What if cell towers interfered with the vortex? Not that she believed the vortex had special energy. . . But someone ought to study any possible energy effects before the vortex was lost. A seismograph might give some indication of underground vibrations, but she wished she could use satellites to help find imbalances and measure heat the way climate change was tracked. Differences in heat energy would explain a lot.
The stick twitched to a path leading up another hill, away from the amphitheater and the cemetery, in the direction Walker had called the Ingersson land. Which was when Sam had a horrible thought—what if her grandparents weren’t buried in the cemetery? She hadn’t seen a gravestone for them.
She froze to consider what she was doing. It was dark and getting cold. If she were a snake, she’d be slithering into a warm nest about now, except she had a vague recollection that rattlers hunted at night. She wore sturdy boots, but she had no idea how old the batteries were in her flashlight. A sensible person would go back and ask about the graves—but if anyone knew, wouldn’t they have mentioned it already? They’d died nearly a quarter of a century ago.
A sensible person wouldn’t be out here paying attention to the frantic tugs of a dead tree branch. She knew she was following this insanity out of fear. Valdis had been out in the heat and cold without water or food for twenty-four hours. How much longer could she last? What if she had a heart condition? What if she’d been bitten by snakes?
What if someone had tried to murder Valdis as they had killed Juan?
Instinct and emotion. . . or science and fact?
She’d spent her life with science, enough to know that book learning wouldn’t help her now. The time had come to extend her experience beyond the ivory tower.
She followed the damned twitching stick. Walker would never speak to her again. She regretted that, but he’d never promised more than good sex. He would be going back to LA and his executive position, and she was pretty certain by now that she wouldn’t follow. Her hands belonged in dirt, not on computers.
It tore at her lonely heart to give him up, but maybe she’d find a home in Hillvale. She missed having a family. She needed to figure out what kind of life she wanted to make for herself, and what people she wanted populating it. Even if she eventually had to leave to make a living, she would like to think she had a place to come back to, where people knew her.
The staff led her up a crude path through shrub untouched by the fire. She sensed she was heading in the same direction in which they’d found Daisy, but this was higher ground. Surely Valdis wouldn’t have buried her parents way up here? Why?
If she could see below, she was pretty certain she’d see the farm in the distance. This had to be the ridge high above the bluff that had protected Daisy’s little hideaway. She sensed the oddly bad energy on this side of the vortex. If she was into woo-woo and spiritualism the way the other Lucys were, she’d be concerned too. Instead, she wondered about polluted aquifers or an earthquake fault hidden beneath the pines and manzanita.
Of course, if she could find those, she might be able to stop the development with science. Her other family would hate her.
An anguished banshee howl lifted the hairs on the back of her neck.
Chapter 25
Late evening, June 22
* * *
Sam fought rising panic. Had she come all this way only to find her aunt totally mad and howling at the moon? She glanced nervously over her shoulder but didn’t see any moon, full or otherwise. The fog was drifting inland.
“Valdis?” she called.
“Go back,” Valdis wailed. “The serpents nest under me.”
Serpents. Deep breath, Samantha, there be no dragons here. “Can you come down here where I am?”
She tried to see her aunt, but the flashlight revealed only large boulders tumbled from a long-ago mudslide.
“Twisted the damned ankle,” her aunt said in a perfectly prosaic voice.
Sam was so relieved by the normality that she almost shook with laughter, until she realized Valdis had been up here for twenty-four hours without food and drink. Or drugs. “I have water and a first-aid kit in my backpack. How do I avoid the serpents?”
“They’re in the rocks, hunting. You can’t. Don’t waste your life for mine. You are the only hope of eradicating the evil. It’s spreading. Even Lance is infected now. This is all Susannah’s fault. You were supposed to learn art, not science.” This time, despair and a hint of doom crept back in her voice.
Art! She couldn’t draw a straight line. She could go back and get help. But she hated abandoning her aunt—and leaving her in danger of snakes.
Sam shuddered, realizing Valdis probably meant she was sitting above a snake nest.
Faced with family or phobia, Sam girded her figurative loins, held her breath, and cautiously poked her staff among the rocks. If she believed in magic, she’d hope the stick would guard her safely past snakes and up the boulder path.
