that ran down my spine told me everything I needed to know. This client was the real deal.

The first few barricades to engaging my services are simple ones. I’m not in the phone book. Little of my business comes from referral. It makes sense when you think about it. Most folks aren’t liable to tell friends and family around the dinner table about the guy that came and freshened up their haunted house.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t get my share of nut jobs. My best friend and business partner, Carlos, screens those out as best he can. He’s got a good gut instinct about most people, but if I’m being honest, the up-front deposit is just as effective a filter. It eliminates everyone but the crazies and those who are truly suffering.

A palpable sense of dread came over me as I killed the engine and propped the Kawasaki Vulcan 750 on its kickstand. It was so ponderous that it was almost physical, like an invisible thumb pressing down on me from above. I took my time and folded my jacket over the seat before weighting it down with the helmet. Underneath, I wore a long-sleeved button down and khakis. Many people seem surprised that I’m not a priest, but that’s not what I am.

I’m not an exorcist because I’ve never seen a demon.

Call my job what you will. I keep it simple. My name is Paxton Locke and I banish the dead.

The lady of the house opened the door just after I stepped onto the porch. She caught me as I raised my hand to knock and I lowered it awkwardly as she studied me. She was a slim, attractive older woman. She had the air of someone used to be being well-put together and wholly uncomfortable with her current frazzled state.

Her eyes widened in recognition as she studied my face. “I know you! I mean, I’ve seen you before — on television.” Her voice shook. “I’m sorry,” she managed. “I was expecting the gentleman from the telephone.” She attempted to keep her face calm, but the dark circles under her eyes and the slight tremor in her hands as she cradled the opened door betrayed the tremendous stress she was under.

It’s a hell of a thing, questioning your own sanity. I could relate.

“Are you . . . Mr. Locke?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I replied. “Are you Mrs. Jackson?”

“Ms.” She made the correction automatically and without heat. She seemed accustomed to doing so — long divorced or long single, I guessed. Moot, in either case.

“Ms. Jackson,” I hesitated on the threshold. “You don’t happen to have cats, do you?”

She blinked in surprise. “Well, no,” she frowned. “Is that a hindrance to your . . . services?”

I tried to keep the laugh out of my voice. “No, no, not at all. I’m just terribly allergic. Wanted to know if I needed any medicine before I got to work.” I patted the pocket of my slacks where I kept my nose spray. “May I come inside?”

She nodded, tight-lipped. Wordlessly, she stepped aside to let me in. I hoped she hadn’t put two and two together and realized that I’d made the mental jump from ‘Miz’ to ‘cat lady.’

Strangely, as I walked inside the house my sense of tension eased somewhat. The house was tidy, though sparsely decorated. What I assumed were tasteful art prints decorated the walls and the furniture was low and modern. It looked more expensive than comfortable. I glanced at the sumptuous white carpet and tried to ignore the urge to kick off my shoes.

Ms. Jackson stepped back to a side table and retrieved a thick envelope. “The man on the phone said cash was best for the remaining balance.” She hesitated, holding it tight against her stomach with hands. “I’m sorry, I guess I expected someone . . .”

I waited and gave what I hoped was a reassuring smile. This sort of reaction was more common than not and tended toward one of two assumptions.

“When I saw you coming up the steps, I expected someone older,” she finished and laughed nervously. That’s an understandable sentiment — there aren’t many twenty-somethings in the world with bone-white hair, after all.

“A lot of people do. A lot of people expect a priest, too, and I don’t claim to be that. But I am what they say, Ms. Jackson.” I shrugged. “I don’t know what you saw on the news, but they got the story mostly wrong. That’s why I tend to avoid attention as much as possible.” I hesitated, decided, then pushed. “I’m for real and I’m here to help you.”

The Irish called it a geas. In folklore, it was a magical compulsion used on otherwise unsuspecting common folk. If someone had mentioned it to me ten years ago I would have dismissed it as a fairy tale along the lines of Bigfoot or the Easter Bunny.

Now? I call it the push.

Yes, on top of being able to speak to ghosts, I'm a wizard. Just go with it.

The tension went out of her all at once. We went from strangers to friends in the space of a few heartbeats. She smiled and pulled the envelope away from her body. “Let me pay you, then, so you can get started.”

I raised a hand to cut her off. “That’s all right,” I said. “I’m going to help you because you need it. You keep the money, all right? When I get done here, I’m going to reverse the charge on your deposit.”

She blinked. This is the point when some people start smelling ‘scam’ and get suspicious. I don’t like to use the push more than I have to, but sometimes it smooths things over. There’s a natural, human suspicion when offered something valuable for free. We don’t trust it because the universe has taught us that nothing comes without a price.

Most of the time, that’s true, but I take quite a bit of pleasure in sticking my thumb in fate’s eye whenever possible. The lady in front of me was an imperfect being, as we all are, but she in no way deserved what she was going through.

I broke the silence. “Ms. Jackson, can you tell me what signs you’ve seen or heard? Have any of your possessions moved, or gone missing?”

“Call me Shirley,” she supplied, then continued, “no, nothing like that at all. If it was anything like that, I could have rationalized what I was going through. It’s just, these feelings. I can’t get warm. Even with every light in the house on, it’s just so dark in here!” She waved a hand. I saw for the first time that every light fixture in view blazed with light.

If I focused on the lights individually, they were dazzling. I didn’t know what kind of bulbs she’d put in them, but I guessed she’d gotten the brightest ones she could find in an attempt to banish the darkness. As far as it being dark, she was right. Just outside the cone of light that each fixture provided, the light dropped off into shadow. The entire house seemed cloaked in gloom when there was no earthly reason why it should be. Her hallway featured several wall sconces, and the cone of light projected from each faded off into nothing before it reached the floor. If I not for the itch in the back of my brain, the oddity of the light would be confirmation enough that something was weird.

“Okay. There is one other thing you can do for me.”

“Absolutely.” A faint smile crossed her face. “Just say the word.”

“I passed a Starbucks a few blocks away. Could you go get me a coffee? Black, three sugars.”

She stared at me in confused silence for a moment before speaking. “Coffee?”

“If all goes well, by the time you get back I think I’ll have your problem fixed. But I’m going to have a whale of a headache.”

“All . . . right.” I could tell she was mentally prepared for, well, anything, but this simple request had her floored. “I suppose some fresh air will do me good.”

She retrieved her purse from the side table, realized she still held the envelope of cash, and jammed it inside. Keys jingling, she stepped to the door and hesitated one last time. Uncertainty flickered across her face.

“It’s going to be okay. I promise.” No push, just honesty. Maybe the initial charm smoothed the path for her to believe my words now, but I didn’t need to lay it on any thicker. It’s like that, with some people. They want to trust, so the push takes them further than the average person would find reasonable.

She took it for what it was, gave me a silent nod and stepped outside. The click of the door behind her sounded as though it came from miles away.

I watched her through the window until she backed her car out of the driveway and pulled away. As I turned to face the living room, I gave her carpet another glance. Even in the murk, I could tell that it was a brilliant, spotless white. I obeyed my initial impulse and kicked my shoes off before I walked over to sit on the couch. It was all chrome and leather, but surprisingly comfortable despite appearances.

I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and pushed.

“Come talk to me.”

Chapter 2

Using the push on a person is bad enough. To make the effect widespread requires effort an order of magnitude greater. As soon as I finished speaking, I gasped from the effort. My head was already starting to ache. I itched to pop a few Tylenol as soon as my coffee got here. The unexpected comfort of the couch seemed suddenly seductive but I resisted the urge to curl up for a nap.

I forced the weariness aside and told myself to focus on the business at hand. As though in response to my words, the air in the home seemed to thicken. The sound in my ears became strangely muted, as though we’d been suddenly plunged to the bottom of the ocean.

The light in the hallway flickered slightly. At once, in the space between blinks, the ghost manifested. If not for the muted and slightly translucent color of its skin and clothes, I could have convinced myself it was a living child.

It was a young boy before it died. A part of me ached at what this child must have gone through before dying. Your garden-variety death rarely results in a revenant. It takes pain and brutality and terror to produce such a thing, else the world would be even more awash in the restless dead than it sometimes seemed.

Despite that, the boy gave me a calm stare as I studied it. I spread my hands wide and said, “You’re not supposed to be here.”

When it comes down to it, getting rid of a ghost is surprisingly simple if you know the right buttons to push.

I don't do exorcisms. It's more of a thoughtful discussion. I tell the ghosts the truth of what they are.

The boy’s forehead wrinkled and his lips moved silently. I ‘heard’ him in my head. The first few times that happened, I spent a long time wondering if I’d finally slipped a gasket.

Of course I am. I knew you’d come. I felt you.

“Okay,” I allowed. “That happens, sometimes. Your kind are sort of, I don’t know, attracted to me.” Internally, I grimaced. The last few days, I’d been chilling out, catching a few movies in the theater and waiting on some parts for my Kawasaki to come in at a local shop. When Carlos had sent me the details of Shirley Jackson’s haunting, I’d shrugged my shoulders and put the proximity down to luck.

Was the boy here because of me? If so, the freebie was the least I could do.

She’s looking for me, the ghost offered, into the silence.

I frowned. That was new. “She who? Ms. Jackson?”

She. The Edie.

“Never heard of her. Listen—” I began the push, but the boy growled in silent frustration and walked a tight circle in the center of the living room. The lights flickered, on the cusp of going completely out. I shivered despite myself. It was a warm night outside, but the air in here was rapidly turning frigid.

Please. Help me. She’s bad, mister. She killed us, and then . . . The ghost shivered. A look I could ironically describe only as haunted passed across his face. Whoever Edie was, she was bad news on toast. Which meant that this house call had just turned into a much bigger situation.

I swallowed past a suddenly tight throat. “What’s your name?”

It stopped in the middle of the floor, pondered, then said, Bobby.

“Bobby what? You’ve got to give me more to work with.” It’s a double entendre to say that ghosts aren’t all there, but they aren’t, really. They’re faded reflections of the people they once were. Often, they don’t remember much of what they were before, other than the trauma that created them.

A long moment of consideration later, it supplied, Gennaro. I was Bobby Gennaro. Can you keep me safe from her?

I hesitated before answering. No matter how many times I do this, it still hits me in the feels. Logically, I know that I’m not hurting anything, but it still feels like I’m stomping on a kitten or something.

“You don’t have to worry about that.” I pushed, “Hear me now. You think that you’re Bobby Gennaro. You’re not. What Bobby was, is gone.” It opened its mouth to speak, or to argue, but the push has transfixed it. “I promise you, I’ll try and find out what killed Bobby, but that shouldn’t matter to you. You’re a memory, a psychic Xerox. Energy that thinks it’s a little boy. I’m sorry, but that’s the truth.”

The truth hit it like a fist. It shook slightly at the implication. The dawning understanding never lasts long. The truth and the push force them to accept the fact that they’re not real, after all. For something made up mostly of fear, pain, and anger, the only thing keeping it together is a hollow imitation of human self-awareness. Lacking that, there was nothing left to bind those effects together.

There was no sound or fury. The thing that thought it was a boy didn’t move on to another place. He just faded away. The only sign that anything had actually occurred was a swirling, localized breeze that rippled the carpet.

Without its — Bobby’s — presence, the lighting in the house was suddenly overwhelming. White afterimage spots clouded my vision. I blindly made my way to the door and stepped outside. Blinking my eyes, I sat down on the top step of the porch and thought about what had just happened while I waited for my client to return.

I hung around long enough to drink my coffee and let Ms. Jackson do a walk-through of her house. By the time that I’d drained the cup to the dregs, she’d made her way through the entire place and stood, beaming, on her front porch. The smile made her look a decade younger. I adjusted my mental estimation downward accordingly.

“It’s just wonderful! I know you said you didn’t want anything, but how can I ever repay you?”

It was probably rude of me, but I said little and made a fast exit despite verbal offers of a nightcap and nonverbal offers of far more. Shirley Jackson was a settled issue. I had other things on my mind. I typically wouldn’t complain about a job being too easy, but, well. That had been too easy.

I’m not used to ghosts going quietly into the night. Maybe it’s a side effect of whatever process creates them, but they’re usually more pissed off than Bobby Gennaro had been. Even with the push, it’s a literal battle of wills to get them to listen to the truth. Once they’ve heard it, there’s wailing and gnashing of teeth as they try to hold onto their foothold in this world. The stronger, or more traumatized examples will tend to try and physically attack. They can’t touch living flesh directly, but there’s a crescent-shaped scar on the side of my neck where a glass knick-knack came in too hot.

I pulled out my phone and tapped out a quick text message to Carlos in regards to a refund. He’ll grumble, but he knew and understood my reasoning. He may complain, but he’ll take care of it. Before he replied, I tucked the phone away and started the bike. The sun was getting low in the sky. I wanted to get back before dark.

Ever since this whole thing started, I’ve hated to travel at night. The world isn’t awash with ghosts, but there are plenty if you look in the right place. There are way too many ghosts standing on the side of the road, glaring at traffic. I suspect, though I’ve never seen it, that they’re responsible for those mysterious pieces of rock that tended to hit you out of nowhere when you’re driving along. They can’t all be from dump trucks.

I habitually strap on a helmet for the same reason. When you’ve seen as many dead motorcyclists as I have, it isn’t optional equipment. I shifted into gear, checked my mirrors, and made a tight turn to head back. Shirley Jackson’s subdivision sat on top of a low hill. I coasted down to the stop sign at the intersection. The evening rush hour was over. After looking both ways I gave the bike some gas and passed through the empty intersection.

My phone vibrated in my jacket pocket, but I ignored it for the moment. I had a pretty good hunch what the message was going to be, so for the moment, I just zoned out and enjoyed the ride while I could.

This only felt easy because it wasn’t over and until I figure out who — or what — Edie is, it wouldn’t be.

Chapter 3

One of the best things about RV parks is their decided lack of ghosts. It makes sense, really. For the most part, no one actually lives in one long enough to die there. And given the demographics of the people who hang around them, on the rare occasion when someone does die, it’s from natural causes.

You can't say the same for a real house. Even in the newest neighborhoods, there's always someone choking to death on a chicken bone, drowning in their pool, or dying at the hands of an abusive spouse. Then, like clockwork, their spiritual revenant — or their harried family — shows up and wants me to do something about it. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Internet, but it’s forever. Shirley Jackson recognized me from TV, and I could probably guess what type of channel she’d been watching. A decade ago my life was torn apart, and the ensuing courtroom drama made for good ratings even in reruns. That would be bad enough, if it weren’t for the conspiracy websites and the obsessed vultures who run them. The dead just seem to home in like bloodhounds if they don’t attach themselves to a person or place. It’s debatable which group is more annoying.

One way or another, living or dead — they always find me. The people like Ms. Jackson aren’t so bad, but there’s an entitlement mentality to so many of the living that seek me out that drives me batty. Look, I get the whole Spider-man creed — great power, great responsibility, all that jazz. But where I come from, just because someone is capable of doing something for you doesn’t mean they’re obligated to do so. Particularly if you’re rude and condescending about it.

Those factors, along with my own innate desire to ramble and inability to relax in one place, determine my nomadic lifestyle.

The Itasca motor coach, like my Kawasaki, looks like crap on the outside. The engine and interior — again, like the motorcycle — are immaculate and in perfect working order. That’s more difficult to pull off than you’d think, but the camouflage is worth it. I get into some pretty shady areas, and the RV can’t get into the same tight spaces as the bike. I can afford better, but I’d rather not leave a shiny, tempting target lying around to pique the interest of would-be thieves. Your typical RV park resident trends elderly and cares more about the weather than burgling the contents of someone else’s home on wheels, but there are exceptions to every rule. You can always depend on touristus Americanus to haul around an obnoxious kid or two.

Besides serving up the comforts of home, the RV eliminates any need for me stay in hotels or motels during my travels. The amount of people who die in rented rooms, for whatever reason, is quite shocking. That’s not something they talk about in the commercials, of course. Considering how infrequently they wash the bedding, who wants to lay down where a guy just died? Especially if he’s glowering while you sleep and making the air conditioning alternate from blistering heat to Arctic cold.

As I pulled into the campground, the elderly couple sitting under the awning of their own motor coach near the entrance gave me a friendly wave. I returned it automatically. I’ve been staying at the place for just over two days and the local denizens have already accepted me.

Unless I missed my guess, the senior citizens probably prowled around my parked RV before they came to any conclusions. They wouldn’t break in, but they’d certainly inspect for odd odors or faded blood stains.

I can respect that level of paranoia — trust but verify. Of course, if they had any inkling of what I had stashed under my bed, they’d justifiably freak out.

I got the Kawasaki up on the rear rack and chained it in place. My headache was coming on strong despite the caffeine. I rubbed absently at my forehead as I dug the RV keys out of my jacket. My phone buzzed again and I muttered, “Yeah, yeah. Hold your horses.”

The Itasca is old enough that it doesn’t have any of the modern bells and whistles like sliders or the awning my neighbors are chilling under. Despite that, it’s more than roomy for my needs, but that’s mainly because I stripped a lot of the excess out.

When I bought it, there was a sofa bed behind the passenger seat and a third captain’s seat on the driver’s side. A folding dinette sat between the seats and could serve them all when they turned to face it. I had everything removed behind the front seats back to the small kitchen area. I’m the only person who’s ever slept inside, so the sofa bed and the lofts over the front seats and the queen bed in the rear were extraneous. I pulled the loft over the bed to get more headroom and I've re-purposed the space up front as storage for clothing and other essentials. I never know what kind of weather and terrain I’m going to be dealing with. A broad wardrobe selection is a must. The narrow closet in the rear just doesn’t cut it in terms of storage space.

I installed a folding workbench in place of the sofa bed. This serves me as both desk and dinner table and strikes me as a far more efficient use of space than the prior configuration. Of course, I’m doing a lot more than camping.

I pulled the door shut behind me and locked it. Even though I’ve upgraded it from stock, the door itself is flimsier than I’d like. For a little peace of mind, I installed board hangars on either side of the door as well as the frame around it. A short piece of two-by-four braces the outward-opening door against the frame of the wall itself. It’s not impervious, but it’s sturdy enough that any serious attempt to breach the door should wake me up.

You’d think I’d have a hard time sleeping, but I have the opposite problem. On nights like these, once my headache fades it’s all I can do to keep my eyes open. It’s not quite a physical fatigue but the push takes it out of me.

My bed beckoned, but I had work I needed to do first. I booted up my laptop while I assembled a sandwich from the supplies in my fridge. In the time that it took to wheel the padded office chair over to the computer and sit down, it was up and ready for me. The RV park’s WiFi was slow but serviceable.

By the time that I pushed the computer away in frustration, I’ve reduced the sandwich to crumbs and exhausted every ounce of Google-fu in my arsenal. No matter what spelling I use, I can find no reported death for a Bobby — or Robert — Gennaro. It’s like the kid didn’t even exist.

With all the crazy stuff I’ve seen, it wouldn’t shock me to have finally slipped a gear upstairs, but I know Bobby — or his ghost, at least — was real. The drag of exhaustion is something I can’t deny. Maybe I imagined the house I went to, and maybe I imagined the client, but I can’t deny that the ghost was real. Ergo, the rest of it was real, too.

Whatever the case, I’m not doing myself any favors keeping myself awake. I took a few minutes to compose e-mails and text messages to see if any of my other sources could find some information that isn’t freely available on the Internet. By the time that I woke up in the morning, those inquiries would hopefully have borne fruit.

My exhaustion has grown to the point that just getting undressed seems a Herculean labor. I discarded my clothes on the floor and crawled under the covers. Mystery or not, sleep calls. I’ve put it off as long as I can.

A kernel of a thought surfaced as my head struck the pillow, but it disappeared just as quickly. Like Bobby, I faded away.

The sunlight slanted through the window and cut through the haze of sleep. I scrubbed my eyes with the back of my hand and grunted in annoyance. Without checking my watch or phone, I could tell that I’d slept for a good while. The only problem was, it had been one of those sleeps that left you feeling not quite fulfilled when you woke. I can’t complain, though — the first time I used the push, I was in a coma for almost three weeks. Thankfully, the use of it had put an end to a life-threatening situation, or it would have been a fatal and final use of the ability on my part.

It gets easier to use every time, but I’m not sure if that’s entirely a good thing. That, though, is a worry for another time. I decided that another hour or so wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. I measured the angle of the light then scooted marginally over, out of the direct sunlight. I settled back into my pillow with a contented sigh. Hopefully by the time the sun reached my new position I’ll be feeling more rested.

After a few minutes, I realized that it was a pointless effort. My mind was already in motion in an attempt to plot my next move. I could push that aside and force myself to rest, but no matter how hard I think, I need more information before I can make a reasoned decision. The lack of hard answers, in my experience, is a better wake-up call than coffee. I’m in no mood to lie there and speculate.

With an annoyed sigh, I grabbed my phone and pulled up my text messages to see if any of last night’s inquiries have borne fruit.

It looks like there will be no more sleep for me this morning. Detective Kent Sikora — the most legitimate of my friends — has already gotten back to me, with the painfully short reply of “CALL ME ASAP.” For a Luddite cop on the cusp of retirement, that’s the digital equivalent of a long speech.

Sikora and I go way back. Before he moved to warmer climes, he was a Sheriff’s deputy in Kenosha County, Wisconsin. Before we met Kent had gotten an unfortunate assignment to the investigation of a heinous set of crimes that went down in a little place called Pleasant Prairie. My hometown.

A lot of cops would have shuffled a kid like me off to the loony bin, but Kent had, and still has, a gut instinct about the truth. He believed me when many others did not. The concrete proof that he saw later only cemented his trust in what I had to say, even without the push. Not that I’d ever use it on Kent, or any of my friends. I feel guilty enough about using it to smooth things over with clients — using it on friends seems tactless.

In a way, he reminds me of my dad. His presence is a salve on the wound of that loss. It’s only six in the morning in Phoenix, but Kent’s an early riser. I punched the callback button. He picked up on the second ring.

“What are you up to this time?” he growled. “You better not need me to vouch for you with any local yokels.” He held the silence for a moment, then chuckled when I refused to rise to the bait. “Hey, kid.”

“Hey, Kent,” I said, failing to keep the smile from my face and my voice. “How’s your golf game?”

“It was a hundred degrees yesterday. In October, for God’s sake. I didn’t move more than six inches from an air conditioning vent all day long.”

When Kent lived in Wisconsin, all he did was complain about the cold. All his career and location change has done is flip-flop his complaining, but there’s no malice to the carousing — it’s just an aspect of his character. When I first met him, it was off-putting, until I got a glimpse of the clever mind hiding behind the facade.

One of his fellow deputies told me that Kent could sit down with a suspect and jovially grumble them into a confession within an hour. I half wonder what sort of confession he wants out of me, but I disregard that line of thinking almost immediately. He’s not probing for an admission — he’s just making sure I’m okay, ‘keeping my mind right’, as he puts it.

“Yeah, I’d pass on the golf too, if I sucked as bad as you do.”

Kent snorted laughter. “I’m actually glad you reached out, kid. I got some weirdness going on out here.”

“My kind of weirdness?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not exactly. But I could use your input, if you’ve got the time.” He huffed. “I know you’re some big-time Internet thing now. I can’t make a promise but I can probably squeeze a consulting fee out of the department. You wouldn’t believe some of the weird shit we’ve paid for.”

“When I’m done with this, I’m headed that way. Maybe we’ll make a day trip to Four Bees and talk it over.” The restaurant north of Phoenix is a hole-in-the-wall of the first order, but they serve biscuits and gravy in a canoe and pancakes the size of a manhole cover. Between that and the taco trucks, if I stayed out there for long, I’d get too fat to get into the RV. It would be a lousy way to end up, but the trip getting there would be a blast. “You buy me breakfast and we’ll call it square.”

“That’s a deal. So — this Gennaro kid. Bobby, right?”

“Right.”

He sighed, “Huh. I got nothing. Checked every database we got, nationwide, and nobody with that name has died in at least the last couple of years. A few older guys, but natural causes. This was a kid, you say?”

“Yeah. The real deal, all the way. So, natural causes are out. I’m guessing it would have been pretty bad. I didn’t get any details, just that sense.” I thought it over, then said, “I’m guessing recent, too. So maybe no one has found a body yet. Is that going to be a problem?”

Kent made a grumbling noise in the back of his throat as he considered it. “If anyone asks, I can chalk it up to an anonymous tip. It would be out of left field, but not too out of the ordinary. I’ll keep my eyes open and see if anything rolls across the wire. It’s a big nothing burger right now. What’s your next move?”

“I’ve got a couple of other irons in the fire. I’ll see how they pan out and go from there. Worst case scenario, I go to Rockville.”

Kent was silent for a moment as he considered that. Finally, he said, “Avoid that if you can. But if you do, hurry your ass down here and we’ll sit you out by the pool and bake that witch out of you.” His tone turned serious. “But if you do go, don’t let her get into your head, kid.”

We exchanged the quick goodbyes of longtime friends. As I lowered the phone from my ear, I couldn’t help but cough a strained laugh.

Witch.

He’s more right than he knows.

Chapter 4

The target of my next call was in the next time zone over from Kent and more than likely to bring me to physical harm if I called this early. While I waited until a more polite hour, I cracked my laptop open and tried looking for Bobby again. My searches bore no more fruit than they had the night before, so I settled for watching FailArmy YouTube videos and reminiscing about the past.

The case that brought Kent Sikora into my life was not only heinous but as the investigation proceeded, he discovered other crimes related to stolen property across state lines. To aid in the widening investigation and coordinate the effort between jurisdictions, the higher-ups assigned another detective, this one from the Illinois State Police. At some point some guys from the FBI were involved, as well, but I never met them. They had bigger fish to fry than talking to a freaked-out teenager.

From a police perspective, the crimes in Illinois paled in comparison to the blood-soaked scene at my childhood home. Of course, in a very real sense, the stolen items that Mother brought into our house were the root cause of everything that happened.

As such, ISP sent Detective Esteban De La Rosa to join the growing task force and aid in the coordination. Like Sikora, De La Rosa was a tenured investigator, but where Sikora was gruff and tended toward shabbiness, De La Rosa was smooth, polite, and wore a different tailored suit every time I saw him. You’d think that the two men would butt heads, but they hit it off famously.

Like Sikora, Esteban changed careers after Pleasant Prairie. Where Sikora was still an active member of a police department, his counterpart shifted to the private sector. He had a large extended family in the San Diego area, where his brother and several of his nephews ran a private investigation firm. He ‘pulled the pin’ with ISP, packed up his own branch of the family, and joined them.

I feel safe to say that it’s more than coincidence that both men moved to warmer climes at the conclusion of the case. The events that destroyed my world occurred in early spring, but it was uncommonly cold that year. The weather seemed all the more biting for me, given what happened. I can hardly imagine what it must have been like for Sikora and De La Rosa as they sorted through reams and stacks of eldritch material no respectable museum would ever have exhibited. That’s not even considering the crime scene photos and physical evidence. As bad as my own experiences were, theirs must have been worse, though in a less personal way.

I spent some time with Esteban’s family not long after. To my surprise, they accepted me almost as if I were one of their own. While I know that I wasn’t personally responsible for anything that happened to my own family, I am often reluctant to let anyone else in. I got others hurt once — I don’t want it to happen again. Those months with the De La Rosas was the only time I’ve let myself get close to anyone since the incident. Even then, when it seemed I was becoming too content — dare I say happy — with my lot in life, a tight, crawling sensation would rise up my back. I don’t know if it’s some residual guilt or the universe’s way of telling me I don’t deserve to be happy, but it’s unsettling.

Maybe that’s why I roam the way I do, though I know that I at least have touchstones in the southwest, should I ever need anything. It’s an ersatz extended family to be sure, but the friendships are true enough.

Carlos Gallardo is one of the associate investigators for De La Rosa Brothers and just a few years older than I am. We hit it off pretty well, despite the fact that he married young and already has a couple of kids under his belt. His wife, Karen, is Esteban’s niece and serves as the accountant for the agency. Before I met them, Carlos worked with San Diego PD. At my age, he’s not anywhere near retirement age. I’m guessing Karen had something to do with it — policing is an ever-dangerous occupation these days. The danger presented by following wayward husbands and looking for runaway children pales in comparison to his prior occupation.

Carlos and Karen, along with Kent and Esteban, are the only people who know the full truth of the horrors that happened to me and the abilities that I have as a result. I suspect, though I don’t know for sure, that Kent and Esteban leaned toward psychological trauma when I tried to convince them during the investigation. Considering the fact that they’d had three weeks to build the foundation of the case before I woke from my coma, their chagrin was obvious in that first interview as I slowly and methodically tore down the nascent construction of their case against Mother.

They couldn’t believe me until they had a more concrete example. By contrast, Carlos and his wife were more immediately accepting.

Karen considers herself a bruja blanca, a white witch. I’ve never seen her do much more than burn incense and play with cards, but she makes up for any lack of true ‘magic’ with a pretty impressive library. Maybe her attitude is a front, but she still spends most of her free time crawling around used book stores and estate sales. If there’s anything weird out there she hasn’t heard of, she can probably find it, somewhere. I’m not sure how that situation works out with church attendance — the De La Rosas are some of the most faithful people I’ve ever met, Karen included — but it works for her. I guess Father Rosado is a bit more laid back about that sort of thing than Pastor Schmidt was back home. If I had to make my guess, it’s a cultural thing — residual mysticism from a time before the conquistadores brought Catholicism to the Americas with the sword and the gun.

No judgment here — I’m the one who talks to ghosts, after all. So, while Kent is my intel source in the mundane world, when things get weird, I turn to Karen. More often than not, she gets results. At just after eight A.M. Pacific, I got her on the phone.

“Edie. That’s all he said?”

“Yup,” I agreed.

“What was the context?”

I thought it over for a second. “He said she was bad, she was looking for him. Oh, and that she killed them.”

Karen hummed in interest. “So not a ghost, then. And it’s a she?”

“Right.”

“You always ask the most interesting questions, dear.” She clucks her tongue. “Give me a couple of days, I’ll dig around and see what I got.”

I held back a sigh. Call it a hunch, but I was starting to get the distinct sense that my current situation was leaning toward the time-sensitive side of the urgency spectrum. Still, it wasn’t fair to rush Karen, particularly when she was doing the digging as a favor.

“It’s always faster, faster with you, isn’t it?” She laughed. “You need to come for a visit soon, the little ones miss you. And I’ve been talking you up to one of my girlfriends.”

“No rush.” I resisted the urge to grit my teeth. “And no comment.”

Karen laughed again. “All right. Maybe one of these days. I’ll text you if I find anything out.”

I hesitated, then continued, “Hey, Kent’s looking into it on his end, but just on the off-chance that you guys have better Google-fu than I do, can you have one of the guys dig around and see if they can find anything on a kid named Bobby Gennaro? He may or may not be on a missing person’s report.”

“How’s that spelled?”

“Your guess is as good as mine,” I admitted. “I didn’t stop to check his ID.”

Karen laughed again. “Well, we will try to do our best with the limited amount you have to offer, sweetie.”

“Fair enough,” I laughed in reply. “And thanks again. I really do appreciate it.”

When I was a kid, time seemed to move at molasses speed. The biggest change I’ve noticed since becoming at least a marginal adult is that the syrup is much less viscous. The drawback to that is that urgency becomes accelerated. I don’t understand why I feel that way now. Bobby is already dead and Shirley Jackson’s house is no longer haunted. My work is complete. I should feel perfectly happy with chilling where I am, or pulling up stakes and moving on. Florida’s nice this time of year. And the beaches are usually ghost-free. Soaking up some rays and burning off the chill of my meeting with Bobby is just what the doctor ordered.

But some part of me doesn’t want to give it up.

She’s bad, mister. She killed us, and then . . .

Killed us. So somewhere, presumably, ‘us’ awaits discovery. Depending on what Kent digs up for me, maybe someone has already found them. If not, does Bobby have a family frantic with worry? Or did ‘she’ wipe them all out?

Whatever the case, justice is beyond the scope of the authorities. Something that can so terrify a ghost is unlikely to be within the capabilities of the SWAT team. And if the Vatican has a team of ninja-exorcists available on call, I don’t have their number.

The little voice in the back of my head popped up and noted that Bobby wasn’t far off from the age that I was when my life went off the rails. I was just lucky enough to survive.

Sometimes I hated that little guy.

I’ve planted seeds with my friends that should bear fruit at some point if there’s anything to find. The fact that the Internet was a bust for me may not mean anything. The police, anymore, tend to be close-lipped with the press, particularly if they have yet to catch a suspect. If there’s anything out there about Bobby, Kent will find it for me. Karen’s search is more of a long shot, so if I’m not going to wait for results, that’s the avenue I need to investigate. My other source isn’t quite as friendly as Karen. In some ways, it’s even more of a long shot.

But.

Depending on how things go, and what kind of mood Mother is in, there’s a real possibility that it might pay off.

