“Run by my house real quick,” I said. She gave me a puzzled look but said nothing. “Rule one. I’m going to try to be as completely forthright as I can. That doesn’t mean I may not hold some things back if I think it’s for your own good, but I’m not going to keep secrets just for the heck of it.”
“All right. So why are we going to your house?”
“Two reasons. I want to just, you know, take a look at it. But I also need to get something.”
“And that something is?”
“That, I’m not going to tell you. It’s a long shot, but let’s just say if it works I might actually be able to teach you something other than healing and telekinesis.” If I could even do that — it wasn’t like I’d learned them by any sort of instruction, after all. I didn’t have the first clue in how to teach Cassie how to do it.
She pulled up in front of my house and my heart broke a little. I’d seen it in flames, but the charred frame wrapped in police tape was far worse. They’d towed the Itasca and Cassie’s car out of the driveway, but the cleanup had yet to begin on the rest of the house. My insurance company had wanted to know what I planned to do after they issued the check for the home and contents, but I still wasn’t sure. I’d need to have the land cleaned up, of course, but was there a point to rebuilding? Shackling myself to a physical location seemed like a bad idea right about now, unless it was a castle on top of a mountain. Even then I’d still be pacing the floors, worried that Mother or one of her group would pop out of thin air. For now, it was better to stay on the move. At least my prior nomadic lifestyle had prepared me for it, though now instead of aimless rambling I was going to have to avoid what I presumed was an active pursuit.
Or maybe not. They hadn’t come for me in the hospital, of course.
Burning down the house had been petulant at best. I figured that Mother and her groupies had swept in, found us gone, and searched the house and RV for the grimoire or anything she might have hidden away. Not finding us or the book, she’d set fire to the house she’d once called home. Pique, or a desire to cover up the evidence of her compatriot’s crimes? Either way, it didn’t matter.
“Hang loose,” I said to Cassie. “This won’t take long.”
I hopped down and made my way up the driveway. The thin aluminum of the garage door had warped and collapsed in the blaze. I had to shove at one corner of the door to pry open enough of a gap to slip inside. Most of the roof had also collapsed, which gave me more than enough light to find my way by.
There hadn’t been a car in the garage for years. Most of the stuff in here was just clutter, but there should be a shovel inside.
I’d used it to bury the ashes of the grimoire, after all.
Look, maybe it was dumb to burn the thing in the first place, but I’m not so foolish to think that something magical wasn’t still dangerous. When the ashes cooled, I’d dumped them into an old metal ammo can that grandpa had used to store miscellaneous nuts and bolts. I’d wrapped the entire package in trash bags and put a good amount of thought into where to hide it.
Telling Melanie that I’d hid it in the hut was a believable lie, but back then I’d reasoned fairly quickly how that would be a terrible place to keep it. Sure, the land was still undeveloped after all this time, but who knew when someone would decide to put a shopping mall or a restaurant there?
Keeping it with me was just as bad an idea — the fact that Melanie had gained access to it and ransacked it just confirmed I’d been right all along. In the end, the best — and only — place for it was on property that I owned and controlled.
I’d often considered just dumping it down a sink or spreading the ashes across the country a handful at a time, but fear of the consequences had stayed my hand. For all I knew the stuff was the magical equivalent of depleted uranium.
The fire had consumed the top half of the shovel, but enough remained for me to wield it in an awkward fashion. I retrieved it and exited the garage through the back door.
Our property didn’t have any trees to use as convenient landmarks, but it did have a four-inch steel pipe. This was where granddad’s enormous satellite dish hung before he wired the house for cable. Apparently, he’d had concerns that a tornado night rip it out of the ground, because he’d set it in a massive concrete plug that went down so far that my dad threw his hands up in frustration after trying to remove it. In all the years since the pipe had remained untouched.
I headed to the north side of the concrete plug and knelt in the grass. An otherwise innocuous mark in the concrete gave me a starting point. I began digging.
It was slower going than it had been the first time. The ground wasn’t frozen, but it was cold enough that it didn’t give as easily as it had the spring dad had died.
