“Not here for your meth, Maggie. You know Ray-Ray?”
“Sure,” Maggie replied. Her voice was thick, tired, and loose. “He brings the pseudo.”
“What else was he bringing?” Savannah could not shake the feeling of doom that had stuck with her since she left the Briarcliff.
Maggie giggled, and the bubbling sound intensified. It sounded thick, organic. “Something special. But he didn’t come. Ah, damn!”
Something inside the room tore. It sounded like a sheet of construction paper being cut with dull scissors, a rhythmic, raspy noise that made Savannah’s skin crawl.
“I’m coming in, Maggie.”
“Better not.” Maggie giggled again. “Paul’s feeling kind of, you know, frisky.”
Savannah slipped through the open door then swung the revolver left to right. Nothing rushed at her. Nothing moved. Downstairs, the children had been reduced to quiet whimpering. The man with the shredded arm had stopped making any noise at all.
“Who was Ray-Ray bringing his stuff to, Maggie?”
“Mmm,” she hummed deep in her throat. The bubbling intensified. She raised her voice. “Me and Paul. We cook it up; gave it to the family.”
Savannah moved deeper into the room, closer to Maggie. Savannah whispered an incantation. The glyphs on the barrel of her revolver bathed the room in soft green light.
Even in the glow of the revolver, Savannah could tell that Maggie had eyes the color of the morning sky. Her pupils were shrunk down to pinpricks, but she only had two of them.
Maggie stared into the light without blinking. “Hey, sis, that’s not cool.”
“Ray-Ray was bringing something else. The Izintwala. Little statue creatures, did you ever see—”
Something heavy slammed into Savannah’s neck, at the base of her skull. Her vision swam, gray and blurry. She dropped to her knees. Liquid fire poured down her back, gnawing away at her cuts.
Jagged fingernails dug bloody crescents in Savannah’s scalp as someone grabbed her hair. Whoever it was jerked her head back and forth, like a pit bull with a rat in its maw.
Savannah threw herself backward, slamming her weight against the legs of her tormentor. A mass of wires and hoses tangled around her shoulders and head.
A high-pitched burbling screech came from behind her.
Savannah grabbed a handful of the mess around her shoulders then jerked it forward. Something hot and sticky spilled down the back of her neck.
“You’re hurting him,” Maggie said, her emotionless voice falling strange on Savannah’s ears.
The hand let go of Savannah’s hair.
The Root Woman scrambled back onto her feet.
A tall man staggered around, his jittering hands trying to push a hose back into a bloody hole in the side of his chest.
“You must be Paul,” Savannah said.
Paul pushed the tube in, but it went in too deep and before he could back it out, Savannah saw bloody sludge spurt into the translucent rubber.
“Nng,” Bill moaned. He could not speak because his lower jaw and tongue had been replaced with a collection of flexible plastic tubes and coiled wires that disappeared down the gaping hole of his throat. Other pipes ran out of him, ending in plastic bags filled with murky fluids or looping out of sight behind him.
Maggie crawled over to Paul, but she was clumsy from drugs and panic. “I think you done killed him.”
Paul slumped down on his dingy bed. His hands were loose in his lap, catching the blood that fell from the torn holes where Savannah had ripped out the tubes and wires. His left eye went wide as he glared at Savannah, and three burning pupils flared in the dim room.
“There was an accident,” Maggie said. She sat next to Paul then patted his head. “Explosion. Paul was gonna die. Ray-Ray said he could get us help.”
“Who? Who was he working with?”
Maggie gestured toward the lab. “Cookin’ meth’s dangerous, you know? We got propane and acetone and all kinds of shit in there.”
“Just tell me who he was working with. I’ll go get them. They can help him again.” Savannah did not care if they could patch Paul back together or not, but she hoped Maggie would be dumb enough to tell her who they were working with. It would make her job a lot simpler.
“You done this. They said you would. Said you didn’t give a damn about any of us.”
“That’s not true. What they’re doing is wrong. It’s evil. I’m trying to help.”
“Help? They fixed Paul when we was sure he was gonna die. Now you gone and killed him.”
Savannah’s neck ached from the glassware Bill had smashed against it. She pulled on the supernatural strength to quicken her healing. “Help me stop them, before it’s too late.”
“Already too late. They was right about you.” Maggie kissed Paul on the side of his bloody face. “It’ll only hurt for a little bit, baby.”
Paul nodded.
“Help me put an end to this. No one else needs to get hurt.”
“Ain’t nobody gonna help you, Root Woman. Not now.”
There was a small hiss and a pop. Maggie’s hand flashed through the air, and something shot at Savannah’s head.
She ducked low, letting the little butane torch fly past. Savannah watched the brilliant blue flame twirl through the air, sailing through the rough door someone had hacked through the wall between Paul’s bedroom and his meth lab.
“Screw you,” Maggie whispered as something in the lab caught fire. Orange flames flared red and began to spread.