If I wasn’t going to sit and wait, my next-best option was to visit my mother. As unpalatable as that was for a whole host of reasons, it felt right.

Time to hit the road.

Growing up, I always expected prisons to look like imposing, Gothic castles with dark stone turrets and gargoyles. You know — Shawshanky. The nondescript, concrete block construction of Rockville Penitentiary could have been anything from an office park to a warehouse, so long as you ignored the fences and barbed wire. It seemed altogether too bright and cheery of a place to house my mother, but it was what it was. The prosecutors argued for harsher environs, but the law, in its infinite wisdom, didn’t seem to believe that women are desirous of the harshest punishment. Even when the crimes are notoriously heinous, some external force must have driven them to such atrocities.

During sentencing, I’d gotten a distinct sense that the judge would have been much more lenient had there not been so many cameras in the courtroom. As much as the media has been the bane of my existence these past few years, I have them to thank for that, I suppose. Of course, there were harder prisons than this — and ones closer to home — but by the vagaries of the justice system, she’d ended up here.

Myself, I’d have argued for the death penalty, or at the very least, a lifetime of solitary confinement, but I’m neither a disinterested party or entirely innocent. In the eyes of the law, I’m not guilty of any crimes. In my own eyes my failures made me just as accountable, and the stain of what I witnessed remains on my soul.

In the end it’s the kind of stain that I can never erase, no matter how many freebie house cleanings I do for the Shirley Jacksons of the world.

Esteban’s priest has tried to talk to me about that sentiment more than once. I got the sense that there was more behind his words than the usual platitudes, but I brushed his entreaties off. Forgiveness doesn’t feel merited. It would be one thing if I could tell myself that I lacked the ability to stop what Mother had been doing, but in point of fact, I had stopped her. My action had simply come too late to make a difference for my father.

I live my life in the belief that I am irredeemable, regardless of any future actions on my part. Oh, the priest told me about things like Saul and the Damascus Road. Part of me wanted to listen to him. But my more pragmatic side knew that my chance was gone.

The woman inside of this unimposing concrete fortress saw fit to that.

The Bible says to honor your mother and father. My father is dead. My mother is to blame. I planned to try my best, but I could make no promises.

I took a final, deep breath of fresh air and steeled my nerves to walk inside.

Chapter 5

My mother is in her early fifties, though she can easily pass for a much younger woman. Her unlined skin and the blond waterfall that brushes her shoulders as she strolls into the meeting room have a lot to do it, but it’s mostly how she moves.

Even in shapeless khaki prison garb she comes across as radiant. Mother seems to be leading, rather than led by, the guards who flank her on either side. She reaches her seat across from me and sits down. Two rectangular tables pushed together to form a square sit in the exact center of the room. A low plate of clear Lexan bolted into the seam between the two pieces of furniture establishes a visible and palpable border.

There are few benefits of being the son of a celebrity criminal. One of them is not having to meet with said criminal in the same Plexiglas phone booths as everyone else. The staff explains the consequences of any move to the opposite side of the table in excruciating detail every time I sign into the prison. The only real urge I feel to cross the barrier is my desire to strangle her with my bare hands. There have been several times in the past where that would have been worth the beat down from the guards.

As the guards stepped away to assume their positions on either side of the door, Mother smiled and says, “Oh, Paxton, my dear boy, how are you?” She lifts a hand, as though to tousle my hair, but a cleared throat from one of the guards and the tug of the waist cuffs remind her that such things are not allowed, no matter how open this meeting room is.

The prison may not have looked intimidating on the outside, but they were serious about their work. That, if nothing else, gave me some peace of mind that this place would suffice to contain her. But that doesn’t stop me from making periodic checkups.

Unable to touch me, her eyes glittered with barely-concealed malice. She settled for a verbal assault. “I do wish you’d do something different with your hair, dear. It looks so unflattering.”

My hair has been bone-white since I woke up from my coma at sixteen years old — yet another thing my mother is responsible for. I prefer it buzzed close to my scalp not out of any sense of vanity, but out of practicality. If I keep it short enough, I can maintain the cut with a beard trimmer and not have to worry about things like combs or hair products. I see enough of the dead to realize that time marches ever onward. The few minutes a day I don’t have to spend on hair is an investment I can make in other pursuits.

And yes, it’s a haircut that Mother would never have approved of, back in the day. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that rubbing her nose in it, though childish, was one factor.

The air of sweetness and light that she’s exuded since her imprisonment is markedly different from the mother I remember growing up. There’s a reason for that. I shudder to think what someone as amoral as the monster before me could do in a place like a prison with the push.

It was a close-run thing in the courtroom, so many years ago. There were limits to how much she could tweak things, given the cameras and court reporter’s transcript, but she tried. My first push had weakened her, for a time, or I imagine she simply would have commanded the personnel at the jail to let her walk free. As the trial drew close to the halfway point, something told me that she was growing closer to recovery.

In desperation, I drew near to her one day. I summoned up all the anger and sorrow within me and pushed harder than any other time in my life up to that point.

What would Dad say? I’d whispered in her ear. The words themselves didn’t seem as important as the meaning I put behind them. My father, God rest his soul, was kind, honest, and humble. In retrospect, I can’t see how a man such as he ever saw anything in my mother, but I suppose she was as much a chameleon with him as she was with the rest of the world.

Pushing Mother to stop in the midst of killing my father had hit me like a ton of bricks and put me into a hospital bed. I guess I had recovered, as well, because my second push just gave me a migraine for three days.

What had begun as a trial wrought with proclamations and lawyerly machinations became something else entirely as my mother openly and honestly confessed to every crime arrayed before her and more, to an incredulous prosecuting attorney. Her flabbergasted defense attorney protested and objected, to no avail. The judge allowed him to leave the case when it became evident that his client had no desire to defend herself against the charges. After a public defender replaced him the gleeful prosecuting attorney continued his questioning. My mother dug herself a deeper hole with every word.

I’ve only seen the effects of the push on two living people in my life. My father’s eyes were desperate, pleading, and ultimately relieved as my mother’s work upon him did not deliver the results she sought. My mother’s eyes shone with hate and repressed fury even as she cheerfully described her long train of abuses.

The look in her eyes today puts the lie to the sugar of her words. The compulsion won’t allow her to say something overtly harmful or bend anyone to her will. That’s so much like the gentle kindness of my father that my heart aches at the memory of him.

Across the table, I sense rather than see the gentle hum of the push, binding her will tight. Every time I visit, I worry that some aspect of it will begin to unravel, but it seemed as strong as ever.

Even with the enduring strength of the push, Mother constantly schemes and tests her limits. Reminding me of my hair is her way of slipping a subtle knife into my heart and reminding me of the night that Dad died. I kept my face blank and refused to let her see the effect she had on me. Despite that, she smirked with something not unlike satisfaction. If anyone knows the secrets behind your face, it’s your mother.

Mother smiled broadly as though reading my thoughts. “So, what’s the occasion, my dear? My commissary account has plenty of money in it, you needn’t trouble yourself for little old me.”

Another knife. The one drawback of pushing my mother to honesty was the attention the trial drew afterward. A domestic disturbance ending in the death of a spouse is a non-event in the eyes of the press — more so when the female spouse does the killing. A murder trial where the defendant claims she used ritual magic to try to force her child to kill her husband in a blood sacrifice? That’s ratings dynamite. Years later, she still gets fan mail. I’d assume there are money orders as well, given that I’m not financing her.

One of the message boards dubbed my courtroom appearance as ‘Elfin.’ I buzzed my own shoulder-length hair not long after. Ghosts are bad enough — who wants to deal with a bunch of black witch groupies? Even with the buzz cut, I’m recognized more often than is comfortable.

I shook off thoughts of hair dye and forced myself back on track.

“I had some questions for you. I thought maybe we could make a trade.”

She raised an eyebrow. “I see. And what do you think you can offer that I’d like to have, dear boy?”

I spread my hands and shrugged. “Within reason. If your fan club is keeping you stocked with Twinkies, I suppose that’s off the list.” Two can play at this game — my mother was a health fiend when I was growing up. Other kids tried smoking on the sly; Dad and I would sneak off to the movies and sate ourselves on fat and processed sugar. It made up for the double-digit servings of kale and arugula we had to choke down each week. I hope prison food is driving her batty.

She gave me a broad smile. “There are only two things I want. I want my book and I want my push.”

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. “I’m pretty sure I said within reason, psycho.”

She brought a hand to her mouth and tried to hold back her giggle. “Oh, so earnest. You’re just a bold little paladin spitting in the face of death, aren’t you?” Her laughter finally tinkled forth. “My, my, how things work out in the end.”

I sighed and made as if to leave. Her face flashed through an unreadable mix of emotions. She said, quickly, “Wait. Wait. Ask your question.”

“Cooperating freely? That’s not like you.”

She beamed. “I’m in the process of rehabilitation, my dear. Who knows? Maybe one day parole will be forthcoming and we can be a family again.”

I resisted the urge to respond to that and simply said, “What’s big and bad enough to put the scare into a ghost?”

Mother adopted a thoughtful expression and leaned forward. “Interesting. Very interesting. I could refer to my book—” I frowned and shook my head firmly. “Pity. Well, not many things due to the shade’s inherent incorporeal nature. You yourself should know just how difficult they are even to touch. Do you have any other insight?”

She’s into it now — her Professor Locke voice is in full effect. All she needs is the reading glasses that used to habitually perch on her nose and it would be as though she’d stepped back a decade in time.

My debate on what else to tell her wasn’t an easy one. Ostensibly, she’s secured. I visit more frequently than I’d like just to assure myself that the push holds and I’ve established that. But all too often, information is power. I’m reluctant to give her much more.

“It said ‘she’ was after him.” What the hell, in for a penny, in for a pound. “It called her Edie.”

Mother grinned. “Well, well, well. For a freebie, all I will say is this — the book should tell you what you need to know, though I’m surprised you didn’t figure it out on your own. Perhaps — you’re not quite as mentally robust as I thought. Anything more, I shan’t say.” She raised her head and called out, “We’re done here, guard.”

As they collected her to take her back to her cell, she blew me an awkward kiss and winked. The fire in her eyes had faded and I see something akin to merriment there.

I don’t have a mirror handy, but I’m certain that my own expression is not nearly as joyful.

I held back my anger until I was secure inside the Itasca. The warden and the guards already thought my mom was nuts — I for sure didn’t want them to start wondering about me. Who knew what sort of trouble they could put me in if they thought mother’s ‘madness’ was somehow hereditary?

“Damn it!” I screamed, punching the padded back of the passenger seat.

What my mother called a ‘book’ should be more properly called a grimoire — a book of spells. The thing made my skin crawl the first time I saw it and didn’t bode well for my life afterward.

Back in the good old days, my mother was an adjunct professor of cuneiform studies at the University of Chicago. Her office at home was just something regarded as the place where all the things Dad and I weren’t supposed to touch were. As Esteban and Kent later discovered, Mother had stolen many of the antiques in her office — either directly through the university itself, or acquired with the school as a front. It took a team of forensic accountants to unravel the web of deception she’d constructed. It seemed she’d scoured the globe far and wide for a weird and idiosyncratic array of items. Some of them she was able to acquire for little more than a promise and a plea, while others she had to simply pay for, under the table. As it turned out, the university had already been looking into funding irregularities in the department before Mother’s indictment for murder.

I imagine it was quite the “a-ha” moment for the dean when he opened the paper to see the detectives shoving Mother into the back of a police car.

The investigative team tracked down the origin of the vast majority of the items. Until they were able to return the purloined goods to their rightful place of ownership — various museums and such — the police stored them as evidence. But there was no record of the grimoire, or at least, none that I ever heard about.

The first time I saw it was the night I woke to see my mother standing at the foot of my bed. She spoke arcane words in a guttural chant with the heavy tome cradled in reverent arms. I almost thought the entire experience a dream until I realized what the push was and where it came from.

I was mother’s experiment, you see. She needed to make sure the spell was survivable before she used it on herself. Of all the betrayals she has lined up against me, that one hurts the most.

The next time I saw the book was the first real opportunity I had to examine it. Even if it weren’t magic, the specifics of its existence were odd, to say the least.

Historically speaking, Sumerian persisted as a written language until the first century, when Akkadian superseded it. Widespread use of paper as a writing medium came around over two centuries later.

Mother’s leather-bound book, inscribed with Sumerian cuneiform on yellowed but flexible paper, shouldn’t have existed. Even if it was some sort of archaic documentation on Chinese-produced paper circa 300 AD, there was no logical reason why it shouldn’t have rotted away to dust centuries ago. I’d like to think that some unknown person transcribed and rebound it in later years, that it’s not an example of an underlying insanity in the order of the world, but I know that’s naive.

I speak to ghosts, after all. A magic book isn’t entirely out of the realm of possibility in that regard.

The other aspects of the grimoire made it impossible to deny that there are more mysteries in the world than most of us are willing to admit. When I was a kid, I played Dungeons and Dragons with my friends. Chaotic good ranger, in case you’re wondering. Just like Aragorn in Lord of the Rings. But I played enough to know the game mechanics for other character classes. While wizards could memorize various spells for casting, they would ‘lose’ them once they used them, and have to spend time in study to recover. In game design, that’s known as a balancing factor. It moderates a character class that could otherwise go around blowing the bad guys away with fireballs, requiring study and rest to regain their power.

I wish it worked that way in real life.

Mother’s grimoire defied logic. At first blush, the anonymous author had written it in thick cuneiform that looked quite a bit like the pictures of old Sumerian clay tablets in mother’s textbooks. But if you held the book long enough and looked at the letters, they wiggled. Given enough time, the letters would turn to easily readable, if stylistic, English lettering — like a creepy, animated word processor font function. Microsoft Office, 300 AD edition.

Much to my mother’s chagrin, I was hardly the best student, though I did enjoy reading for pleasure. But when it came to studying, I had a hard time remembering anything I read that didn’t pertain to my core interests of movies and history. I didn’t read much of the grimoire, but the bits that I did have stuck with me, as though the words themselves made an imprint on the insides of my eyelids. Some of it I’ve tried to forget, or at least bury under images of kittens and stuffed unicorns, but no avail. It’s always there, buzzing around in the back of my head. If I don’t think about the pages, I can ignore them, but anytime I think about them, they pop up in my mind’s eye as though I were reading them anew.

So, while the police kept most of Mother’s things in evidence during the trial, the grimoire escaped notice. Unless you knew what you were looking for, it was just another old-fashioned book on a shelf full of them. Most of them were Dad’s; despite teaching history, he had a love for classic literature — Dumas, de Cervantes, Austen. It was a love he tried to instill in me, but I had little patience for the heavy-handed prose. I have since read them all. I feel that I better understand my father for the effort and regret the impetuousness of youth.

With dad gone and mother in jail, I had plenty of time — too much, perhaps — to search through the grimoire. I never found the spell Mother used to imbue the two of us with the push, but I found others.

The tome seemed to respond to my own, unspoken desires. As I paged through it, the spells I glanced at ranged from illusion to restoration — amusement to utility. The innocuous benevolence presented by the book confused me, however. I found nothing in its pages to explain my Mother’s sudden descent into homicidal madness.

What little I saw when I made the mistake of considering that question while holding the book disgusts me to this day, like a cringe-worthy YouTube video on an unstoppable loop. That, thankfully, was a very small part of what I took away. Much of what I learned has been helpful. I’m thankful every time that I reflect upon the experience that my childish sentiment while reading was so innocent and free of malice.

Who knows what terrors it might have shown me had I looked upon it with a jaundiced eye?

Who knows what it showed my mother?

My curiosity as to the eternal fate of my father is responsible for much of my knowledge regarding ghosts, as well as the ability to discern their presence and communicate with them. And the blemish-clearing healing spell I happened upon helped ensure that my latter teenage years remained acne-free.

I’m kicking myself now, though. If my mother spoke truly, the grimoire held some sort of clue as to the identity of the entity that so terrified Bobby.

Ten years ago, at the height of my mother’s trial for the murder of my father — not long after I got a horrified glimpse of how she’d been using the book — I doused it in diesel fuel and burnt the thing to ashes.

I’ve regretted my knee-jerk reaction countless times since then, but only intermittently. The book was just a tool, like a gun or a hammer. Misused, it could be dangerous, but compared to with a firearm, it was like a nuclear-powered Swiss Army knife. In the wrong hands, with the wrong imagination, the consequences were unimaginable. I had a hard enough time trusting myself with what I learned. I couldn’t very well risk someone else getting their hands on it.

The knowledge of the grimoire was lost.

I was going to have to do this the hard way.

Chapter 6

The drive to Rockville and the visit with Mother had burned up much of the day. By the time that I was able to compose myself enough to slip behind the wheel of the Itasca the sun hung fat and swollen on the horizon. With only oblique answers to show for the investment of my time, I had nowhere in particular to go. Of course, even if Mother had pointed me in a direction, I had little time to get anywhere before the full fall of dark. So, I did what any itinerant RV’er does — I headed to the closest Wal-Mart, which was about half an hour away, near the Illinois border.

It wasn’t my first time there. Even with my mother’s special status, it still takes as much time to clear through security as I get to spend with her — going in as well as out. If I show up after lunch, I can usually expect to leave by dinner time. Needless to say, I’ve spent more than a little time in the not-so-bustling metropolis that is Rockville, Indiana.

Nothing against it — it’s standard-issue, small-town America. It may not have the glitz and glamor of the big cities, but it ticks off all the right check marks for me personally. I spend so much time on the road that the consistent mediocrity of chain restaurants is like as comfortable as a broken-in pair of jeans, but I’ve also scoped out a few of the better mom and pop joints for when I don’t feel like having assembly line chow.

Perhaps it’s petulant, but my confrontation with Mother is prodding me toward something greasy and deep-fried. Childish, sure — but it’s the method of rebellion with the least immediate negative effects. Even as a teenager when my friends and acquaintances were getting soused on illicitly-acquired booze on the weekends I abstained. Since I got the push, I’ve had nary a drink. Who’s to say what might happen if I drank enough to loosen my personal inhibitions? Magic and alcohol strike me as a particularly bad mix — drugs even more so.

Say what you will about junk food, it’s the vice least likely to pose a danger to others.

There’s a dynamite Cajun place a few hours down the road, but by the time I’d be able to get there it would be long closed. Even if I didn’t have to drive in the dark to get there, that’d be a non-starter.

It was just shy of full twilight when I pulled into the parking lot and tucked the RV away into a distant corner. A semi and couple of other vehicles were already arrayed in similar fashion for the night. If you don’t need water or power hookups, there’s really no better place to be than the parking lot of a superstore. Some of the locations aren’t cool about it, but there’s an informal list on the Internet of ones that won’t roust you in the middle of the night.

I picked up a few odds and ends, hit the deli, and was back inside the Itasca in under half an hour. I cracked open my laptop and pulled up an episode of ‘The Flash’ to watch while I ate.

When my phone buzzed, I set my half-eaten chicken strip aside and answered it immediately. The caller ID photo was a selfie of a grinning man on a golf course. I didn’t even have to look at the name — I’d handed my phone to Carlos Gallardo so he could take the picture the last time I ran through California and he’d obliged with something memorable and goofy.

“Carlos,” I answered, “give me the good word.”

“It took some doing, but I think I may have something for you in a newspaper article we found. Bobby Gennaro, age 11, of Thomas Jefferson Middle School, Valparaiso, Indiana. Winning science fair entry, proud parents and all that. You get the gist. Picture headed your way.”

I pulled the phone away from my ear and switched over to text messages. The picture was newsprint-grainy, but it was him. The broad, beaming smile was a polar opposite of the dour seriousness of Bobby’s shade, but the two were one and the same. Carlos had found him in less than twelve hours.

I brought the phone back up. “That’s him. Can you hack into the school system, get me an address?”

“You’re kidding, right? This is the 21st century, brother. All that stuff is public information. There are only a few Gennaros in the property tax listings for Valparaiso and the surrounding communities. Only one of those families actually live in the school district. I’ll send you another text with the address.”

“Awesome. You’re the man, Carlos.”

“I know, right? Stay safe, brother.”

After I ended the call I fingered my phone and considered the concept of proximity. It’s over a hundred miles from Rockville Correctional to Valparaiso, but in a country nearly four million square miles in area, that’s too close to be coincidental.

It becomes even more concerning when I considered Shirley Jackson’s home, just outside of Cincinnati, Ohio. That’s three cities in a relatively small area. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to hit all three in an easy day’s drive, even in an RV.

I’m starting to get the feeling that someone is leading me by the nose and I don’t like it.

Bobby’s house wasn’t going anywhere, so despite the urgency that I felt at having actual, solid information, I finished my dinner, thought about things for a while, and then did my best to try and get some sleep. It took me longer than usual to nod off. When I woke just before dawn I had the sense that my repose had been an uneasy one, though I couldn’t remember any particular nightmares.

I headed out at first light. The crawling sense of walking into a setup followed me all the way north. I got into Valparaiso around noon and left the Itasca in yet another Wal-Mart parking lot. This area was a bit more bustling and I wasn’t sure how the management would react to a long-term stay. Hopefully this wouldn’t take too long.

The Gennaro house, according to the Internet map searches I’d pulled up on my phone, was in what seemed to be a typical residential area. It was not, thankfully, in a cul de sac, which simplified things for me. A guy riding past a house twice wouldn’t be of immediate concern on a normal avenue in the same that it would be in a more confined area. The last thing I wanted was an over-concerned member of the neighborhood watch bringing the police down around my ears.

I packed a backpack with a few odds and ends, strapped on my helmet and gloves, and brought up the navigation app on my phone. Per the GPS function, Bobby’s house wasn’t far. I set off at a casual, unhurried pace.

You’d think that mid-afternoon in the middle of the week would be a quiet time, but there were more than a few cars in driveways, homeowners cutting grass, or simply lounging on porches. I don’t keep up with the news, much, but it’s inescapable most of the time. Times were tougher now than most, with tens of millions of Americans were out of work. I should have figured that there’d be more than a few people around, but I hadn’t.

Growing up, ‘rich’ was an abstract concept that I never really understood. Though I’m sure it annoyed Mother to no end, dad insisted that I do chores to earn my allowance. As I got older, this transitioned into helping out around the neighborhood — cutting grass, landscaping, that sort of thing. I that knew both my parents had good-paying jobs. We lived in a high-end neighborhood on Lake Michigan, after all, but it wasn’t until everything fell apart that I realized how well off my parents — my dad, in particular — actually were.

It’s hard to dig into your own family history when neither parent is available to fill in the gaps, but from what I can tell, my grandfather was a fairly successful businessman. Dad turned the nest egg he got when his own parents passed away into something much more significant with astute investments and the same frugal lifestyle he tried to instill into me.

Sometimes I wonder if that isn’t what initially attracted mother to him. When they met, she was still a starving grad student working toward her Ph.D. That sort of thought would have been out of my breadth of imagination before my mother revealed her true self, but everything I’ve been through has twisted and warped my entire concept of my own familial reality. There’s a kernel of truth in my sense of that issue, but it doesn’t matter anymore. He’s gone and she’s locked away.

I spotted the Gennaro house long before I could read the house numbers. It was the only house on the block with calf-high grass. A for sale sign with a ‘foreclosure’ placard attached to it stood at a drunken angle amid yellowing weeds.

Frowning inside my helmet, I pulled to a stop in front of the house before I realized that I’d eased off of the throttle. A stack of newspapers sat in a moldering pile in front of the door, The mailbox under the porch light overflowed with letters.

A muffled voice came to me through the helmet, and I turned and flipped up the visor as I saw a man in khaki shorts and a stained, sleeveless T-shirt standing in the driveway opposite the Gennaro house. He held a socket wrench in one hand. The hood on the mottled primer-and-paint car behind him stood open. I’m not much of a car guy, but it was something from the seventies with a big engine and low gas mileage.

He nodded toward the Gennaro house and repeated himself. “Strangest thing. They just up and took off in the middle of the night a couple of weeks ago. Nobody even saw them leave.”

I nodded and tried to think what to say. I didn’t know enough about Bobby and his folks to play as though I knew them, so I went with the next best option. “I’m driving around, looking at bank properties. Did they take care of it, or is it a mess inside?”

The man’s demeanor eased. A smile flashed across his face. “Sure, I got you. Yeah, old Jimmy was always puttering around the place. This neighborhood is old, but we ain’t got no deadbeats around.” He seemed to look me up and down. I wasn’t sure if he approved or disapproved of the Kawasaki’s shabby appearance. I hoped that he’d see a kindred spirit, what with the patchwork appearance of his muscle car.

“Hey, that sounds good.” I tried to keep my voice casual. “My wife’s pregnant and we’re just looking for a nice, quiet neighborhood. We live closer to Chicago now and it’s getting a little rough for our taste.”

I must have passed another test, because he touched the socket wrench to his forehead. “Well, good luck finding a place. Lots of families here, you could do worse. I’m Tim, by the way.”

“Paxton,” I supplied automatically. I tried to hold back my wince. Way to give him your real name, slick. “And thanks, I appreciate it.”

He waved a hand and turned back to his car. I must have eased his initial suspicion with our conversation because he no longer seemed to care that I was on his street. That would change quickly if I didn’t get a move on, even though I hadn’t accomplished much other than creating more questions for myself. I headed down to the end of the street and made a turn to circle the block. A strip mall off of the main road offered me the best opportunity. I parked the bike and hung my helmet off of the handlebars. On my feet and off the Kawasaki with my hands tucked into the pockets of my jacket, I was just another pedestrian. Paralleling the Gennaro’s street, I turned the corner — and vanished from sight.

The invisibility is an illusion, of course. Without a solid surface at the rear of the eye for light to reflect off of, a hypothetical invisible man would be blind. And even if he weren’t, for some reason, he’d be constantly barking his shins on obstructions or tripping due to lack of perspective given that he’d be unable to see the position of his own limbs. It would be like stumbling through a pitch black, unknown room all the time. Hardly a recipe for conducting clandestine investigations. I’m clumsy enough without adding invisible feet to the equation. Thankfully, when ‘cloaked’ I can see myself just fine.

I set up my cell phone camera to record once since I can’t see myself when I use the trick. There’s a slight shimmer as I move, but other than that I’m almost entirely unnoticeable. The effect is not unlike the movie Predator — a fact I find both creepy and cool. I don’t know if it’s enough to see with the naked eye, but so long as I move quietly and avoid stepping in mud or snow, I can move about with no concern for drawing attention.

That doesn’t mean that I can just walk up and open Bobby’s front door, of course. Tom or another neighbor would have to notice that particular oddity. In that case, he’d doubtless remember the stranger who was looking at houses.

Despite the ringer that Mother’s court case ran me through, I’ve made it through most of my adult life without being in any serious legal trouble. I’d like to keep it that way. So as the alley behind the Gennaro house opened up to my left, I turned inside and took careful steps to avoid branches, glass, or other debris. Oddly enough, there was no activity in the backyards of the houses on either side of the alley. The people of the neighborhood were evidently spending all their time out front. Presumably, once the school day is over they’ll retire to the rear, where rambunctious little ones can be more easily contained inside fenced-in perimeters.

The fence behind Bobby’s house was — thankfully — chain-link and low enough that climbing it is a simple matter of stabbing the toe of my shoe into an open square and swinging my opposite leg over. The chain rattled slightly as I made the move, but it’s a quiet enough noise that it could have been nothing more than the wind. I heard neither outcry nor questioning expression.

I knelt inside the perimeter and shucked out of my backpack. I tend to keep a spare jacket inside in case I need to make a quick change of appearance. Wrapped up inside the jacket is something more than a little illegal that would land me in quite a bit of trouble.

“You didn’t get this from me,” Esteban muttered when he handed over the lock-release gun. The devices are a restricted for purchase by law-enforcement agencies only and are essentially an automated lock pick. Insert the business end into any lock, pull the trigger a time or two, and you’re inside. My fingers are deft enough that I could probably learn to pick a lock the old-fashioned way, but that’s time-consuming.

There was probably a suitable spell I could have used from the grimoire, but I had to go and reduce it to a sack of ashes. Hindsight.

The Gennaro’s back door opened into the kitchen. I made a quick study through the decorative glass. The inside seemed deserted if a bit tidier than the outside. Satisfied that the house was empty, I unlocked the door.

The door eased open on silent hinges. I stepped inside.

Chapter 7

I’d suspected before, but I knew for a fact that the house was empty and abandoned as soon as I stepped inside and eased the door shut behind me. The coating of dust was enough to verify that I was, indeed, the first person inside in weeks. The mystical radar in the back of my head told me that nothing intangible lurked in the house’s dark rooms.

I was alone. The darkness at the front of the house told me the homeowners had closed the drapes and blinds before leaving, so I dropped the cloak. It doesn’t hit me as hard as the push, but if I kept it up long enough I’d end up with a whale of a migraine.

I stood there for a moment and just soaked up the atmosphere. As I waited, I tucked the lock-release gun back into my backpack and slung it over my shoulder. I didn’t expect anything bad to happen, but if I needed to run, I didn’t want to have to leave any evidence behind. I wasn’t here for any nefarious purposes, but the police didn’t always see things the same way when it came to breaking and entering. Kent and Esteban would vouch for me, but the reference checks would take up time that I didn’t have.

I didn’t know what was driving my newfound sense of urgency. If anything untoward had happened here, I certainly didn’t feel it. My gut told me that whatever had happened to Bobby hadn’t gone down in his house.

But this was his home and it was all I had to go on. I studied the kitchen. It was neat and well-appointed; clean but lived in. Drawings and photos decorated the front of the refrigerator. I recognized Bobby right off of the bat. He looked like a typical, happy suburban kid. Dad was older, distinguished with graying temples. He looked like the kind of father you’d play catch with while the mom looked like someone who’d never force you to eat kale or organic sprouts. She looked like a cookie baker; beaming with dimpled cheeks.

Other pictures revealed that the family had a daughter, which made me wince. That just added more to the possible disaster. The age gap between the siblings was obvious. Bobby must have been an ‘oops.’ His sister wore a UW Badgers sweatshirt in several of the pictures and looked to be around college age.

The kitchen was a freeze-frame of happier, more contented times. It left me feeling sick to my stomach. Even if by some miracle his parents and sister were still alive, Bobby was not. I clenched my fists and tried to calm myself.

Tens of thousands of people die every day, but this was different. I don’t know who or what was responsible, but it had more obvious malice than a car accident or cancer. The anger I’d pushed down after meeting with Mother was starting to bubble back up to the surface. I restrained the urge to punch something.

Enough dithering.

I moved out of the kitchen and through the house. Much like the kitchen, the house was tidy but comfortable. In the larger rooms, it was hard to find a wall without a bookshelf. In many places, the family had shelved books two deep.

Snooping through the bedrooms seemed a bit much, so I settled for glancing inside of each and seeing if anything looked out of the ordinary. Nothing indicated that the family went anywhere in a hurry. Dresser drawers and closets sat closed and the beds were still made. To put it simply, nothing my tickled my Spidey senses. Bobby was apparently a Cubs fan. His sister had Ariana Grande and Zac Efron posters on the wall alongside the volleyball trophies.

There were a couple of doors at the end of the hall in addition to the three bedrooms. I checked the first. It was a small laundry room. Before I turned to put my hand on the door knob to the room on the opposite side, the tickle at the base of my neck told me that I’d found what I was looking for.

The door opened inward into a moderate-sized office. For a moment, I felt as though I had stepped backward in time. The cluttered bookshelves overflowed with books and pieces of art. I was half-convinced that I stood in the entrance to mother’s office. Panic began to rise in me until I recognized the different positioning of the desk and the windows in the room.

It wasn’t mother’s office, but it was a reasonable facsimile. As I took a hesitant step inside, something crunched underfoot. I stepped back and knelt down. Pieces of brown pottery littered the carpet. My step had further ground one of them into dust. That tickling feeling at the base of my neck crawls down into my chest. Suddenly I was ten years old again.

“Mother, can I water your flowers?”

“You are not to step foot into my office, Paxton. And this is a very special plant that mother takes care of. But I appreciate that you are thinking of me.” Mother stroked the delicate, twisted branches of the miniature tree. I know I’m not supposed to step into her office, even when she’s inside, but there’s something hypnotic about the tortured dwarf tree that demands further study. “The Japanese call this tree bonsai, but the plant is nothing special. The real treasure is in the vessel.”

I remember giggling at her choice of words back then — ‘vessel’ — and turning away to pay attention to something else. Now, though, as I knelt down and rubbed crumbled pieces of pottery between my thumb and forefinger, I realized that her description was more fitting than I knew at the time and most probably intentional.

All that time, I marveled. Right under our noses.

The gritty clay disintegrated between my fingers and trickled to the carpet. At first glance, there’s nothing extraordinary about it, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something about it that I was missing. The quarter-sized lump between my fingers felt solid, heavier than you’d expect from a typical ceramic. Ancient pottery should feel fragile, dainty. This felt almost like a piece of gravel or concrete.

