Beacon's Spark (Potomac Shadows Book 1)

by Jim Johnson

  The Spinner reached out with his tendril, splitting the end of it into a dozen glowing filaments that floated over the bed and then hovered over the man’s chest and head.

  The man stirred and cracked open his eyes. He was slow to regain sense of his surroundings, but gradually focused on the dangling lights displayed over him. He took a deep breath and nodded. “Didn’t think it was time yet; had more I wanted to do.”

  This was a surprise. They usually didn’t stir when approached. The Spinner didn’t have anything to say to the man, so shifted his tendril of etheric energy into a magical scalpel and shoved it into the man’s body, leaving no physical mark but cutting deep into his soul.

  The old man’s eyes widened and he let out a sharp cry of pain. The Spinner worked quickly to sever the thread that held the man’s soul to his body, cursing himself that he hadn’t bothered to put a check in place to keep the man quiet. He was getting lazy.

  He morphed the etheric scalpel into a grip that took hold of the man’s soul and then pulled it out of the room, down the hall, and into the Veil rift. Once the remnants of the soul were safely in the woven world, the Spinner closed the Veil rift with a thought and then pulled the soul to him and tasted of its essence.

  It was a little sour-tasting, and the Spinner acknowledged that he should have perhaps been a bit more patient in harvesting the man’s soul.

  But he had work to do. He consumed about a quarter of the soul for himself, adding the old man’s etheric essence to his own to bolster his strength, and then he siphoned off the remainder and added it to the pool of energy he was building in his private etheric grid.

  Once done with that, he considered heading back to the nursing home for another, but checked himself and moved his woven world avatar back to his private meditation room. While he could harvest all the souls in the nursing home tonight if he wanted, he knew that if every person there died in the same night, there’d be a lot of attention drawn there. And there was some attention he didn’t want to attract. Not yet, anyway.

  No, best to be patient and methodical. He settled into a meditative stance, and focused on nothingness, trying hard to shut out his constant urge to feed.

  Chapter 12

  A SHARP SCREAM FROM SOMEWHERE IN the darkness pulled me out of a dreamless sleep. It took me a few moments to regain my bearings, but the warm body pressed against me and the pile of blankets draped on top of me reminded me that I was home, in bed, with Abbie by my side.

  I could tell from her steady breathing that my startling awake hadn’t disturbed her, so I carefully settled on my back. I wasn’t sure what time it was, though glancing at the dark window with only the faintest hint of purple light told me it was clearly pre-dawn.

  The scream didn’t repeat. I stared toward the window with my heart hammering in my chest. I wasn’t sure what I’d do if today ended up as a repeat of yesterday. Maybe lose my mind.

  I took a couple deep breaths to try and calm myself, and forced my mind toward the mundane elements of my life.

  Abbie’s alarm would go off at 6:10, and she was usually a pretty sound sleeper, so I left her alone and stared up at the ceiling, just visible in the night’s glow.

  The house around me was silent. I could hear muffled snoring coming in through the walls—either Penny or Cooper, I was never sure which one made such a racket. Vinya’s bedroom was on the main level of the house so if she made any noise at night I didn’t know about it. She was the quietest of my house-mates.

  The newest addition to the house, the new renter, Tasha or Tiesha, had the basement suite to herself, and God knows what she got up to at night. She’d moved in a few weeks ago and had pretty much kept to herself.

  Abbie suspected that—Tara? Tanya?—must eat out a lot and must take her laundry to one of the local laundromats, because no one had seen her come out of the basement.

  She didn’t have a car either, so she had to walk to the bus or the Metro, or maybe catch a cab. Abbie and I had talked about staying up late one night to watch her come home and then to stay up through the night to watch her leave the house, but as yet we hadn’t gotten around to trying it out.

  As near as I could tell, she had paid her rent early and seemed to be on Penny’s good side in that Penny didn’t have anything to say negatively about her.

  Of course, she had me for that, and Abbie. So why dump on the new housemate when she could dump on me?

