Savannah crossed the floor, careful not to step in the dung. She heard something crunch underfoot. Glass. Someone had broken all of the light bulbs. “Damn,” Savannah sighed as she made her way into the kitchen.
Broken glass shone in the moonlight. Dried blood stained the table and floor dark brown. Savannah stepped around the blood, sweeping the glass out of her path with the side of her boot. She peered out the kitchen window. The corpse of the big man from Pigmeat Porter’s hotel lay a few feet from the house. His scorched coveralls were coated in a sheen of melted fat that glittered in the moonlight. “Knew I should’ve cut off your goddamned head when I had the chance.”
Savannah followed the trail of blood out of the kitchen and up the stairs. She felt her chest tighten as the droplets of blood turned into a steady line, then into wide splashes. By the time she got to her bedroom door, Savannah felt as if someone had wrapped her heart in barbed wire. The door was closed and painted with blood, the wood gouged by thick claws. “They’re not dead until you see the bodies,” she tried to reassure herself.
Savannah stood in front of her bedroom door, hands clenched into fists. She had to open it; she had to see. But she was not ready. Had she quit her crusade against the darkness too late to save her family?
She pushed the door open. The room was splattered with more blood and feces. The sheets were gone from her bed, thrown into one corner where they lay wadded up like a big, bloody bandage. Savannah stepped around the pile of crap then looked down at something crunching underfoot – bones. The floor was carpeted with tattered scraps of fur, leathery skin and bone.
The Root Woman sat on the edge of her bed then rested her head in her hands. Her family was gone. She did not know where. She did not know if they were alive or dead. Savannah opened the nightstand’s drawer then pulled out the flat black case her mother had kept there. It was the first time she had laid hands on the box in her life. She shook a little when she lifted it.
Savannah flipped back the case’s lid then ran her fingers over the artifacts inside – a matched pair of weathered pistols, their barrels engraved with many wards and blessings. They hummed at her touch.
Savannah’s mother swore the guns were made by Colt’s wizards, but they bore no identifying marks. The guns had no place in their grips for magazines, but Savannah had seen her mother fire them and never run out of bullets. And while Savannah had never fired them, she had seen the guns take down a possessed raging mountain ram. They were true relics and had killed more sorcerers and demons than Savannah could count. If she had to go looking for Rashad and the children, at least she would have weapons, even if those weapons did have a haunted history Savannah wished she could forget.
While not as powerful as her revolver, the pistols fired at a much more rapid rate and never had to be reloaded. She would need them against an army of adherents.
She could not help but wonder if her powerful trio of guns would be of any use to her. Whatever she was up against – whatever had conjured those girls and set the vermin loose – seemed ready for her. While Savannah had been out busting up There Road-practicing molly-and-meth-heads, the shadows were busy coming for her family. Savannah felt beaten and stupid.
The black phone rang.
Savannah stared at it. She did not work for the mayor anymore. All that remained for her to do was to give her formal resignation, but it seemed like a bad idea to piss off Jedediah Green by ignoring his call.
Savannah lifted the receiver.
“They are here.” The mayor’s voice sounded tired. “They will remain here tonight. You can come for them in the morning.”
“What happened?”
“Rashad is fine. Carter is wounded, but he will recover.”
“What happened to Lashey?”
“I have the situation well in hand.” Mayor Green paused. Savannah heard him take a drink. “It’s best if you stay put until the morning.”
“What are you doing to my daughter?” Savannah tried not to think of those arched rooms that lined the entryway. “Let me talk to Rashad.”
“Do. Not. Come!” The voice was powerful; commanding.
But there was her family to think about. Her husband, daughter and son were in that monster’s house. “I’m coming.”
“The gates are closed until sunrise. Stay put! That is an order.”
Savannah decided that was as good a time as any to quit. “Screw your orders! I don’t work for you anymore. I’m coming for my family.”
“We will discuss the terms of your employment tomorrow morning. There is no need for you to complicate matters here tonight.”
“I’m coming.”
“The dogs will stop you. It would be a waste to add your death to an already tragic day.”
Savannah ran her fingers over the twin pistols. “If anything happens to them—”
But the phone was dead; the line filled with a rustling static.
Savannah slammed the receiver down, scooped up the pistol case then headed downstairs. She detoured into the kitchen for a freshly rolled joint that sat atop the refrigerator and then she flopped down in her old recliner. She sat and smoked, watching the black sky, waiting for the first rays of dawn to slice their way through the night.
***
The mayor replaced the handset on its polished silver cradle. His eyes blazed in the shadowed corner of the Briarcliff.
Rashad could feel his anger like a cold, dry wind.
Mayor Green turned to Rashad. “Will your wife do what I have asked?”
He shrugged. Rashad knew Savannah would hate not being with her family, but he also knew she was not going to push the mayor. “She’s stubborn, but she’ll probably stay out of this since you asked so nicely.”
The mayor snorted then turned his attention back to the circle he had been drawing around Lashey. With a few strokes from a stick of charcoal, he sealed the circle around the three of them. The air shuddered, and an almost inaudible hum tickled Rashad’s ears, raising the hair on the backs of his arms.