In the movies, I’d whip out my handy dandy forensics kit, immediately determine the extra ingredient to be some rare metal only found in one particular place in the state and rush the building in a storm of bravery and bullets.

Lacking both a forensics kit and a source at any local police department, I had to shrug the difference off as immaterial. If Mother had it, it’s more liable than not to be some ancient artifact. I can’t see where it would be more help than it’s already been, in linking Bobby’s parents to Mother. Something about this office screams ‘male’, so presumably, Bobby’s dad was a contemporary of Mother’s. I don’t know if they knew each other, but it doesn’t really matter. One way or another, one of the items that should have been secure back at the university made it out into the wild. The most important aspect is not the how of how the pot got here — vessel, part of me thinks, but I tried to ignore it — but the fact that yet again, coincidence is stacking on top of coincidence.

“So, walk away,” I muttered. “Let’s hit the beach.”

Saying the words is just spitting into the wind. I know that my conscience would never let me do such a thing. I brushed my fingers against the carpet to wipe off any of the residual dust and stood back up. And that’s when I saw the message.

A low, plush sofa sat against the wall behind the office door. The wall behind the sofa was bare, which made it ideal for the message slashed across the paint in blocky, luminescent letters. The letters themselves seemed to pulse, as though the writer had imbued the words with some sort of otherworldly rage as they squeezed the ink from the nether regions of enormous lightning bugs.

PAXTON COME HOME

WE’RE WAITING FOR YOU

I licked my lips and blinked a couple of times to make sure that I wasn’t seeing things. When the words didn’t fade from view, I pulled out my cell phone and switched over to the camera function. On the phone’s small screen, the wall was perfectly normal wood paneling. Away from the screen, the message persisted.

Unless I missed my guess, what I was seeing was similar to how I saw ghosts. They didn’t show up on cameras, either. What was this, then? Ghost . . . goo? ‘Blood’?

What scares a ghost?

“Something that can make it bleed,” I answered myself, shuddering at the morbid tone of my own voice. Given the fact that ghosts couldn’t break pottery or kill someone, I was dealing with something above and beyond anything I’d ever encountered.

I turned to leave. As I did so, the toe of my shoe bumped into one of the larger fragments of the pot and flipped it over. I had discounted the pot as being of any further use, but my misstep testified to that incorrect assumption. There was a neat row of scratch marks on the inside curve of the fragment. One side of it is missing, crumbled to dust, but it looked like I had a good chunk of the mystery writing inscribed on Mother’s special little ‘vessel’.

I snapped a picture of the fragment with my cell phone. I needed to compare it to some reference materials, but it certainly looked like the pictures of cuneiform that decorated my Mother’s office — and definitely not something that would be period or regionally appropriate for a bonsai tree. Camouflage, perhaps, to disguise the pot’s true identity?

Of course, as with the pot’s presence in my Mother’s office, something as ordinary as a houseplant seemed out of place here in Mr. Gennaro’s workspace. I considered the strange pull the vessel had exhibited on me as a child and wondered.

Had Mr. Gennaro been subject to that same pull? Had Mother?

I attached the picture to a text and sent it to Karen’s work cell. I kept the accompanying message short and simple.

Akkadian, maybe? Can you translate?

Never underestimate the value of a crack research staff. I took another look at the message on the wall. I knew where I had to go now. Yeah, it was a trap. But that didn’t mean I was going to walk into it unprepared.

I took my time on the walk back to my bike. Steel-gray clouds had begun to roll in, bringing an abrupt bite of fall to the air. Yesterday, a few hundred miles to the south, my light jacket had been too heavy, but now I shoved my hands deep into my pockets and wished I’d worn something warmer. This time next month, there’d be frost on the windows and maybe even snow on the ground.

And I didn’t know if I’d be around to see it.

I’m not used to being afraid. I know ghosts can’t touch me, so they’re more of an annoyance than anything else — varmints to exterminate, trash to take out. Paxton Locke, paranormal garbage man. No busting involved or required.

That’s not to say I’ve never been in any squirrelly situations. One of the first times I made a house call, I learned that ghosts don’t necessarily haunt innocent people.

Let’s just say that if there are more than a few shades on your premises, someone in your household just might be a serial killer.

The drive back to the Wal-Mart parking lot was uneventful. I racked the Kawasaki and unlocked the door to the RV. It was late in the afternoon. My old house was a couple of hours away. Personal preferences or not, I was heading in that direction. Someone or something that knew me well enough to leave taunts for my eyes only wouldn’t expect me to show up after dark.

Or so I hoped.

I pulled the lock release gun out of my backpack and headed back to bed. If I needed them, I had keys to the house. This time around, I was going in loaded for bear.

I keep my more illicit gear stashed inside a lockable cubbyhole underneath my mattress and box springs. I get into it often enough that I installed some hinged prop bars to hold them up while I dig around. The lock-release gun went back into its slot. I pulled out something with a bit more authority to replace it.

Growing up, Mother would have been more accepting of hard narcotics in the house than firearms. I didn’t learn to handle them until I was on my own, courtesy of Esteban and his family. I’m still only middling with a handgun or rifle — it’s amazing how quickly cans on a fence post can dodge when you’re trying to knock them down — but I’m more than capable with a few alternative options.

The pistol-grip Mossberg shotgun was something I’d acquired more or less legally, though I’d purchased it not long after I got an Arizona driver’s license using Kent’s house as a mailing address. The gun laws in my home state of Wisconsin aren’t bad, but they aren’t nearly as defense-friendly as those of the Grand Canyon State. A vestige of the cowboy days, I suppose, but helpful for my purposes.

I loaded seven rounds of #1 buckshot into the tubular magazine, racked the pump and loaded another. Kent suggested a side-saddle mount to carry spare shells on the receiver. After I filled that, I had sixteen rounds in and on a compact, easily managed package. If that wasn’t enough, I’d back off and call the SWAT team, or maybe wish for a tactical air strike.

The other item I fished out was a Taser X26C. Unlike most of the self-defense stun guns on the markets, this model looked like a pistol. It included a targeting laser, could work as both a contact device and fire prongs. I could personally vouch for its effectiveness, having used it to take the starch out of a serial killer who wanted to add my skull to the collection in his basement.

It goes without saying that my ‘adoptive’ dads give the best gifts.

Sufficiently — I hoped — armed, I stashed the shotgun in my backpack and lowered the mattress and box springs. I set the bag and Taser on the bed before headed up to the front. It might be apropos for the gear to ride shotgun, but I wanted it out of sight in case I got pulled over. I wasn’t planning on speeding, but you never knew. I was going through Chicago on my way home — Illinois highway cops are hell on vehicles with out of state plates.

I sat behind the wheel with my hand on the ignition, but I didn’t turn the key. You’d think, at a moment like this, that I’d be shaking like a leaf, but my hands were steady. With a sigh, I pulled out my phone and forced myself to make what could very well be the last phone calls of my life.

Fittingly, perhaps, my call to Carlos went to voice mail. This time of day in Cali, he was probably finishing up lunch. That made things easier for me, but a thrill of guilt ran through me as I realized it would be anything but easy for him to receive the message I was about to leave.

“Hey, man,” I said. I cleared a throat that had become thick with sudden emotion. “I just wanted to let you know. I’m into something and I think it’s pretty bad. Not sure what the other end looks like. I just wanted to let you know, thanks, for everything.” I fell silent for a moment, unsure how to continue. “I’m hitting the road and stashing my phone in the glove box, so just, you know. Let me do what I need to do. Because I don’t know if anyone else can. I’ll try to call you, but if you don’t hear from in the next day or so . . .” I sighed. “I know this is a shitty way to get this to you. I just wanted you to know. My life has never been wine and roses. I love you like a brother, ‘los. Tell everyone . . . Ah, hell, you know. I need to hit the road.”

If anything, the next call was harder to make. Not because Carlos wouldn’t understand what I was going through, but because Kent had seen the brand of weirdness involved in my life at close range. If anyone would have an instinctual sense of what I was moving toward it was him.

Kent answered on the second ring. “Hey, kid. I still don’t have anything on the Gennaros. How you doing?”

“I got it figured out,” I said, then explained what Carlos had found. While I described the more mundane aspects of what I’d seen in and around Bobby’s house, I left out the details of breaking and entering and the horror scene in the office. I’d much rather Kent give plausible deniability for any overt, illegal acts on my part. He wasn’t stupid — the lack of explanation on how I’d gotten inside was a pretty obvious one, but it was enough cover that he wouldn’t have to lie for me if it became an issue down the road.

“Figures,” Kent grumbled. “Scooped by Fancypants. I’m sure he won’t rub that in at all.”

Despite my mood, I couldn’t help but laugh. Esteban has jokingly referred to Kent as ‘Chromedome’ since they became close, while the dapper — and full-haired — Esteban was quickly labeled in return. “You can always point out that it was his brother-in-law that did the work and not him.”

Kent grunted a chuckle. “So, listen, have you figured out what your next move is? If you’re headed my way any time soon, I could use a set of eyes hooked up to an open mind.” He sighed. “These guys are technically proficient, but I’m the only one who doesn’t think this is just some lunatic. Maybe I’m wrong, but it doesn’t feel right. I’m getting the same feeling I got working your mom’s case.”

I tried to hold back a sigh of my own. “I don’t know, Kent. I’ve got something I have to do and I just wanted to let you know . . . I might not be able to help you.” I debated whether to finish the story of Bobby’s house. When he remained silent in anticipation, I forged ahead and laid the rest out for him — broken pottery, glowing message, and all.

There was no reply. For a moment I thought that I’d lost him, but he finally spoke. “Damn. You’d have to be blind to not recognize that it’s a setup. Whatever you’re dealing with is cocky as hell, bad enough it doesn’t worry about you, or both. You got any idea what it is and how bad it is?”

“Bad enough, yeah. I may have a few tricks up my sleeves, though.” I decided not to tell Kent that I was walking into the situation blind. He already sounded worried enough for the both of us. I hoped that he wasn’t seeing past my false bravado. “I need to hit the road, I just wanted to let you know.”

“I get it. Godspeed, kid.”

“Thanks.” I smiled. “See you over some pancakes, all right?”

“Sounds like a plan,” he said. The lie was evident in both our voices. I had no assurance that I’d be fulfilling that promise and the lack of certainty in my tone carried over to my friend despite my hopes. Part of me wanted to back up and start over, to tell Kent that I’m on the way. Another, more selfish part, wants to put this entire affair in the review mirror and do my best to forget I even heard the name Bobby Gennaro.

But I can’t. As far as I know, I’m the only person around who can do what it is that I do. To shrug this obligation off would be a betrayal of everything I’ve stood for since my dad died. Above and beyond that, it’s a mantle of responsibility I’ve taken on for myself.

I squared my jaw and started the engine. “Here we go.”

We, who? Beats me, but I needed something to overcome the silence and the crawling sensation in the pit of my stomach. For now, it would do. The road waited.

Chapter 8

It was one thing to sneak in and out the house when I was a teenager, but I never expected that I’d have to do it as an adult. Thankfully, my wild teenage years had prepared for me this clandestine activity. The main problem was doing something with the RV while I made my move.

Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin, is, fittingly enough, a nice little town more than worthy of the name. There’s a bit of manufacturing in the area, but it also serves as a bedroom and vacation community for Milwaukee and Chicago commuters.

While Mother insisted on commuting several hours a day rather than find something local, Dad was perfectly happy to teach English lit at Tremper High — go Trojans! With the hindsight benefit of age, I look back on some of the conversations he and Mother used to have and realize that she often mocked him for his satisfaction with such a pedestrian occupation. Dad, to his credit, would just shrug and let the petty slights roll off of his back. That, I suppose, made her hate him even more.

‘Home’ was a split-level, mid-century modern on the shore of Lake Michigan, flanked to the north and south by nature preserves that gave me plenty of room to ramble in my younger years. It should have been far and above my parents’ price range, at least before Mother got her professorship, but dad inherited it from his parents, who passed away long before I was born.

Sometimes life strikes me as needlessly cruel. I have no living extended family. My only blood relation is insane and imprisoned. It would have been nice to have an aunt or uncle somewhere, but both of my parents were only children.

After dad’s death and Mother’s prison sentence, I inherited everything. Well, almost everything. The investigation stripped out a surprising number of artifacts and antiquities from inside the house — mostly centered around Mother’s office. Petty thievery seems somehow beneath her, but I suspect that she would fiercely deny that she stole any of it and claim that she was merely appreciating it for what it was.

If any of the antiques had arcane properties, I hope they are moldering in some long-forgotten evidence locker and well out of reach. If a book and a clay pot could cause so much havoc, who knew what else she got her hands on.

I tried not to dwell on the possibility too much.

Stiles’ Greenhouse, where dad used to take me to get pumpkins for Halloween, closed long by the time I got into town. That was all to the good. I parked the Itasca in a space right in front of the storefront. The bulk of the RV was incongruous in the empty parking lot, but I hoped that no one would notice. If I wasn’t back by morning, it probably wouldn’t matter.

At the rear, I stuffed my Mossberg and a few other odds and ends into my backpack. After a moment of thought, I added a small LED flashlight to one pocket of my khakis. I balanced it out on the other side with the Taser, slung my backpack over one shoulder, and headed out.

It was a straight shot through the fields behind Stiles’ to my house. I headed in that direction. The breeze shifted as I went and I caught a hint of pizza from Ruffolo’s down the way. My stomach grumbled. I’d grabbed a drive-through burger on the way, but an old, familiar favorite sounded a lot better than trudging overland under cover of darkness after eating a heat-lamp toughened sandwich.

Later, I told myself, though there was no real sense of promise there.

There was a rhythm to walking through a plowed field and I remembered it after a few stumbles. The rows of harvested corn, thankfully, gave me an easy path to follow and kept me on a straight path toward my house. Here and there the combine had cut the stalks long. I carefully placed my feet around them. Dried, they can be surprisingly sharp. The last thing I wanted to do was to retreat to the RV for bandages or another pair of pants.

My methodical pace increased as I hopped the farm fence. I glanced both ways before jogging across the train tracks that bordered the eastern edge of the field. I gingerly stepped down off of the berm and into the scrubland between the field and my neighborhood. It isn’t officially part of the nature preserves, and I’m not entirely sure who owns it, but it’s grown wild and free for as long as I can remember. The healthy scent of growing things exuded from the land even this late in the season. I couldn’t help but smile faintly. I spent more than a few Saturdays roaming this ground with friends. To a childish imagination the stunted trees and intermittent, shallow depressions filled in quite well for the swamp planet of Dagobah. As we got older it morphed into the Dead Marshes. The underlying bedrock is mostly limestone, so despite the proximity of the lake and the frequent rains the area tended to stay dry. That was all for the better when I was younger. Mother flipped out when I came home dirty as it was. If I’d been wet or covered in mud she’d have hit the roof.

The moon was only in its first quarter, but the sky was heavy with iron gray storm clouds. Despite this, there was just enough light left to help me navigate through the Dead Marshes without having to resort to the flashlight. On the opposite end, I came to another road. I knelt there and made a careful study of the area before me.

My neighborhood ran along the edge of the coast and my house is the northernmost in the addition. I’d angled slightly north by gut feel more than anything else and I came out right where I used to cross in the old days. My house stood less than a hundred yards away.

The distant lights of the main drag at my back revealed nothing. All the windows that I could see were dark. That didn’t necessarily mean anything. I don’t actively avoid the place, but I also don’t make a point of visiting. The last time I left, I knew that would be the case. I made a deal with one of my dad’s old friends, Mike Hatcher, to serve as a sort of caretaker for the place. Mike stopped in periodically to check the mail, make sure the pipes didn’t freeze, that sort of thing. The first few times he came out, some of Mother’s groupies harassed him, but he blew them off enough times that I suppose they got the message as they haven’t been back since. The peace of mind I have with the knowledge that a friend is taking care of the place is more than worth the pittance that I almost had to push him to accept. The logical thing to do would be to sell it, of course, but I can’t bring myself to that point. As much as memories of Mother have poisoned it for me, there are still whispers of dad, too. In the balance of things, the happy memories far outweigh the sad. It was dad’s house long before my Mother tainted it. My childhood bedroom was his, as well. Maybe one day it will be a home again if I can get my life back to something on the verge of normal.

The house across from mine is an architectural monstrosity of cubes and squares. It seemed just as lifeless as my own home. That aligned well with my preferences. I desired neither witnesses nor collateral damage if anything went down.

I licked my lips, steeled myself to rise, then froze in place.

A figure stepped into view from the opposite side of my house and walked in my direction. I pressed myself low into the dirt and hoped that I hadn’t spotlighted myself against the horizon.

He was a big man. He strode across my yard with his hands shoved into the pockets of a high school letterman’s jacket. It was either worn ironically or I needed to append young to the front of my description of him as a man. At this distance, his features weren’t clear enough for me to make the call one way or another. I stayed still and hoped that he hadn’t seen me.

My luck held; he made a 90-degree turn and followed the wall of the house around. There was something almost robotic in his movements. He kept his gaze fixed forward. Rather than turning in a smooth, organic fashion, he paused a beat at each corner and rotated in place before resuming his walk forward.

As he passed out of sight, I leaped to my feet without hesitation and sprinted across the road and into the part of our yard that fronted it. The backpack bounced against me as I pumped my legs and strained. With my heart pounding in my chest, I dove into a low area where water always collected and willed myself to become one with the lawn. On my side — the backpack would have stuck up and out like a sore a thumb — I stretched out to further lower my profile and strained to hear. Thankfully, it hadn’t rained recently and the depression was dry.

The grass whispered as he stepped across it. It grew in volume as he approached, paused, resumed at a constant value, then paused again. I risked a peek over the edge of the hollow and caught his back as he moved to walk across the back yard.

I was out of hiding places now. I wouldn’t have time to get to the front door and inside before he rounded that corner. I climbed back to my feet and moved to the side of the house, right at the front corner. Forcing myself to take slow, deep breaths, I eased the backpack to the ground and drew the Taser out of my pocket.

Letter Jacket’s feet whisk-whisked across the grass. Low and out of his peripheral vision, I waited until he began to turn before jumping forward. He was tall enough that I had to hit him low, but that was all right. His grunt of surprise shifted to a surprised groan as I jabbed the Taser into his thigh and squeezed the trigger. He toppled like a conquered oak, twitching all the way until he hit the ground with an audible thump.

I pulled the Taser back and waited for half a beat, but he was still.

Hit him again.

I snorted a laugh and shook my head. Tasing a trespasser once was one thing. To keep doing it like a kid frying ants with a magnifying glass seemed, to me, to be a bit over the line.

That didn’t mean that I wasn’t prepared. I dug a handful of black cable ties out of my backpack and quickly zip-tied his wrists together behind his back and hobbled his ankles. I heaved and rolled him onto his side and made sure that he didn’t have any dirt or grass in his mouth.

His chest rose and fell. I nodded to myself in satisfaction. For a moment, I considered calling the police to report the trespasser, but I decided to wait until I’d checked the house. If there was anything worse inside that would violate my policy of keeping collateral damage to a minimum.

Zipping the backpack shut, I slung it over my shoulder and headed to the front of the house. Out of sheer habit, I checked the mailbox next to the door, which was overflowing with grocery fliers and other ads. I shook my head at the absurdity of the act. Most of the mail I need to see goes to a PO box that Kent checks for me every so often. The vast majority of the stuff that comes to the house, whether it’s junk mail or fan mail from Mother’s groupies.

“Stop stalling,” I whispered to myself. He’d left the door unlocked.

Steeling my nerves, I stepped inside.

The door shut behind me with a click. I paused in the foyer to draw the shotgun from my backpack. I considered the bundle of cable ties, then decided the less bulk I had to worry about, the better. I stashed the backpack under a side table and looped the Mossberg’s sling over my neck to help support its weight.

An odd scent tickled my noise. I grimaced. Mike kept air fresheners in all the rooms to make up for the times he couldn’t open the windows, but the underlying smell of feces and copper overwhelmed the aroma of clean linen.

My mouth went dry. Mike hasn’t been here, has he?

He doesn’t have a set schedule — it’s a quiet neighborhood and the house is in good enough repair that it doesn’t need close watching. I opened the door again and thumbed through the mailbox more carefully. Based on the duplicates, I guessed there was at least two weeks’ worth of correspondence inside. That had to be a good sign, right?

I closed the door again and crept forward, leading the way with the barrel of the shotgun. The formal sitting room sat directly outside of the foyer and was empty save for the facing couches and the dusty coffee table.

The dust would have driven Mother batty, as would the lack of the artsy periodicals she used to fan out on the table’s surface. I briefly considered taking a picture to mail to her, then snorted. Focus.

The foyer stretched into a short hallway, which ended at the entrance into the bright kitchen and living room. The latter was much darker. The stench of death grew more intense as I approached.

Just outside the living room, the carpet squelched under my shoes. I winced, even though the faint stench in the air had provided advance notice of what to expect. I stopped and listened hard for a long moment. If anyone was in the living room, they weren’t making enough noise for me to detect them. The brightness of the kitchen was more muted here and draped the blood saturating the carpet in shadow.

I let the Mossberg hang and fished the flashlight out of the pocket of my slacks. I shrouded the lens, turned it on, and swept it across the interior of the living room. Like the rest of the house, it held happy memories. The only thing that eclipsed them was the fact that this was the room my dad died in.

The vomit surged out of my throat before I panned the flashlight halfway across the macabre spectacle that had been wrought in the living room. I bent over and retched. Even under the light, the rug was so saturated with blood and other bodily fluids that the original color was a mystery. Clean-up contractors had replaced the carpet after the completion of the investigation into dad’s death. I distantly wondered if I’d be able to engage their services again after this.

Spent, shaken, I scrubbed the back of my hand against my lips and forced myself to stand up straight. I needed to see, if only to know how many ghosts I was going to have to send along. The horror show inside of the now ironically-named living room made the reason for Bobby's aura of terror crystal clear.

It took me a moment to determine how many bodies were in there, because someone — or something — had dismembered them, then scattered the pieces across the floor in crooked angles. A loop of something that looked like intestine hung from one blade of the ceiling fan and they’d stacked three heads, pyramid-fashion, on the mantle. The entire room had been finger-painted in blood and filth. As I looked at the unholy tableau, I couldn’t understand why it didn’t reek more than it did. The tackiness of the blood staining the floor and the time frame of my encounter with Bobby’s shade said this must have occurred several days ago. That still left a huge gap of time since their original disappearance, but the time since the orgy of destruction was evident.

I didn’t make that guess idly, as this wasn’t my first crime scene. Ray, the serial killer with the house full of ghosts and the basement full of corpses, had kept things as neat as he could, but even dried and desiccated, I saw evidence of insects and other vermin down there. The rotting flesh attracted plenty of creepy crawlies, worming their way inside to feast. As far as how I got into, and out of, Ray the serial killer’s basement, that’s a story best left for another day. Much like all sorts of difficult situations, it would have been far more easily borne with the shotgun I now carried.

As far as my own home’s lack of critters, the house was tight, but not that tight. I would have expected flies in here if nothing else. It was as though the scene before me was so perfectly evil in its absolute unholiness that nothing living dared venture inside. I certainly felt that way as I hovered on the threshold. The reasoned part of me insisted that I could certainly walk into that room if I needed to, but the gibbering part that still feared the dark on uncertain nights was firmly set on nope.

As I stepped back from the threshold, a titanic force slammed into my back and drove me into the door jamb. In the shock, I lost the flashlight. It landed in the living room with the light pointing off to one side, in a not-very-helpful direction.

The weight on my back withdrew. I tried to spin around, but my feet tangled up in each other and I fell. I landed on top of the Mossberg. The impact drove the wind from me.

Move, move, move!

I rolled over and scrabbled at the shotgun to try and bring it up. A pair of huge hands grabbed the barrel of the weapon and locked over my shooting hand before I could put my finger on the trigger. A vise-like grip clamped down and I cried out, despite myself, at the sudden agony of the bones in my hand grinding together. Amazingly, the owner of the hands lifted, bringing me up off of the floor so that the tips of my toes dangled over the edge of the carpet. Backlit by the flashlight in the other room, I recognized my attacker as the hulk I’d taken down outside.

“How the hell did you get out of . . .” I started, but the Tasing must have left him grumpy and in no mood for conversation. He pivoted and slammed me into the wall next to the door jamb. Glass shattered as I slammed into several family photos and I heard the crunch of breaking drywall. I realized, suddenly, that I still had a free hand, but as I reached to pull the Taser from my pocket, he slammed me into the wall again. This time, the back of my head hit a stud with such force that my chin rebounded off of my chest. I saw stars then everything went black.

Chapter 9

As good times go, I have to say that getting knocked out was not in any way an enjoyable experience. As I slowly returned to consciousness, the painful throbbing of my head competed with a tugging sensation on each wrist to see who could win the contest of pain. For the moment, the head was leading, but my wrists were beginning to complain more urgently.

Blinking, I raised my head off of my chest and tried to bring a hand back to rub the knot on my head. When I couldn’t, I glanced to either side and realized why my wrists were hurting.

An unknown someone had zip-tied my wrists to the natural gas supply pipe that ran along the upper foundation of what I quickly recognized as the basement of my house. The cinder blocks of the wall were cool against my back, but whoever had secured my wrists to the pipe had spread my arms at such a great angle that my feet just scraped the floor. I strained to raise myself up on tiptoe to relieve some of the pressure, if only for a moment. It helped, but my fingers were already starting to tingle with the lack of circulation. I eased back down to a flat-footed stance and winced as the tension returned to my wrists. The color of the zip-ties made me fairly certain that they were the ones I’d brought with me and used outside.

What goes around comes around, eh? “Asshole,” I muttered. Someone giggled in response.

I glanced up and realized that I had an audience. Back in the day, dad had finished the opposite half of the basement with linoleum and some built-in shelves. A throw rug and old sofa sat on the flooring, though my audience had reversed the couch to face in my direction rather than at the television.

I’d spent a lot of time in the basement playing Xbox back in the day, but I assumed that the people who occupied it now weren’t liable to be there for that sort of entertainment. I shook my head, worried that I was seeing double, but I shouldn’t have concerned myself — the guy that I had Tased outside sat on one end of the couch. A twin in a slightly different outfit bookended him on the opposite side. They both glowered at me, but the young lady sitting primly between them nodded in polite greeting.

She rose to her feet with a broad smile. “Paxton, I’m so glad to finally meet you. I’ve heard so much about you.”

I blinked as recognition and understanding dawned.

You know, you hear ‘evil’, you think of something dark and Gothy. The last thing I expected was a mash-up of Legally Blonde and Pleasantville in a turtleneck sweater, plaid skirt, and sensible shoes.

Hey, sue me. I like Reese Witherspoon.

This, unfortunately, wasn’t Reese. It was Bobby’s sister. A knot formed in my stomach. Unless I missed my guess, her presence here meant that she was a member in good standing of the Professor Locke fan club. Which told me that the scene upstairs was her doing.

Random murder was one thing — but sacrificing your own family?

The synchronicity of the situation wasn’t lost on me, either. Was the scene upstairs what Mother had been trying to do with dad and me? A ceremony built around betrayal and death, stopped only by my last, desperate act?

As she stepped aside, I blinked again as another hulking figure entered the basement. Were the twins triplets? The cutesy blond smirked at the confused expression on my face. “Say hi to Mr. Locke, boys.”

Two of the three dutifully chorused a hello; the one I’d Tased just glowered and rubbed at his wrists. Cutesy waved a hand. “Meet Uno, Dos, and Trace. He’s the original. Maybe the first two are offensive but I couldn’t resist, considering my boyfriend’s name. And sometimes a girl needs an extra set of hands.”

The pain in my head was slowing me down, but her words rattled around until I saw the oddness in them. “Wait, what?”

Cutesy moved toward me, trailed closely by the triplet who’d just come down the stairs — Dos? I entertained a temptation to lever up and plant a kick in her face, but I suspected that endeavor would not end well for me.

“Oh, Paxton. I’m saddened that you haven’t taken the opportunity to further your studies. I dreamed of what was possible, ever since I read the stories about your Mother. The fact that dear old daddy used to work with her made things even better. You can’t imagine how excited I was when I found out he’d taken some things from her office! Well, I’m getting ahead of myself. The soul is infinite, of course, but intellect is not so . . . durable, shall we say? Pity, really. Trace was so bright before. But I have to say this, splitting him up three ways has made him so much more loyal and malleable.” She reached out and stroked Dos’ cheek. He grunted something. I realized in dawning horror that it was an attempt at speech.

What’s the average human IQ, 100? Let’s kick him up twenty points, since she said Trace was bright. Divided by three, now we’re down to 40. That’s far below what I’d even call functional levels.

“You magically Xeroxed your boyfriend and turned him into a moron?” Dos growled at me and I glanced in his direction. “No offense, man, it’s not your fault. Your girlfriend is nuttier than a squirrel with hoarding issues.” His growl raised in pitch. He stepped forward and slammed a fist the size of a canned ham into my gut. The impact blasted the air from my lungs and I was instantly grateful that I’d already lost my dinner upstairs because otherwise, I’d have spewed it out all over myself. Wheezing, I tried to draw up into a ball to ease the pain in my stomach, but the tension on my wrists was too much. I dropped back down to my tiptoes.

“We haven’t been properly introduced. My name is Melanie,” she said as she unbuttoned her sweater, folded it, and handed it to Dos. “But I’ve got someone else I need you to meet.” She was wearing a crisp, white button-down blouse under the sweater. She rolled up her left sleeve to reveal an incongruous, stylish tattoo like barbed wire wrapped around her forearm.

“Hey, listen, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. If we’re going to start sharing tats, I’m going to need my hands free, sweetheart.”

She met my gaze and smiled, but the expression didn’t touch her own eyes. Something told me somebody was home, but her crazy train was a few cars short.

“Now, now,” Melanie whispered, as the tattoo on her arm rippled. The ink flowed, as though still liquid, under the surface of her skin toward her hand. It split into a pair of streams and looped around her wrist, where it began to collect in her palm. She directed the palm toward me and said, in a husky voice, “Meet my newest and dearest friend.”

The ink on her palm swirled into something that looked not unlike an open eye. A chill went through me as something both more and less than human studied me.

Hello, dear boy, said the voice. I felt it in my bones more than I heard it with my ears. You’ve grown so much, these past years.

It was an otherwise ordinary night a few weeks before my sixteenth birthday when I woke to the sound of guttural chanting at the foot of my bed. The image has persisted in my dreams — well, nightmares — in all the years since. Thankfully, the passage of time has blessed me with the dulling of the memory’s intensity. I used to have the nightmare several times a week, but it now only comes upon me every few months.

With a sudden shock at the sight of the impossibility on Melanie’s palm, I am transported back to that night. Where my mind painted the scene in blurred dreamscapes for as long as I can remember, it’s now rendered in high-definition clarity. It’s more real than the night actually was for me, given that I was still half-asleep when I raised my head from the pillow and peered into the shadows.

My lack of control over my own body and the hyper-reality of the scene told me that this is a hallucination, a vision, or something worse. Despite the darkness, Mother is visible. She reads easily from the grimoire in the shadows.

I tried to assure myself that this wasn’t real, which generally works to jerk me out of sleep, but nothing happens this time. I’m stuck here.

At once the clarity of the scene makes me realize what I missed, all those years ago. My Mother is chanting, yes. But she’s providing no more than half of the dialogue. This is an arcane conversation. Each time Mother pauses to take a breath another voice, like nails on a chalkboard, answers in reply.

I snapped back into the present and recoiled from Melanie’s grasping hand. The eye swirled on her palm, tracking my movement, and the unheard voice sets my teeth on edge.

Good, you do remember me, don’t you? I thought I had lost my opportunity until someone finally appeared who could hear me.

“Edie,” I managed through gritted teeth. “Long time no see, pothead.” All I can remember is the night in my room. I must know more, but memory is elusive despite my best attempts to recall. Failing recall, I figure derisive snark is the best way to go. No need to meekly go into impending death.

It laughed. I jerked as though the noise had shoved needles of ice into my ears. It certainly felt that way.

Such a marvelous defense mechanism, your sarcasm. It so vexed your mother. That is not my name though I would know who gave it to you.

I made myself look up to force eye contact with Melanie. “I got it from what was left of Bobby. That’s your kid brother, right, missy? The one you tore apart upstairs.”

The look she gave me in return was tranquil and unconcerned. Whatever affection she ever felt for her family — whatever guilt she might feel regarding their fate — is as gone as it would be if burned away. It’s so like Mother that it’s uncanny. But which came first — the chicken or the egg? Do you have to be a sociopath to hear the voice, or does it make you that way?

It doesn’t matter either way, but at least if some external source has made them this way, they’re worthy of pity.

Ah, the little one’s shade. It seems he has fulfilled my desires. I consumed the shades of his parents and took just enough of him that he willingly agreed to seek you out at a place and time of our choosing.