  Anyway, I stared up at the ceiling and pushed thoughts of horrible Penny out of my brain and thought about that scream. Had it been a nightmare, fueled from yesterday’s events, or maybe more immediate and close by? The silence around me suggested it couldn’t have come from anyone in the house. And our neighborhood was usually pretty quiet, though I guess it wasn’t so quiet that someone might not scream out into the night.

  The more I thought about the scream, the more I got the sense that it had been made from some distance, and muffled somehow, like it had been made from the other side of some thick blanket or wall.

  Maybe even a curtain… Like maybe a glowing curtain?

  Even as I made the thought I sensed the truth of it, and that bothered me a lot because there aren’t too many things I’m sure of in my life. The last time I’d felt so sure about anything was that horrible night at UPenn, where I had that ‘moment of clarity’, a term my counselor had liked to throw around, that moment in time that said that there were more important things I should be doing with my life.

  This felt like one of those times. I had no doubt the scream had come from the other side of a curtain of some sort, possibly like the one I had seen in that stairwell at Branchwood.

  I extricated myself from Abbie’s warm limbs and managed to slip out of bed without disturbing her. I slid over to the window and peeked outside. The glass was strangely opaque and it took a moment for my bleary eyes to focus and to realize that I was being stared at.

  I flinched away from the window, but not before the image of a half-dozen strange faces staring at me through the window registered on my mind’s eye. I reeled back from the window and pressed my back against the wall.

  The weirdest thing was that my first feeling wasn’t fear. My heart was racing and my breaths were coming sharp and fast, but I couldn’t really classify fear as one of my leading emotions.

  I took a moment to process what I was feeling, another technique my counselor had taught me. It dawned on me that what I felt, more than anything else, was a profound sense of sadness for the people attached to those faces.

  Encouraged by my apparent lack of fear, I straightened up from the wall and took the few steps over to the window again, and after a fortifying breath, glanced out. The faces were gone—all I saw was the front yard and the street outside our house.

  “Okay, pretty weird, again,” I muttered. This was veering into some late-night X-Files rerun business. I could almost hear the spooky Mark Snow soundtrack kicking in, underlying my racing thoughts with a dark and sinister mood.

  Who had made that scream, and why could I hear it? And had I really seen a bunch of strange faces reflected in the window? I glanced across the darkened room toward where my satchel sat on the floor in a slump of fabric. That crystal pendant was in there, and a second moment of clarity in as many minutes made me think that the voice I’d heard from the pendant had been similarly muffled, though at even more of a distance.

  Something was not right in the state of Rachel-brain. I glanced over toward the bed to check on Abbie, but she was still sound asleep, curled onto one side, facing away from me, the blanket pulled down off her shoulder.

  I carefully padded over to my satchel. I fished around in the large pocket and produced the pendant, and stared at it in the slowly-brightening light.

  As before, it was a hunk of quartz in a metal setting, with an eye for a chain that had long since been broken and discarded.

  Remembering the voice from the night before, I stood up and took two steps to the five-drawer chest I shared with Abbie, and opened the sm
all jewelry case on top of it. I had a few odds and ends of necklaces in there, and I poked my finger around in it, looking for an older silver chain I had picked up along the way but rarely wore.

  I pulled it out and brought it over to the window to be sure I got the right one. Sure enough, touch was enough to tell which was which. I lifted the pendant closer to my face to see what I was doing and then unlatched the chain and threaded it through the eye on the pendant. I let the pendant swing from the chain a couple times. It picked up the little bit of light coming in the window and glittered dully. This was an older, cloudier crystal, clearly not of a high quality, and the pewter housing felt downright ancient.

  I slipped the chain around my neck and reached behind me to secure the clasp. The pendant hung just above my cleavage, and felt weirdly comfortable against my skin in spite of the cold metal. It’d gradually warm against my skin, but I could feel the weight of the thing, and it didn’t feel all that bad. I usually didn’t wear necklaces because they just tended to get in the way, but I suspected it would look all right with my silver ear piercings and the little diamond chip in my nose.