“Then let us begin,” the mayor whispered, bending over Lashey.
Rashad watched Mayor Green’s fingers pry Lashey’s jaws apart then slip a pair of rubber blocks between her back molars to hold her mouth open. Lashey was limp and quiet, but Rashad knew she would not stay that way once the work began. The spirits inside his little girl would fight to stay within their host. Rashad just hoped he and the mayor did not kill her trying to get the spirits’ hooks out of Lashey’s soul.
The mayor peered into Lashey’s mouth as he tapped his fingers against her throat.
Rashad held his breath as Mayor Green reached his thumb and forefinger into Lashey’s mouth.
“Be ready to do your part,” the mayor said to Rashad just before he began pulling the first broken spirit out of Lashey.
The fireplace flared with green light. The flames roared in a wind Rashad could not feel. The mayor’s shadow stretched across the room. For just a moment Rashad was sure Jedediah Green’s shoulders brushed the high ceiling.
He clutched the crystal cube tightly to his chest as the mayor drew a clotted shadow from Lashey’s gaping mouth. It danced in his grip, its pulsing, muscular body growing longer and thicker with each passing moment.
Lashey bucked; her tiny hands beat at the mayor’s wrists. A sound of pain and fear rattled out of her.
The mayor held the spirit in the air, until its thrashing body dangled almost to the floor. He held it with both hands as its tail thrashed wildly, darting back toward Lashey’s mouth, straining to burrow back into its lost home.
Rashad thrust the crystal toward the spirit then let the old words flow from his mouth. He felt the spirit in his grasp. His words – an extension of his tongue – wrapped around the spirit-serpent. Every syllable drew the old shadow nearer to the cube. Every word filled Rashad’s mouth with the taste of ashes and dirt, the flavors of the grave.
The spirit touched the cube. The crystal turned dark as pitch.
Rashad drew t
he broken ghost into the depths of the cube with words he had promised Savannah he would never use again. They felt right in his mouth, though. A shiver of power ran through him. He felt young again; strong again.
“Please,” the spirit begged, its voice a tortured scream inside Rashad’s head. “It burns! We had no choice; they are devouring the dead. We had to escape!”
Rashad could feel the spirit’s pain – a delicious pressure between his hands. This thing, this parasite that had once been a woman’s spirit before it invaded Lashey, shrieked at Rashad to stop; begged for release, but the Night Howler’s son relished the spirit’s final moments of anguish. It had harmed his daughter. For that, there was no penalty that would be harsh enough; no torture too extreme.
A cold shadow spread behind Rashad – a darkness that hung from his shoulders like a cloak. “That’s my boy,” it whispered. “Ya did good, just like I did when you was a baby and they came fo’ us.”
The memory of angry rednecks, driving up in their beat up pickup trucks, flashlights blazing and rifles at the ready, filled Rashad’s heart with a cold determination. He bore down on the spirit, his words slashing its hooks free from this world and banishing it to the sterile, maddening crystal confines between his hands.
The spirit’s scream became a panicked string of promises, curses and threats. Rashad smiled. He spat sharp, burning words onto the crystal. The screaming died.
The cube was heavy in his hand. Rashad let out a long, shuddering sigh then dropped the ebony cube into the mayor’s outstretched hand.
Mayor Green peered into the cube’s depths for a moment, rotating it this way and that, as if examining Rashad’s handiwork.
Rashad frowned. “You do your part. I’ll worry about mine.”
The mayor nodded. He placed the cube in the empty space in the rack. He tossed another cube to Rashad, then turned his attention back to Lashey. “We will have to be faster. Dawn is coming.”
Rashad watched the mayor snatch the next spirit out of Lashey, drawing it out between his hands like a magician snaking an impossibly long scarf from his pocket. Rashad did not wait for the spirit to be fully exposed. He touched the cube to it where its black body extended past the Mayor’s hands then let the words roll off his tongue.
They worked together like that for hours, filling the cubes as a team. Rashad held nothing back, letting the old ways blossom inside him as they had when he was younger, as his mother had shown him. The Night Howler was awake.
The mayor tilted Lashey’s head back then put his ear near her mouth. He tapped on her throat, waited, tapped again. His spider-leg fingers palpated Lashey’s stomach. “Almost done.”
Rashad counted the black crystal cubes on the rack over the fireplace. Just three left. He closed his eyes. The spirits’ screams of terror and pain echoed in his thoughts, tingling against his skin like the touch of a lover’s fingertips.
The first light of dawn was creeping into the Briarcliff when the Mayor reached into Lashey’s mouth once more then fished out a slender, wriggling scrap of a spirit. It seemed too frail, too small to be any real threat. Rashad touched it with the crystal cube, and it snapped taut in the Mayor’s hands, like he had jolted it with electricity. A single, quick tug, and it vanished into the crystal.
The mayor plucked the rubber blocks from between Lashey’s teeth. He sighed then sat back on his heels. For a moment, he looked ancient – a withered mummy crouched on his haunches. Then he drew in a shuddering breath and was once again powerful, in control. “There.”