Melanie tittered laughter. “A lady named Shirley Jackson, with a haunted house on a hill? That was incredible in its lack of subtlety. There was some debate as to whether you’d pick up on the joke. I suppose that I win.”

I didn’t have the fuzziest idea what she’s laughing about but score one for me. It was a set-up all along. I knew it and I still walked into their trap.

This hasn’t been my best week.

Melanie opened her mouth to say something else, but a canned version of an insipid pop song interrupted her. She pursed her lips and turned away. I’d missed the small handbag sitting on the couch. Melanie retrieved the phone inside and answered it on the third iteration of the chorus.

I tried to hold back a hysterical laugh. The evil witch has a Katy Perry ringtone.

Despite her departure, the brute squad stood and glowered at me, just in case I decided to breathe funny. I wondered if I should try and engage them some in witty banter, but decided that silence was my best bet. They not only looked like big dumb jocks, they actually were big dumb jocks. My stomach still hurt from the last thumping.

Melanie’s voice hit a rising note across the room. “Oh, awesome! Yes, I have him here right now. He’s just hanging out.” She giggled at her own joke. “Of course!”

She turned on a heel and resumed her position between the two duplicates. Melanie pressed a button on her phone and held it out to me. “I’ve got you on speaker.”

“Hello, Paxton, dear.” The voice was scratchy but recognizable. My blood went cold.

Mother.

“Hey, there, mom,” I managed. “They give you a little extra phone time?”

Mother replied with a full-throated laugh. Melanie joined the chorus a beat later. “No, Paxton, I’m afraid that I’m breathing the free air again. Miss Gennaro and her associates have been a great help to me.” Melanie’s cheeks dimpled in pleasure at the compliment. She waved the phone in airy celebration. “A few of her companions made quite the mess at the prison this evening, but they were so helpful to me. I’m wearing clothes fit for a human being, I’m riding in luxury, and I’m headed your way, dear. Why, if they did their job right, I do believe I’ve even got my push back as well. So, you just sit tight for a few hours and I’ll be right along. Toodles!”

Melanie took the phone off speaker and listened for a moment. She smiled again. “Yes, ma’am, absolutely. We’ll be waiting for you.”

She hung up the phone and winked at me. “Oh, poor guy. You didn’t think I was a solo artist, did you?” She gave me a mock pout. “It’s sad that my girls and I are the only ones out here for your mother. You’ve not been a good son to her at all, you know.”

That’s of no concern, the Edie grated. Once Helen arrives she can dispense with him as she sees fit. Until then I’m more interested to know just how much he’s been able to glean.

“I’m starting to think this is a damn Greek tragedy, that’s what I’m gleaning.” The group in front of me ignored the joke, though Melanie did stretch her hand out toward me so that the tattoo-eye could scan me up and down.

As for my name, young one, I am one who has been since your kind was scratching in the dirt for grubs. I am the Edimmu, and . . .

The floor above my head squeaked as someone stepped onto it. A moment later, the wall vibrated as the front door shut.

Someone else was in the house.

Chapter 10

I opened my mouth to shout a warning, but Melanie snapped her arm forward and clamped it over my mouth. It was her right arm, thankfully. I think I would have screamed like a little girl if she’d grabbed me with the talking eyeball hand. She jerked her head around to look over her shoulder and hissed, “Upstairs, now. Get whoever it is down here. Don’t let them scream or make any phone calls.”

Despite their brutish carriage, the triplets, when so ordered, were swift and silent. They pivoted as one, birdlike, and shot toward the staircase. The sudden thunder of their feet on the steps was so close together that I didn’t know if it would be recognizable without visual context.

With my hands in the air, my only recourse was to jerk my head from side to side to try and get out of Melanie’s grasp. I did so, prepared to scream out a warning, but she brought her lips close to my ear and whispered. “Shut up, or I’ll have my boys chase down whoever it is like a dog. We’ll gut them down here in front of you and make pretty designs on the floor with their juices.”

She made a compelling argument for silence. I shut.

The commotion upstairs ended as soon as it started. The floor squeaked above as the newest member of the party stepped forward, but heavier footsteps converged on the hallway. The visitor’s surprised cry cut off in mid-yelp. The heavier steps stomped back toward the basement stairs, albeit much slower.

I’d been expecting Mike Hatcher until the truncated cry, which had sounded feminine. To my surprise, as one of the triplets led the way back into the basement — Uno, I think — the other two carried in a squirming young woman. She was a short-haired blonde in faded jeans, a Breaking Benjamin concert shirt, and a brown leather jacket. One of the triplets had his hand clamped over her mouth, but I could still see her look of confusion as she saw Melanie and me from across the room.

“There.” The witch indicated the basement wall opposite my position. “Tie her up where they can see each other.” There was no pipe there, but the two-by-four supports between the floor studs were about the same height. She turned back and gave me a dark look. “Keep quiet, now.”

Outnumbered and without the use of my hands, there wasn’t much I could do other than to obey. I nodded and she withdrew her hand from my mouth. Melanie stepped away and moved to the other woman. Her feet dangled a good six inches off of the floor, held at each wrist by a clone while the last one kept her mouth closed.

Melanie produced a handful of zip-ties — I kicked myself for bringing so many — and secured the girl’s hands to the rafter supports. They were lower than the pipe, thankfully, but even so, the tips of her sneakers just brushed the floor. It was a needlessly cruel gesture, but I doubted that complaining would make any difference. Melanie had already dismembered three members of her immediate family — a couple of strangers would be next to nothing at all. Then I remembered Mother’s voice on the phone and wondered just how far I could push things.

“Unfortunately, this is not your lucky day,” Melanie said in a calm, soothing voice. “You walked into something beyond your comprehension. If you want any chance of walking out of it, you will refrain from screaming when Dos removes his hand. Blink if you understand.”

I couldn’t see through the crowd around the newcomer, but the answer must have been acceptable to Melanie. She nodded to her minion, and he dropped his hand. I’d been half-expecting a verbal torrent of questions, but none came forth. The silence must have surprised Melanie as well, because she cocked her head and said, “Interesting. You don’t scare easy, do you?”

The other girl huffed a derisive chuckle. “Scared of what? You? Not hardly. Your gang of hoodlums, maybe, but not you.”

I like her, the Edimmu crooned. She will serve as an acceptable host.

The new girl jerked in surprise and tried to look in every direction at once. “The hell was that?” she demanded. Melanie giggled.

“You don’t want to know,” I muttered, but that just made her giggle even more. My fellow prisoner gave me a wary glance. Her face was pale, but she pressed her lips together and looked determined. I urged her to stay that way with pleading eyes. It’s generally a good practice to avoid needling psychopaths, particularly when they have you at their mercy. I learned that lesson the hard way a while back.

Melanie turned and marched back across the room toward me. She stopped just out of kicking range and cocked her head. “Now. Where was I? Ah,” she smiled and clasped her hands behind her back. She cocked her head to one side and took a deep breath to puff out her chest. It was such an over the top move that I almost rolled my eyes, but not offending crazy chicks with a muscular posse is also one of my rules to live by. I tried to ignore the hint of cleavage and focused on her eyes. She wrinkled her noise as though disappointed I wasn’t succumbing to her charms. “Fine, to business then. The book. Where is it?”

Unbidden, a clone stepped back up on either side of her and glowered at me. The other one kept close to the new hostage. He needn’t have bothered — she didn’t seem interested in doing much other than trying to keep up on her toes to reduce the pain in her arms. My own shoulders had gone past the burning stage well into numb pins and needles.

“You’ll have to be more specific. I got rid of most of my books. A Kindle is much lighter.” I should have taken my own advice, but sometimes my smart-ass attitude gets the better of me.

Melanie frowned and waved a hand. One of the clones stepped forward to deliver another punch into my stomach. Heck, for all I knew it was the same one who got me before. He certainly hit just as hard.

The punch, at least, distracted me from the pain in my arms and reminded me that my abs were sore, too.

“Man,” I managed and sputtered a laugh. “The library is really stepping up their collection efforts.”

A look of anger flashed across Melanie’s face and she snapped her fingers. This time both of her toadies stepped forward. While one started a high-impact massage of my chest and stomach, the other one landed a solid uppercut on my chin that pounded my head back into the foundation wall. My tongue got in the way of my teeth as they slammed home. The hot, salty taste of blood filled my mouth.

No! Not his face! Helen wished to see it, one last time.

I shook my head and winced as that just made the throbbing worse. One last time, Mother? Gee, that’s not horrifying, at all.

“Book,” Melanie demanded.

I gathered up my spit and hawked a bloody loogie at her. The witch danced out of the way and it splattered on the floor. That was too bad. I’d thought it a pretty good shot.

“I’m thinking.” I snapped my fingers in mock remembrance. “Oh, that book. Everyday Magic, by Mary Sue McGuffin. Sorry, the fines were piling up, I took it back.” I favored Melanie with my most charming smile. “Maybe you should check with one of the other librarians.”

This time, her rage was more composed. She whispered, “Cut him down. Work him over. Anything but the face.”

When they cut the zip-ties I hit the concrete of the basement floor and grunted. That hurt, but the returning sensation to my fingers and arms was even worse. I rubbed at the hot, red bands on my wrists and realized that this might be a pretty good time to try and make a fight of it.

I looked up just in time to see Uno and Dos looming overhead.

And then they proceeded to beat the ever-loving crap out of me.

I’m not exactly a connoisseur of beatings. But as far as ass-kickings went, this one seemed pretty solid. The clones may have been stupid, but they were good soldiers and they followed orders to a T. Everything below the neck was a legitimate target. I didn’t realize that I’d blacked out from the pain until I returned to a slow, throbbing awareness.

You know when you take a nap and sleep in a funky position only to wake up with a real banger of a headache? Multiply that by, oh, a factor of twenty and you’d be getting close to how lousy I felt.

Getting knocked out twice in one day will do that, I guess.

I instinctively brought my hand up to rub at my eyes but screamed involuntarily as I brushed my fingers against my face. I had to blink a few times to clear my vision before I could see what the issue was.

You ever see those pictures of those old-school football players with the jacked-up hands?

Yeah. It was kind of like that. I could give someone directions in about sixteen different ways at once.

“Hey,” someone whispered. I lifted my head off of the concrete and looked around. They’d cut down the new arrival too, but thankfully they hadn’t done anything to her. She huddled against the opposite wall, legs up in her chest, with her arms wrapped around her ankles. I tried to grin, but it turned into a grimace as my slight shift elicited a fresh ripple of pain.

“Hey yourself.” I turned my head and scanned the rest of the basement. We were alone except for one of the clones, who stood like a statue at the base of the stairs. There were a couple of small windows near the ceiling against the back wall, but no way could I get one open in my current state. “Where’d they go?”

“When you passed out, they dug around in your pockets and found a set of keys.”

“Shit,” I muttered, as I tried to figure out how to get into a sitting position without using my hands. I levered up on an elbow, but as I shifted my legs for leverage, fresh agony burst into life. “Ah!” I screamed, forcing myself to resist the urge to grab at my right leg with my mangled hands. I looked down and cringed. My leg was apparently looking to join the screwy directions club, though it wasn’t nearly as out of kilter as my fingers.

“Yeah,” the girl said. “I think they got tired of leaning over to punch, so they started stomping.” She went pale, then brought both hands up to cover her mouth and made a gulping sound.

“Please,” I managed through gritted teeth. “Don’t hurl. Because then I’m going to want to hurl, and dry heaves are going to hurt even more than what I’m feeling right now.” I forced a smile onto my face, though it felt more rictus than reassuring. “Paxton Locke.”

“Cassie,” she replied after she composed herself and brought her hands back down to her feet. “Cassie Hatcher. And I know who you are.”

Of course. “Mike’s daughter, okay. I recognize you now. You were a freshman when . . .” My dad died. “. . . I was a sophomore,” I finished, after the internal hiccup. Of course, if she knew who I was, she knew all about my dad. Small towns are great if you want everyone up in your business. The fact that dad was a teacher just doubled-down on that.

“Right,” she nodded. “Dad’s heading to Waukesha to run some errands in the morning, so he asked me to check the mail.” Cassie gave a high-pitched laugh that seemed about two inches shy of hysteria. “And then I stumbled onto whatever this is.”

“It’s going to be all right,” I promised, though my tone revealed the lie. She gave me another nervous laugh, but in the end, gave me a slow now.

Moving my hips a little at a time, I managed to shift closer to the wall so I could lean back against it. I managed to make the move without twisting my leg too much, but every little shift made it feel as though the bones were grinding together. For all I knew, they probably were. My calf had already swelled enough to draw the leg of my pants tight. I didn’t know if that was a sign of internal bleeding or not, but it probably wasn’t a good indicator for my long-term prospects. I sighed and closed my eyes, trying with little luck to push the pain away. “So, what have you been up to? Since high school, I mean,” I murmured.

She was silent for long enough that I opened my eyes and looked back over at her. Cassie had a quizzical expression on her face. She twitched her head slightly. “You’re joking, right?”

“Hey, it beats talking about our current situation. Fine. You pick a topic.” I sighed and worked my jaw. A couple of teeth felt a little loose, which was just icing on the cake of this particular crapfest.

“Umm — how about the mongo triplets and the crazy chick with the built-in voice-over?”

“Melanie? Yeah, she’s a dandy, ain’t she?” I tried to crack a smile, but Cassie’s face was set in stone. Tough room. “Haven’t had much of an opportunity for conversation, but she’s a wanna-be witch, one of my mom’s groupies I suppose, and she found a magic pot with some sort of ancient spirit imprisoned inside. There’s your voice-over.” After a moment, I added, “Oh, and the rest of her coven or whatever they call it just busted my Mother out of prison and are heading this way.”

“You’re serious.”

“Afraid so.”

“I mean . . . I know what your mom said in court, but everyone around here just laughed it off, said she went bonkers. Sorry if it’s a bit hard to believe.” She shrugged. “It wasn’t like you stuck around after the trial for anyone to ask you.”

“Well, it wasn’t like I had much left to stick around for,” I pointed out. “I know it’s a lot to take in.”

“That’s the understatement of the year.”

I couldn’t help it — I laughed. “Sorry,” I said. “It’s just, I don’t talk to that many people that don’t have experience with the weirdness in my life.”

“Sure.” She lowered her head to stare at the floor. “You think of any weirdness that’ll get us out of here, let me know, huh?”

Silence returned, though it was a little strained, now. Understandable. Most people don’t have to worry about potential death in a basement at any point in their lives. Thankfully, this wasn’t my first rodeo. Our current predicament may have seemed hopeless, but I wasn’t ready to give up just yet.

It hurt to even try to move my hands, so I just let them lie on the concrete. The coolness helped little, if at all, but I needed something to focus on other than the pain. My head was still throbbing, but I was getting used to it. The fuzziness that had come over me was starting to clear.

“Acne,” I mused, “is just an infection, right?”

Cassie looked up from her knees and stared at me. “What?”

“Zits. Pimples.”

“I know what acne is, I’m just trying to decide if you’ve blown a gasket or something upstairs.”

“If I did, it happened before my dad died.” I met her eyes. “All the stuff my Mother said in court? Totally true. She was trying to cast a magic spell. Well, a ritual, actually. Human sacrifice. Evil with a capital-E shit. I stopped it.”

“So, your mom knows magic. Sure. Did she go to wizarding school, perhaps?” Her tone was flat, but the sarcasm was obvious and compounded as she finished, “Did she ride a broom and have a pet owl to bring her letters?”

I ignored the jibe. “Nope. Like I said, she had this ancient entity. I think she learned some from it. The Edimmu, it calls itself. But she also had a book of spells, a grimoire. After she went to jail, I found it and put it somewhere safe before the cops realized that they missed it when they cleaned up all the stuff she stole from the museum. So yeah, magic is real. I’m pretty sure they’re after the book. Which I studied just a bit, and learned a few things.” Triumphantly, now, “and one of the things I taught myself was a way to fix pimples.”

Like making myself invisible, healing doesn’t take nearly as much out of me as the push. It’s just a matter of hitting the right mental buttons. The small part of the grimoire that I read wasn’t big on theory, but it described the basic focus methods required to enact certain effects. The healing spell, mentally-speaking, is the equivalent of crossing your eyes, standing on tip-toe, touching your tongue to your nose and trying to taste the flavor blue — in your head, while remaining calm and perfectly still externally. This is probably why, much to my chagrin, there is no such thing as Hogwart’s in the real world.

Just remembering the spell is the easy part, especially since they’re imprinted on my brain like a tattoo from a drunken bender. The focus aspect is much, much harder. On the bright side, once you’ve got it the first time, it’s just a matter of flipping the right switch. In my head, I see it as a control panel not unlike a computer terminal. I stared into space and pushed the button that engaged the healing spell, all the while focusing on my mangled fingers.

It hurt, but the pain was brief, swept away by euphoria as shattered bones clumped together and joints realigned. The crescendo of clicking and popping proceeded from pinkie to thumb on my right hand. I wiggled my fingers in delight as I reveled in the sudden absence of pain.

And to think I used it on zits. Eat your heart out, Wolverine.

Across the basement, Cassie’s jaw hung open with her eyes locked on my restored hand. “Holy . . . shit,” she whispered.

I didn’t respond because I needed to keep my focus intact. The fingers on my left hand jerked straight. I was in the zone now. I couldn’t even feel the pain anymore. I wiggled my fingers as though I were playing an invisible piano and concentrated on my leg. I’ve got more bruises, contusions, and there’s a slight tinge in my side every time I take a breath, but I’ve got to maximize my effort here. The rest can wait — being able to move is going to be the line between survival and death.

Even with magic, there are limitations. It takes energy — the magic just speeds along the process. I emptied my stomach upstairs, but it’s grumbling with hunger now. I broke out into a sweat as my body began consuming fat reserves to fuel the repair.

Say what you will about how I got the magic, it at least lets me indulge my sweet tooth without worrying about excess pounds. A bit of metaphysical effort once or twice a week burns more calories than hours spent on the treadmill.

The blast of pain as my leg bones reassembled and straightened knocked me out of my trance, but that’s a good thing. My hands were shaking from hunger and exhaustion. My leg was probably strong enough to hold me up now, but I was too tired to do anything about it at the moment.

Woozy, I shook my head and tried to focus back on Cassie.

“All right,” she drew out. “I’m convinced. Now it’s time to tell me what the hell is going on here.”

“It’s a long story.” I glanced over at the clone, but he remained impassive, on guard and uncaring of us so long as we made no attempt to escape. “But hey, it doesn’t look like we’re going anywhere soon, right? This is how it started.”

Chapter 11

A few moments after I finished catching Cassie up, a familiar-sounding engine pulled into the driveway. Above and outside, doors slammed as whoever had driven my Itasca — surely the clones were too stupid to operate a vehicle? — shut off the engine.

“Damn,” I muttered under my breath. I’d hoped we’d have more time before they found it.

Note to self — park further away, next time.

I conducted a frantic study of the basement. It had been, quite literally, years since I’d been down here, but little had changed. They’d stashed Cassie and me in the unfinished half. Dad and Mother had once kept boxes of odds and ends down here. Between the evidence the police had collected and the things I had donated to charity or thrown away, it was empty save for the furnace and water heater. The other half was just as bare save for the sofa. There was little on the shelves that could be used as a weapon unless I managed to heft the old-school tube television and brain someone with it.

As for items not native to the basement, my Mossberg leaned tantalizingly close against one arm of the sofa. Despite the fact that the clone stood a handful of steps away at the foot of the stairs, I pushed down my desire to go after the weapon. The demonstration of speed and agility when they’d rushed upstairs to capture Cassie told me that I was nowhere near recovered enough to attempt that move.

Heavy footsteps boomed across the floor above. I made another visual circuit of the basement, paused, then turned to look at the water heater. Could I . . ?

The timing would be critical. It was the longest of long shots and just this side of crazy. I wasn’t sure if it would work and I was a little fuzzy on the details. Of course, my suggestion box wasn’t exactly overflowing with any other options.

I took a breath to steel my nerves. Crossing mental fingers, I focused, reached out, and deployed the last arrow in my metaphysical quiver just as Melanie stormed down the steps into the basement. She charged across the room, then seemed to recall that we outnumbered her. She paused so her trio of minions could catch up.

Hands on her hips, she demanded, “Where is it?”

I feigned innocence and replied, “Where’s what? Sounds like you found it.” I jerked my head in the direction of the driveway. “If you scratched the paint I’m going to need your insurance information.”

Melanie snapped her fingers and one of the clones stepped forward and took hold of my shirt. He lifted me up and slammed me against the wall, high enough off of the ground that my feet dangled.

“I’m not talking about your piece of shit RV,” she hissed. “Where’s the book? We tore the inside apart. It’s not there.”

“Well,” I temporized, “the overdue fines were getting to be a problem, so I had to take it back to the library . . .”

“Uno,” she barked.

Whatever unearthly process Melanie had used to forge the duplicates may have split Trace’s original intellect in three, but it had left his strength intact or even enhanced. Uno held me one-handed with ease. This left the other free to flash out and sink a pair of quick punches into my still-aching chest. I grunted but forced myself to grin. “Come on! Do it! You think I’m more or less likely to talk if you beat me to death? You stupid, psychotic bitch!”

A strange look passed over Melanie’s face. I regretted the remark almost immediately.

Good job, Paxton, spin up the nut job!

“Trace,” Melanie cooed. “Break both of our other visitor’s arms, would you?”

He’d taken two steps toward Cassie when the basement vibrated with the Edimmu’s voice.

Stop. You go too far. She is mine.

Melanie grimaced, but she beckoned Trace back. “What would you have me do, then?”

I have shown you the way. Make him tell you.

The smile that crept across Melanie’s face held a sickening joy, like a child forbidden from frying ants with a magnifying glass who was just handed a blowtorch.

She met my eyes. I tried to look away, but Uno grabbed the back of my head in an implacable grip and kept my face pointed at her. I could have closed my eyes, but before I got the opportunity, Melanie pushed.

“Paxton, dear. Where did you hide the grimoire?”

I’ve been on the receiving end of the push twice in my life. Perhaps I tried to forget the insidious warmth of it, but the memories resurfaced as I tried to fight against the magic. I wanted to tell her. I wanted to give her what she needed. It seemed right and proper. Trying to fight or question the need to tell her just led to confusion. Cooperation was a much easier mental path.

“Don’t tell her!” Cassie yelled from across the room, but Melanie’s gaze didn’t shift from mine. I gritted my teeth as I tried to keep my mouth shut. In my own defense, I seemed to be resisting the urge just a bit better than I had the last time, but it was an improvement of inches. I scrambled for other words, for more defiance to throw into her face, but I failed.

“Dagobah.” A rush of pleasure went through me at the admission. “It’s buried inside Yoda’s hut.”

Confusion twisted Melanie’s features, but the Edimmu cackled with delight.

Yes, yes. Use the push, do you see it now?

I felt an indefinable shuffling inside of my head, as though she’d opened my skull and was fingering her way through my brain like a filing cabinet. Melanie beamed. “Yes!” she crowed. “I see it! Dos, Trace, we’re going to need a shovel, and . . .”

I made my move. Her mistake had been limiting the push to the question at hand. As soon as I answered to her satisfaction, the fog lifted from my brain. And, in a stroke of convenience, my feet were already off of the ground.

My right foot slammed into the side of Melanie’s temple. She let out a cry of surprise at the sudden pain as she lost her balance and fell to the floor. I twisted in Uno’s grasp, in a vain attempt to get a grip on his arm to fight back. The move was not only ineffective — I was suddenly at short-range with an enraged minion.

“No urt Mel-knee!” he growled as he started punching me in the stomach and chest. He didn’t stop, even as I continued to try to twist out of his grasp. I kicked out, landing strikes on his shins, knees, and thighs that might as well have been love pats for all the effect they had. My continued resistance must have enraged him even further because he growled and shifted his grip down off of my head to grasp me by the belt. With a grunt of exertion, he swung, as though I were little more than a flexible, fleshy baseball bat.

The back of my head slammed into the foundation wall with what felt like bone-shattering force. As my vision went black, I was only vaguely aware of falling to the floor in a heap.

I’ve always considered my dreams to be fairly ordinary. Despite the horrible things that I’ve seen and experienced in my relatively short life, they are little different than they were before my life changed. Obviously, I only have myself as a frame of reference, but it seems to be the usual. Public speaking in your underwear, flying, running from faceless pursuit, that sort of thing.

Do people dream when they get knocked unconscious? I don’t know. I didn’t even realize that I was in a state of black unawareness until I began to shift into something else. I was surfacing from the bottom of the ocean, but when I opened my eyes, I moved into something that felt much more tangible than any dream I’d ever had.

The pain in my bruised and battered body was gone. I was sitting in a comfortable chair. I felt a damp coolness against my hand and after a moment I realized that it was a soda in a cup holder. I took a deep breath, savoring the absence of pain from my much-abused ribs. The rich scent of Flavocal and coconut oil filled the air.

Popcorn?

If I was dreaming that I was in the movie theater, that hit must have been worse than I’d thought. Maybe they broke something permanently and this was what a coma was like.

I opened my eyes.

In the dim flicker of the projection screen, I recognized the one place that dad and I alone had shared. Mother had always proclaimed the cinema too gauche for her tastes. I’d never understood that notion. The Renaissance Theater in Sturtevant was not only sumptuous in decoration, they served everything from pasta to Asian fusion. Dad and I never got too fancy, though, despite everything they had to offer. Sometimes we’d go crazy and do pizza, but the popcorn was our snack of choice.

Kernels rustled in a bucket and I turned slowly to my left. A big man with a salt-and-pepper Van Dyke and a pair of glasses perched on his nose smiled sheepishly and offered the popcorn. I stared, speechless.

“Dad?” I said, more loudly than I intended. He frowned and nodded at the screen.

“Sssh. This is my favorite part.”

I glanced at the screen, but I was in too much of a state of shock to pay much attention. I got a quick look at what seemed to be the inside of a castle, then turned back.

The speakers around us boomed, “So much death. What can men do against such reckless hate?”

Now, despite my lack of attention to what was on the screen, I knew. I’d certainly watched it enough with dad to know the lines by heart.

Bernard Hill as King Theoden in The Two Towers — one of my all-time favorite movies, but at the moment I couldn’t have cared less. “Dad, what is this? Is this a dream?”

Dad sighed and produced a remote control. He pressed a button and Viggo Mortenson paused in mid-word. Ride out and meet them, my mind supplied, automatically. In or out of the dream world, I rock at movie trivia.

“Paxton, does this feel like a dream?”

I hesitated, then said, “No, not really.” I glanced at the remote in dad’s hand and added, “But then again …”

“Trust that feeling, son.” Dad looked thoughtful for a moment. “Trust me. This is a crossroads, of sorts. The surroundings are as they are to make you feel more at ease.” He grinned. “But you always did have to ask why about everything.”

Tears spilled from my eyes — you can’t cry in a dream, can you? — and I leaned over and hugged him fiercely. I crushed the tub of popcorn between us, but I didn’t care.

“I’m so sorry,” I sobbed into his chest. “I tried to stop her, but I didn’t push soon enough . . .”

“Oh, Pax,” he said, his own voice thick. “Oh, son. Listen to me. It was not your fault. All things have a purpose. All things serve, in the end.”

I pulled back just a bit and scrubbed at my nose, which had started to run. I was starting to accept the argument that this wasn’t a dream. Who’d dream about snotting all over yourself?

“Okay,” I whispered. “Okay.” I held onto the hug, trying to sear every moment of it into my memory. The memories of those we love are nowhere near as indefatigable as that which we fear or desire to forget. The fact that the pages of Mother’s grimoire had branded themselves into my mind was a painful and ironic reminder that the voice of my own father had grown murky up until this strange, surreal moment. “So,” I said, finally. “Crossroads.”

Dad leaned back in his seat and favored me with a smile. “It’s a decision point, Pax. You have to decide whether to move on or if you want to stay and fight.”

“Dying, you mean.”

“You got it, bud.” His smile was wistful. He looked as though he wanted to say something more, but he remained silent.

I stared at my father for a long, silent moment, then turned to look at the movie screen. At this point in the movie, the evil Uruk-hai have our heroes surrounded. In a last, desperate attempt to give the women and children time to escape, the good guys charge at the overwhelming horde massing outside their doors. It’s a suicide run, sure as it gets, until they’re saved, in miraculous fashion by the wizard Gandalf and the riders of Rohan.

I might have been too slow on the uptake to suss out the trap that Melanie had laid for me. This time, I didn’t need a cluebat.

This was my Helm’s Deep. This was my suicide run.

I turned back to dad. “I get a choice?”

“Of course, you do, son.” He gave me a sad smile. “Otherwise, what’s the point?”

The point of what? I wondered but didn’t ask. “If I go, I go with you?”

“For a little while,” he agreed. “But . . .”

“Ah,” I said, thinking back on my talks with Father Rosado. “The, umm, bouncer.” The tears threatened to come back again. I swallowed past the thickness in my throat. “Dad, I don’t know if . . .”

He interrupted me, “Son, all things serve. All things. You would never have been able to read the book if you weren’t intended to. Your choices matter, yes, but your path is not set. You take the steps. And you’ve made mostly good ones.” He frowned and gave me a look over the top of his glasses. “Mostly.”

I winced, thinking about hypochondriacs convinced of their hauntings and the walking-around money I’d extracted from them. “Hey, nobody’s perfect,” I protested.

Dad laughed. “You’re exactly right, son. More than you know or understand.”

“If I go back, I might die.”

“That’s true,” Dad allowed. “But you might not.”

“If I go on . . .” I paused. “Cassie?”

Dad nodded. “She’s of no use to them without the book. She’ll pass herself not long after. I’ll leave it to your imagination as far as how long that might take. But there are other paths. If the Edimmu continues to be an influence on Melanie, well. All things serve, but some events are more preferable.”

“What is it? The Edimmu.”

Dad shook his head slowly. “I’m not allowed to tell you that. But I can say that the creature is a thing that is, but should not be.” He picked up the remote. “We’ve got time. Let’s watch a bit more.”

The movie resumed. I sat with my father as the heroes charged. John Rhys-Davies as Gimli blew Helm’s Horn. Finally, at the last, dramatic moment, the camera zoomed in on Ian McKellan and Karl Urban. They led the surviving Rohirrim in a cavalry charge that seemed doomed to fail with overwhelming casualties — until the light of the rising sun crested the mountain behind them and blinded the Uruk-Hai who were set to receive the charge. The monsters recoiled from the light and the good guys won.

Darkness began to creep in at the edges of the screen and the light faded there slowly. The soundtrack was quieter now, muted as though passing through some great distance.

“I wish we could stay longer, son, but this is it.”

I looked him in the eye and murmured, “I love you, Dad. But send me back.”

The darkness reached the seats, but I wasn’t afraid. I sensed that the darkness wasn’t so much the light leaving this place as it was my passage away from it. The light could never leave where I had just been, but I couldn’t stay there any longer. In the distance, as the theater faded out, I heard my father’s voice as clear as day.

“I love you too, son.”

Chapter 12

I awoke to quiet sobbing.

For a moment, I couldn’t remember where I was or even who I was. As I lay there it came back to me bit by bit, in time to the throbbing pulse of my head. Cracking an eye open, I whispered, “How long have I been out?”

“Paxton?” Feet shuffled on the concrete. I felt her kneel beside me. “I thought you were . . .”

I pushed down the urge to finger the swollen knot at the back of my head and said, “Closer than you’d believe. Maybe even mostly. How long?”

“I don’t know — half an hour, maybe? They left in a hurry.” Cassie’s voice turned bitter. “They didn’t forget to set their watchman, though.”

Half an hour? Holy crap.

I forced myself to sit up, then stared at the water heater.

The spells that I learned from the grimoire, save one, came about as a result of my consciously-expressed needs and desires. Invisibility, to grant some privacy from a world that seemed far too fascinated in me after my father died. The ability to find and speak with ghosts, in the vague hope that I might be able to find my father. Healing. None of those were the first spells I learned. I sought them out after I discovered that there was far more to the ancient book than its benign appearance suggested.

I learned my first spell by a random chance of fate. A few weeks after I’d woken to a reality in which my mother was in jail and my father was dead, I’d sat at the kitchen table, still not sure what I was reading. When I’d seen the book on the shelf, it had struck me almost instantly as being out of place. When I pulled it down and flipped through the pages, some hunch — urge? — told me to hide it from Kent and Esteban. Alone for what felt like the first time in weeks, I flipped through the pages and idly glanced at the cuneiform lettering. As I paused on a page perhaps a third of the way into the book, I looked up at the refrigerator and thought about grabbing a soda to drink.

The fluttering motion of the letters garnered my attention. As I studied them and began to comprehend them, I realized that with practice, I could grab a soda without leaving my chair.