A bite would cause excruciating damage before they could reach anti-venom supplies. Snake-bite kits were mostly for pretending something was being done so the victim stayed calm.
“Why can’t Cass hear you?” she asked, hoping to distract herself if not Valdis as she climbed.
“Unconscious,” Valdis said in disgust. “Not good with pain.”
“Well, start sending magic signals to Cass now. I’m coming up.”
Swallowing hard, fighting panic, Sam stepped up on the first rock in the slide area, beating her staff against the stone and underbrush. She almost wished her memory hadn’t returned.
Valdis started to moan, not in pain, but as if possessed. Now, it wasn’t only the hair on the back of Sam’s neck standing up. She had goosebumps up and down her arms.
“He’s here,” Valdis wailed. “He’s here. He’s come back! Be careful. I don’t know him anymore. The evil. . . He doesn’t know what he’s doing. Promise me, you’ll take care of them. Don’t let them give in to temptation. . .”
Sam beat her stick against the next rock, whacked at the bushes, and prayed to whatever gods or spirits looked after mad women. “Who’s back?” she called, just because. She was fairly certain this was her aunt on spirits, not drugs.
“Go away!” Valdis shouted in a voice not her own, confirming Sam’s suspicion. “Go back! Leave this place. Let the evil die here as I did!”
“Okay, that’s not a positive attitude,” Sam muttered. “Valdis, block that jerk. You’re not dying. Find someone useful.”
Maybe she had started channeling Cass and her acerbic take on life. No wonder her great-aunt was a little weird if she’d lived with people in her head all her life. That sounded like a description of schizophrenia if she’d ever heard one.
Valdis fell silent. Biting her bottom lip, Sam climbed a little faster, questioning her sanity as she went.
In the silence, she heard the unmistakable rattle of a diamondback. Sam froze.
Valdis chose that moment to start howling. “It’s in the paint! I see the demons, and they see me! Stop them, stop them now, bury the demons before they reach us!”
Snakes, paint, demons. . . Snakes—snakes were real. The rattle was loud and threatening. She was in its territory. Stay calm, don’t panic. What did the books say she was supposed to do? Freeze. Respect the snake. Okay, she was completely frozen. If respect meant frozen with fear, yup, she was all over it.
“Don’t worry, he’s gone.” Valdis spoke in a sing-song voice with a slight accent—Scandinavian? “You’ll do fine if you don’t give in to greed as the others did. Don’t play with the crystals and be strong, dears. It’s up to you to rebuild our beautiful farm.”
Don’t play with crystals?
The new voice almost sounded coherent. Either that or Sam figured she was as nuts as her aunt. She’d feel better if the voice had said don’t play with snakes.
Heart pounding frantically, she listened for the rattle as Valdis grew quiet again. Sam ran the beam of her flashlight over the rocks until she caught
movement. She inadvertently stepped backward to avoid the slithering shadow and lost her footing on the boulder. She screamed.
Stalking out of the cemetery, surrounded by chattering Lucys, Walker irritably decided he wanted one of Harvey’s big sticks too. They’d be useful in batting off the crazies.
The scream shivered every nerve in his body.
Without hesitation, he ran toward the amphitheater. The scream had been much more distant than the vortex, but it was Sam’s, he knew it. Fear escalated his pulse.
He pulled out his radio and was calling for an ambulance before he gave it a second thought. His training had taught him better, but he wasn’t following his head. He was following his damned. . . what? Instincts? Heart? He’d been around the Lucys too long.
He swept his big flashlight around the arena, finding no way of tracking Sam on rocks. How the hell would he find her?
Harvey stepped out of the shadows ahead. Harvey, the nightwalker, the maker of crazy sticks—but Walker knew nothing against him. As far as he’d been able to tell, the musician was just exactly what he seemed, an underpaid creative who carved sticks for a living.
“Valdis goes up on Bald Rock when she wants to commune with the spirits,” the long-haired man in black said, pointing one of his sticks at the mountain.
“Why didn’t anyone say that earlier?” Walker asked, stomping out his anger and fear by following the direction indicated. “And that was Sam’s scream, not Valerie’s.”
“No one will go up there but Valdis. Sam wouldn’t know better. She would have followed the vibrations.” Harvey fell in step with him. “If you’ve called for help, I’ll direct them up there, but I’ll only go to the bottom of the path. The rock is haunted, and not by friendly ectoplasm.”
