Beacon's Hope (Potomac Shadows Book 2)

by Jim Johnson

  And besides, if it was a Beacon-specific journal, maybe there’d be some insights in there that could help me train Malcolm or deal with the countless rifts in the Veil.

  I got home and went straight upstairs. I tidied myself up in the bathroom then padded down to the kitchen for a quick lunch, then went back to the bedroom. I closed the door behind me, even though I was confident I was alone in the house.

  Well, mostly confident, anyway. I was never sure of Tonia’s schedule, and she was nearly as silent as a ghost down there in her basement suite. I had to believe she wasn’t home, though.

  Anyway, finally, with no commitments for the day and knowing Abbie would be home late, I had the whole day to do nothing but check out that journal, meditate, and do whatever else I felt like. No Malcolm, no Buster Jay goons, and no weird visits by Detective Bello. Maybe I’d spend part of the evening seeking and guiding lost souls into the Veil.

  But not the Holding, not yet. I had yet to be brave enough to venture back into the Holding to guide ghosts from the Holding to their final resting place. Something about the Holding still freaked me out. I didn’t think I was ready to jump into it again any time soon. My time in there while fighting the Spinner had been more than enough. Not to mention that Miss Chin wasn’t exactly a fountain of information on what exactly I was supposed to do with the spirits once in the Holding. Maybe another thing the journal could help explain.

  I grabbed a few candles and the journal, and pushed the rug aside to sit on the cool hardwood floor in front of the bed’s footboard. I placed the book on my lap, where it sat with a satisfying weight, and arranged the candles all around me in a circle.

  I was barefoot and in comfortable flannels, so I reached out and grabbed one of my grandma’s old knit afghans off the foot of the bed and draped it on my lap. I could have used the ley threads to warm me up, sure, but I wanted to save my energy for the meditation and examination of the journal’s secrets—if it had any, anyway.

  Once settled into the center of the circle, I rested my hands on the journal and closed my eyes, and silently emptied my mind with a blend of the breathing techniques both Miss Chin and Bonita had taught me.

  My breath guided me to my center readily enough. I reached down deep into the earth with my will and tapped into the ley grid, and pulled a tendril of etheric energy to do my bidding. With a whispered word of ‘light’, I directed the ley energies toward the candles, and sensed them all flare into life even though my eyes were shut. I focused on and felt the slight rise in temperature and the faint glow visible through my eyelids.

  I refocused the remainder of the ley thread’s power and attached it to my core, there to use if I needed it. I didn’t need to open my eyes to know that my little quartz crystal, suspended from my neck, was ablaze in bright blue light tinged with silver. It had become my constant companion and good luck charm.

  Keeping my eyes shut, I reached out for the journal and picked it up, the worn leather cover cool in my hands. The faint scents of dust and musty leather filled my nostrils with every breath. I focused that ley thread just so, reaching out for any initial impressions.

  The book was ancient, easily more than a hundred years old. My grandpa had books that were as old or older in the library of the family house, or at least did. I hadn’t been in the house in a while and had no idea if Robert or my mother had sold off the collection. I wouldn’t put it past them.

  I remember countless nights as a young girl, encouraged to wander the large house by myself. Invariably I’d end up at either the kitchen, which I would be shooed out of, or the library, where I was neither encouraged nor discouraged from visiting. I had spent a lot of time there, carefully, reverently, pulling old leather-bound tomes off the shelves I could reach and laying with them on the floor, flipping their ancient, brittle pages that smelled like dust and knowledge.

  As I focused on the journal, the energies surrounding the book shifted slightly. Had I not been focused right on it, I might have missed it. I furrowed my brow and caught another ley thread, and added its power to the other and augmented the strength of my scan.

  I didn’t sense anything new, though there was definitely something unusual about the connection between the journal and the ley threads. I cracked open my eyes and added my mundane vision to my arcane Sight. Both the front and back covers of the journal were unadorned, and the spine carried evidence of ancient tooling and decoration, and even had a few flakes of gold imprinting here and there inside the designs. The pages of the book were cut unevenly, and the whole thing was bound shut by that intriguing little clasp that had neither a lever or a keyhole.