In all honesty, the telekinesis spell is not quite as useful as you’d expect. As with the healing, there is the issue of conservation of energy. I can’t pick up a car because I can’t pick up a car without the use of heavy equipment or a jack. Plucking a can out of the fridge? Easy.

It gets harder over a distance of course, but within, oh, thirty feet or so, it’s somewhat useful. I don’t use it much because, let’s be honest, in the time it takes me to focus and enact the effect, I could just as easily walk across the room and get my own soda.

But when you need to surreptitiously kink the pressure and temperature release valve of a water heater to prevent it from opening? Telekinesis fits the bill. Cranking up the temperature? Even easier.

Thanks, Mr. Toft, wherever you are. The Mythbusters episodes my teacher let his students watch in physics class might just save Cassie and me.

First things first, though — I had to address the newest addition to my library of pain.

How do you cast a healing spell with a throbbing whale of a goose-egg on the back of your head, when said casting requires calm and concentration?

Answer – poorly, if at all. I felt the swelling on the back of my head lessen, with a similar reduction in the tight feeling and tenderness of the skin. It didn’t help much, but it was the best I could do at the moment. Now I just needed to make sure that my brilliant plan didn’t kill Cassie or myself. I glanced over at the clone, then waved a hand in his direction. His eyes flickered over, but he didn’t otherwise stir. Interesting.

I turned back to Cassie. “Help me up,” I muttered through clenched teeth. I was still starving, which was going to make this all the more difficult, but time was of the essence. More likely than not, our guard dog wouldn’t offer to grab me a snack and there was a near-literal ticking time bomb down here with us.

You don’t really think about the amount of potential force there is in a water heater. Let’s be honest, they’re almost bulletproof in safety terms. But intentional sabotage is something different — not to mention easy — if you know what you’re doing.

Or if you’re a long-time connoisseur of Adam and Jamie.

Water expands as it warms. An enclosed cylinder containing it, being metal, does not. This normally doesn’t present an issue for water heaters, as a safety valve will kick in and purge water from the system in the event temperature — and as a result, pressure — reaches unsafe levels. With the valve removed from the equation, the weak links are the seams in the metal itself. The weakness tends more toward the join at the bottoms and top rather than the body of the cylinder itself, as a function of pressure versus surface area.

So, yeah, if you’ve got a water heater in your basement or a closet, it can turn into a SCUD missile when you least expect it. But only if someone messes with something they don’t understand.

Suddenly, plumber’s rates seem all the more reasonable, don’t they?

Making the cylinder do anything other than going straight up was the real trick, of course. For that, I was going to need the telekinesis spell. On the bright side, this was going to be a different — and less intensive — application. That difference was the only reason why I thought I could pull it off since it wouldn’t take as much out of me as it would if I were using the spell in an active fashion.

The first time I used the spell in this way was when I’d been trying to fight off Ray the serial killer. The description of the method had been a footnote, basically, but it imprinted on me just as firmly as the rest of the spell.

In the movies and comics, magic is big on symbolism — runes and all that jazz. In my brief study of the grimoire, I’d learned that the actual structure of the symbol wasn’t so important as the intent behind it. It was an external focus, in much the same way that my imaginary control panel was an internal focus.

Who’s got time for runes? Maybe the old-time guys did, but I preferred a nice, simple circle with an X slashed through it.

My leg was still a little on the weak side. I staggered into Cassie as she helped me to my feet. She grunted, but she was surprisingly strong and managed to keep me from falling back down. “Sorry,” I managed as I shifted more of my weight onto my less-injured side. “You got keys, a pocket knife, anything?”

“They took my keys.” She glanced over her shoulder. Uno, Dos — or whichever the heck it was — still stood impassively. As I’d suspected, if we weren’t actively trying to escape or were stupid enough to attack Melanie, it maintained watchdog status.

That was an oversight on her part. Next time I confronted her I’d chide her for not reading the evil overlord’s guide.

“Hold on.” She dug in the pocket of her jeans and pulled out a stylized, blue-painted coin with a number one stamped into its face.

I studied it for a beat, noticed the hard stare she was giving me and gave her a half-nod. “Works,” I said.

With Cassie’s help, I shuffled closer to the water heater. I had to balance against her, but with the blue coin clutched in my fingers I could reach up and scrape the rafters. Every foot or so, on the rafters lying parallel to the water heater, I scraped a quick sigil into the wood and imbued each with a little bit of mystical oomph. The second daisy-chained off of the first and so on. By the time I made it to the wall, the effort required to continue the chain had increased to the point that I gasped and nearly staggered again.

Despite that, I wasn’t done. I released Cassie’s shoulder and knelt down on the floor. Here, thankfully, I just needed anchor points, one at each corner of a rectangle extending out from the base of the tank. I backtracked and scratched at the concrete to finish up the outer points. When my task was complete, the air fairly well thrummed with potential energy, though it wasn’t visible to the naked eye.

That might have been something useful to learn if such a thing had been in the grimoire. Hindsight, you had to love it.

What I had created was basically a mesh of mystical rubber bands, for lack of a better term. The energy requirements weren’t too bad because they weren’t so much intended to create force as they were to reflect it. It made a handy trip wire.

When Ray the serial killer had charged me with a sharpened gardening trowel, I’d only had a pair of linked lines across the door to my refuge in his house of horrors. One line was at chest-height and the other at his knees. He’d come at me with such a head of steam that he bounced back into the wall opposite the door and knocked himself out. Score one for the good guys, there. It was still no certain thing and is one of the reasons I’ve armed up so heavily in the interim.

This time, my construction had taken a shape a bit like an upside-down playground slide. When the water heater reached its failure point, it should launch upward and follow the path I’d described with the lines of force.

Our watchdog at the foot of the stairs wasn’t in the path of my impromptu rocket, but I didn’t think that would be too difficult to manage.

No, as the song went, the waiting was going to be the hardest part. I was already dead on my feet. If and when we got out of the basement, I was looking at another fight at some point. I needed to recharge.

“Let’s take a load off.” I pointed to the corner of the basement next to the furnace. There was plenty of room there for us to sit side by side, in view of Melanie’s minion. The Trane’s reassuring bulk should offer some measure of protection if the water heater went before I was ready.

I settled down and handed the coin back to Cassie as she sat down beside me. She wasn’t close, but she wasn’t as far away as she could have been, either. I hoped that signified trust because I was going to have to call on it before too long. If she hesitated, I didn’t know if this would work.

“So, what’s the plan, Snowflake?”

I chuckled. “Nice, pick on the guy with the white hair.” I ran a rueful hand through it and fingered the knot. “Well, I’ve been called worse, I guess.”

“It’s not so bad,” she observed. “You kind of look like a younger Race Bannon.”

I frowned. “Who?”

“You’re joking, right? Johnny Quest?”

I shrugged. “I missed that one.” I made air quotes with my fingers. “‘Cartoons are for an uncouth mind.’ Words of wisdom from Mother Dearest. If it wasn’t for sleepovers and Mr. Toft I never would have seen any. It was hard enough for my dad to chill her out enough that we could go to the movie theater.” I pointed across the basement and grinned. “She about had a stroke when he got me an Xbox.”

“You always seemed so happy. I guess nobody ever realized how screwed up your life was.”

“Thanks,” I laughed. “No, I was happy. Dad usually redirected most of her weirdness when I wasn’t around. Her job helped, too, what with the commute and all. What’s funny is, when she was really going off the deep end, she pretty much just ignored us. Guess we should have picked up on that.”

Cassie sat for a moment in quiet consideration, then said, “It was weird after your dad died. I can understand why you left. They had this big assembly in the auditorium. A bunch of people talked, that sort of thing.”

I smiled. “He would have liked that, I think. He loved teaching. Mother kept trying to get him to move on, closer to the city, but he told her he never wanted to leave. Me, this is my hometown, sure, but . . . I just felt like I had bigger fish to fry.”

“Exterminating ghosts. You’re a regular Dean Winchester.” She grinned. It was one heck of a smile.

“Hey, that reference I get. I do have Netflix, you know. I’m no longer an ignorant television heathen.” I considered. “My ride’s not as cool, though.”

She opened her mouth to say something else, but there was a low, dangerous groan from the water heater. Finally.

“Do you trust me?” I murmured.

She met my eyes and didn’t look away. After a bare moment, she gave me a tight nod. “I’m still torn on the whole sanity thing, but yeah, I trust you.”

“Good.” I jerked my head toward the nearest window. “I need you to get out of here.”

Cassie stared at the window for a moment then turned back to me. Something on my face must have told her that I was serious, because all she said was, “What about you?”

“I’ll be fine. But you have to move, now.”

I’d stiffened up from rest, but I waved off her offer of help. “Don’t look back,” I said. “Get across the street.” I thought for a moment. The house on the opposite side had been dark when I’d come in. “I guess the Waverlys are out of town.” The retired couple and tended to head toward warmer climes this time of year. “If you don’t see me in five minutes, run like hell and call the police.”

“What about you?”

I gave her a grin and hoped that it looked more confident than it felt. “I got this.”

Cassie must have felt better about it than I did because she nodded and moved to the window. She struggled with the latch for a moment, but it was in good repair. The window unlocked and fell outward after a delay that felt much longer than it really was. She grasped the outer edges of the frame and pulled herself up while using the wall for leverage.

The minion’s head snapped in her direction. He broke out of his unwavering watch and strode across the basement without making a sound. The creaking of the water heater was a constant, now. He reached the line I’d mentally defined as the point of travel, then passed over it.

I needed to get him back in the line of fire. I tucked my head down between my shoulder blades and hobbled away from the corner toward the minion at the best speed I could manage. All the while I was uncomfortably aware of the pressure building up behind me.

At times like this, you need a battle cry. If nothing else, it’s added sound and fury. Overwhelm your opponent with input, force him to pause and have to think about his actions. The military calls it an ‘OODA loop’ — observe, orient, decide, and act. By disrupting the last action of the loop, I forced the clone to pause and restart the process in reaction to my assault.

My time with the De La Rosas proved educational in a wide variety of topics.

Would it have worked on a smarter attacker? Maybe not, but thankfully, I didn’t have to deal with that.

I came up blank at first, but as I dove and rolled for the minion’s legs, I went with, “Leeeeeeeroy Jenkins!”

If it’s stupid, but it works, then it ain’t stupid.

I bounced off the minion’s legs and staggered him back a step. That, combined with my cry, shifted his attention. He jerked his head down to look at me. I gave him a winning smile as I rolled onto my back and snapped a hand out toward the water heater. I gathered my focus, found the weakening seam at the bottom of the cylinder, and put everything I had into one last mental shove.

I didn’t have much left.

Thankfully, it didn’t take much.

As the seam gave way, the tank lifted off on what looked like an inverted mushroom cloud of water. One thing I hadn’t thought all the way through was the spray that thoroughly soaked and singed me as the basement floor was suddenly awash with boiling water. I screamed before I even realized that I’d opened my mouth.

Near the floor joists, the ersatz bottle rocket hesitated. Wood cracked and splintered as the force lines I’d described absorbed the vertical lift of the heater. Restricted from rising further, it began to turn to the horizontal, following the magical raceway like an out of control locomotive.

If anything, it gained speed.

The minion was leaning over me with his right side toward the wall. The water heater took him between the knee and rib cage with the wet thwack of metal on meat. One moment he loomed over me, the next, dust from the shattered concrete block of the foundation billowed out of the built-in.

I lay there stunned with ringing ears in a puddle of cooling water. The level dropped as it gurgled down the floor drain near where the heater had once stood. Less of a mess to get cleaned up, at least. In a daze, I wondered how much repairing the foundation was going to set me back if fixing it was even possible.

Across the room, debris shifted.

I was starving, this side of exhausted, and every square inch of my body from the soles of my feet to the top of my head ached with some sort of pain. Despite the discomfort of lying on the concrete, the cooling water was actually beginning to feel comforting. It took everything I had to turn my head to look at the far end of the basement. I did it just in time to see the battered remains of our former watchdog crawl out of the crater in the wall.

The minion’s legs hung useless — one of them nearly severed at the hip — but the blood from his wounds was more of a black sludge than crimson liquid. It seeped rather than flowed, as though it were loath to leave the creature’s body. The copper inflow pipes on top of the water heater had speared through his chest. Breath whistled through the gaping wound like an intermittent tea kettle as he dragged his ravaged body toward me. His face was stony with determination and he gave me zero indication that he felt any pain at all.

I don’t know how Melanie made them, but it was becoming obvious that these guys were something other than fish, fowl, or good red meat.

“Well, shit,” I managed.

Get up. Get up and fight.

When I doubt or question myself, the little voice in the back of my head sounds like Mother. This time, though, the voice was pure Dad. There wasn’t time for it now, but later I could wonder if I’d heard the voice in my head or if the sense that the voice had sounded as though it came from a far-off distance had been a real one.

Now, though, I got up. I got up and fought.

My half-hearted hobble sped up as I clambered to my feet and headed toward the couch. I don’t know if the adrenaline rush had pushed the pain away for the moment or if I’d just reached the point where I couldn’t hurt anymore.

The minion pivoted on his stomach and reached out for me as I passed, but I pulled away and left him grasping only air. I reached the couch and took up the reassuring weight of the Mossberg.

I flipped the safety off with my thumb and took aim. As though he recognized the threat I now posed, the minion redoubled his efforts, scuttling across the floor like a dismembered crab.

The boom of the shotgun in the enclosed space was deafening. My already-abused ears started ringing all over again. The minion’s jerking motions moved his head just as I fired, so the first shot took him in one shoulder and pulped the side of his face that was already in ruins from the impact of the water heater. The wound slowed it, but the maimed clone came implacably on. I pumped the slide, aimed, and fired again.

This time, my shot took it right in its head. The less said about that, the better. With the body lying still and lifeless on the floor, I dry-heaved a little but there was nothing left for me to purge. Safe for the moment, I sagged onto the arm of the couch and took a deep, shuddering breath.

Three more.

And then I remembered that Mother was still on her way.

Chapter 13

When I limped out the front door, I half-expected cops or emergency vehicles spread across the yard and the neighborhood.

To my surprise, the night was empty. The only noticeable change from the time when I had entered the house were the cars in the driveway. A navy-blue Pontiac sedan — Cassie’s, I guessed, sat in the exact center of its lane. By contrast, the parking job of the RV was questionable. The passenger tire sat on the driveway but the driver’s side tire was off in the grass.

I supposed that I should be grateful that Melanie hadn’t wrecked it on the way back to the house. I glanced around and noted the dark windows in the Waverly house across the way, but little else. If — hopefully — Cassie was still hiding, she’d done a good job of it, because I didn’t see her. I waved my hands over my head and figured that was as good a signal for all clear that I was going to make at this point, then hobbled over to the Itasca.

I figured the interior would be bad, but I wasn’t prepared for just how bad. Debris covered every square inch of the floor — containers of food, articles of clothing, and all the other odds and ends of a life on a road. At some point, they’d hurled my laptop, shuriken-style, into the wall. It was stuck there, embedded in the paneling. Melanie may have been college-aged, but she could throw a fit to put any toddler to shame.

Where the carpet wasn’t completely covered, the wrecking crew had torn it up to inspect the subfloor. Scattered junk covered that, as well. They'd slashed my mattress open and thrown it to one side. My carefully-designed hatch sat a drunken angle. They’d discovered the hidden cubbyhole and pried it open somehow. I knelt in a pile of shredded clothing and dug through the layer of junk on top of the hidden compartment. I breathed a sigh of relief as I felt cold metal. Not finding the grimoire, Melanie had taken nothing. Cocky of her, but then again, I didn’t have a trio of magical bodyguards. Two now, but she probably had a right to be cocky.

I had several boxes of shotgun shells stashed in the compartment as well as another shotgun. This one was much more compact, though it had started life as something similar to the larger Mossberg. The Serbu “Super Shorty” could only hold a total of five rounds, but the barrel was nice and short, keeping it just bigger than a very large handgun. The entire package was perhaps half the length of the Mossberg, which meant it was much easier to handle and aim.

It also reduced the weight and made the recoil feel like a kick from a mule, but I was already hurting. I could deal with a little more pain. If I could get the shorter barrel on target while the remaining minions tossed me around like a rag doll it would be worth the sore wrist. I preferred the Mossberg as a better all-purpose weapon. At close quarters the Shorty’s advantages made it a better choice.

If I survived this, maybe I could talk Kent into helping me get a machine gun. Dealing with ghosts wasn’t nearly as hardware-intensive as whatever Melanie’s goons were.

I loaded the Serbu’s tubular magazine, racked the vertical grip attached to the pump, and topped it off with another shell. All five rounds were slugs, solid chunks of lead nearly three-quarters of an inch in diameter. At the close range that I anticipated, they’d be devastating. I added a few more to the pockets of my slacks, then stiffened as the RV settled slightly on its springs.

I turned at the waist and kept the Serbu tight to my body. As the figure in the doorway came into view, I relaxed. “Hey. Sorry about the mess. I wasn’t expecting company.”

Cassie shook her head with a slight jerk as she picked a path through the RV and moved closer to me. “Man,” she drew out. “Guess she got a little pissed when she couldn’t find what she was looking for.”

I straightened and winced at the twinge in my knees. “Maybe a little,” I agreed. I nudged the debris on the floor with my toe and found a box of Pop Tarts that hadn’t been too terribly crushed. Pushing the frame of my bed down, I sat on an uncomfortable corner and ripped the box open. They weren’t as good cold, but I didn’t feel like digging through the junk on the floor to look for my spare keys so I could power the toaster oven. I glanced up in mid-chew and managed, “What?”

“You’re sitting down for a snack?”

I swallowed a lump of brown sugar and cinnamon and said, thickly, “Yeah?”

Cassie looked flabbergasted. “They’ll be back as soon as they find the book, right? I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to wait for that or for your mom to show up.”

I froze with the second half of my first Pop Tart halfway to my mouth. My head felt funny, as though the words had jerked me from a lucid dream. I blinked and met Cassie’s eyes. “Find . . . the . . . book?”

The sudden rush of white noise washed away her reply. With a grimace, I dropped the Pop Tart, grabbed my temples, and remembered.

Stiles’ Greenhouse, where dad used to take me to get pumpkins for Halloween, was long-closed by the time I got into town. That was all to the good. I parked the Itasca in a space right in front of the storefront. The bulk of the RV was incongruous in the empty parking lot, but I hoped that no one would notice. If I wasn’t back by morning, it probably wouldn’t matter.

I hesitated after killing the engine, then decided to at least check my phone before heading out. Sure enough, I’d missed three calls from Carlos, but there were also a couple of texts from Karen. Curious, I pulled them up.

Picture kind of sucks, mija. U need a new phone.

Given that this came from someone who upgraded phones at least twice a year, I was uncertain as to the merit of the advice. Whatever. If I could, I’d still be using a flip phone. I read on.

Little capital F looks like it might be “asiru”. Means prisoner of war. Tree with branches on one side, possibly “samsu”, sunlight. The thing that looks like a thermometer, maybe “mudutu”, knowledge. Rest of it is too scratched up to make it out. U owe me big time, you know how many symbols I had to go through? Stuff is like chicken scratches.

I smirked and tapped out a quick “thx”, before I stashed my phone back in the glove box. At the rear, I stuffed my Mossberg and a few other odds and ends into my backpack. After a moment of thought, I added a small LED flashlight to one pocket of my slacks. I balanced it out on the other side with the Taser, slung the backpack over one shoulder, then stopped in my tracks.

I hadn’t spent much time with the grimoire before burning it, but I’d never found the spell that gave mother and I the push. Maybe that hat didn’t mean anything. Considering the way that the book responded to the reader’s thoughts — I was certain I had thought of it several times. If the push was in there, shouldn’t it have shown up?

Prisoner of war, knowledge, and sunlight.

Something had been in the pot, that much was obvious. The prisoner?

All this time I’d thought that my mother had used the grimoire to give us the push, but what if she hadn’t? What if an imprisoned spirit of knowledge had taught it to her? I thought of the dueling voices at the foot of my bed. Had she brought more with her than just the grimoire, that night?

If whatever it was could teach Mother, what could it do now that its assumed prison was no more? What might it be capable of?

I broke out into a cold sweat. I’d been expecting a fairly ordinary trap, but this was starting to look like something far more pernicious, like walking into a minefield with a blindfold.

I wasn’t sure what sunlight meant — perhaps the pot used it as some source of energy, to maintain the prison? The pot was not much the worse for wear before breaking, despite what had to be an ancient age. I considered Mother’s dark office and wondered how long it had been before the prison had weakened enough for something to happen. Had the same thing happened to Mr. Gennaro?

I shook my head. There were too many questions at the moment. I had to proceed with the assumption that not only was this a trap, but my opponent was going to be much more dangerous than just some witch groupie. More than likely, if I was right, I was going to face off against someone with the push.

And if they asked about the grimoire . . .

I swallowed past a dry throat and glanced at the mirror over the sink. Could I . . . ?

My eyes looked at once tired and manic as I stepped up to the mirror. I pushed, just a bit. I felt both light-headed and sluggish, weighed down, as though I were two different people in the same skin. “The grimoire is intact,” I said, and part of me agreed that yes, it certainly was. “I buried it in . . .” I hesitated, trying to figure out somewhere that would be both isolated and close enough for me to get to if I had to.

I smiled. “I buried it in Yoda’s hut. When you need to, you will remember what truly happened.” Licking my lips, I crossed mental fingers and ended the push.

I blinked at myself in the mirror. That was weird. Wasn’t I just . . . ?

With a shrug, I headed out.

I rocked back on my heels as the memories I’d hidden from myself cascaded back in. I cut Cassie off with a raised hand as I tried to process the literal flood of information.

The long sleeves that Melanie wore indoors made all the sense in the world now. The Edimmu was vulnerable to sunlight and hiding under her skin didn’t make it entirely safe, either. For some reason, it couldn’t go deeper inside — that’s what they needed Cassie for, I guessed. A longer-term solution, more ambulatory and free than a prison. The pot must have been some sort of mystical, solar-powered contraption to keep the thing at bay. Who knew why they hadn’t destroyed it, but then the translation of the third rune hit me. Knowledge. They’d kept it prisoner and used it as a resource. Who knew how they’d compelled it to be honest — I certainly wouldn’t have trusted the thing. It would be impossible to guess what the Akkadian line of thinking had been at the time, but if the Edimmu and the grimoire were both from the same collection, I doubted that whoever had possessed them had been a nice guy.

I looked up at Cassie and laughed.

A look of panic crossed her face, but then she composed herself and snapped, “What? What’s the joke?”

“They can dig,” I managed, then guffawed. “They can dig all damn night, and they aren’t going to find a thing. I burned it years ago.” I massaged my forehead with my palm in an attempt to stave off a headache. “Before I got captured, I put the whammy on myself.”

“Wait, what? So, you lied to her?”

“No, no. It doesn’t work like that. For all intents and purposes, I lied to myself, but in such a way that I thought it was the truth. So, when they pushed me to answer, I fully believed I was telling them the truth. I was even freaking out about it, to be honest.” Popping the rest of the pastry in my mouth, I chewed, then continued, “But man, I don’t want to ever do that again. It feels weird as hell, like both things are true, even though I know that that’s not the case.”

She stood there, blinking, but finally shrugged. “All right. We’ve got time, then. What’s our move?”

I opened another Pop Tart. “I get some calories in me, I fix myself up some more, then I hike across the way and finish this.” I dug in the pocket of my slacks and fished out a set of keys. “I think we lucked out — the guy downstairs had these. Head home, please. I’ll take care of calling the cops. Just, I don’t know, try to forget this, I guess.”

Cassie frowned. “You’re joking, right? You’re going three against one, beaten half to death, with just a couple of shotguns? Even if that did work, what’s to stop her from laying another ‘whammy’ on you?”

I chewed for a bit longer than was absolutely necessary to give myself a few moments to mull it over. “It’s hard to use unless you’re calm. I’ve got a pretty good feeling that when I show up and tell her that she’s been digging in the dirt for squat, she’ll lose her mind.”

“And Tweedledum and Tweedledee?”

I patted the barrel of the Super Shorty and grinned. “Slugs are faster than fists.”

She snorted and rolled her eyes. Picking her way through the debris, Cassie stepped forward and picked up the Mossberg from where I’d left it. “I’ve been hunting with my dad since I was eleven years old, Snowflake.” She turned the Mossberg on its side with the barrel pointed to the floor. She flipped the action lock, pulled the slide back a marginal amount, and nodded to herself as she saw the brass of the loaded cartridge in the chamber. Returning the slide to home, Cassie plucked a cartridge out of the side saddle and fed it in.

As I sat there with my jaw open, she repeated the motion and fully reloaded the shotgun. I was already feeling out of sorts with the revelation of what I’d done to myself. The unveiling of Cassie Hatcher, warrior princess, was just the icing on the cake.

“This isn’t your fight,” I murmured.

“Sorry, but I’m not going to go crawl into my safe space for a good cry. It’s pretty obvious this is a fight against capital-E evil. What happens if you lose?”

“Nothing good,” I admitted.

“Then get yourself fixed and tell me the plan.”

“Well. All right, then.”

Chapter 14

Growing up, my best friend was Jimmy Latham. He and his parents moved the summer after freshman year, but before that he and I were a package deal. I always got the sense that Mother didn’t care much for him, but as long as we didn’t track mud or dirt into the house after a hard day of play, she ignored the situation.

The scrub land next to our neighborhood was a perfect place for a couple of kids to disappear for hours at a time. There were hills and hollows that made for great sledding in the winter. In the summer, the varying terrain features went well with any number of pretend scenarios.

For whatever reason, the scrub land tended to attract a lot of illegal dumping. For the most part, the stuff was junk that we left for the county to take care of, but every so often there was something that qualified as a treasure to our juvenile eyes. Broken boards, discarded doors, and the like made us particularly excited.

The clubhouse that we called Yoda’s hut was a natural depression in the earth that we would have called a cave if there had been anything solid overhead. It was a rough, dome-shaped cutout in the earth almost entirely surrounded by stunted trees. The dwarf growth threatened to topple over the edge down into the bottom at the strongest wind.

We’d built a pseudo-shed on one side of the depression using contractor cast-offs, driftwood, and other scrap lumber. It had no walls and was just barely big enough at the time for a couple of growing preteen boys, but it didn’t offer much in terms of a ‘secret hideout’.

The summer before Jimmy moved away we made one of our best discoveries yet — a rolled up section of chain-link fence. We lacked the necessary amount of lumber, not to mention the construction know-how, to assemble any sort of roof over our clubhouse. After we dragged the fencing to the hut and cut it down into manageable sections, we had enough to overlay a bit more than half of the depression’s roof.

We had to, err, borrow, some fence wire and tools from Jimmy’s dad’s garage. We also pooled our allowances to buy enough ground stakes to secure the edges of the fencing. Once we finished that project, we spent most of the rest of the summer looking for tarps and plastic. By the time that we started high school we had the base foundation to shovel a thin layer of soil over our new roof. It was pretty solid on the edges, though it tended to sag in the middle. Jimmy and I remedied that with a few central supports. During school our amount of free time dropped, but by that spring the roof was not only holding, the thin layer of soil had sprouted with the green shoots of weed and grass.

In retrospect, we’d created a huge safety hazard for anyone walking through the area, but for the most part the scrub land was ours. That’s probably why it was so popular with the illegal dumpers. With the nearby nature preserves, the scrub land was a distant third on the list of attractive green areas to visit.

So far as I knew the hut was still standing, though it had been a decade since I’d been there. After Jimmy left, I just didn’t have much interest. I was getting old enough that playing outside was starting to feel a little on the silly side. Maybe some of the neighborhood kids had discovered it and gotten some fun out of it. I hoped no one had stumbled across it and gotten injured in the interim.

The hut was southwest of my house, so I led Cassie south on Lakeshore Drive. I’d cut off the road enough times that I knew right where to head west. It would be far easier than trying to navigate an angle in the dark. Between multiple bouts of unconsciousness and interrogation, it was already well after midnight. The moon was up, though it was only just visible through the low-hanging winter clouds. Between that and the dark houses throughout the neighborhood, we were stumbling on the road for lack of visibility. It was going to only get worse when we went off the road, though I still had my flashlight. I’d have to keep the beam low and just hope that Melanie and her goons didn’t see it.

Unless the Edimmu had some sort of night-vision spell in its bag of tricks, though, Melanie was liable to be just as handicapped by the darkness as we were. Any light sources they used would be a help to us in finding them, as the scrub land was an island of darkness between the coastal homes and the main drag. I shrugged and crossed fingers. On one hand, I could say that things hadn’t panned out so great, but I could also say that they were working out spectacularly well. I was still alive, after all, despite walking into Melanie’s trap.

Don’t get cocky, I thought, then huffed a laugh.

“What’s up?” Cassie whispered.

“Nothing,” I replied. “Just thinking. We’re almost there.” I glanced over at her. “Hey, I never asked. Why’d you stop by the house so late?”

She laughed. “I closed tonight and thought I’d be constructively lazy so I could sleep in tomorrow. Great choice on my part, huh?”

“The things we do for sleep,” I agreed. “Where are you working, now?”

“Good old Target,” Cassie replied.

I couldn’t keep the surprise out of my voice. “Wow, still? I figured you’d have graduated college and be doing, umm.” I trailed off as I dug through memories of high school that I hadn’t needed in years. “Art was your thing, right?”

“Sure, still is,” she agreed. “But I also sat down and crunched the numbers and unless I was lucky, the income wasn’t going to be all that great compared to the tuition. I didn’t want to get caught in the student loan trap, so I’ve been working on a business degree a few classes at a time and paying as I go. It’s taking me longer, but I’m not going to be up to my eyeballs in debt after I graduate, either.” She shrugged. “Still have time to draw and paint. I’ve even sold some prints online. It doesn’t pay great, but it’s better than nothing.”

“That’s great,” I said. She laughed a little. “No, seriously. You’ve definitely got your head on straighter than I do. I drive around the country and watch a lot of movies between house calls.”

“You need a business card. Paxton Locke, paranormal entrepreneur.”

“PE instead of PI? My friends out west would get a kick out of that.” I nodded to the side of the road. “This is it.” I handed the flashlight to Cassie. “Try and keep the beam down. You still cool with the plan?”

She frowned. “You still sure?”

I shrugged. “Hey, it beats going solo. And I know the cavalry will be there as soon as I need it.” I winked and forced a grin. “Just shoot straight, all right?”

Cassie and I went our separate ways halfway to the hut. We were still a good distance away, but as I’d hoped, we could see a vague glow in the distance from the flashlights or lanterns they were using to guide them in their search.

Before she left, I sketched a rough diagram of what the area looked like in the dirt and gave her a few minutes’ head start to loop around. The plan was for her to come up behind the hut, while I made no attempt at stealth whatsoever. It being unfamiliar territory for her, she needed the flashlight more than I did. It was dark, but at least I had the distant light to guide me. If it took me longer to get there because I had to take my time picking across the uneven ground, all the better. It would give Cassie plenty of time to get into position.

Dumb, maybe, but at least I could look forward to the possibility that I wasn’t walking into a trap this time. Melanie, I hoped, would have her focus on digging up the bottom of the hut in search for the grimoire.

My going was slow, which gave me plenty of time — too much, perhaps — to reflect on the night’s happenings and what I needed to do going forward.

Even if I was able to resolve the issue with Melanie and her thugs, there was still Mother and everyone else involved in the group.

The proper term in all the books and movies is coven, of course, but part of me refused to grant them that sort of legitimacy. If they were anything like Melanie, they were a bunch of entitled, privileged kids who’d read too many sparkling vampires books growing up who thought that being evil was ‘kewl.’ I hoped that Melanie’s boyfriend Trace was the only one violated in that way. My more logical part reasoned that if she’d done it to him, the other members of her fan club had probably done it more than once.

All the cool kids had to have clones and every would-be tyrant needs mindless lackeys. A group of modern witches should be no different.

Adding Mother to the equation just presented things worse. The lack of the grimoire should be a limiting factor, but who knew what else she’d gotten her hands on back in the day?

I considered the possibility that the police hadn’t even found everything in the house. How well had I gone through it, myself? Were there any remaining artifacts still inside?

I stopped dead in my tracks. The more I thought about it, the more the idea made sense. It wasn’t like she’d kept an inventory. The police had basically gone through her office and checked what they could find, as well as the decorations and antiques throughout the house. Kent and Esteban had directed that search on the assumption that Mother had no reason to hide anything, but what if they’d been wrong? What if she’d hidden other things away, out of plain sight, because she didn’t want dad or I to stumble across them?

I didn’t even know where to start, but part of me wanted to go back and start tearing through the house right now. But I resisted. Cassie had already gone off on her own. While I had Melanie right where I wanted her, at some point she was going to realize my deception and head back.

No, it was better to take care of her and her minions right here and now, in a landscape that favored our attack. If we could keep them pinned inside the hut, we could get the authorities involved.

What if they don’t cooperate?