Lashey took a deep, peaceful breath. The dark circles were gone from under her eyes, and she seemed at rest.
Rashad allowed himself a single tear of relief, which he wiped away with the back of his hand. It was over.
The mayor motioned for Rashad to bring him the last cube.
He placed the black cube in Mayor Green’s hand. “Thank you.”
The mayor waved Rashad’s thanks away as he twirled the cube on the tips of his fingers. “Savannah would never forgive me if I let anything happen to her family. She may still not forgive me. At least she obeyed and did not interrupt us.”
The light from the sun was brighter now, streaming in through windows that punched through the high walls of the sitting room. In the daylight, the mayor seemed shrunken, almost fragile.
“There are rooms,” he began, but his words died on his lips. He tilted his head like a dog trying to track down a particularly annoying sound. “No. Impossible!”
He snapped upright then staggered toward the fireplace, stretching his arm to put the crystal cube in the last slot on the rack.
Rashad rushed to his side. His skin crawled to be so close to the mayor, but his hands were reaching out for him before he could stop them. The mayor needed his help. Despite everything else he was, Rashad was still a healer. He slipped under the mayor’s arm to try to hold him up, but the mayor stumbled away from him.
His arm swung in a clumsy slash across the rack, sending the cubes tumbling. They slammed onto the mantle then fell to the wooden floor where they banged divots into the boards. The cubes had enormous weight and did not bounce.
But they did crack. Rashad could see the hair-fine imperfections spreading across the faces of the cubes, filling the air with the sound of fracturing crystal.
Lashey lifted her head. “Daddy?”
Outside, the dogs howled, then screamed in pain. Carter’s voice joined them, a savage roar that filled Rashad’s guts with ice.
The mayor struggled to rise, but he could not. His limbs flopped at his sides like a bug with a broken back. “We’re under attack. Take the girl,” he gasped. “Run!”
The Briarcliff’s main doors exploded inward then tumbled down the entry hall like playing cards in a hurricane. One of the doors slammed into the arched doorway of the sitting room; the other hurtled straight at Rashad.
He threw himself to the side, landing hard on his hip. The door sailed by, smashing into the wall behind the bar. Bottles shattered, filling the room with the scent of aged liquor and wormwood – a smell that was washed away at once by the foul scent of vermin feces and putrefaction that flowed into the room on the wind.
Rashad could feel the presences outside the house – a trio of power that filled the air with crackling jolts of rage. “Baby, get behind me!”
Lashey scuttled across the room, her arms and legs stiff and clumsy. Rashad grabbed her when she got into arm’s reach then shoved her behind him.
They came in through the door together. One floating, one walking, one slithering across the boards like a snake. “Get out of our way,” the floating girl said, gesturing at Rashad with an arm that ended in a blooming ring of grasping fingers and toes.
The mayor hauled himself to his feet. “Get out of my home!”
Rashad expected something to happen – a blast of lighting that incinerated the intruders, a giant maw to open in the floor and devour them… something.
He did not expect for the girls to laugh. He did not expect for the floating girl to drift to the mayor then close her grasping digits around his face.
The girl lifted the mayor off the floor with ease. “You have no idea how long we’ve waited for this,” she said.
Rashad thrust his hands out in front of him. Words his mother had taught him – profane hexes to break bones and disintegrate a man’s soul, erupted from his mouth.
The floating girl flinched, as if Rashad had slapped her. She lost her grip on the mayor, who scrambled away into a corner. The walking girl caught the blasphemous words in her fists, swallowed them, then spat them back from a mouth with no lower jaw. The girl’s dangling tongue lashed the air.
Rashad recoiled, feeling his own power thrown back at him. The attack dropped Rashad to his knees.
The conjured girls moved toward him as one. The slithering girl hooked an arm around Rashad’s waist then drew him close, licking the side of his face with a bloodied tongue.
The floating girl reached past Rashad for Lashey.
The girl screamed then pulled away from her father. “Get away from me!” she howled.
“Come with us, girl.” The floating girl moved closer to Lashey, hands outstretched.
Rashad struggled against the other two conjured girls, but his mouth was held closed by the powerful hands of the walking girl, and the slithering girl held his hands. Rashad was powerless.
Lashey was not.
She raised her hands over her head. In response, the cracking crystal spheres floated from the dented wooden floor, dripping darkness as they rose. “Please, leave us alone,” Lashey begged.
The floating girl laughed, a maniacal shrieking that dug at Lashey’s ears. “Go ahead, bitch, let’s see what you’ve got!”
Lashey flung her arms wide, calling out to the fragmented souls that had been inside her. One by one, the crystal prisons shattered and the broken spirits flowed back into the air like plumes of black smoke.
The air was filled with the screaming of spirits and the laughter of the conjured girls.
Rashad’s head rang with the noise. The mayor was saying something, he could see his lips moving and his hands reaching for him, but Rashad could not make out Mayor Green’s words over the cacophony.
A Haunting in the SWATS (The Savannah Swan Files Book 1) Page 21