About a foot down, the blade of the truncated shovel hit metal. I scraped the dirt away more gently now, exposing the duct-taped layer of trash bags around the can. Once I had the top free, I set the shovel aside and took hold of the lid with both hands. After a moment of straining it popped out of the hole and I tore into the insulation. There was no rust visible on the olive-drab surface of the container, which gave me hope that the contents remained dry.
The ashes of the grimoire took up a bit more than three-quarters of the gallon Ziploc bag I’d dumped them in. As I fingered the bag, I wondered if I needed to be touching the ashes themselves.
Stop stalling. Just try it.
I found my center and focused on the weight in my hands. It was at once the same and different as trying to heal Cassie. Exerting the spell outside of myself was as tedious as it had been before, but once I’d established that connection, the ashes of the grimoire jumped and pulsated in my hands. The odd sensation almost distracted me, but I retained my focus, intent on not repeating the life-draining mistake that had nearly killed me when I’d healed Cassie.
I needn’t have worried — it was almost as if the book wanted to be whole. All at once, something shoved me out of my focus. I lowered my head to look at what I held in my hands.
The sudden expansion and restoration of the grimoire had shredded the plastic around the ashes. I tore the rest away and marveled at the solidity in my hands. I didn’t feel as though I’d put much, if anything of myself into it, but it certainly felt heavier than the bag of ashes had. That shouldn’t have been possible, but for me, the barrier between the realms of possible and impossible had long been broken down.
I flipped through the pages — careful not to do more than glance at the contents — to assure myself that all seemed as it had been, before the fire. Satisfied, I closed the cover and tightened my grip on the book.
I thought about pillars of salt, the possibility of redemption, and my dad. I needed to sit down and have a long talk with Father Rosado, but I had a promise to keep first.
After Paxton disappeared into the garage, Cassie decided that sitting there and staring at the burned-down building was a lousy way to pass the time. She busied herself with programming the favorites on the RV’s satellite radio. If he didn’t like the Octane channel, well, it was going to be a long trip. She smirked to herself. If someone had told her last week she was going to quit her job and put college on hold in favor of going on a road trip with a guy from high school, she’d have called them crazy.
Crazy, of course, was all in the eye of the beholder after the last couple of days. To her own surprise, she’d had little trouble going to sleep, though vague terrors had filled her dreams. They didn’t wake her, but she often found that she’d twisted the covers around herself upon waking. Insomnia would have been better — at least then she wouldn’t have to remake the bed every morning. Maybe this venture would help to alleviate that. If nothing else, maybe she could learn enough to grant her some level of protection that a gun hadn’t.
On the bright side, since her experiences with nearly dying, the light in the sky, and her subsequent healing, she hadn’t had a single craving for a drink.
Which was, in the end, perhaps the strangest thing of al
l. Even after eighteen months of sobriety, it had been a struggle more often than not. The smallest thing as a commercial or songs she used to hear at parties would get that little itch going.
But she’d stayed strong. Now, it seemed, that itch was gone. She’d had a long talk with her sponsor. Donna had nearly hit the ceiling when she’d explained about the indefinite road trip. She hadn’t detailed her experiences — even seeing the destroyed jeans and shirt, would her friend believe her? — but the earnestness in her voice must have carried over.
The opening of the door brought her out of her reverie. She turned to look as Paxton appeared in the opening.
Clay and dirt crusted his hands, but he still held a dark, leather-bound book in his hands as he climbed inside and closed the door. He met her eyes and shrugged.
“Is that . . .?” She couldn’t finish.
“Indeed it is,” he replied. “Surprise.”
“But you burned it.”
“I burned it in the backyard. I buried the ashes back there, too. I left that part out.” He shook his head slowly and stared down at the book. “I still can’t believe it worked.”
Magic. Even now, she had trouble with the word, but she shrugged herself. Just go with it. She put her hands on the wheel and said, “Well. Where to, then, Snowflake?”
Paxton fingered the raised pattern on the surface of the book and murmured, “We’re headed west, Cassie. I need to see a friend about a serial killer.”
Paxton Locke will return
In
Night’s Black Agents
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Daniel Humphreys geeks out for movies, target shooting, and football. He has worked in Fortune 500 IT for over two decades and resides in southern Indiana with his wife and children.
Fade (Paxton Locke Book 1) Page 18