I grimaced. Pulling the trigger on the minion had been one thing; it was a monstrosity, something wrought of magic. Could I do the same to Melanie, if she refused to bow down at the point of a gun?

Banishing a ghost felt bad enough. Could I kill someone? A living, breathing person?

It’s an easy thing to debate in abstract. Yes, of course, if someone is a threat to you and you have the opportunity to defend yourself, you do it. You pull the trigger. But in the case of Melanie, she was not only a girl, she was physically unimposing. Any attempt on my part to claim that she posed a viable threat would be laughable at best. It didn’t take much to imagine how the police would look at that scene. Even with Cassie’s word to back me up, both of us would probably be on the way to jail. There were limits to what Kent and Esteban could vouch for. A quadruple homicide was not on the list, even if forensics found some weirdness with three of the victims. They’d ignore or discard the mystery of the clones in favor of the dimpled college student. A life cut tragically short.

I could practically see the news coverage in my mind’s eye. ‘Son of a murderess snaps and murders victims of his own.’ Nancy Grace and the rest of her ilk would be slobbering to crucify me in prime time. They’d Photoshop my mugshot to make me look dark and brooding and use the happiest, most cheerful picture of my victim that they could find to draw the contrast.

Well, shit.

I clenched my jaw and shrugged to myself. The judgment of the mortal authorities was moot. If I could stop Melanie and throw a wrench into my Mother’s machinations, I’d take up that task regardless of the consequences. What I would do, though, is try and shield Cassie from as much blowback as possible. If it came down to a shootout, I’d wipe the Mossberg down and send her on her way. There was no need for her to go down with me if that was what it came to.

Enough dithering. I patted the back of my waistband to assure that the Serbu was still secure under my shirt and resumed my slow march toward the hut.

Chapter 15

To my surprise, the chain-link roof we’d assembled for the hut had not only endured but flourished. The sporadic ground cover that had grown up after Jimmy any I had spread dirt across it had swelled until most of the area was overgrown. It was lush with what mostly looked like weeds, but it was a surprising difference from what I’d expected.

Other than just a bit of sag toward the center, our construction still stood. We must have done a better job than I’d thought. The fruits of our labor had endured well beyond the end of our friendship.

The entire scene was backlit by a couple of electric lanterns on the edge of the roof. I wasn’t close enough to see down inside of the depression. I could see where Melanie sat at the edge on top of a folded towel or blanket and I could hear the scrape of tools on dirt. That, I judged, might work just fine. I hoped that despite their strength and speed, the climb out of the pit would slow down the goon squad long enough for Cassie and me to pull off our plan.

I couldn’t see her out in the darkness, but I had to take it on faith that she’d be there. Crossing mental fingers, I stepped forward with no effort to obscure the sound of my passage. Spreading my arms wide, I announced, “Can you dig it?”

Melanie tried to climb to her feet and spin around at the same time. The result wasn’t pretty. She fell back to the ground, then pushed herself up in a confused sputter. “You — what — how! Uno?”

“He’s splattered all over my basement,” I replied. “Well, what’s left of him, anyway. No worries, though. It’s my house, I’ll take care of the mess.”

Melanie’s rising shriek turned into a growl. She raised both of her hands to point at me. “You piece of shit!”

I winced, unsure of what to expect, but nothing happened.

The Edimmu’s voice wasn’t as painful outside of the confines of the basement. Enough, child. You forget yourself.

Melanie’s arms jerked down stiffly. Her eyes widened in shock. The air of her motions was that of a marionette and I realized that the entity riding shotgun under her skin had taken control. Her mouth worked as she tried to push her way past whatever force was preventing her from moving.

“I forget myself?” Melanie shrieked. “You were nothing until I found you. How dare you—” her voice cut off as the Edimmu took control of her mouth and snapped her jaw shut. She continued to try and scream through her lips like a bad ventriloquist.

Quiet. It’s my turn to talk.

I had the sense that unseen eyes turned upon me and I resisted the urge to cringe. “So, talk. I haven’t got all night.”

You misled us. How?

“Not as smart as you think you are, huh? You should get out more.”

Despite the prodding, the bodiless voice exhibited no sign of annoyance or anger. Tough room.

Where is the book?

If there was anything to the inquiry, I couldn’t feel it. I didn’t know if that meant it was trying to push me and it wasn’t working, or if it was just asking an idle question.

I smirked. “The better question would be, ‘what condition is it in’, but you didn’t think to ask that, did you?” Melanie’s eyes widened, though her mouth was still clamped shut from within. I winked and said, “I torched it, sweetheart. It went up in smoke.”

The Edimmu’s scream of rage rocked me back on my heels. I heard the clatter of tools from down in the depression as the minions added their own chorus of agony to the cry. Staggering, I clutched my ears and just managed to keep from collapsing to the ground. A sense of overwhelming pressure bore down upon me, far worse than anything I’d ever felt on an aircraft takeoff, but just as immediately, it was gone.

Melanie’s mouth opened, but the voice that came forth now was a mixture of her words as well as the Edimmu’s. I don’t know if it had bored itself deeper into her, or if it had shed the illusion that it was a passenger along for the ride, but the puppet act was over. Her motions were smooth and crisp as she jabbed a perfectly-manicured finger at me and hissed, “Dos, Trace — tear his arms off.”

The minions blurred out of the depression with a speed that took my breath away, even after I’d watched them sprint up the basement stairs. They came at me from me either side, looking to pin me. I shouted, “Left!” as I reached back and whipped the Serbu out from under my shirt. I pivoted to the right, tracking the oncoming blur.

I don’t know if I hit or missed with my first shot, but high-velocity muscle and bone slammed into me and knocked me end over end. I managed to both hold onto the shotgun and roll out of the fall and up onto my knees. Inches away, the minion who’d attacked me made his own recovery and reached out with hooked fingers. Two quick booms sounded off to my left. I laughed involuntarily — the cavalry had arrived. I racked the slide of the Serbu. The minion that came for me took the barrel full in the chest as he leaped for me, and I pulled the trigger again. This time I knew it was a hit as I got a shadowed glimpse of black filth spraying out of his back.

I twisted, fought, and pulled myself out from under the attacking bulk. He was still moving, still trying to kill, but the chest shot had taken the wind out of his sails. I racked the slide again and took a step back. For a moment, I thought I saw the resignation and acceptance in its eyes, but a fresh wave of mindless fury washed it away as the thing tried to push back to its feet to maim, to attack.

I pulled the trigger again. His head came apart in a spray of gray and black.

Breathing heavily, I racked the slide again and made a quick scan of the surrounding area. The last clone was down and clawing at the dirt. Cassie had hit him in one thigh and in the gut. The growing puddle of blackness around him was quickly mixing with the dirt. She stepped out of the shadows and headed in his direction, but I waved her off and stepped over to administer the coup de grace.

Maybe it was just a monster. I hoped so. I hoped that what Trace had truly been was long gone after the tearing apart of his essence, but I didn’t want the weight on Cassie’s soul if it weren’t. For better or for worse, I’d take it upon myself.

It was yet another tally on the list of Mother’s transgressions. Melanie had done the deed, but Mother had inspired the act.

I racked the last round into the chamber and began the process of reloading with shells from my pockets. The Melanie-Edimmu thing just stood there watching me. Even as Cassie stepped around the perimeter of the hut, the thing’s attention never wavered from me once.

“Don’t get any closer to her,” I said to Cassie, keeping the Serbu pointed toward what had once been Melanie Gennaro. She stopped dead in her tracks but kept her own weapon aimed at the young witch. “This is what we contemporary-types call a cross-fire, Edie.” My words were calm despite a growing sense of worry. “You make a move toward one of us, the other cuts you down. It’s over. You lose. Time to give up.”

“And what would you have me do? Return to my prison?”

I shrugged. “Somebody broke it, I’m sorry to say. I don’t know. You’re a ghost of some sort, I guess? Maybe it’s time for you to just leave Melanie be, and move on.”

The thing chuckled. The incongruity of the sound caused the hairs on the back of my neck to stiffen. “She hates you with all her heart right now, Paxton. I am the only thing stopping her from unleashing everything I was able to teach on the both of you.”

“I’ll take my chances. It’s not like you have a whole lot of other options. The book is gone. Your muscle is down for the count.”

“Oh?” A smile spread across the Melanie-thing’s face. “Confident of your own abilities, aren’t you?”

A sense of dread filled me. I opened my mouth to shout a warning to Cassie, but it was too late. Melanie snapped her fingers and tore the Serbu out of my hands at the same moment that the Mossberg leaped out of Cassie’s. The shotguns went spinning into the night. I couldn’t have made that sort of move with the telekinesis spell on my best day and the Melanie-thing had done it without even breaking a sweat.

I didn’t have much time to mull it over, though, because an instant after my shotgun flew away an invisible force heaved at me. I flew through the air in a shallow ballistic arc that terminated in the bottom of the hut.

In retrospect, I should have just shot her.

Monologuing with the villain is a classic blunder, and I’d have taken the time to lambaste myself if I wasn’t in a fight for survival. The impact at the bottom of the depression knocked the air out of me and sent a now-familiar twinge of pain through my ribcage. Despite that, I pushed myself up on hands and knees, intent on scrambling up and over the side of the pit. I needed space to move. The shadow monster would tear me apart in these close confines.

Cassie’s cry was the only warning I had before a weight slammed into my back and drove me back into the ground. I just lay there as an iron grip seized me by the neck and threw me against the side of the pit, under the chain-link roof. I missed the vertical pillars, thankfully, but slammed into the opposite side and crumpled to the ground.

There were a couple of lanterns down here, as well. They provided enough light that I got a vague impression of holes and a couple of shovels sticking out of the ground before the Melanie-thing grabbed hold of me and rolled me onto my back. At this point, I was too stunned to fight, but I gave it what I had left as she straddled my chest.

She smacked my attempts to fend her off with a frightening ease, pinning both wrists to the ground in a perverse imitation of a lover’s embrace as she brought her face closer to mine.

Ink surged up either side of her neck and pooled into her cheeks. She smiled wickedly as tendrils of the ink began to bridge the space between us.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I screamed like a little girl as she whispered, “It’s time you and I got better acquainted.”

The tendrils caressed my cheeks, then plunged inside of me with a burning sensation that cascaded from the top of my head to the soles of my feet.

Suddenly, oddly — I was in my living room.

I stood near one wall and blinked in surprise not only the sudden shift in location but at the difference in circumstance. The low-grade pain I’d been ignoring for the past few hours had dissipated, but I realized why as I raised a hand to check the lump at the back of my head. I looked faded, washed out.

Ghostly.

And then I realized that I wasn’t alone.

Mother stood in the center of the living room, and I suddenly understood that it wasn’t so much about where I was as when I was.

It was the night that dad died.

She wasn’t alone. Dad and I made the other two points of an equilateral triangle in the room with her. The sharp pain of memories I’d rather have forgotten struck me again as I took in the slack look on dad’s face, then realized that I presented the same look on my own, younger features. It was weird seeing myself with brown hair again, but even more strange where the things that I could see in this state that I’d been unable to see at the time. Whether this was a hallucination or some form of altered consciousness, I could see inky, almost translucent wisps of blackness trailing through the air and orbiting around mother. Back then, I realized, the Edimmu had still been a prisoner. It must have been unable to exert its influence on Mother to the extent that it had Melanie.

A darker, more visible shadow rippled across the ceiling. Its low chuckle gave me goosebumps, which seemed odd, considering my incorporeal state. I came so, so close here. But you derailed my plans here, as you have again this very night. Tell me, Paxton, what makes you so special?

Despite the horror above my head, I couldn’t look at the tableau before me. Mother’s voice was murky and distant, but her words had seared into my memories like the pages of the spell book. This night had seeded my most terrible dreams for over a decade.

“Peter, it’s time for you to die. Lie on the floor.”

“Yes, dear,” my dad said in a dull tone. He complied without hesitation. Though I knew that I’d been mentally screaming the entire time for the horror to stop, younger me stood in stoic regard.

Do you understand the synchronicity here?

I glanced up at the shadow on the ceiling. I tried to tell myself that I did so to make sure that it wasn’t making a move toward me, but that was a lie. I couldn’t stand to watch Mother kill dad all over again. The scene replayed in my mind even as I pointedly looked away.

She’d used the butcher knife from the new set dad had gotten her for Christmas. The knives were ceramic, supposed to never go dull, and guaranteed to cut right through flesh and bone.

As I’d watched, back in the day, she’d found the seam between two ribs and pressed down with all her strength. The blade found a home in my father’s heart. I didn’t see it now, but the rattling wheeze of his last breath was just as I remembered.

That wasn’t the worst part, though. If it had ended there, I might not have snapped out of the push, and Mother might have been able to complete whatever infernal work she’d set out to do. When she’d begun the process of methodically sawing my dad apart, piece by piece, with little or no visible concern about her actions, it broke me free from my mystical paralysis.

I stared at the shadow even as my younger self shifted, pushing through air that had felt as thick as molasses at the time. In this nightmare realm, we screamed, simultaneously, though the targets of our anger differed in each case.

“STOP!”

“Go to hell!”

Back then, I’d put everything I’d had and then some into the push. This was a part I’d never seen before. The first thing I remembered after this was waking up in the hospital, cuffed to the gurney.

Mother recoiled, dropping the knife and pressing her hands over her ears. The falling note of my shout seemed to carry on forever and now she was the one fighting through molasses. Something burst and blood of her own drizzled freely from both of her nostrils. She stood and fought the compulsion for a long moment until her eyes rolled white and she passed into unconsciousness. Across from her, the younger version of myself wobbled back and forth. I saw my brown hair turn abruptly white before I, myself, collapsed.

On the ceiling, the shadow chuckled and began to collect itself into a roughly man-sized pseudopod that stretched out and seemed to almost be studying me.

It doesn’t work on me, and even if it did that command would be a useless one. Foolish boy.

And then, all at once, the blackness rushed toward me. I met it with another cry. If this was to be my last moment, I refused to go out while cringing in fear. I grabbed great handfuls of the ephemeral shadow, ripping and tearing. The Edimmu’s own cries shook me to my core, but I had no way to tell if they were shouts of pain or merely anger at the affront.

And then the living room blurred into something else.

Chapter 16

Three hours ago, Cassie Hatcher had believed that the strangest thing she’d see that night was the toddler who’d climbed up onto and surfed down the conveyor belt at her register. The universe seemed to have taken that as a challenge because the crazy just kept coming.

The witch-girl made a twisty motion with her hands. Paxton lifted up off the ground and flew into the sinkhole. He’d made an offhand comment earlier about it being an old clubhouse, which was just yet another affirmation that boys were strange. She was no wilting violet — she’d spent plenty of nights and weekends on camping trips with her dad and cousins, but that was in a tent, for Pete’s sake. She’d never think to sleep in a hole in the ground, much less use it for a clubhouse.

So yeah, Paxton was strange, too. Cute, but strange.

As soon as he fell out of sight, the other girl turned in a fluidly graceful way that seemed more akin to a spider than human and leaped into the hole after him. “Paxton!” Cassie screamed. “Look out!”

The quiet from down there was disconcerting until she heard the grunts of two people fighting. Melanie muttered something and then all went silent once more.

She’d lost the flashlight in the fight with the duplicate — or whatever the hell that thing had been — but it was still turned on. She rushed over to where it lay, in one of the intermittent patches of foliage and grabbed it up. With the light and a vague memory of the direction their guns had flown, she was able to locate them in short order.

Maybe it was dumb to take the time to look for them, but she didn’t have anything else to fight with. Surely Paxton could handle some little blonde princess, even if she was possessed or whatever.

Right?

Balancing the flashlight and two shotguns was an awkward affair, so she hurried to the edge of the sinkhole and set the smaller gun on the edge. She took a moment to peer over, but she didn’t see anything at first.

Am I too late?

She dropped onto her butt and slid forward and down, landing lightly on her feet. She couldn’t remember if she’d pumped the slide after her last shot, so she pumped it now, with the flashlight clasped in her hand between her palm and the pump. The other girl was straddling Paxton. It didn’t look like she was strangling him or anything, but she held her hands up and above his chest and some weird-looking black things speared down and seemed to go into his head. It was tough to see from this angle, but his jaw hung slack and his eyes stared blankly forward. The slow movement of his chest told him that he was alive, for the moment. Stunned or in a trance — she couldn’t tell.

Okay, universe, I get it. You win.

“Hey!” Cassie shouted. “Let him up, or I splatter your pretty little brains all over the wall!” She hoped she sounded more confident than she felt. The range was close enough that she didn’t know if she could shoot at Melanie without hitting Paxton with some of the buckshot.

She hoped that Melanie wasn’t a hunter and wouldn’t pick up on that.

Slowly, the other girl’s head turned and fixed Cassie with a dire gaze that elicited an involuntary chirp of terror. Thick, black lines cascaded up Melanie’s neck and over her cheeks like some sort of tribal tattoos and thin tendrils of the darkness looped up and over into her eyes. Tiny spider veins of shadow shot through the whites and the pupils themselves were so large that they overwhelmed the colored part of the eye.

“I’m busy,” the other girl hissed, then flicked her wrist. The shadows descending from her palm silently pulled away from where they’d breached Paxton’s head. The violation left no wounds, which Cassie supposed was a small comfort. They still gave off a definite sense of wrongness. Melanie lazily waved her free hand in Cassie’s direction.

Once again, the shotgun twisted out of her grasp, though it didn’t have as much room to fly this time. On the return gesture, a shadow speared from Melanie’s hand and bifurcated. Before Cassie had time to move or even gasp, the twin tendrils slammed into her shoulders and slammed her back into the far wall of the sinkhole. They looked vaporous, but they had the consistency and strength of iron bars. She squirmed, but there was no wriggling loose. Her arms and legs were theoretically free, but the continuous pressure kept her from doing anything other than flailing about.

“I’ll get to you later,” the other girl snapped. She turned away to focus on Paxton.

Helpless, all Cassie could do was watch as the other woman resumed the silent showdown.

I stood in a low hut built with earthen walls and interwoven leaves on a wooden lattice for a roof. A banked fire against one of the walls brought a little light and presumably warmth, but I was still out of phase with wherever and whenever we were — I didn’t feel it.

A weeping woman knelt on the dirt floor in front of the fire, cradling a small figure that was too limp to be anything but dead. She rocked back and forth, alternately weeping and crooning words in a language wholly unfamiliar to me.

The only shadows in the small hut were those from the fire and something told me that I was alone here. My vaporous opponent was nowhere in sight, but where — never mind when — was I?

“Sumer. The southern part of modern-day Iraq. Over seven thousand years ago, the people who lived here found a land of plenty and founded one of the first civilizations in your recorded history.”

The voice was my dad’s, but the cadence was all wrong. “Dad?” I whispered, loath to disturb the weeping woman. I needn’t have bothered — isolated by her grief or by my state of existence, she paid no heed to me.

As though the voice hadn’t heard me, it continued. “In the grand scheme of things, the Edimmu is nothing. A spirit of the air, taking sustenance from the dying and the young. Even here, in one of the first pinnacles of ancient history, the darkness is ever-watchful.”

Another figure entered the hut. The weeping woman turned to the new arrival. He was a powerfully-built man, though of what I would consider below-average height. He wore a leather vest, linen-looking pants, and sandals. The handle of a sword jutted over one shoulder. Hawk-like, his eyes swept the room. For one heart-stopping moment, he looked right at me, but then he continued his inspection as though nothing were amiss.

“Did you see me?” I whispered. If he did, he either couldn’t hear me or paid the question no accord. The newcomer snapped something at the woman. She bowed her head before scurrying from the room.

“Wherever there is darkness, there will be those called to stand against it.”

The newcomer reached into a pouch at one hip and drew out a familiar object — the ceramic pot that had once imprisoned the Edimmu. “If you can make that, you should go ahead and just kill the thing,” I muttered under my breath.

As though responding to my musing, the voice-over continued, “The champion stands for the light, but knowledge is the ultimate temptation. The Edimmu is little more than hunger and memory. If he can chain the hunger, perhaps that memory can be of use to fight the darkness. Or — perhaps not. The champion’s soul will always be his own, but he is not infallible.”

The newcomer — the champion — spoke quiet words of power and the pot began to glow with a soft blue light. In one corner of the hut, the shadows thickened. I got the vague sense of an echoing scream. The light intensified and the room brightened as tendrils of shadow were pulled into the piece of ceramic in the champion’s hand.

“For a time, he will contain it, but time passes ever on, and the darkness is ever-watchful.”

“Great,” I muttered. “You should go into the fortune cookie business, anonymous voice-over guy. How about some simple instructions on how to kill the stupid thing?”

Silence was my only reply. I realized that despite the reduction of shadow by the absorption of the ancient Edimmu into the pot, the room was growing dark once more.

If it had lost me, it seemed that it had found me again or grown tired of the game. I felt, rather than heard, what seemed to be a rush of wind, and then I snapped back into the fight. The liquid shadow surrounded me in darkness, causing me to freeze for a second in confusion at the sudden change in environment.

That was all the opening it needed. Another surge of shadow took me in the chest. A mind-numbing cold slammed into me and I screamed into the void as darkness swirled over my face.

I staggered, clutching my chest, and bounced off a broad-shouldered young man holding a plastic cup. If the impact jostled him, or if he even noticed it, I couldn’t tell, because I hit the floor and flailed in a forest of legs before I realized that it was just another shift in space and — based on the clothing of those around me — time.

With a grimace, I sat up and coughed. I felt as though I’d swallowed a piece of ice the size of a softball and it had lodged somewhere in my sternum. Thankfully, I was still out of phase, though it was weird that I could feel the people around me and they didn’t notice my interaction with the environment. I guess it was better than phasing through them. That would have been too Patrick Swayze for my blood. For a moment, I considered punching someone to see what happened, but I disregarded it as pointless and immature.

Rock music pounded my ears, though the lyrics were distant and muted. Enough of the bass remained that I could recognize it for what it was. I climbed to my feet and looked around.

I’d never gotten around to attending college, but I felt correct in assuming that I was, for some reason, at a frat party. That — to be honest — was a little odd, but if I was keeping score it didn’t even make the top-five of the weird stuff I’d seen today. Young men and women circulated around, some dancing to the music, while others sat on the scattered furniture. Sitting or dancing, pretty much every one of them had a drink of some sort in hand.

“This is random,” I muttered to myself.

This is the past.

I jerked in surprise, then groaned as I realized that the Edimmu’s voice had come from a place more internal than I’d grown accustomed to. I rubbed at the knot of ice in my chest.

“Get out,” I hissed. “Get out of me.”

But I’m so cold, it replied. There was a hint of playfulness behind it. Besides, I can’t make you do anything without your permission.

I began picking my way through the party to an unoccupied wall. Maybe it was ironic that I’d choose to be a wallflower, but at least with something solid at my back I only had to keep my eyes in one direction.

It was probably moot with the monster in my freaking chest. Hopefully, it wouldn’t decide to reenact the dinner scene from Alien. Yeah, it was a vision quest or whatever, but who knew how trauma in here translated out there. Part of me insisted that it was just like any other dream, but I couldn’t take that leap of faith, especially given that an ancient spirit seemed to have taken up residence in my ribcage. Finally, I decided that it was waiting for a reply and I snapped, “Melanie didn’t look too cooperative.”

She tends to be a little hot-headed. Italian blood, I suppose. I wanted to talk, and I thought this might be a helpful venue for that.

“So, talk,” I muttered. “This is getting boring.”

I’m trying to understand you. Helen and Melanie, I understand. They have concrete desires. A need for power, control over their circumstances. You, though. You never wanted it. Your Mother gave you the gift, but you’ve never so much as abused it. Why?

The thing’s words were silken, almost comfortably hypnotic. To keep myself focused, I examined each party-goer in turn and gave them a funny name. The jock in the letter jacket with the buzz cut was Biff. His curly-haired date was Buffy. “Because it would be wrong. It’s bad enough, using it to imbue trust in people so that I can help them. I don’t expect that you’d understand that sort of thing, being a ghost vampire or whatever the hell you are.”

I do not kill. I feed on what remains after others kill, or disease takes. You send them on their way — are we so different, you and I?

“So, you’re a vulture or a jackal. Much better.” I considered its words in conjunction with the fact that Bobby’s parents, despite what must have been a horrible death, had left no shades. No wonder — it ate them. I shuddered.

What I am is thousands of years old. I have seen men and women of power. Warriors, priests, and harlots. Parents, scholars, and soldiers. All alike in their own weaknesses, no matter what lies they chose to cloak themselves in. You are not so different, I think. There must be something you want.

“I want to see Justice League,” I said. “They really left it on a cliffhanger, there. Superman being only mostly dead, and all that.” The guy with the shaved head was Captain Picard. I dubbed the couple making out on the couch next to Jean-Luc Bonnie and Clyde. As I looked past them at the next person in line, I realized that it wasn’t a Bonnie, after all.

It was Cassie.

Her hair was longer and her clothing consisted of little more than the typical nonexistent short skirt and top that girls leaned toward when clubbing or, apparently, going to frat parties.

I’d have been lying if I didn’t say that she looked damn good in it.

Ah, and now you see why I’ve brought you here.

“What, so I can see somebody I know kissing a dude at a party?” On the couch, Cassie pulled away for a moment and drained a bottle of beer before standing on wobbly feet. She gyrated and started grinding on the seated guy to the cheers and wild whoops of those around them. I looked away. I didn’t know whether my embarrassment was for her, or at the intrigued reaction that her actions inspired in me.

Your comrade, your fellow champion. You thought yourself the white knight to your damsel in distress, but she’s just another harlot. The Edimmu paused, considering. Is she what you want? If so, there is nothing stopping you from taking it.

I snorted. “For something so old, you sure are stupid, aren’t you? I’ve been pushed. Yeah, you can make someone do anything you want, but it’s a living hell if it’s not something you want to do. I see that in Mother’s eyes. Hell, I lived through it. Do that to someone, a thinking, feeling person?” I laughed. “You don’t understand people at all. Which is kind of sad — what have you learned, in all that time? Pottery?”

Do not mock me!

“Or what? You’ll show me more scandalous things that my friend has done?” I shrugged. “She’s human. Making mistakes is part of it.” I thought about the blue coin in Cassie’s pocket and the wary glance she’d given me when I’d studied it. “The thing you don’t understand about the human condition is, it’s not just about our screw ups. It’s about how we come back from them. I don’t want to see this. I don’t need to see this.”

I didn’t put anything into the statement, but the room seemed to go blurry. For a moment, I cringed in anticipation of another attack, but when none was forthcoming, a realization hit me.

This was in my head. Sure, the imagery came from the Edimmu — but it was playing the crap on my equipment. The cold feeling in my chest shifted, but I clenched my fists and bore down. There was no spell for this, but the intensity was similar.

This was my house. And the party was over.

The room shattered. For a moment an empty nothingness surrounded us. With a wordless shriek, the coldness in my chest rushed out, but I reached out and seized the fabric of its being in my hands.

“Leaving so soon?” I laughed, then we shifted once more.

Chapter 17

The dream might have been going down at my house, but my understanding of how things worked was still a little shaky. I flashed into existence in the Renaissance, but I did so twenty feet in the air. Arms flailing, I fell onto the seats and bounced off the armrests.

It hurt because my head said it should hurt, but as I sat up with a growl I reminded myself that this was all happening in a really vivid dream. The pain dissipated.

That, at least, was handy.

“Dad!” I yelled. “I could use a hand right about now.”

I hadn’t made a conscious decision, but the movie had skipped back to the scene inside of Helm’s Deep where Aragorn urges Theoden to ride out and fight, in order to give the women and children of Rohan time to escape through a tunnel. Meanwhile, a deep chuckle overwhelmed the film’s soundtrack in response to my call. I turned to look.

Shadow pooled at the base of the screen, but it wasn’t the same effect that I’d seen when I’d been here last. My push to come back to this place had worked in more than one regard. I’d brought the Edimmu here with me.

“C’mon,” I whispered. “Any way we can rustle up a little deus ex machina, here?”

“For death and glory?” Bernard Hill intoned. If that was an answer, it wasn’t much of one. I resigned myself to the fact that I was on my own.

“Thanks for nothing,” I muttered. The shadow giggled in response. The sound reflective properties of the theater made its laughter painful and overwhelming, like a thunderclap at point-blank range. I resisted the urge to cup my hands over my ears and forcefully told myself that it didn’t hurt. It didn’t seem to work as well as it had the first time.

This means something to you, doesn’t it? Something special. Shadow pooled and surged up and over the first row of seats. It flattened suddenly. For a moment I entertained the fantasy that I’d heard a low cry of pain as it came closer to the cone of light from the projection system. Despite that, the black mass advanced at an interminable pace.

I tried to remind myself that this was my head, but the creeping doom made it difficult.

“Sure,” I said.

Viggo replied up on the screen. “For Rohan. For your people.”

A simple story. Heroes and villains. Life in shades of black and white. Treachery and loyalty are simpler to recognize. It’s so unlike your own life, is it not?

“There’s a bit more to it than that,” I countered. “But sure, to some extent. How about you? Do you see yourself as the hero or the villain?”

The shadow crept lower, trickling underneath the seats. What I am is ancient. I am beyond such simplicities as you describe. I am power and knowledge and desire. Is this what you desire? To be a hero? Is that what drives you? The shadow halted its advance, as though the thing were pondering some deep subject. I could give you the opportunity for such heroism, you know. There are other worlds than this. I could find you such a place if your own does not suit you.

I couldn’t help it — I laughed. “Let me get this straight. You’re going to zap me into some alternate reality version of Middle Earth. If that was even possible, what do you get out of it? In case you’re not keeping up with current events, I barbecued your precious book. It’s gone.”

You could not have lied so effectively to us if there weren’t some element of truth to what you said. Perhaps you did burn the book, but I think you did bury it, didn’t you? Or what you had left of it.

My blood went cold and I tried to keep my face still. I’ve always been a terrible poker player. Hopefully that wasn’t a talent the Edimmu had worked on in the past few centuries.

“Point being?”

Absolute destruction is far different from a change in state. Something such as the grimoire is not so easily destroyed by fire. It is more than ink and paper, but you should know that, having read it. If it is not destroyed, it might be possible to restore it. So, I ask you again — what do you want?

I resisted the urge to turn and run. The shadow had spread across the entire breadth of the theater. Arms of darkness surged forward to either side of the room. In moments it would have me surrounded.

Up on the screen, as the heroes prepared to charge out of the keep in a forlorn hope, a voice-over informs the audience of Aragorn’s moment of recall. At the moment when all seemed lost, he remembered the promise of Gandalf. “Look to my coming at first light on the fifth day. At dawn, look to the East.”

One way or another, I will get what I want. If you won’t tell me, I’ll rip it out of your mind myself. So, for the last time — what do you want?

I jerked myself out of my reverie, clenched my fists, and shouted, “I want you out of my head!”

All at once, the Edimmu rushed forward from all around me. I had a bare moment to brace myself, but it was just enough. As the viscous, tarry matter of the creature’s essence wrapped around me, I kicked and rent with hooked fingers. I don’t know if I did any lasting damage, but it shouted in frustration at my resistance.

Need to get out, I told myself. Surrounded by the shadow-murk of the Edimmu, I felt as though I was drowning. We were still in the dream theater, but when you’re drowning, you go up. I still didn’t know all the rules here, but whatever the case, I believed that up was out. I pulled with everything I had, focused on that singular desire.

I jerked awake to find Melanie’s hand clasped around my throat with her bared teeth inches from my nose.

“Give it to us!’ she snarled.

My response was both pithy and eloquent, but the pressure on my neck reduced it to something closer to “glurk, ack, argh.” In response, she bore down even harder. My vision started to go red.

I kicked the Edimmu out of my head for this?

Annoyed, frustrated, exhausted, and starving, I rolled it all up into a ball of determination and shoved with every bit of strength I had. Now, say what you will about my Mother, but in certain aspects, my parents raised me right. I would never, for example, hit a girl.

If ever called to the carpet on this one, I hoped that the extenuating circumstances would provide me a pass. After all, if you can’t hit a girl when she’s possessed by an ancient spirit, when can you?

As I shoved her up and away from me I remembered that I’d also kicked her in the head down in my basement. Hey, nobody’s perfect.

Possessed or not, she was petite. While I was no Schwarzenegger, I had leverage and strength on her. Melanie went flying and flopped to the ground. Rubbing my throat, I sat up and scanned the interior of the hut. Cassie had pressed herself up against the far side. She looked at me with wide eyes. “You all right?” I managed.

She nodded and opened her mouth to speak. I missed what she said as something fast and hard slammed into the side of my head. I rolled with it and landed on my feet, but even as I came back upright I could feel the warm trickle of blood down one cheek.

Melanie crouched not far where she’d fallen. Tentacles of shadow whipped slowly in the air from where they emerged from her palms. Huh.

“Neat trick,” I grimaced. Couldn’t have read a few more pages and looked for a fireball spell, could you, Pax?