  I glanced out the window and saw the glow of sunlight on what little horizon poked through the trees and houses all around my neighborhood.

  I turned toward the bed and glanced at Abbie. I suspected her alarm would go off pretty soon, and for some reason, decided I needed to go for a run, maybe to clear my head or maybe just to get out of the house and think for a while.

  As quiet as I could, I slipped of my sleeping clothes and changed into track pants, athletic bra, t-shirt, and my trusty hoodie. I made sure the pendant was tucked underneath my shirt, and then grabbed my sneakers and socks and padded quietly out of the room, careful to avoid the worst of the squeaky spots on the hardwood stairs and floors.

  I grabbed a bottle of water out of the fridge, pulled a banana off the hook in the kitchen, and slipped out the back door, careful to pull it shut slowly behind me.

  Take that, Penny. No lights left on and sure as hell no oven left on. I glanced at the closed and darkened door that led to the downstairs suite, wondering if maybe T-girl had been the one to leave the lights and oven on.

  Gods, the cement back-step was freezing! I hunkered down on it and pulled on my socks and sneakers, tying them with double bows.

  I locked up the house and then tucked the keys into my left sock and folded it over, then bounced up and down a couple times to get the blood flowing. I jogged off the back-step and into the early morning chill.

  Even with the crispness in the air, it felt good to get out of the house and just run. The pendant was secure underneath my clothing, so it didn’t swing as I moved through the narrow residential streets of Del Ray. I passed a lot of little single-family homes and duplexes, and plenty of narrow alleyways similar to the one I’d seen that ghost in last night.

  I paused at a corner to catch my breath and settle in, surprised at myself. I had meant to avoid the thought that the woman was in fact a ghost, but the matter-of-factness with which I accepted it was surprising all the same. I never thought much about spirits or ghosts or the like, and didn’t really have much thought about what happens to us when we die.

  I had enough problems in this one to worry about the next one. I’d probably make a lousy cat. I bet they don’t think twice about their nine lives, and just live each one fearlessly and without regret.

  That’s what it seems like, anyway. But not for me. I have regrets, plenty of them. Truckloads.

  I resumed running and picked up the pace, transitioning from a jog to a more deliberate, marathon-like pace. I hadn’t run long-distance since high school, and hadn’t given myself the time to get back to it. Seemed like there was always something else getting in the way, be it the job, Abbie, getting reamed out by Penny, and my seemingly endless family drama.

  I continued running along the familiar streets, automatically waving at the occasional early riser whether I knew them or not. Most of the faces were familiar, though there was just enough turnover in the neighborhood that there was always someone new.

  Seemed like every block had a ‘for sale’ or ‘rental’ sign up on a property somewhere, and I guess that’s just what happens when your town is less than ten miles from the Pentagon and the Capitol building and the seat of the national government.

  My musings eased off as I settled into the running rhythm, letting my exertions sweat my cares away. The weird experience at the nursing home and the talking pendant and the ghost in the alley all reduced in importance in favor of the run and the ache it put in my muscles and the satisfaction I got from just doing my body good. For all the crap I’d had to deal with lately, the run was the one thing I could give myself.

  As the sun rose in full over the horizon and the tops of the nearest houses, shining in a cloudless sky bright enough for me to wish I had thought to grab a pair of sunglasses, I paused and focused on my surroundings.

  Either by coincidence or some subconscious machination, I found myself standing outside the low, wrought-iron gate set into the low fence surrounding Miss Chin’s two-story Victorian, which was set deeper into the block than either of her neighbors. Her house was easily a hundred years older than either of the other two houses on the block—she had lived there a long time, and the houses that had dated to the same period had since been torn down when the new owners decided to put something more modern in their place.