  Upon closer examination, the lock seemed to have no moving parts at all. It was riveted to the front and back covers in such a way that it was impossible to open the book without damaging the spine or covers.

  Idly, I wondered if the lock had been put in place to keep the book from being opened, or to keep it from opening itself. Thinking that was a strange thought to have, I shook my head and then focused the ley threads and my Sight more closely on the lock itself.

  It was definitely metal, and fragile, even though it was somehow strong enough to resist my attempts to physically open the covers. I played the threads and my Sight around the lock, building a mental image of it. Once I had a good picture of it in my mind, I rotated it around, but nothing useful jumped out at me.

  I took another deep centering breath and then adjusted my ley threads and pushed them into the lock itself, finding room somehow. Miss Chin had suggested there might be a scientific explanation for how we can push ley threads seemingly into solid surfaces, but I had glazed over a few minutes into the lecture. Science wasn’t really my thing—I was content to know that whatever we did worked. Why question that any farther?

  The threads pushed into the metal easily enough, sort of like pushing a metal rod into a bucket of mud. I moved the threads around inside the lock, then, and worked to build up an image of the interior of the lock.

  Now I was getting somewhere. I took my mental image of the outside of the lock and made it transparent and filled in the blanks of the interior. After a few minutes of concerted effort and observation, I had a complete image of what the inside of the lock looked like.

  I was no expert on locks by any means, but I understood the basic mechanics of tumblers and keys. This lock had four tumblers, arranged inside the lock in a strange geometric pattern. No wonder the thing didn’t have a physical key—I didn’t think it was possible for anyone to make a key that would fit this lock, not out of metal or plastic, anyway.

  No, this key had to be made from ley threads, and that meant the lock had to be for Weavers only, or for people who manipulated the ley energies like Weavers.

  Excited and encouraged, I settled in to study the tumblers and started to experiment with morphing the threads into different shapes that might serve to trigger the lock. I kept part of my focus back at a higher level, intending to catch any negative energy or warning signs from fiddling with the lock, but none surfaced. My old days of playing Dungeons and Dragons sprang to mind, and I wondered if maybe the lock was trapped or poisoned.

  If it was, it was hidden from my Sight. Which maybe wasn’t saying much since I wasn’t a great practitioner of the threads just yet, but… Suffice to say I didn’t detect a trap on the thing.

  After another several minutes of tinkering and shoring up my flagging strength with a fresh pair of ley threads, I thought I had the right combination and shape of threads that would serve to pop the lock. I took another fortifying breath of air, held it, then pushed my reshaped threads around to trigger the tumblers.

  I felt the tumblers move under my hands and felt the resistance against my ley threads, and then I felt more than heard a little ‘pop’. The lock spread apart in an angular geometric shape, and the top cover nudged up against my hand slightly. A tiny cloud of dust puffed out of the book.

  I expelled my breath in a mix of pleasure and surprise. Opening a magically-locked book
had been a pretty cool experience, and I was proud of myself for having figured out the puzzle. As a reward for myself, I reached out and pulled open the cover, eager to read the text on the first page.

  Much to my dismay, the page was blank, save for a slight yellowing on the pages and faint traces of wood pulp in the paper itself.

  I frowned, and then riffled the uneven pages, stopping here and there to pull it open. Blank. Every single page was yellowed, showed signs of wood pulp and a tiny hole here and there, but no words. Nothing.

  I wondered if maybe Miss Chin might have played a trick on me by giving me a blank journal with a clever lock on it, but… Something about the journal had made me want to study and open the lock, to open the book and examine the pages.

  I slouched down into my circle of light, tired from the exertion but happy to have made some progress. The mysteries of the book would have to wait for another day. The more I thought about the book, the more I thought about magic, and somehow my mind wandered back to that odd conversation with Detective Bello.