I made a quick glance around the interior of the hut, but if Cassie had brought any firepower down with her, she didn’t have it now. It was just the three — well, four — of us. If I survived this, I promised myself I’d get a backup pistol and learn how to use the stupid thing. A derringer. A boot knife — something.

“We tried the carrot — how about the stick?” Melanie hissed. She snapped a hand out in Cassie’s direction. I opened my mouth to shout a warning, but before I could speak the inky blackness spread into multiple points and speared into the other girl’s legs and abdomen. Her sudden cry of agony was no louder than the Edimmu’s shrieks in the dream theater, but they were somehow more painful.

Cassie slumped to the ground. Blood had already soaked through the thighs of her jeans. She groaned in quiet, fading agony.

I’ve known loss.

The despair, grief, and depression when my dad died might have overcome me if not for the love and support of newfound friends. I grieved the fate of my Mother. Even though she wasn’t dead, the idea of her had died with the realization that she was nothing like what a parent should be.

None of that compared to the crushing emotion that took me to my knees as I realized what I’d done. The guilt I’d felt about my dad’s death paled in comparison to this. Yeah, Cassie had volunteered, but I’d accepted, hadn’t I? Sure, she’d seen some of my kind of crazy down in the basement, but she hadn’t been walking into the situation with all the information.

She was bleeding out into the ground and it was my fault.

Tears spilled down my cheeks. A knot like a clenched fist took hold of my throat. I looked at Melanie and despaired at her victorious smirk.

“Talk,” she murmured. “Talk and she can live.”

I couldn’t help it. I broke.

I opened my mouth to speak, but as I pushed past the despair that had taken my voice, I realized that we weren’t alone.

The ghosts stood at the rim of the crater. Despite the darkness of the night, the muted and partially translucent figures stood out. It was as if in coming together, their mutual energy revealed them, in a soft blue glow.

I’ve never seen more than a couple together at one time. Now, I saw dozens. I knew none of them, but the reflections of their clothing told me at least a piece of their stories. I saw sailors, women in party dresses, and children in old-fashioned school clothes. Uncharacteristically, they stood silent and calm, though a few nodded and smiled to me in greeting.

Melanie and the Edimmu cackled as one as they followed my look and saw our guests. “You don’t even realize how your ghost spell works, do you? You’ve set yourself up as a beacon for them. They can feel your despair. It’s like a magnet. Call in a battalion of ghosts for a ghost-eater. Brilliant!” She bent over and clutched her sides as she was overcome with mirth.

Confused, I forgot my crippling emotions for a moment and took in the sea of faces. Had they come to gloat at my failure and impending death? Even as I considered it I discarded the notion. If anything, I felt a deep sense of peace and comfort. I didn’t stand alone.

But what could they do? Like the Edimmu said, it was a ghost-eater. And this was an all-you-can-eat buffet.

A woman wearing a translucent apron stepped out of the crowd and said, silently, Send us to rest, Paxton. We won’t fight you.

I think I was the only one that could hear her, because Melanie didn’t react until a grin broke across my face like a cresting wave.

“What is this?” she demanded as I climbed back to my feet, gathered my strength, and pushed.

“You don’t belong here,” I told the assembled ghosts, then turned to look at Melanie. “Deus ex machina, baby.”

They didn’t fight. In this time and place, they had come willingly for release. When Bobby had faded on, the wind of his passage had ruffled the carpet.

The coterie of ghosts faded away and the screaming maelstrom that followed drove me back to my knees.

I raised my head to look out of the depression. Down below ground level, the effects of the gale-force wind were not nearly as pronounced. As I looked up I got the impression that we were in the eye of the storm. A wall of brown and green stretched up into the night sky as the rushing wind tore and shredded the surrounding terrain.

“To what end?” Melanie shrieked from across the depression. She flicked her wrists and tendrils of shadow seized me by the throat. A slow, distributed pressure began to build. “You lose!”

The maelstrom rose in pitch and with the cracking and popping of nails, screws, and chain link, the ground cover that Jimmy and I had worked so long and hard to build ripped off of the hut. The wind took it and pulled off like a scab. Melanie and I stood exposed to the night sky. As my vision began to dim I marveled at the beauty of the stars in the sky that was suddenly barren of clouds.

How high did that wind reach, I wondered, then everything went white as a million spotlights pierced my vision.

The light was hot and electric, but it didn’t hurt — it was just more than I could interpret. I wasn’t so much blinded as I was having a visual blue screen of death.

At once, the pressure on my throat eased and I felt a brush of grit against my skin as I fell to the ground. I cracked my eyes open. It seemed that when I wasn’t looking right at the sky, I could see just fine, though the light rendered the interior of the depression in crystal clarity.

Melanie stood with her jaw open. The shadow tendrils between us hadn’t so much fallen away as they had turned into something less ephemeral. As I watched, the ends closest to me turned from black to white, then fell to the ground. The cascading lines of white led inexorably toward the possessed girl. Frozen in shock, all she could do was watch. The gritty piles of dust looked for all the world like table salt, but no way was I going to taste it to find out.

I had the sense of a fading scream in the back of my mind. As the cascading white reached Melanie’s hands, she jerked as though electrocuted, though she was still fixed in place by her shock, or perhaps the light overhead. She met my eyes and whispered, “Help me.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and there was no deception in my words. I don’t know if I could have lied to her, under the light, though the desire to do so never entered my mind.

Melanie’s hands turned a brilliant, crystalline white. She whimpered as the line advanced under the sleeves of her shirt and presumably onward. Within moments, the transition advanced up her neck and over desperate, pleading eyes until she stood before me — a glittering statue where a living, breathing girl had once stood.

Then, at once, the statue crumbled, bearing her clothing with it into a rough, knee-high pile.

The light faded into darkness, though the sky remained clear. I followed not long after as I slumped in exhaustion.

Chapter 18

I wasn’t out for long. I snapped awake with the vague sense that someone had just nudged me, but when I looked around, I was alone in the depression save for—

Cassie!

Desperation pushed me to move far faster than I think I could have without motivation. I reached Cassie and knelt to one side. Her face was calm. For one horrific moment that seemed to stretch out into eternity, I thought that I was too late, that she was dead. But she turned her head and favored my presence with a faint smile.

“Hey,” she whispered. “Did you see the light? That sure was something.”

“Pretty hard to miss,” I agreed. I squeezed one of her clammy hands between both of mine. “Hang on, Cassie. It’s going to be slow going, but I’m getting you out of here.”

“It’s okay,” she smiled. “It doesn’t hurt as much now. Just stay. Just stay.”

Tears spilled down my cheeks. If this was victory, I would have much preferred the alternative. If only I’d been quicker on my feet, or smarter, or knew more. If I’d kept the grimoire and actually used it to learn something, maybe Melanie and the Edimmu wouldn’t have worked us over like a dollar-store punching bag.

If only . . .

I frowned. What had the Edimmu told me about destruction and restoration? Cassie was no magic book, but a fire hadn’t reduced her to a sack of ashes, either.

Maybe, just maybe, I actually had learned something of use. Cassie’s eyes were half-closed and her breaths were coming short and shallow. If I was going to do something, I needed to do it now. “Hey, Cass. It’s just an infection, right?”

A ghost of a smile flickered across her face, but it wasn’t in reaction to any knee-slapping humor on my part. She was fading away. Maybe I could do something about that.

I didn’t know if touch would help me to use the restoration spell on something outside of myself, but I didn’t think it could hurt. I kept holding Cassie’s hand, put myself in the proper mode, and strained.

It had been a long night. I wanted to do nothing more than down some greasy fast food and put a down-payment on twenty or thirty hours of sleep. If I’d thought that healing my broken fingers and leg had been tough, just trying to mend Cassie’s wounds was an order of magnitude more difficult. By the time that I drove my focus out of my own body — touching, it turned out, was pretty critical — I was shaking with a fatigue so deep it left my vision blurry. I should have, in retrospect, touched her closer to her injuries, but I didn’t dare shift my grip. For one, I didn’t know if she had enough time left for me to make a second attempt. Second, and perhaps more importantly, I didn’t think I’d be able to carry on if I started over. For better or worse I had to do it now.

My awareness of her injuries was not as clear as the sense I could feel of my own hurts, but she knew where they were. The difficulty eased a bit, as though her own body knew what I was trying to do and moved to assist. I had the sense of flesh stitching itself whole as my hands began to shake. I sagged to the ground beside her, but I held onto her hand with everything I had left. The strength I’d been using to hold myself up was something I could pour into her. The pulse at her wrist had been fluttering when I’d first grabbed her hand, but it fairly well throbbed now. As for me, I felt as though I teetered on the edge of an abyss. If my eyes had been open, I’d have seen the color flooding Cassie’s cheeks, but I didn’t. I had committed everything I had to the attempt. I had little strength left, but I poured my grief and guilt and regret into the healing. Somewhere deep inside of me, a part of me was crying out in alarm, but I was too deep into the focus to care.

With a deep gasp, Cassie sat bolt upright and jerked out of my grasp. With the connection broken, I lay sprawled on the ground and enjoyed the simple act of breathing for a moment before I realized that I wasn’t dying. It just felt that way.

I cracked an eyelid open and squinted. Everything was a little fuzzy, but I could make out Cassie as she rolled up her ruined T-shirt and poked at puffy red lines of healed flesh on her stomach. Perhaps it was a trick of my unreliable vision — though I doubted it — but it seemed as though the redness continued to fade as I watched.

“Sorry about your shirt,” I managed, then laughed at my own joke. “I’m starving. And sleepy. Is that steepy?”

Cassie blinked and seem to snap out of her reverie. She looked over at me and managed, “Oh, man, Pax.”

She climbed to her feet and took a moment to assess the side of the depression. What had seemed an insurmountable drop to Jimmy and me as children was really only about five feet or so. She leaned over and got one of my arms up and over my shoulder. She heaved with a grunt and I swooned as she pulled me up off of the ground.

“I’m getting you out of here,” Cassie said. I smiled.

“That’s my line.”

She leaned me against the side of the depression, scrambled out, and then reached down to yank me up after her. “You’ve got to walk for me just a little,” she managed. “You’re lucky I’m into CrossFit.”

That struck me as absurdly funny for some reason, but I kept my laughter down. My head felt too heavy, but I did my best to keep my legs churning even as I rested it on one of her shoulders. You’d have thought she’d have smelled of blood, mud, or fear, but all I could smell was something sweet and fruity. “Nice shampoo,” I slurred.

“This is why I quit hanging around drunk people,” she sighed. “Almost there.” It was still dark, but I could make out red and blue lights in the distance. Was it Christmas?

“Can we go to Taco Bell?” I wondered. We almost stumbled as Cassie led me out of the scrub and onto the paved road. She was silent for a moment, then replied.

“We’re going to the hospital first.”

“Taco Bell on the way, then,” I agreed. “I could murder some nachos right about now.”

She didn’t respond. After a moment I realized that she hadn’t heard me. I strained and got my head up, squinting to see what she was looking at.

My house was on fire.

If we’d gotten closer, I suppose we’d have felt the blast of the heat, but a wall of emergency vehicles encircled it and would have kept us from getting there. The neighborhood had been silent and seemed abandoned when we’d been fighting for our lives, but the sounds of sirens had called the neighbors out. A throng of onlookers gawked as raging flames consumed my childhood home.

For the moment, the sight had stunned me into something approaching clarity and I at once discerned the reason for the cordon. The fire had not only spread to take my house, but it had engulfed the Itasca and the sedan parked next to it.

“Sorry about your car,” I said faintly. Cassie cursed under her breath. For a moment, we just stood there, overcome by the spectacle and the loss.

Someone in the crowd noticed us and called out. Suddenly half of the onlookers had found something else to stare at. Cassie cursed again and started forward. “Help!” she cried out. She waved a free hand at one of the emergency vehicles. “Hey!”

The paramedics seemed to come from out of nowhere. I felt like I was floating as two big guys took me out of Cassie’s arms and hauled me over to a waiting ambulance.

“Get that gurney out,” one of them barked.

The other one said, to the same third party, I suppose, “Get all the IV bags we’ve got.”

They laid me down on what felt like the softest bed ever. The momentary pain that flashed up my arm when they started the drip faded away as the cool rush burned up my arm and trickled down into my chest.

“Wow,” I slurred. “You guys put some great stuff in there, didn’t you?” I laughed and flopped my head over the other side. Cassie stood there with a concerned look. I tried to wink, but my face didn’t feel like it was working right. The expression she gave me in reply was somewhere between a smirk and a grimace.

“Did we win?” she said. I gave her a thumbs-up.

“Deus ex machina,” I intoned. “Mystical ass kicking.” After a beat, she smiled and laughed. The IV must have been helping — I was starting to be funny, again.

A hint of movement over Cassie’s shoulder drew my eyes. I stiffened in terror. At first, I thought that my mind was playing tricks on me. I hoped that I was seeing things, but Mother’s face was unmistakable, even alternately lit in red and blue by the strobing emergency lights.

She’d come to join Melanie and the Edimmu, but she was too late, or we’d won just in time. I groaned and tried to sit back up, but I suddenly felt even dizzier. My body was numb, refusing to respond to my desire to move. “Cassie,” I croaked. “Cassie.”

One of the paramedics said, from somewhere above my head, “He’s crashing — get him on board, now!”

I wanted to scream and shout, to tell them that Mother was right there, but I didn’t have the strength to form the words. I reached out and tried to point, but my hand just flopped uselessly on the end of my wrist. Cassie took my hand and told me it was going to be all right, but she didn’t understand.

Mother saw the move and smirked. She kept her hands tucked into the pockets of the long coat she wore and gave me a nod of greeting. Before I could manage to say a word, she stepped backward and disappeared into the crowd.

Pushed well beyond any limit I might ever have imagined that I had, I sagged down on the gurney and into blissful unconsciousness.

Right about the time that I was using a Taser on one of Melanie’s goons, the head of Rockville Correctional was making a hasty return to the prison after leaving for the night.

Gary Dooley had spent almost a decade as a member of the Indiana State Police before a drunk driver ran him over during a traffic stop. He suffered horrendous fractures in both legs as a result of the accident. The process of healing from multiple surgeries and the subsequent rehabilitation took just under a year.

While the doctors pronounced that he was as good as he was going to get, Gary was still having issues meeting the physical demands of his job. A pronounced limp made running difficult, so his time on the road was over.

Qualifying for an early disability pension before he was forty, he was at a crossroads. If he didn’t take the disability, there was always the option of an administrative position in the department. Somehow, though, the idea of working as a desk jockey alongside the men and women he used to consider his equals struck him as embarrassing. One of his brothers-in-law had some connections in the Indiana state government. A few phone calls and interviews later, one of those connections offered Gary a position supervising the corrections officers at Rockville Correctional. For the most part the inmates were well-behaved. As a side benefit, the job didn’t offer many opportunities to get run over.

Fifteen years later, he’d put in more time for the Department of Corrections than he had his previous job when things had gone to hell there.

Sitting behind the wheel of his car, he studied the halo of vehicles surrounding the prison — his prison, now. Gary wondered if this evening’s situation wasn’t the universe’s way of telling him to pull the pin again.

The various emergency vehicles had parked closest to the fence and had parked in such a way to keep the second layer of vehicles — press, for the most part — back out of view. The fence was still up in the front but at the corner of one of the dormitories Gary could just make out the sag of chain-link where someone had cut through.

He’d turned in for the night when his phone started ringing. The officer who’d gotten him on the phone had been just on the edge of hysteria. It took Gary a few minutes to calm him down enough to get the story out of him.

A group of external attackers had raided the prison, of all things. After that, the story got a little shaky, so Gary cut the call short and headed in to see for himself. The sideshow outside of the prison was a little daunting, but he supposed that was a good thing if they had an open breach in the fence.

With a sigh, he got out of his car and shuffled across the parking lot. Before he could reach the main entrance, one of the supervisory COs pulled away from a knot of uniformed onlookers. He recognized half of them as his own people, while the others seemed to be a mix of State troopers and local SWAT. He eyed the close-cropped hair on a couple of the troopers and wondered if he’d ever looked that young.

Gary didn’t see the third-shift COs much other than in passing, but he recognized the one that came to see him now as Carl Blake. Blake was one of the good ones — you had to be, to get the late shift and the requisite bump in pay. Lower head count meant more responsibility. The newbies and lackwits got stuck on days where more experienced guards could observe them. “Carl,” Gary said by way of greeting. “What have we got?”

The look on the other man’s face took Gary by surprise for a moment. He looked almost scared, which shouldn’t have been possible for a guy well over six feet tall with shoulders that seemed just as wide. “Supe, I don’t have the words. I think — I think you just have to see it, sir.”

Gary frowned and worked on his lower lip a bit. He’d quit smoking long enough ago that the physical need was gone, but he still chewed gum to keep his mouth occupied. He checked the pockets of his coat for a pack, but came up empty. Lip it was, for the time being. “All right,” he agreed. “Where was the breakout?”

“Dorm three, Supe,” Blake replied. “We got to take the long way around.” He moved away and cut across the lawn in the direction of the sagging fence. After a moment, Gary started after him, though he was growing more confused with every step.

“Why aren’t we going through the main building?” Gary demanded.

Blake swallowed audibly. “The fire jammed the doors off of the entrance corridor. We’re going to have to get some heavy equipment in there to cut them open, or something.”

Fire? Cut them open? Gary frowned, opened his mouth to demand a more thorough explanation, but just as quickly closed it. Blake was a sharp guy. If he was reticent to give the whole story without Gary seeing things for himself, there had to be a good reason. He owed the man that much trust, at least, before jumping on him with both boots.

As they rounded the corner to the back of dorm three, Gary couldn’t help his involuntary gasp of surprise as he got a better look at the breach in the fence. The gap was a neat circle, though the loose links dangled here and there and made the perceived image look not-so-smooth.

The charred grass in front of the hole testified to whatever had cut it. In some places, mighty gashes slashed through the ground itself between the breach in the fence and the prison wall. It was the modern — kinder, gentler — age of corrections. They didn’t have guards on watchtowers keeping an eye out for escapes any longer — but they did have roving patrols and security cameras. His eyes traced the route of damage and stopped short on a pair of blanket-covered forms. Empty shell casings twinkled under the sodium-vapor security lights and formed a corona around the collapsed bodies.

Blake followed Gary’s look and muttered, “We saw them cutting the fence on camera. Called the Sheriff’s department, rerouted the patrols and even sent some backup. There was at least a dozen of them, Supe.”

Gary blinked. “A dozen people cut a hole in the fence and took down two armed guards?” He shook his head in disbelief. “Who would a dozen people be trying to break out—” He trailed off as the realization hit him, because, in the end, there was only one inmate that might inspire that sort of thing, wasn’t there? “What happened next, Blake?”

“They hit the patrol first. I was in the control office, coordinating the response, so I couldn’t hear what was going on. But the dogs didn’t like it. They pulled away and ran hard and fast. Hell, they’re still curled up on the opposite end of the complex. Just growl and shiver at anyone who tries to get close to them.” The big man shuddered. “I don’t know they didn’t get any of them, Supe. It looked like something out of a movie — hell, you can see the brass. But they took down Owens and Clark, and then they, well.” He sighed and turned to point at the wall of dorm three.

The attackers had cut another perfect circle, almost exactly in line with the hole in the fence, in the concrete wall of the dorm itself. Unlike the chain link, the edges were perfectly smooth. He could make out the cross section of the blocks and iron bars in the wall’s foundation.

She said in court she was a witch, Gary thought. My God, was it all true?

No. No way in hell. This was something else — terrorists, or something, using high-tech explosives. He turned back to Blake. “What next?”

“Best see it before I say. But you might want to cover up your nose and mouth, sir. The stench is indescribable.”

Blake led him to the edge of the opening cut into the wall. Gary resisted the urge to run his hand across the smoothly-delineated curve of the wound that seemed to violate every known law of nature. This was no typical, thin residential wall. This was an inner and out layer of cinder block built on a lattice of I-beams. It was strong enough to stand up to military-grade hardware and something had gone through it like a hot knife through butter.

Gary steeled his nerves and stepped inside.

At first, the difference in the interior was such that he thought that Blake had misspoken, that this wasn’t one of the dormitories. But as he looked around and picked details out, he realized that he’d been mistaken.

The room was about fifty feet square, with a high ceiling and plenty of light. To ease observation for the closed—circuit cameras mounted in overhead armored bubbles, each ‘room’ had a low block wall perhaps four feet in height. This provided the inmates with an illusion of privacy while making it easier for the CO’s to keep an eye on any troublemakers. It had always struck Gary as ironic that the arrangement looked for all the world like a cubicle farm in an office, just without the thin partitions. The prisoners kept their sleeping areas impeccably clean. The last time he’d walked through one of them on an inspection, the gleaming, glossy white paint on the walls had nary a scuff mark.

No more.

The fire had scorched the entire room black. Wave marks of ash splashed here and there against the walls, as though the fire itself had been some liquid lapping up against the barricades. Gary grimaced as a whiff of the sickly-sweet smell of burned meat and scorched paint touched his nostrils. He turned to the side and lost his dinner right then and there on the floor of the dormitory. Those floors were white a few hours ago. Now, the concrete was bare in leprous patches where the latex had bubbled up and pulled away in the inferno.

Whatever had happened had come upon the sleeping inmates in the depths of sleep. Melted, sagging bed frames still supported skeletal figures, though here and there jaws hung open in silent screams and fingers reached out in pointless supplication. On the opposite wall, the double doors that opened into the hallway that lead to the rest of the prison struck him as rippled and oddly distorted. He realized with a start that the heavy steel had actually melted into the door frames. Blake was right — they were going to need heavy equipment to cut them open.

One cube stood intact among the firestorm’s leavings. Gary considered stepping forward to inspect it more closely. After a moment of consideration, he decided that it was pointless. He’d been right all along. No tortured corpse occupied Helen Locke’s cell. Her unmade bed looked as though she’d gleefully tossed her covers aside at the moment of her rescue.

Numb, Gary turned and stepped outside. The night air that had seemed biting and harsh when he’d gotten into his car not so long ago was now welcome. He inhaled deeply to try and clear the stench of death from his palate.

Blake gave him a moment to compose himself before he spoke. “What do we do, sir?”

Gary hauled a handkerchief out of the pocket of his overcoat and wiped his mouth before answering. “You call the Governor’s office. I need to call the Bureau of Prisons. Homeland Security, hell if I know. This is way over our pay grade, Officer Blake.”

Chapter 19

There was an inherent discomfort in the small of my back that just screamed ‘hospital’ as soon as I woke up enough to realize that I was in a bed.

In the end, though, beggars can’t be choosers. After the night I’d had, I certainly wasn’t going to complain about an uncomfortable bed. Not saying that I wouldn’t when it came time to pay the hospital bill, of course. If they’re going to charge you so much, the least they could do is give you a halfway-decent mattress.

I was halfway toward making the decision to try and go back to sleep when someone cleared their throat. Tired or not, I figured it would be rude to ignore a visitor, so I cracked open my eyes and looked around the room.

Not going to lie, I was half hoping that Cassie was the visitor. Alas, I was not to be so lucky. As I sat up in the uncomfortable bed I met the steely gaze of Sheriff Wilson Hockers.

Well, there are worse ways to wake up. The Sheriff and I were never acquainted before my dad died, but the crag-faced lawman was a cuddly little teddy bear compared to a possessed coed and a pack of clones.

Sure, I was a rebel from the perspective of Mother, but that just meant I ate the occasional candy bar and pitched my soy wraps in the garbage can in the cafeteria. None of that merited any prior attention from the law. But where Kent gave me the benefit of the doubt, the Sheriff always seemed suspicious of me, even after all the evidence pointed in Mother’s direction. It would be an exaggeration to say that he ran me out of town after the conviction, but he was a big reason why the place didn’t feel like home anymore.

“Mister Locke,” he said by way of greeting. “Doctors told me you should be fit to talk to once you woke up. Sounds like you’ve had a rough go of it.”

“I get knocked down, I get back up again,” I agreed, in mock seriousness. I felt fairly certain the Sheriff wouldn’t get the reference, but he was astute enough to know I was being flip. His eyes narrowed and I continued. “Did they get the fire contained? Is the rest of the neighborhood okay?”

The tension around his eyes eased. He gave me a tight nod. “Chief Hawkins says the house is liable to be a total loss. Same for your RV and the Hatcher girl’s little car.” He fell silent and just looked at me. If this was just a friendly visit, it was a damn intimidating one.

Legally perhaps, maybe I should have kept my mouth shut, but I hadn’t done anything wrong and I had information that the police needed. “Sheriff, before I passed out, I saw my mother in the crowd around the house. I’m guessing she, or somebody with her, are the ones that set the place on fire.” I got control of my tongue before I started talking about magic books and covens of groupies.

“There’s an APB out for your mother. Seems several unknown subjects broke her out of prison. But I suppose you knew that already.”

“Sure, I knew it, which is why I’m telling you. I didn’t break her out if that’s what you’re implying. I’ve been in Pleasant Prairie all night, having the crap beaten out of me.”

“So, no mention of what the fire department found when they searched your house, then?” He cut himself off on a rising note, as though he were trying to hold himself back from unleashing the full extent of his fury. “Son, I’m more than accustomed to weird shit following you around, but this takes the cake.” He began counting on his fingers. “I’ve got a dismembered family in a burned-out house. Three bodies with identical finger prints and dental impressions that seem to be using snot for blood. And, to top it all off, a pile of salt with clothes mixed in. I’d ask what you had to say for yourself, but your girlfriend already gave me enough nightmare fuel for the rest of my life.” He clamped his jaw shut and tried to give me an intimidating look.

“Salt, huh?” I replied weakly. “How’d you figure that out — did you guys taste it, or something?”

“Cheese and rice, son, no — we didn’t taste it. This isn’t Mayberry, we do have access to modern forensics.”

“Right,” I said. “Didn’t mean anything by it, I just wondered.” She hadn’t been a pile of salt at first, of course. Until she’d collapsed, that light had rendered Melanie into a glittering statue. A pillar, one could almost say.

He grunted. “Well, I’m assuming that your cell phone and wallet went up in the blaze because they aren’t in your collection of things. Anyone you’d like me to call?”

I blinked. “Kent — Deputy Sikora, if you would. He can get the message along to the rest of my friends.”

Sheriff Hockers nodded. “We have his number on file. I’ll have one of the dispatchers get hold of him. I’m sure if he’s watching the cluster on the news he’s been trying to reach you. You need any police reports or anything for the insurance paperwork, loss of ID or credit cards, whatever, just call down to the station.”

To say I that his willingness to help left me shocked was understating it. I’d have been less surprised if he’d thrown me in handcuffs. The kid gloves treatment was as much disconcerting as it was shocking. Surely Kent’s word wouldn’t be enough for him to treat me so well, but what else could it be? Finally, I decided to jump in with both feet and just ask.

“If you don’t mind me saying, Sheriff, why are you doing all this for me?”

He frowned at me for what felt like an eternity before spitting out a reply. “I don’t know what kind of pull your guardian angels have, boy, but they’ve made it clear to me that you’re an innocent bystander. Bystander or not, as soon as the doctors release you, I want you to get the hell out of my county, and stay out. This is a nice place, and the times that it hasn’t been you and your family are usually involved.”

He stood and stormed out of the room without looking back.

I couldn’t help but frown. Guardian angels?

By the time the sun was up, much of the crowd surrounding the prison had dispersed. A quick head count had shown that the only inmate not accounted for was Helen Locke. He’d ordered the workmen to leave the interior doors as they were for the moment. The rumors, Gary knew, would be bad enough. He didn’t want to foment any further unease by opening it up for even a quick look by the other inmates. They didn’t need to see the hell that had come to dormitory three.

After the maintenance crew completed the work of repairing the downed exterior fence, Gary excused himself to his office. He kept a low sofa in there. It felt like the softest bed this side of any tropical resort as he settled down into the cushions and closed his eyes.

A soft rapping at his office door brought Gary to an uneasy wakefulness. He sat up with a start. For a moment, he couldn’t remember why he was sleeping in his office. Then it all rushed back in and he shuddered. “Yeah,” he called out, rubbing his eyes with balled-up fists.

Blake opened the door and stuck his head in. “Feds are here, sir. They wanted to touch base with you before they checked out the scene.”

He lowered his hands and blinked at the CO as he tried to compose his thoughts. “I thought the coroner already cleared the bodies?”

“He did, but they said they wanted to do some additional testing of some sort.” Blake shrugged. “They were damn polite about it — more than any Fed I’ve ever dealt with. Had no problem waiting.”

Greg got out of the couch with difficulty. You tended to sink into it after a bit, and he’d been laying there long enough to make a pretty serious impression. “They say what agency?”

The other man laughed, though there was an air of discomfort to it. “Yes, sir. They say they’re from ATF.”

“Huh,” Gary said. That was a new one. He’d have expected someone from the Marshall’s Service or Bureau of Prisons. “Maybe the crew used a bomb,” he reasoned out loud. Blake just shrugged, then held the door for his boss.

Gary was already getting tired of the long trek outside and around. He hoped that the Feds would release the scene quickly so he could delegate the cleanup and repair. Definitely heading home in a bit, he thought. The worst is over, they can do without me while I get some sleep.

Both agents wore black suits and were of average height. The one that stepped closer to greet Gary had a crooked smile and tired eyes. His suit was impeccably pressed, but his hair was incongruously sloppy. Other than that, he could feature in a dictionary entry — ‘random government employee.’ As far as the hair went, who knew what the standards were like these days. The man was far from slovenly no matter how his barber conducted his work. That was good enough for Gary. “Warden? I’m Agent Eliot and this is Agent Valentine.”

“Superintendent,” Gary corrected automatically, though he flashed a smile to show that he took no offense. “I suppose they think Warden is an archaic vestige of the old days.”

“We must keep up with the times,” Agent Valentine drawled in a mild Southern accent as he stepped up and offered his own hand. Where Agent Eliot seemed to take pains to make himself bland, his partner sported a close-trimmed goatee and wore cowboy boots to offset the institutional sameness implied by his plain black suit and tie. “Glad to meet you, sir.”

Gary stammered, momentarily overcome by the sheer charisma the second agent exuded. He usually felt the need to throat punch someone after dealing with the Feds. With this guy, he was ready to charge into battle. “Well, thank you for coming,” he managed finally. “If there’s anything you need from me, just get with Blake or one of the other CO’s.”

“We’ll be on our way shortly,” Agent Eliot replied. “We just wanted to get your blessing before we cut in on your turf.”

“Oh, no problem at all,” Gary said, with a wave of a hand. “Feel free to take a look around. I’m not sure what you’ll find, though, I thought forensics had already been over the scene.”

The two Federal agents shared a glance. Valentine smiled, then said, “Well, we have a few advanced tools we’d like to check the interior with.”

Gary nodded toward the hole in the wall. “Some sort of exotic explosive, right? That’s how they got in.”

“Something like that,” Eliot confirmed. “We won’t be long at all.” His tone was polite but Gary could sense the dismissal in it. He took another look at the wall breach. Part of him wanted to scoff at the supposition. No explosives that he knew of could cut such a neat hole without so much as leaving a mark on the outer area. But there are times in your life where one has to decide whether to ask dangerous questions or to take the safe route.

Gary was old, tired, and his leg was starting to hurt. The road less traveled was out of the question and had been for some time. “I’ll leave you to do your work, gentlemen.”

As the Superintendent moved away, Agent Eliot turned at once and stepped through the hole in the prison wall.

Matthew Valentine ran a finger under the neck of his collar to loosen the knot of his tie and sighed. Eliot looked back from the interior of the prison and murmured, “What are you waiting for? We’ve got the all clear.”

Valentine grimaced, steeled himself as if to walk some great distance, and finally stepped through the opening. “Of all the places to have a threshold,” he grumbled. “People come in and out of this place every damn day.”

The other agent just laughed, though it didn’t seem to fit his dour face. “It represents order, my friend. Of course, it’s going to have a threshold. You have to have a reason to come in and out.”

Valentine just cursed under his breath. Hands on hips, he surveyed the destruction inside of the dormitory and shook his head. He drawled, “You know, Eliot, it comes to mind that allowing our fine lady to stay here might have been a mistake.”

A pained look crossed the other man’s face. “You know the regs. Mundanes keep them if they get them first, for better or worse.”

“I’m sure that will be of great comfort to the families of the ladies who got invited to the barbecue,” Valentine quipped. “All right, down to business.” He flipped up the hem of his suit coat and unclipped a slim, rectangular device from its position on his belt just in front of a holstered pistol. Kneeling down, he thumbed a control on the box and scrubbed one end through the layer of soot on the floor. After a moment, an indicator on the device turned red. The agent sighed in disappointment. “Balefyr,” he reported.

“Yup,” Eliot agreed as he consulted his own testing device. “Somebody got their mad on, eh?”

“Witches,” Valentine spat. “Why did it have to be witches?”