  But not Miss Chin. I didn’t know her real well, but Bonita did, and had told me that Miss Chin’s family had come over to America in the nineteenth century gold rush before the war, and that they had been one of the few Chinese families to do well enough on the railroads that they actually moved east rather than find their fortune (or their death) in the west.

  I paused at the gate and leaned over to catch my breath. The two gables on the top level of the house stood imposing in their dark gray coloring, which caught the sunlight creeping in over my shoulder, making the windows into opaque eyes that seemed to look down on me with some strange mix of benevolence and warning.

  As I studied the gabled windows, the front door opened. Through the screen door I saw Miss Chin, all four feet of her, come into view. She called out in her characteristic little shrill voice, “You gonna stand there and gawk all day or you gonna come in and have some tea?” Then she muttered in what I guessed was Mandarin and disappeared from view.

  I reached out and unlatched the iron gate, stepped through, and re-latched it behind me. It had moved without a sound, which was surprising given its lived-in, rusty appearance. I guess Miss Chin oiled it on a regular basis.

  I walked up the four steps to the main level of the porch and peeked in through the screen door. The aromas of cooking bacon and a more subtle fragrance of steeping tea reached my nose, and underlying those was a more pungent aroma, like onions or garlic.

  Miss Chin’s head poked into the hallway from around the corner, presumably from the kitchen. “I don’t pay to heat outside, girl! Get in and shut the door!”

  I smiled at her, but her head ducked out of view before she could see it. I opened the screen door, noting that both of its lower panels had irregularly-spaced scars in the screens, as if someone had poked a series of blades into them and pulled.

  I opened the door and stepped in, and as I let go of the screen door, Miss Chin called out, “And let Mister Parkour out!”

  I frowned. “Who?”

  A thunder coming down the wooden staircase set to one side of the hallway answered my question. A massive, long-haired tabby rumbled down the stairs, making a beeline for me and the screen door.

  I felt both my eyebrows rise in surprise. This cat looked to be bigger than some dogs. Heck, if he ran into me, I bet he might’ve knocked me over.

  I shot my hand back behind me to keep the screen door from latching. I guess I caught it just in time because the cat, Mister Parkour presumably, shifted to one side of me and pushed his head against the screen door to open it enough to let his massive frame t
hrough. The screen door slammed shut as he roamed off into the bushes lining the fence without a glance back at me.

  I followed my nose toward what I guessed had to be the kitchen, taking in the simple yet tasteful decor in the hallway. Miss Chin seemed to have a definite thing for crystals—shelves of them hung on the walls, a crystal-laden light fixture hung from the stucco ceiling, and there was another crystal-centered window down the hall opposite the door I’d entered.

  I moved into the kitchen, which was more modern than I expected given the classic exterior of the home. It was appointed with stainless steel appliances and a small marble-topped island in the center. Three hip-high stools stood in a row along one side of the island, under a short lip of gray and blue marble.

  Miss Chin, a steel spatula in hand, stood next to the range, where a cast-iron skillet full of wonderful-smelling vegetables simmered. She pointed toward the stools with the spatula. “Sit.” It was less a request than a demand.

  I settled onto one of the stools at the edge of the island. “Mister Parkour is an impressive cat.”

  Miss Chin snorted. “Don’t you let him hear you say that. He’d be even more insufferable than he already is.”

  I didn’t know much about cat breeds, but I asked anyway.

  “He’s a Norwegian Forest cat. Big boned, big hair, big personality. Gentle as a lamb unless I’m threatened.”

  I grinned, wondering what sort of life Miss Chin would have to live in order to be threatened by anyone.

  “He’s certainly a big boy. I bet he scares off dogs.”

  Miss Chin shifted the vegetables in the pan with her spatula and gave me a look that I had trouble parsing. “He’s helped me out on more than one occasion.”

  The way she said it suggested there was more of a story there, but I wasn’t going to pry without getting to know her better.

  She slipped on a thermal glove and shut off the heat under the skillet and filled two plates with grilled vegetables. As she placed the plates on the island in front of me, I asked, “Can I help with anything?”