“Shit!” Savannah shouted. The Root Woman ran.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Rashad approached his children with slow, careful steps. The floor was littered with mutilated raccoon and mole rat carcasses. He felt a heavy, damp pressure on his skin, as if all of the blood spilled in this room still hung in the air. He brushed the skins and bones and blood-soaked sheets away from Carter with the edge of his foot.
Carter took long, slow breaths. His expanding ribs spread open the wounds that dotted his sides and back, revealing their rich, red interiors. His muscles jumped under his skin, and his breaths took on a ragged, growling edge.
Rashad squatted an arm’s length from Carter then stretched his hand toward his son. He brushed Carters ankle with his fingertips – the boy’s skin was cold and sticky. Rashad jostled Carter’s legs in hopes it would wake him. Carter did not stir.
Rashad crawled to Lashey, then wrapped his arms around the little girl. He stood with Lashey held tight to his chest. “Daddy,” Lashey said, burying her face against Rashad’s shoulder.
“It’s okay, let me get you out of here; get you some fresh air.” Rashad walked as he whispered to his daughter.
He was almost to the bedroom door when it slammed in his face.
Carter groaned behind him – a thick, animal sound, heavy with fatigue.
Rashad closed his fist around the door knob then gave it a twist, but the door would not budge.
“Carter,” he said. “Get up.”
Lashey stirred against her father. Her tiny hands shoved against Rashad’s chest, and she kicked. “Let me go!”
Rashad hugged his daughter tighter then backed away from the door. He leaned against the foot of Savannah’s big bed then turned Lashey so he could see her face. The little girl’s brows were furrowed, but her eyes were still clamped shut with welling tears in their corners.
“Let me go,” the little girl begged; but there were other voices within and below her own.
“Dad?” Carter crawled to the edge of the bed. Moving caused fresh blood to leak from his wounds. He wrapped his bleeding arms around his father and sister, then curled up onto the bed with them. “What’s happening?
“They need room,” Lashey gasped the words and they were hers alone. “There isn’t room for us all in here. Help me make room.”
Rashad slapped Lashey’s cheeks. “Let go!” he commanded, his voice heavy with the authority he had inherited from the Night Howler. “Release
her, spirits, and return to your rightful places.”
Lashey’s jaw fell open. Dozens of voices rose out of her like echoes from the depths of a well.
We…
The remains of the vermin danced on the floor around the bed.
Will…
The discarded and dripping sheets shredded into bloody strands that wound themselves into cords and cracked the air like whips.
Not!
Bones worked free from the carcasses of the vermin, then spun around the perimeter of the room like a wall of churning needles.
Rashad pressed two fingers down onto Lashey’s tongue, pulled her hanging jaw open, then he peered down the little girl’s throat. He could see the shadows whirling deep inside her. Countless restless spirits had taken root within Lashey, and they were not willing to leave. The sheer number of greedy ghosts threatened to displace the little girl’s spirit. Without a body to anchor her, she would fall away and fade from the Earth long before her proper time.
“You will leave my daughter of your own will…” Rashad pushed Carter back to make room then laid Lashey down on the bed with her head pointing to the east. “Or you will be torn loose and cast asunder!”
We will not!
Their words were a rebuke of Rashad’s power; a denial of his birthright.
He would not stand for their rebellion. He was the Night Howler – child of the night; seed of the God of Crows, and his power would not be denied by the restless dead.
Rashad straddled Lashey then held his hands before the girl’s mouth and nose. Ancient words rumbled from his chest, pulling the first of the tormented spirits out of Lashey.
The spirit rose from the little girl’s mouth in a gout of black smoke. Rashad seized it with hooked fingers. He unleashed a word of subduing and the spirit went limp in his clutches. Rashad reeled it out of Lashey like a knotted black thread – slowly; carefully.
This is what he was meant to do. It was his birthright to command the dead. Rashad bent his will to the task and felt his power rise to the challenge. The smoke stretched between Lashey and Rashad, growing thinner as the last of it was pulled from the girl. With a quick flick of his wrist, Rashad had the thing free of Lashey and wrapped into a tight ball of shadows writhing between his palms.
Lashey coughed and hitched under her father. Blood sprayed Rashad’s face; a hot mist that tasted like tears on his lips. Another cough, and more of Lashey’s blood misted into the air.
We will kill her!
The spirits’ words thundered.
If you drive us out, she will join our number and fall to ruin with us.
Rashad crushed the ball of smoke between his palms until it was no bigger than a marble. His eyes were hot with tears. For all his power, the spirits inside his daughter had more tricks than he had believed. “You’re already killing her,” he said. “There isn’t room in there for all of you and her. Just leave her in peace.”
There is no peace. The shadows hunger. We are their prey.
Lashey’s body convulsed. Blood bubbled up into her mouth then trickled over her lips. Rashad turned the girl’s head to the side to keep her from choking on her own blood. Lashey’s skin had gone pale; her pulse a jackhammer, pushing at the side of her neck.
Rashad could feel the spirits inside his daughter, tearing at her, stretching her soul. He could pull them out of Lashey, but they would kill her before the task was complete. His shoulders slumped, and his fists shook with rage.