  He’d talked to me about ghosts, and had encouraged me to check out the Lincoln Memorial. That was suspicious enough, but being in the same alley that I had liberated the ghost of Kareena Mathison from locked in my suspicion that he had more going on than he was letting on.

  And that made me think that maybe Malcolm was right—maybe we should pay Detective Bello a visit. After the fight at Branchwood, he had given us his business card and encouraged us to call him anytime.

  I glanced at the journal in my hands and shook my head. No way was I going to get back to it now. I unlit the candles with a wave of my hand and a subtle twisting of the ley threads, and then busied myself with cleaning up the candles and melted wax. I replaced the afghan and the rug, and then stored the journal in my bedside table. I didn’t bother re-locking the lock, though I could have now that I understood its secrets. If Abbie or anyone else happened to stumble upon it, they’d just see what I saw—a blank book with an old leather cover and a weird lock.

  I sat on the edge of the bed and took a few deep breaths and used the ley threads to give myself a bit of a boost. I glanced at my phone—just after four. Rush hour would be underway in earnest, though the traffic going into the city would be slightly less worse than that coming out of it.

  I gathered up my things, freshened up my hair, and then started a brisk walk toward the bus stop. I needed to figure out if Bello was full of crap or not. Only way to do that was take his bait, be prepared, and then see what happened.

  Chapter Sixteen

  OH, RACHEL, WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

  I shook my head at myself and trudged through the new slush toward the Lincoln Memorial. It was getting darker, colder, and the smell of winter hung thick in the air, as if the clouds above were ready to drop a ton of snow on us. Again.

  We’d just gotten a few inches of little wet crap, just enough to look pretty and to shut down pretty much every road for a twenty-mile radius. While I have a driver’s license, I don’t have a car, save for Abbie’s beat-up car that I can borrow from time to time, but with the Metro and the buses and my two damn feet, I don’t bother driving much.

  And the snow we got today was a good reminder why I didn’t drive. The last thing I wanted to do was sit in traffic for hours on end trying to get into the city. Screw that.

  Much better to take my new cell phone and some magical accoutrements safely stored in my satchel and sit on the heated Metro train with a thousand other people and sit and wait and creep toward my destination one stop at a time.

  The Blue Line from Potomac Yards to Foggy Bottom took about thirty minutes, though it might have been a little longer since there were so many people on the train and we had to wait a little longer at each stop for people to get on and off the train.

  I eventually got to the Foggy Bottom stop and got off the train, leaving the press of people behind. I generally don’t mind a lot of people crowded around me, but tonight was a little different.

  I was already on edge from everything happening with Malcolm and Buster Jay’s boys and that strange chat I had with Detective Bello. So with all that stuff going on weighing me down, plus my heavier coat and my trusty satchel slung over my shoulder and chest, I shoved my hands deep into my pockets and worked toward the Lincoln Memorial, grateful that I had let my hair grow out a little more. I’d forgotten a hat and I was grateful for what insulation my long hair provided my neck and ears against the cold, wet air.

  I glanced up at the cloud-filled sky. I doubted there’d be much moonlight tonight, thanks to the dense cloud cover and looming snow. The streets of DC are pretty well lit, though, especially those leading toward the various key monuments in the city near the Mall. Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR, even Martin Luther King—all the monuments and the sidewalks leading to them were decently lit. You had to get a few blocks away from the Mall to see the less glamorous side of the city, and even then the homeless were fearless enough tonight to perch wherever they wanted, even right on the Mall itself.

  And on a night like this, as cold as it was, they were looking for all the warmth they could, and it looked like the DC police were cutting them a break for once.

  Weirdly, as I approached the pillared rectangle of the Lincoln Memorial, there were fewer homeless people and fewer tourists around. Thinking about what Detective Bello had told me, there might be a good reason for that.

  I took a few deep breaths of the thick, wet air. The chill contained in it cleared my head pretty quick. I quickly ran a spiraling technique and centered in, and pulled a thread of ley energy and used it to focus ahead, to try and get a sense of the surroundings, to see if I could pick up anything weird that might account for Bello’s cryptic comments.

