“There’s more?”
He nodded. “Yeah. Didn’t you check your email?” At my chagrined look, he tutted in mock judgment, like we didn’t have enough going on. “Ryan and Kell have been finding bits of funky cloth in odd places, and getting rid of the pieces like we showed them.” He pushed the laptop to face me, and tapped a few buttons, revealing some recent news articles. “I think it’s working. It’s even made the nightly news that the ‘grouch flu’ as they’re calling it seems to be going away.”
“Grouch flu?” I rolled my eyes. “Anything for ratings, right?” I considered Teag’s comment as I savored my coffee. “So you and Mrs. Teller and Niella have been weaving replacement cloth?” Teag nodded. “What’s to keep our phantom Weaver from swapping them out again?”
Teag shrugged. “Technically, nothing. But I think the discord was either a diversion or a way to gin up some cheap negative energy that could be siphoned off to give the spell caster a quick power boost. The cursed cloth would have slowly lost its power over time, although that could have taken weeks.”
“Tell that to the people in jail for assault thanks to cursed pieces like Opal Lady’s shawl,” I replied.
“Speaking of which, there’ve been several new arrests for everything from bar fights to domestic violence—all with bits of woven fabric found on the people who started the brawl.”
I ran a hand through my hair. “We’ve got to figure out what’s going on. And I can’t shake the feeling this is the warm-up to something a lot worse.”
“Yeah, me too,” Teag agreed. “On the bright side, I slept better last night,” he said. “Anthony told me what you did. Thank you again.”
I squeezed his hand. “Anything to help. Glad it made a difference. Rowan stopped by and took the safe, so she might be able to make something of the hex charm before Sorren gets back.”
I pulled an old book out of my bag and flipped it open to a picture. The pen-and-ink drawing showed a cavalcade of spectral riders and ghostly horses led by a frightening cloaked figure, with a terrifying pack of hellhounds running alongside. “I keep looking at the evidence, and it always brings me back to this.”
Teag looked up and met my gaze. “The Wild Hunt?”
“It fits,” I replied, wishing I had a better suggestion. “Missing people, taken by the Master of the Hunt. Horses and dogs snatched away into another realm, and a destructive force of incredible power, unleashed to bring a ‘reaping’ down on a helpless population.”
Teag knew the myths as well as I did. The Wild Hunt showed up in a number of Western European legends. Some claimed it was led by Odin, others said Perchta, while still more tales claimed the Erlking or other notables among the Fey. The Hunt harvested souls—willing or not—to ride with them in the Afterlife, and showed up periodically to wreak havoc during autumn nights. As threats went, the Wild Hunt rated up there with a natural disaster as a destructive force.
“But why?” Teag wondered aloud. “And why now? Someone’s going to a lot of trouble to call down the Hunt, and we know damn well it’s not an every-year occurrence. So who benefits? And what’s the goal?”
“There’s got to be a reason this all connects back to those prominent families,” I mused. “And when the same names keep coming up, odds are good that someone back in the day really did make a deal with the Devil—or some other supernatural power.”
“Do you think Mrs. Morrissey would know where to find the dirty laundry about this?” Teag asked.
“I bet we could narrow it down if we look at the families involved.” I paused to finish my coffee, then stood to pour myself another cup. “And if it is the Wild Hunt, then it might have been summoned before. So we need to look for patterns.”
“But what does a Weaver have to do with the Wild Hunt?” Teag asked. “And why would someone want to call up the Hunt? If someone wanted revenge, there are a lot easier ways to get it.”
“Maybe we need to have pizza night at my house, and pull out the big whiteboard,” I suggested. “You, Anthony, Kell, Maggie. Lay everything out on my dining room table and then tape the pieces up on the whiteboard when we find patterns.”
“Works for me,” Teag said. “It was my turn to make dinner, and I don’t feel like cooking. I was probably stopping for take-out anyhow.”