“Tell me what you want!” Rashad shouted over the growing tide of murmuring voices. It was like standing in a crowd of the fearful and the blind; each person crying out, all trying to find that one person they knew; that one warm body they could cling to. “What can I do to save my daughter?”
Help us. Hide us from Uncle Ned in the Darkness. Shield us from the conjured girls and their terrible hunger.
“Tell me how. Show me the way to save you. Don’t kill my baby.” Rashad’s voice cracked and sounded all the louder in the sudden silence. The whirling wall of bones fell to the floor. The sheets wound themselves into a tight ball and hovered in the center of the room.
The mayor knows. Go to him.
Rashad shook his head. “I can’t. You don’t understand what he is.”
Then the girl dies!
Lashey gagged on her own blood. Thick, red tears leaked from her eyes.
The black phone rang – a shrill, insistent braying from the far side of Savannah’s oversized bed.
“There has to be another way. Please. Don’t make me do this.”
Mold spores boiled across the surface of the blood-stained sheets, and the tight ball decayed before Rashad’s eyes.
The phone rang.
Rashad crawled off Lashey then crossed the bed. His hand refused to reach for the phone. The black handset was forbidden. It had never rung when Savannah was gone.
The phone rang.
“Please. Anything else. There has to be another way.”
Black streaks grew up the sides of Lashey’s neck. Her lips pulled back from her blood-stained teeth.
The phone rang.
Rashad lifted the receiver.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
A ball of fire blew through the meth lab like a cannon shot. Jugs of acetone ignited with dull thumps, splattering burning fuel in all directions. Overheated oxygen tanks popped their regulators then burst through the house’s thin walls, throwing stunned and burning junkies into crumpled piles. By the time Savannah was halfway to the stairs, the mattress room was vomiting a steady stream of meth-heads, half of them covered in blood while the others screamed and beat at the flames gnawing at their bodies. They screeched and shoved at each other, all of them trying to get to safety but only managing to block the stairs with their struggles while red-streaked clouds of toxic black smoke roiled across the ceiling.
Savannah did not have time to calm the meth-heads and get them moving down the stairs before the fire killed them all. She pointed the revolver at the ceiling over their heads then pulled the trigger, filling the air with thunder and bringing down a rain of moldy plaster.
“Move!” she shouted.
The threat of violence got the junkies stumbling away from Savannah and down the stairs. The Root Woman helped them along with shouted threats and shoves that kept the panicked herd moving in the right direction.
Savannah stumbled onto the first floor behind the meth-heads. The fire had chewed through the ceiling and dumped a blazing tangle of lab equipment and pressurized tanks of liquid fertilizer onto the ground floor. She knew she had to get out of there before the anhydrous ammonia overheated and turned the house, and an acre around it, into a smoking crater. She scrambled away from the living room and the screaming junkies trying to beat the fire off their clothes or get around the wreckage to reach the front door.
Terrified tweakers blocked every exit Savannah could see. They clogged the broken kitchen windows, wedging themselves tightly in the frames and cutting themselves to bloody ribbons on the shards of glass. The kitchen continued to fill as the crowd from upstairs rushed into the burning bottleneck in the living room then doubled back in search of another escape route.
Smoke boiled out of the living room, filling the top half of the kitchen with a seething black cloud. Savannah threw herself over the kitchen table, rolling and kicking junkies out of her way as she came down on the other side. She hoped her guess was right; she bulled her way into the utility room she had spotted earlier.
It was little more than a hall, crowded by a rusting washing machine and disassembled dryer – both victims of meth-head fiddling. But at the end of that crowded little room, Savannah saw the door she had been hoping to find. She squeezed past the dead appliances, kicked it open then took a deep breath of clean air. She was out.
Almost.
“Hi, Soul Sista. Been lookin’ for you, baby,” the woman on the back porch said with an alligator smile filled with cracked and rotting teeth. She slammed the heel of her cowboy boot into Savan
nah’s gut hard enough to double her over, then brought both her hands up under Savannah’s chin to send her staggering backward.
Savannah landed on her haunches back inside the house. Her lungs gulped for air, but swallowed choking smoke instead. Eyes watering, she crawled away from her attacker, pushing past the dryer, going deeper into the utility room. She needed some distance; room to use her revolver.
The screams inside faded away as meth-heads escaped or succumbed to smoke and flames.
A pointy-toed kick to the ribs flipped Savannah onto her side. The woman crouched down next to her, waving a curved knife in her face. “Where’s the shit you took from Ray-Ray?”
Savannah shook her head. She managed to get a clean breath from the air coming in through the back door. She was trapped on the floor between the maniac with the knife and the washing machine. “I don’t have your pseudo.”
The girl pressed the tip of the knife against Savannah’s chin. “I do love my crystal, but that is not what I’m after, and you know it.”
Savannah’s revolver dug into her back where she had fallen. It was pinned underneath her. She searched the girl’s wide, wild eyes and found the three pupils she was looking for. “I don’t have it.”
A Haunting in the SWATS (The Savannah Swan Files Book 1) Page 17