  I wasn’t prepared for the sudden jolt that smacked into me like a wet pool noodle. I stopped in my tracks and closed my eyes, and took a few deep breaths.

  I was sensing something ahead, over near the Memorial, or possibly in it. Strange sensations I didn’t think I had felt before, and something like a low-level buzzing, almost a white-noise sort of thing that would not turn off no matter how much I adjusted the ley energies around me to try and shield myself. Maybe I just wasn’t very good at it yet. Something else Miss Chin could pick on me for and then work with me to improve.

  Assuming I didn’t practice it myself, which I would anyway.

  I started toward the Memorial again, keeping my eyes open and my senses alert. The buzzing continued, just below the surface, not enough to be annoying, but very present, like an itch that you just can’t quite scratch no matter how much you contort yourself or rub against something.

  I knew the ley grid was below, energy there for the taking. I was confident in my abilities, or mostly, anyway-I could really use some stronger shields, and I had my trusty satchel, which I could brain someone with in a pinch.

  And I had my sneakers and my feet, though glancing at the slush and sand scattered all over the surfaces, I wasn’t confident about how much speed I could get up to without risking a slip and fall.

  And wouldn’t that be an end for the new Beacon of the District? Heh. ‘Goddess Beacon’ had a better ring, really.

  Amused at my super-heroic naming thoughts, I neared the lower level of the Memorial and stared up at the impressive pillars holding up the massive marble roof.

  I had lived in the area most of my life but had failed to get out to see the monuments on a regular basis. I used to take the bus in and out of the city all the time, and must have driven past the Lincoln Memorial a million times, but rarely bothered to ever set foot on it.

  It’s a really impressive, imposing building. I started up the wide slab steps, and as I neared the first landing, some man with greasy hair and a ratty coat stumbled out from behind one of the pillars and worked his way down the stairs toward me.

  He had a strange look on his face and had one hand clasping his coat shut. His other hand was clenched tight around a small shopping bag that bulged at the seams. He must have seen m
e because he was working his way down the steps right toward me. He didn’t look threatening, though I did clench my satchel more tightly as I warily watched his approach.

  “Hey…hey…Starlight. What you doing out in the dark tonight?”

  I frowned. “What did you call me?” A glimmer of recognition came to my mind, though I had trouble sorting it out given the buzzing I was sensing within the ley threads around me.

  He nodded and lifted his shopping bag to point at me with his hand. “Bright woman, glowing like a star. I see you.”

  My frown deepened. I glanced down at my chest in reflex. My crystal pendant was tucked inside my shirt and my jacket, and was completely hidden from view. But I could feel the warmth of it pressing against my chest and sensed its ever-present glow.

  I stared at the man. “You can see…” My memory of him clicked into place. “Cubes?”

  He nodded and made a little hop, first on one foot and then the other. He grinned with a strange little grin. “ You remember me! I remember you, Starlight. I see your glow, sure I do. Just like the old lady, and the tiger you took away from me.”

  The encounter with Cubes came back to mind. Me and Malcolm, visiting him in a little tent under the I-395 bypass around the city. Back when Malcolm was looking for information on his missing sister and Buster Jay, back when…

  I stared at Cubes. “Are you still…buying drugs from Buster Jay?”

  Cubes shifted from foot to foot but shook his head. “No, no, no more of that. Old lady doesn’t like it, not at all. Once you took the tiger away, I worked hard to get myself cleaned up. Hard work too.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “But that’s good, Cubes. Cleaning yourself up, right?”

  He glanced at me and then at the falling snow, then returned his gaze back to me and shrugged. “Old lady thinks it’s a good thing. Not using the drugs keeps my eyes and mind sharper, more aware.” He nodded a couple times, then mumbled something I couldn’t catch, frowned, but then smiled again. “You glow, miss. Old lady says you bring light to the darkness.”