The rest of the day proved uneventful, although the store stayed busy. Maggie had the day off, well-deserved, but she insisted on coming over for pizza to help look for some clue to what the hell was going on. I still had a knot in my gut telling me we hadn’t seen the worst yet. So far, we’d assembled a lot of puzzle pieces, without any idea of what the big picture was supposed to be. I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were missing the key, the heart of the problem, and once we figured out what it was, the rest would all fall into place.
Now I had to hope that once we figured out what was going on, we still had time to stop it.
I expected an uneventful evening. We closed up on time, agreeing to meet back at my place in an hour to map our findings on the whiteboard. Teag headed in one direction, and I turned in another, intending to pick up some snacks to add to the pizza.
A large, solid object fell from the sky into the oncoming lane of traffic. I jammed on my brakes, as did the driver coming my way. I heard the screech of tires and smelled burning rubber, then looked up to see the pale, panicked face of the driver through the windshield.
Shit. Whatever fell had been big. I got out of my car and looked up to see clear sky above me. No overhead wires, no skybridge, or even a passing airplane in sight. But the thing that dropped out of the sky had looked much larger than a bird, even if an eagle somehow had a heart attack and died over downtown Charleston.
Then the screaming started.
I moved around my car door, as the other motorists crowded closer. My stomach lurched, and I felt very glad I hadn’t eaten yet.
Sprawled on the asphalt was a body, none the better for having fallen to the ground from a height.
“Do you think he was alive when he hit?” A woman asked from beside, morbidly curious.
“No. I’m sure he didn’t feel a thing,” I assured her. I could offer that opinion in confidence, because given the advanced decomposition of the splattered corpse, I’d say the poor fellow had already been dead for a long time.
Traffic snarled since we couldn’t exactly go anywhere without driving over the remains. Sirens wailed, and the onlookers had started to pull out their cell phones to snap photos or upload video. I got back in the car and called Teag.
“I might be late for pizza,” I told him.
“Something wrong?”
“A dead man just fell out of the sky in front of my car.”
I heard Anthony’s voice in the background give a startled yelp and call for Teag. A few seconds later, Teag returned his attention to my call. “Um, you’re not going to believe this—”
“Try me.”
“You’re not the only one. It’s on the news. At least three bodies reported so far, and more calls coming in.”
“I can guarantee you, this guy didn’t hide in the wheel well of a passing jetliner,” I said, recalling an incident in the headlines a few years past.
“How do you know?”
I sighed. “He’s been dead longer than disco.”
“So you’re stuck ‘till the cops clear the area?”
“‘Fraid so,” I replied. “And a little longer, because I’m not coming home before I drive through a car wash.”
It took more than an hour for the police to cordon off the area, take the statements of those with a front-row seat, and get the situation under control. In the end, since I couldn’t move my car without driving over gobbets of fallen dead guy, the cops impounded my car and the other car that had been right up front, told me to call the station in the morning to see when I could get it back, and sent me on my way. Teag came to pick me up, waiting on the outskirts of the blocked-off area.
“Wow. That’s pretty rank,” Teag said as his eyes te
ared up when I opened the passenger door.
I’d doused a tissue with potent hand cream so I could hold it against my nose to overpower the smell, but even that couldn’t cover the stench. “Yeah. And worse, it’s so strong it’s a taste.”
“Ewwww. Any idea what happened?” Teag asked as we drove away. The influx of police cars and news vans made it impossible to move quickly.
“I wasn’t scanning the sky at the instant he fell,” I admitted, “but I can’t come up with any non-supernatural explanation. So I’m pretty sure this is our kind of problem, and odds are, it’s connected to the rest of the weirdness.”
“Pretty sure you’re right,” Teag agreed, then cursed under his breath as a news team car cut him off, gridlocking the intersection. “Oh, and right before you called, there was a segment on the news about animal control getting a flood of phone calls about howling dogs.”
“Dogs?”
He nodded. “People have been calling in from all over the area about packs of dogs barking and howling, and how someone needs to do something about it. Only when the animal control people get there, they can’t find any dogs—or wolves, coyotes, or anything else. Not a sign of them.”