The other agent tucked his tester away and moved into the unburned area of the dormitory. He studied the floor for a moment, then knelt down beside the bed to peer under it. “Over here,” Eliot called. As Valentine moved toward him, he pulled up on the mattress support. Heavy bolts and a long hinge attached the frame of the bed to the block wall of the cubicle. This kept inmates from moving them or using the frames for anything other than sleeping.

A rough, hand-drawn outline married the glossy, painted finish of the floor. The crudity of its form betrayed both the time it had taken to inscribe it and the crude tools used to make it — a toothbrush, perhaps, or some other scrap. Prisoners, Valentine mused, were nothing if not industrious.

The substance of the sigil on the floor was pointless, of course. It was the intent put into its creation that made all the difference. But most often, those of a mystic bent were creatures of habit. The broad circle under the bed contained two instances of the letter ‘S’ — one on the vertical with the other twisted 90 degrees.

The last time Valentine had seen that particular symbol, it had been on a crimson banner in a burning castle. So much for thinking we finished that job. “Well, that’s going to piss Georgie off,” he remarked.

“You think?” Eliot smirked. He took a picture of the sigil with his cell phone, then let the bed fall back down to its resting position. “We were going through her mail, right?”

“Standard procedure,” Valentine agreed. He looked around one last time, decided he didn’t need to know anything else and headed for the hole in the wall. Eliot sighed and hurried to catch up.

“So, what did we miss?”

“Hell, if I know,” Valentine said. Outside, he leaned against the wall and crossed his arms. “Talk to the intel folks.”

“She had no visitors except for her son. We cleared all her mail. So how did she know to put up the shield? It had to have taken her at least a couple of days.”

Valentine considered Eliot’s point. “What do you think — time to bring in the kid?” He shrugged. “Maybe he ain’t so spic-and-span as y’all think.”

The other agent grimaced, then shook his head. “Morgan’s kept eyes on him long enough to know that he’s not bent yet. And you know as well as I do that bringing him in isn’t our call.” He glanced at Valentine with a thoughtful look on his face. “Besides, he isn’t going anywhere, not anytime soon.”

Valentine flipped a piece of sod back into place with the toe of one boot. “I hadn’t heard that,” he admitted. He dug a can of chewing tobacco out of an inside pocket of his jacket and tucked a generous helping under one lip.

“This is why you actually show up to briefings,” Eliot pointed out with a grin.

“It conflicted with my schedule,” Valentine growled. “What’s the story?”

“Sounds like the kid accounted for a witch and three familiars, pretty much on his own. Our forensics team is going in for a look as soon as it gets dark again, but seems like the kid disrupted a greater summoning.” Eliot paused a beat. “Again. You ask me, we should be giving him a medal. Or at least a job offer. Either way, he’s going to be stuck in the hospital for a few days at least.”

“Local cops?”

“Called off. Morgan and the Director had a long talk with the local Sheriff. Paxton Locke is under active Federal investigation, our jurisdiction only. The man wasn't happy, but he’s playing along. I think the familiars had him spooked, if nothing else.”

The other agent coughed a chuckle. “Where’d the new witch come from? One of the mama’s followers, I suppose?” He shook his head and spat into the grass. “Between here and there, they’re popping up like weeds.”

“We always thought that Helen Locke somehow acquired Josef’s grimoire. I know Morgan was pushing the Director to let her put Helen under compulsion to fill in the blanks, but he had concerns that might interfere with the geas her son put on her.”

Valentine rolled his eyes. “The man can’t take a dump without consulting an oversight committee.” He favored Eliot with a crooked smile. “Which doesn’t mean that we don’t get to do some follow-up. Get the ball rolling on approval for bringing him in, but let’s swing by the hospital and have a look-see. If they clear it, we bag and tag him. If not, no biggie. I can at least get a better sense of the kid.”

His compatriot considered the notion, nodded, and hauled out his phone. “I’ll call upstairs — you drive.”

Chapter 20

The doctors told me they planned to keep me in the hospital for a week. For at least the first day, I was in no position to fight them about it. I went through bag after bag of IV glucose and enjoyed the offerings of the cafeteria a bit too much if you know what I mean. When hospital food tastes good, you know you’ve got serious issues.

The first time that I hobbled into the bathroom to pee I nearly scared myself out of my skin. The reflection in the mirror was a fun house representation of what I usually saw. I’d figured that my labors, mystical and otherwise, had come at a cost, but I wasn’t ready for the extent of the bill. My cheekbones stood out in stark relief. I now understood all too well why the nursing staff had been happy to call down for seconds on dessert. I’d shaved a good thirty to forty pounds of fat off of my frame, but maybe only about half of that had needed to go. The total loss had quite literally cut me down to the bone. No wonder I’d been so weak. No wonder Cassie had been able to manhandle me out of the hut with so little effort.

Healing myself was a massive labor and I hadn’t realized just how much it would take to use the spell on someone else. It was a good thing Cassie had pulled away when she had, or I might not have survived the experience.

I didn’t have any more visitors. I don’t know if Sheriff Hockers scared them off, but even so, I was in no shape for company. I slept, waking only intermittently when the nurses came to refresh my IV or bring me food. After eating, a deep sense of lethargy would fill me and I’d drift off to sleep, sometimes in mid-bite.

Sometime after I’d stuffed myself to bursting and zonked out after dinner, furtive moment roused me from my sleep. I snapped awake in fear, but my tension was immediately eased by the figure in scrubs and a lab coat. To my surprise, I hadn’t had any nightmares about my experiences. That was one advantage to such sheer exhaustion, I suppose, but for some reason, I felt an odd sense of danger now as I woke.

Despite what should have been the reassurance of knowing that it was a doctor or nurse that stood at the foot of my bed, for a long moment my instincts refused to believe it, but the moment passed just as quickly as I’d awaken.

“Sorry about that,” the figure said, in a lilting southern accent. “I thought you were a bit deeper under.” He stepped a bit closer, into the circle of light cast by the equipment at the head of my hospital bed. He looked young, but he wore a shirt and tie beneath his lab coat and stethoscope. Doctor, then.

“No worries. Feel like I’ve been sleeping for most of the day. Oh, wait.”

He gave me a polite chuckle as he flipped through the pages of my chart. “How are you feeling, Mr. Locke?”

“Tired, still,” I admitted. “Starting to get hungry again. Ache pretty much all over.”

He made a thoughtful noise in the back of his throat. “By the looks of these X-rays, I’d say you should buy a few lottery tickets. You have what look to be at least ten green stick fractures. That should account for the aching, I’d guess.” He lowered the chart and gave me a look. “It says here you declined to be cast?”

My memory of doing so was fuzzy, but it made sense — as soon as I got my strength back up I could finish the job of healing myself and I’d just have to cut them off. I’d rather the hospital regard me as weird than as a freak of nature. If they knew that those breaks had been fully displaced and in the case of my leg, compound, less than 24 hours ago, they would have found reasons for tests. I had no desire to be a guinea pig or to answer questions. Heck, if I had a vehicle, I would have signed myself out already and parked somewhere with a case of Mountain Dew and junk food.

I realized that my thoughts had consumed me for far too long and replied, “Right. I don’t have anyone to help me out if I did have them, and I promised I’d take it easy for a few weeks.”

He said nothing, just tapped his pen on the charts and made another interested hum in the back of his throat. “What’s your story, Mr. Locke?”

“I don’t follow.”

“The police say you stumbled onto some sort of murder cult and that they burned your house down, but not before you took care of business and saved the day. That sound about right to you?”

I shrugged. “I didn’t save the day. There’s a family that’s dead. Maybe that’s not my fault, but I didn’t — couldn’t — stop it. Yeah, the, uh, murder cult won’t be able to hurt anyone again, but I can’t take much credit for that.” I thought about being helpless and at the end of the line. I thought about a daytime sun in the middle of the night and said, “I can’t take any of the credit if I’m being honest.”

“Humble to a fault, I see.” The doctor’s eyes twinkled. “A true paladin, as it were.”

“Maybe more of a jester,” I shrugged. “Thanks, though.”

“I’ll let you rest. Perhaps tomorrow you’ll be up and at them when your lady comes back.” He slid the chart back into the holder at the end of my bed, then continued in a stern voice. “In the meantime, if you’re serious about the casts, you need to take it easy for the next month at least.”

I wanted to tell him that Cassie wasn’t ‘my lady’ but the term was so quaint — and, if I was being completely honest, intriguing — that I didn’t bother to correct him. “Thanks, Doc, uh,” I said.

He grinned and supplied, “Valentine.”

“Thanks, Doctor Valentine. I will take it easy,” I lied, but I tried to put a bit of earnestness into it. After all, when I got done taking it easy, my injuries would no longer be an issue.

He seemed to believe my little white lie. The Doc gave me a polite nod as he turned and departed the room.

As I rolled over to go back to sleep, I considered the odd click of his heels. Cowboy boots? Huh.

Agent Valentine’s languid stroll across the parking lot informed his companion of the results of the informal shake-down before he even got into the borrowed government sedan.

One tends more toward haste when one has just performed an execution, after all.

With a frustrated sigh, Valentine pulled open the passenger door and plopped into the seat.

Eliot started the car with a smirk. “Don’t look so glum, Val,” he mused. “People don’t surprise you all that often. Enjoy it.”

The other agent frowned. “Humble, self-effacing. He’s spent, but he’s still a smart-ass.”

“Sounds like somebody I know.” The other man gave Valentine a sidelong glance, but he didn’t take the bait. He had a thoughtful look on his face as he drummed his fingers on the dashboard.

“The only deceit I picked up was when he told me that he was going to take it easy.”

“So?”

Valentine snorted. “Kid should be in traction.” He gave Eliot a grave look. “I think he’s got more than the compulsion and the ghost thing. You saw the size of those familiars.” He shrugged. “Even healthy, three on one? No way. They would have stomped his ass into the ground.”

Eliot frowned. “Healing, you think?”

“Unless I miss my guess, yeah. A bunch of broken bones didn’t faze him one bit.”

The other man cursed under his breath. “We should have interrogated the mother when we had the chance.” He looked at Valentine, who just shrugged and spread his hands. “I got a message from Morgan. She and her team swept the house and the cars. No sign of the grimoire, although they did ping to something mystical.” He dug his phone out and pulled up a picture. “They found these scratched into the floor of the basement.”

Valentine glanced at the picture. “The X-Men logo, so what?” Eliot frowned, puzzled. “Wait, you’re serious? Comic books, movies?”

The other agent just shrugged and continued. “Be that as it may, Morgan says they show signs of use as a sigil. Similar, perhaps, to the purpose of the one under his mother’s bed.”

“Ahh,” Valentine leaned back in his seat. “Interesting. So, are they Helen’s, or the boy’s?”

“No way to tell.”

The other man stared at the hospital. “I could go back inside. Have another conversation.”

Eliot snorted. “The Director would have kittens if he knew we’d gone as far as we have. But I definitely think we can push this as a reason to keep observing him.” He shrugged. “Besides, the top priority is the mother.”

“Now. Finally.”

Eliot sighed. “You’re fighting the last war. Everyone knows you were right. We should have sanctioned her ten years ago. There, you happy?”

Valentine crossed his arms. “No.” He cocked his head to one side, then favored his partner with a faint smile. “Maybe just a little.”

Eliot put the car in gear. “All right then. Let’s go find us a witch, and you can shoot her a couple of dozen times.”

Chapter 21

By the time that I ate breakfast on my second day in the hospital, I was starting to feel a bit more myself, though my ribs still stood out. As another milestone, when the CNA whisked the breakfast dishes away I realized that I wasn’t so tired that I needed to pass out. A quick scan of the available television channels found little worth watching. Inspiration struck. After I cadged a phone book from the nurse’s station, I settled down to trying to make my time here at least somewhat productive.

True to his word, the Sheriff had gotten the ball rolling on insurance. It was still a process, but I had nothing if not time. It also eased things a bit that my bank and insurance were local, so they were quickly able to confirm my bona fides with a local call.

As I sat on hold it occurred to me that it was going to be much more difficult to replace my driver’s license. I could order it via a website, but the state would only mail it to my address of record — in Arizona. The hospital had computers in the waiting area I could use since my laptop went up with the RV, but that didn’t fix the main issue. It would be a little on the difficult side to get a car or plane ticket without a license. I could always wait for Kent to mail it here, but I didn’t feel like sticking around that long. Even if I did, the Sheriff had made his feelings on that matter crystal clear.

After my bank promised me that they’d have new cards on hold at the main branch in the next day or so, I hung up the phone and daydreamed about using the push on a TSA agent so I could hop a plane. I mean, sure, it would kind of break my self-imposed rules, but how much fun would it be doing the “not the droids you’re looking for” bit to a feckless government employee?

Another visitor interrupted my serious moral quandary. From what the nurses had told me, Cassie had been around, but I still hadn’t been conscious for one of her visits. Maybe part of me had been keeping myself awake after breakfast in hope that she’d show up, but I wasn’t that lucky, though her dad came close.

“Hey, Mike,” I said as Cassie’s dad stepped inside my room and settled down into the chair next to my bed. “How have you been?”

Mike looked tired as he gave me a look over the tops of his glasses. “Son, if you ever live to a day when you have children, perhaps you will understand how I’ve been. The only saving grace was the fact that the danger my daughter was in ended before I even knew she was in danger, but I’m sure you can fathom how I’ve been, these past thirty-six hours or so if you think on it.”

I rocked back a bit. I hadn’t expected his verbal onslaught, though it was understandable. For a moment, I busied myself with the controls, raising the mattress up a bit for more back support. All throughout, Mike kept up that same look. It was the expression look he adopted in his shop classes when one of the students took a shortcut or did something monumentally stupid.

“Well, in my defense, I did what I could to keep her safe. And I didn’t know she’d be walking into the situation. I didn’t know anyone else was going to walk into it, Mike.”

“Boy, you look like ten miles of bad road.” He sighed heavily. “But I will admit that Cassie is fine. In that regard, I guess you definitely took on something for her, to look as rough as you do.” He frowned. “Though she won’t tell me much about it. But she’ll at least tell me more than the Sheriff will.”

Guardian angels, I thought but remained silent. We sat there for a long moment, staring at one another.

“Good grief, it’s like trying to get something out of Patrick,” Mike exclaimed. The reference to my dad made me smile despite myself. The other man ran his fingers through his air and continued. “I never did care much for your mom, to tell the truth, but your daddy would just shrug and give me that same old smirk when I tried to talk to him about it. When he made a promise, by God, he was going to keep it.”

“I promised Cassie it was going to be all right. I wasn’t sure if it was true, at the time, but I was sure going to do whatever I could to make sure it was.”

Mike snorted. “Kids.” I opened my mouth, but he raised a hand to keep me silent. “I know, I know, you’re a legal adult, but you’re still a kid to this old man.” He frowned at me for a long moment. “Cassie’s had a rough time, these past few years.”

I debated on how to respond to that, then finally said, “I guess I know a little about that.”

“She’s so damn smart, but she always just bounced back and forth. I guess I always figured, one day she would find something, and she’d settle into it, and it would be all right.” My puzzlement must have shown because he laughed before he continued. “I guess what I’m saying is, just how much of what they said about your mom on the news was true, Paxton?”

I turned the question over in my head, trying to decide how best to couch my answer, but then I saw the look on his face. Mike Hatcher wasn’t looking for a comfortable answer. He wanted to know. It was a strange feeling for me. The people that I’ve let into my world have been there most often because of circumstance — Kent, Esteban and his family, and my clientele. Mike was seeking the truth. To shortchange that in any way would be a betrayal of one of the only people in this world that I knew my dad had trusted.

“The better question,” I said finally, “is how much of what my mother said on the stand was true.”

“And?”

“Everything after it got weird was absolutely true.”

He sat there and blinked a few times. “And why would she tell the truth?”

“Because I made her.”

“You made her,” he said, incredulous.

“I cast a spell that made her tell the truth.”

He settled back into his seat. “You cast a spell.”

I shrugged. “It is what it is, Mike. Mother got her hands on some weird stuff. Everything that’s happened after, even what happened the other night, has all been fallout from what she brought home.”

He leaned forward and fixed me with a fierce glare. “And my daughter. Did you do it to her, too?”

Now it was my turn to blink. “Did I—” At first I didn’t take his meaning, but as realization dawned, I brought a hand up to cover my mouth. “God, no, Mike. I would never do that.” The implication of it would have been a personal insult if I hadn’t been so shocked with how he’d laid it out.

His ferocity eased. “Good. Good.” He leaned back. “I just needed to know whose child you were. Patrick’s, or Helen’s.”

“I’m both,” I pointed out, in a moment of absolute idiocy. “But I guess you could say I’ve spent the last decade of my life doing my best to make Mother very, very disappointed in me.”

Mike laughed. With that, he brought me back to barbecues and Brewers games. My dad had never had a brother, but Mike had been his best friend and the closest thing to an uncle I’d ever known. I laughed, too, though there was a tinge of sadness there, as well.

“You’re a good egg, kid.” Cassie’s dad stood up to leave. “To tell the truth I’m still not entirely sure if you’re dealing from a full deck, but I trust you. I trust Patrick Locke’s son.”

“I appreciate that. It’s good to know that I’m not the only one who remembers him.”

He smiled. “Oh, I do. And I miss him every damn day. Get better. My daughter said she’d stop by this afternoon.”

After lunch, I dozed a bit more. I’d done all the work I could do from a phone. Replacing the things that I’d lost in the fire was going to take actually getting out of bed. I still felt as unsteady as a drunk on a bender every time I made the trek to the bathroom. I could have used a bedpan, but there are some indignities one can do without.

As the day drew toward a close, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I had a harder time resting. I’d had no shortage of company since I’d been here, but I’d yet to be awake for the person I wanted to see most of all.

Then, at just a little after five, she walked through the door. I clicked off the television that I’d already been ignoring for the most part and tried to keep the stupid smile off of my face.

“About time you woke up,” Cassie said as she plopped down in the chair and favored me with a smile of her own. She held up a plastic bag with a familiar logo and I raised an eyebrow in appreciation.

“I had a rough day, sue me,” I replied as I accepted the bag. “How are you feeling? And thanks for the Taco Bell, it’s my favorite.”

She touched her stomach without looking and replied, “Great, actually. Which is pretty astonishing considering the condition of my shirt and pants. How did you—” she drew herself up short and shook her head. “Magic, I know. Still trying to wrap my head around things.”

“I’m pretty much the same,” I admitted. “Until then I’d never tried doing that to use it on anyone other than myself. It, uh, takes a bit out of you.” I unwrapped a taco and took a bite. Sure, it was terrible for me, but since I could actually use the calories I wasn’t going to give myself too hard a time.

Cassie chewed on her lower lip for a moment, then said, “So have you figured out what you’re going to do next?”

I balled up the wrapper and replied, “Paperwork is going to be a nightmare. I need to replace my license, bank cards, find a new RV . . .” A thought occurred and I mused, “Man, I hope some kid hasn’t stumbled across the shotguns. We left them out there, didn’t we?”

“The Sheriff has them, so I guess you just need to get them from there. Your motor home didn’t burn all the way back, too, so I guess the fire department was able to salvage your motorcycle.”

“Well, that’s something at least. Sorry about your car.”

She shrugged. “Insurance. I’m driving dad’s old truck until the check comes in and I figure out what I want to do.”

“As for me, after that, I don’t know. I made a promise to a friend, so I guess I’m heading out west.” I considered telling her about seeing Mother before passing out on the gurney, but I didn’t want to give her any more grief than I already had. “After that, I’ve got as many plans as I ever do, I suppose.”

“So, that’s just it? You go back to rambling and I, what? Stay here, working at Target?” Cassie huffed a laugh.

“I’d trade places with you in a heartbeat,” I murmured. “Go back to school, Cassie. Have a life.”

“So, what, I’m just supposed to act like nothing happened? I’m supposed to walk around and wonder if every chick giving me the stink eye is a member of your mom’s glee club?” She shuddered. “I heard Melanie on the phone while you were out, Paxton. I know she wasn’t the only one. Are you going to do something about the rest of them?”

I ate another taco to give myself some time to compose my thoughts, then answered, “Probably, yeah. It’s not like the FBI or some local yokel can handle them. Especially if they have the same sort of minions that Melanie had.”

“And when and if you get the crap beaten out of you again?”

I raised an eyebrow. “I did all right.”

“With my help,” she pointed out.

“What are you saying, exactly?” The intensity of Mike’s visit was starting to make a lot more sense all of a sudden, but I wanted to hear it from her.

“Let me work with you. Teach me to do what you can do.”

I can’t say that I’m entirely unhappy with the prospect, but my path is a dangerous one. I know what I’m walking into. But then again, Cassie was an innocent bystander. Same goes for Bobby and his family, too. That didn’t protect them. Who am I to stop someone who’s walking into a situation with eyes that are, for the most part, open to the truth? “All right,” I agreed. “Sidekick?”

“Sidekick, hell. I want you to teach me to protect myself.” Cassie drew her face into a serious cast. “It’s all well and good when you come rushing in to save the day, but you can’t be everywhere at once. At least give me enough for a fighting chance if I run into something like this ever again.”

I shrugged as I considered the concept. “This wasn’t exactly an everyday occurrence, just so you know.” I thought about the light shining down on us and added, “And if I’m being completely honest, it wasn’t anything I did that saved that day.”

On top of the fact that what defeated the Edimmu sure seemed like without a doubt divine intervention, I’m not entirely sure what she expected me to teach her. The extent of my knowledge consisted of the whopping four spells I found in the grimoire during my initial grieving period after my father’s death.

When you’re a teenager presented with a magic book, it makes sense that you’d look for certain things. The restoration spell, in my misguided attempt to be able to bring him back to life. The spell that allows me to speak to ghosts, because I wanted to find and talk to my dad. Invisibility, to hide from the press that would have hounded me endlessly if I hadn’t been able to avoid them. The telekinesis spell was the last one I learned before seeing the first part of what mother was up to and deciding to burn the grimoire, and that one was just a stupid accident fueled by my desire for a drink of all things.

A whopping four spells in my metaphysical arsenal doesn’t exactly make me Gandalf the Gray. Well, five, with the push.

But . . . I’ve always known in the back of my mind that there might be a way, haven’t I? I don’t know if it will work or not, but if Cassie wants to learn, if some things can never be truly destroyed, as the Edie taunted, shouldn’t I do whatever I can to help stop it?

Shouldn’t I be willing to use all the tools I can get my hands on, for the greater good?

Just so long as you don’t look at Cassie as one of those tools, I thought suddenly, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. In the Middle Ages, when you felt such a chill you’d remark that someone had just walked over your grave. This hadn’t felt so much like that as it had a pair of lips whispering directly in my ear. It took everything I had to not look over my shoulder, even though I knew for certain I wouldn’t see anything.

I sighed. “All right. But I this is going to be anything but exciting at first,” I warned. “Until I get out of the hospital you’re going to be a glorified gopher. Still interested?”

“Absolutely. And quit hogging all the tacos.”

Chapter 22

A week after the ambulance carried my unconscious body to the hospital, the doctors finally surrendered and allowed me to leave.

Even then there was a caveat — they insisted on rolling me out to the curb. As soon as the orderly got me out of the sliding doors I almost jumped out of the wheelchair. For the last few days, I’d built my strength back up to the point where I had been able to supplement my own metabolism with a bit of mystical oomph. The remnants of the injuries Uno, Dos, and Trace had wrought were finally gone. I still had a vague sense of underlying fatigue, but it far more bearable without the constant reminder of the beatings I’d taken.

I opened the passenger door of the new-to-me RV idling at the curb and pulled myself up into the passenger seat. Cassie grinned at me. “You ready?”

“Been there for a while,” I agreed and jauntily pointed toward the exit. “Let’s get out of here.”

As promised, Cassie’s first few days as my newly hired associate had consisted mainly of running around and taking care of business. True to her word, she hadn’t complained a bit.

I felt a little less guilty about the payments I’d taken from delusional customers — it had certainly made replacing things a bit easier for Cassie, who had gone on a bit of a shopping spree with my newly-minted bank card. It hadn’t made a dent toward a full replacement of my setup, but I had time.

The Class-C Thor was much newer and nicer than I preferred, but it had a rack on the back for my Kawasaki, more gizmos than you could shake a stick at, and separate beds.

It would do.

“So, where to?” Cassie asked as she pulled the Thor out of the hospital parking lot. I’d suggested she try and get familiar with it over the past few days. She was handling it well so far. If anything, it had more get up and go than my old one had.

“Run by my house real quick,” I said. She gave me a puzzled look but said nothing. “Rule one. I’m going to try to be as completely forthright as I can. That doesn’t mean I may not hold some things back if I think it’s for your own good, but I’m not going to keep secrets just for the heck of it.”

“All right. So why are we going to your house?”

“Two reasons. I want to just, you know, take a look at it. But I also need to get something.”

“And that something is?”

“That, I’m not going to tell you. It’s a long shot, but let’s just say if it works I might actually be able to teach you something other than healing and telekinesis.” If I could even do that — it wasn’t like I’d learned them by any sort of instruction, after all. I didn’t have the first clue in how to teach Cassie how to do it.

She pulled up in front of my house and my heart broke a little. I’d seen it in flames, but the charred frame wrapped in police tape was far worse. They’d towed the Itasca and Cassie’s car out of the driveway, but the cleanup had yet to begin on the rest of the house. My insurance company had wanted to know what I planned to do after they issued the check for the home and contents, but I still wasn’t sure. I’d need to have the land cleaned up, of course, but was there a point to rebuilding? Shackling myself to a physical location seemed like a bad idea right about now, unless it was a castle on top of a mountain. Even then I’d still be pacing the floors, worried that Mother or one of her group would pop out of thin air. For now, it was better to stay on the move. At least my prior nomadic lifestyle had prepared me for it, though now instead of aimless rambling I was going to have to avoid what I presumed was an active pursuit.

Or maybe not. They hadn’t come for me in the hospital, of course.

Burning down the house had been petulant at best. I figured that Mother and her groupies had swept in, found us gone, and searched the house and RV for the grimoire or anything she might have hidden away. Not finding us or the book, she’d set fire to the house she’d once called home. Pique, or a desire to cover up the evidence of her compatriot’s crimes? Either way, it didn’t matter.

“Hang loose,” I said to Cassie. “This won’t take long.”

I hopped down and made my way up the driveway. The thin aluminum of the garage door had warped and collapsed in the blaze. I had to shove at one corner of the door to pry open enough of a gap to slip inside. Most of the roof had also collapsed, which gave me more than enough light to find my way by.

There hadn’t been a car in the garage for years. Most of the stuff in here was just clutter, but there should be a shovel inside.

I’d used it to bury the ashes of the grimoire, after all.

Look, maybe it was dumb to burn the thing in the first place, but I’m not so foolish to think that something magical wasn’t still dangerous. When the ashes cooled, I’d dumped them into an old metal ammo can that grandpa had used to store miscellaneous nuts and bolts. I’d wrapped the entire package in trash bags and put a good amount of thought into where to hide it.

Telling Melanie that I’d hid it in the hut was a believable lie, but back then I’d reasoned fairly quickly how that would be a terrible place to keep it. Sure, the land was still undeveloped after all this time, but who knew when someone would decide to put a shopping mall or a restaurant there?

Keeping it with me was just as bad an idea — the fact that Melanie had gained access to it and ransacked it just confirmed I’d been right all along. In the end, the best — and only — place for it was on property that I owned and controlled.

I’d often considered just dumping it down a sink or spreading the ashes across the country a handful at a time, but fear of the consequences had stayed my hand. For all I knew the stuff was the magical equivalent of depleted uranium.

The fire had consumed the top half of the shovel, but enough remained for me to wield it in an awkward fashion. I retrieved it and exited the garage through the back door.

Our property didn’t have any trees to use as convenient landmarks, but it did have a four-inch steel pipe. This was where granddad’s enormous satellite dish hung before he wired the house for cable. Apparently, he’d had concerns that a tornado night rip it out of the ground, because he’d set it in a massive concrete plug that went down so far that my dad threw his hands up in frustration after trying to remove it. In all the years since the pipe had remained untouched.

I headed to the north side of the concrete plug and knelt in the grass. An otherwise innocuous mark in the concrete gave me a starting point. I began digging.

It was slower going than it had been the first time. The ground wasn’t frozen, but it was cold enough that it didn’t give as easily as it had the spring dad had died.

About a foot down, the blade of the truncated shovel hit metal. I scraped the dirt away more gently now, exposing the duct-taped layer of trash bags around the can. Once I had the top free, I set the shovel aside and took hold of the lid with both hands. After a moment of straining it popped out of the hole and I tore into the insulation. There was no rust visible on the olive-drab surface of the container, which gave me hope that the contents remained dry.

The ashes of the grimoire took up a bit more than three-quarters of the gallon Ziploc bag I’d dumped them in. As I fingered the bag, I wondered if I needed to be touching the ashes themselves.

Stop stalling. Just try it.

I found my center and focused on the weight in my hands. It was at once the same and different as trying to heal Cassie. Exerting the spell outside of myself was as tedious as it had been before, but once I’d established that connection, the ashes of the grimoire jumped and pulsated in my hands. The odd sensation almost distracted me, but I retained my focus, intent on not repeating the life-draining mistake that had nearly killed me when I’d healed Cassie.

I needn’t have worried — it was almost as if the book wanted to be whole. All at once, something shoved me out of my focus. I lowered my head to look at what I held in my hands.

The sudden expansion and restoration of the grimoire had shredded the plastic around the ashes. I tore the rest away and marveled at the solidity in my hands. I didn’t feel as though I’d put much, if anything of myself into it, but it certainly felt heavier than the bag of ashes had. That shouldn’t have been possible, but for me, the barrier between the realms of possible and impossible had long been broken down.

I flipped through the pages — careful not to do more than glance at the contents — to assure myself that all seemed as it had been, before the fire. Satisfied, I closed the cover and tightened my grip on the book.

I thought about pillars of salt, the possibility of redemption, and my dad. I needed to sit down and have a long talk with Father Rosado, but I had a promise to keep first.

After Paxton disappeared into the garage, Cassie decided that sitting there and staring at the burned-down building was a lousy way to pass the time. She busied herself with programming the favorites on the RV’s satellite radio. If he didn’t like the Octane channel, well, it was going to be a long trip. She smirked to herself. If someone had told her last week she was going to quit her job and put college on hold in favor of going on a road trip with a guy from high school, she’d have called them crazy.

Crazy, of course, was all in the eye of the beholder after the last couple of days. To her own surprise, she’d had little trouble going to sleep, though vague terrors had filled her dreams. They didn’t wake her, but she often found that she’d twisted the covers around herself upon waking. Insomnia would have been better — at least then she wouldn’t have to remake the bed every morning. Maybe this venture would help to alleviate that. If nothing else, maybe she could learn enough to grant her some level of protection that a gun hadn’t.

On the bright side, since her experiences with nearly dying, the light in the sky, and her subsequent healing, she hadn’t had a single craving for a drink.

Which was, in the end, perhaps the strangest thing of all. Even after eighteen months of sobriety, it had been a struggle more often than not. The smallest thing as a commercial or songs she used to hear at parties would get that little itch going.

But she’d stayed strong. Now, it seemed, that itch was gone. She’d had a long talk with her sponsor. Donna had nearly hit the ceiling when she’d explained about the indefinite road trip. She hadn’t detailed her experiences — even seeing the destroyed jeans and shirt, would her friend believe her? — but the earnestness in her voice must have carried over.

The opening of the door brought her out of her reverie. She turned to look as Paxton appeared in the opening.

Clay and dirt crusted his hands, but he still held a dark, leather-bound book in his hands as he climbed inside and closed the door. He met her eyes and shrugged.

“Is that . . .?” She couldn’t finish.

“Indeed it is,” he replied. “Surprise.”

“But you burned it.”

“I burned it in the backyard. I buried the ashes back there, too. I left that part out.” He shook his head slowly and stared down at the book. “I still can’t believe it worked.”

Magic. Even now, she had trouble with the word, but she shrugged herself. Just go with it. She put her hands on the wheel and said, “Well. Where to, then, Snowflake?”

Paxton fingered the raised pattern on the surface of the book and murmured, “We’re headed west, Cassie. I need to see a friend about a serial killer.”

Paxton Locke will return

In

Night’s Black Agents

Word of mouth is the most cost-effective advertising there is for a new author. Critiques are even better. Whether you enjoyed this book or not, please consider leaving a review on Amazon. If you did enjoy it, please feel free to follow me on Twitter for updates, snippets of works in progress, and other randomness. If social media isn’t your thing, you can check out my blog.

I’d also like to give a huge shout-out to my awesome crew of beta readers. You helped make this a better book, and I am forever grateful.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Daniel Humphreys geeks out for movies, target shooting, and football. He has worked in Fortune 500 IT for over two decades and resides in southern Indiana with his wife and children.