“Curiouser and curiouser,” I mused. “So here’s my question—if the police can identify the splattered dead men, want to bet they match names on your missing persons list?”
“IDing them isn’t going to be easy, between the decomp and the impact,” Teag replied. “If they hit hard enough, even dental records could be a challenge.”
“If they’ve been missing long enough, dental records might not even be an option,” I pointed out.
“It’s going to take time for the forensics teams to match anything,” Teag said. “We may not have the information soon.” I knew he was thinking what I’d been thinking—that everything seemed to be accelerating toward some warped grand finale that we were guaranteed not to like.
“And we’ve got no idea what the timeline is, or the game plan,” I answered, leaning back in the seat and closing my eyes. “Shit. Is it bad that right now I care more about getting a shower and lighting incense to make the smell go away than I do about saving the world?”
Teag grinned. “Seems logical to me.”
While I showered, Teag used my laptop. By the time I came back, clean and drenched in perfume, he met me with a triumphant grin. “Well?” I asked. “Don’t look smug. Share with the class.”
“It’s not much, but I picked up some chatter on the police radios,” Teag replied. “A couple of the bodies had wallets on them. Both names match missing men on my list—ties to prominent families, horse enthusiasts, missing for two years and six years, respectively. I haven’t heard anything on the other bodies, but I’ll keep checking.”
A knock at the door prompted Teag to put away his laptop since he didn’t want to explain his unauthorized access to Anthony. Everyone showed up one after the other, and all anyone could talk about was the bodies falling out of thin air.
Even the delivery guy who brought the pizzas had to ask if I’d heard about the dead guys. I dodged the question, gave him a nice tip, and sent him on his way. Most people would avoid talking about something so gross over dinner, but not my friends. We debated possible methods and motives, tried to figure out whether the locations where the bodies fell held a hidden meaning and brainstormed why the corpses would be “released” now as opposed to any other time.
When we finished eating, I dragged out the whiteboard and markers. We all voted Maggie the official artist since she had the best handwriting. She sat on a chair next to the board, while Teag, Anthony, Kell, and I took up the rest of the couch. Baxter moved from lap to lap, trying to con everyone out of treats.
Maggie organized our information into lists and marked key locations on a big map of Charleston that we taped up on the wall. She drew lines to connect related items, and I couldn’t help thinking about all the TV shows I’d seen where the FBI agent—or the obsessed killer—papers his walls with clippings and printouts and builds a web of yarn and pushpins to tie the evidence together.
“That looks more like spaghetti,” Anthony observed after a few hours, looking up at the multi-colored scribbles on the big whiteboard. He sat on the floor, leaning back between Teag’s knees as Teag sat on the couch. The board was vivid proof that while we had a lot of information, we were still missing the “glue” to make it stick together.
I looked away from the whiteboard to the big map. Maggie had dutifully marked the cemeteries where the zombies and ghouls had risen, the sightings of black dogs and phantom hounds, as well as the Nicholson plantation. Smaller dots noted where Ryan and Kell’s groups had found cursed fabric, and where the dead men dropped from the sky, as well as the Museum and Archive since they’d been part of this whole mess, too. Harrison Stables, off in Aiken, was a red “X” in the corner of the map.
“Hand me a pencil,” I said, as I studied the map. Everyone watched me expectantly as I walked over and drew a big circle around the locations of the phenomena. Then I took a green marker and made a dot in the center.
“What’s in the middle?” Anthony asked, shifting to have a better view.
I met Teag’s gaze. “Trifles and Folly,” I replied. “We’re the epicenter.”
“How is that possible?” Maggie asked, looking troubled. “We haven’t taken in any super strange pieces lately, have we?”
Teag and I shook our heads, equally perplexed. “In fact, I’d say that we’ve gotten in fewer items with bad mojo in the past couple of weeks than usual.” Fortunately, only a small number of truly dangerous items came into the shop, but those were doozies. Most of the items that we dealt with either carried very negative energy or had a tragic history. We cleansed them when we could, and got rid of them permanently when we couldn’t.
“The Museum and the Archive had pieces stolen that hailed from the same time period—the Viking invasions,” I mused aloud.
“So we’re back to the Norse Seiðrs,” Teag muttered. “Great.”
I came back to my seat and looked at the whiteboard. “Someone’s charged their power by draining energy from pieces at the Archive and Museum that had good juju. They got another boost from creating the ‘grouch flu.’ And if making the racehorses and hunting dogs disappear means someone is gearing up for the Wild Hunt, then what about the guys who fell out of the sky today? Did they get bumped from their spot in the hunting party to make room for fresh meat?”
“That doesn’t match the stories about the Hunt,” Kell replied. I could count on him to know his ghost lore. “Most stories associate the Hunt with the harvest season, but the timing is at the choice of the Master of the Hunt, who isn’t mortal. The legends all deal with how to stay away from the Hunt so you won’t be taken. I don’t remember reading anything about being able to summon it—or why you’d want to.”
“And what does the Wild Hunt have to do with Weaver magic?” Teag asked. I knew the connection bothered him, and while I wasn’t going to mention his dreams in front of the others, I could see the strain in his eyes. “The Seiðrs were sorceresses and prophets. How are they involved?”
I looked at the “spaghetti” mess on the whiteboard and felt a pang of hopelessness. We had organized and reviewed lots of data and dispelled the “grouch flu,” but we didn’t seem any closer to the heart of the problem than when we started.
My phone buzzed, and I saw that the new text was from Sorren. “He says that the Viking connection is important, and to keep our distance from Secona or anything to do with the Seiðrs until he can chase down the lead he’s following. And he agrees that Weaver magic is at the heart of the situation and that Teag needs to be especially careful,” I read the message aloud.
By eleven, we all agreed we’d done as much as we could with the information that we had, and decided to call it a night. I couldn’t avoid feeling frustrated, because the answers were important and they remained out of reach. Gradually everyone drifted off, even Kell, who had an important int
erview with a TV producer involving a possible new shoot about SPOOK early in the morning. Finally, only Teag, Anthony, and I were left. We all pitched in to pick up any remaining glasses and dishes, avoiding the whiteboard like it was the elephant in the room.
My phone chirped as I walked toward the door with Teag and Anthony. Teag turned toward me as I answered, and when I saw that Alicia Peters, our medium friend, was calling, I gestured for them to wait.
“Alicia? Are you okay? What’s up?” I put the call on speaker.
“Cassidy? I tried to ignore them, but they won’t leave me alone.” Alicia’s voice sounded ragged, and I exchanged a worried look with Teag.
“Who won’t leave you alone?” I asked, worried.
“The ghosts,” Alicia replied, dropping her voice as if afraid to be overheard. “They’re all stirred up, but that’s not the worst of it.” She paused to steady her voice. “I can feel a presence out there, something big. And it wants to speak through me.”
“Can you tell whether it’s friendly?” Teag chimed in, as Anthony hung back, waiting to take his cue from us on what happened next.
“No. I mean, it says it wants to help, and maybe that’s true, but it’s really strong. I don’t dare let it in on my own.”
She didn’t have to explain. I thought that being a medium sounded terrifying. Being contacted by restless ghosts, allowing those spirits to speak to you either out loud or telepathically, or in the case of a séance, permitting another person’s consciousness to slip into your body and control your words and actions. I couldn’t begin to imagine the courage it had to take to handle that kind of a Gift, or what it must have been like growing up with that power and vulnerability. My own psychometry had its drawbacks, but I wouldn’t trade my abilities for Alicia’s for all the money in the world.
“How can we help?”
Alicia spoke quietly as if she were afraid someone might overhear. And maybe she was—only that “someone” was already dead. “Come get me. Please, can I stay with you? You’ve got the strongest wardings. And if Rowan and Donnelly are with me when I open the channel, I won’t be afraid of losing control.”
Tangled Web Page 17