“Charming,” Walker grumbled. Did he hear moaning? “You’ve personally seen ghosts?”
Harvey hesitated. “I’ve personally seen evil. That’s enough to keep my distance. There’s something bad happening out there. That’s all I can tell you.”
“And Sam and Valdis may be up there doing battle with demons?” Walker said cynically. “And everyone is abandoning them?”
“Put that way. . . yes,” Harvey muttered. “So, we’re cowards. We’re artists, not heroes.”
“You’re superstitious idiots.” Walker halted to listen. Did he hear voices? “Sam?” he called, hoping for a response. . . hoping Sam’s vibrant life and laughter still lived.
Maybe he was fooling himself, but he thought he heard “Okay,” float down. He picked up speed, tramping on Harvey’s heels close enough to make the other man hop faster.
“No, we’re neither superstitious or idiots,” Harvey said emphatically. “If you stay here long enough, you’ll see what we mean. I heard about the fouled brilliance of the commune, as my father called it, and came up to find out for myself. There’s not much talent left up here to be brilliant, but the foul part is subtle and doesn’t need talent to cause harm. Sam called it negativity, and she might be closer to the truth, but how does one put negativity into dirt?”
“Explain negativity.” Walker needed a distraction from the horrifying images filling his head. Snakes and landslides and broken necks provided more than enough evil without throwing in demons. But negativity, that almost made sense. The world was full of it.
“Talk to Lance sometime,” Harvey suggested, almost angrily. “Look at his artwork. There’s a reason Daisy hands out guardian angels, although I don’t know why the devil she’s using stones from the Ingersson farm, since that’s where the evil erupted.”
Now they were getting somewhere—the hippy farm, where drugs and art ruled. Hallucinogens were probably part of the routine. Cass had learned how to wipe Sam’s memory with that nasty hypnosis trick somewhere. “And you know this how?”
“Listening to the old folks and my father. He was a kid when he lived up here. My grandparents wrote music, played a dozen instruments, got pretty famous there for a while. A lot of the people who lived here were talented. Only the ones who got out survived the evil. My grandmother hauled my father out when he was still young, but my grandfather stayed behind. He was laid to rest on the farm, along with Valdis’s parents.”
Valdis’s parents were buried on the farm, not in the graveyard? Why the hell had no one told him? Because they were superstitious idiots and didn’t want to come out here. Walker thought banging his head against boulders would be more useful than talking to the people in Hillvale.
“Sam!” he shouted again as they climbed high enough to see Bald Rock.
“Valdis is injured.” Sam’s voice called down, sounding sane and safe.
Walker stopped to take a breath and wing a prayer to the universe. “And you?”
“Bruised, embarrassed, but in one piece. There are snakes,” she yelled back. “Be careful.”
All right, keep breathing, he could deal with snakes. No guns. No mad women. No children. Just snakes and rocks and. . . evil. He could almost hear his mother’s voice warning of the evils of vice whenever she caught him with alcohol or pot or flashing cash to impress. She’d chattered at him in Mandarin, smoked sage in his room, cut off his allowance, and invoked the memory of his father. And when he’d really been difficult, she’d planted bamboo outside his window and installed water fountains outside his door—to encourage positive energy flow. So, yeah, he understood superstition.
He’d still grown pot in his dorm room and played beer pong with everyone else, but he’d outgrown flashing cash to impress. Well, maybe his BMW was the adult method of impressing. So sue him. He wasn’t evil, and he still didn’t believe bamboo helped.
“You’re going to leave it up to Sam and me to help Valdis down?” Walker asked Harvey, trying to keep his tone neutral.
Harvey mumbled a few curse words under his breath. Or maybe he was chanting spells.
Valdis chose that moment to begin a chant in her own voice. “Go now, go back to the hell you created,” she shouted. “Take your greed and your pride, leave us this earth we were given.”
Walker’s hackles rose, and he increased his stride, pushing past Harvey.
“She’s praying,” Harvey offered. “She hears dead people, if you want to put it like that. It sounds as if she’s talking to one she knows, but she never explains, so we can only guess.”
“He shot me,” Valdis shouted in a deeper, different voice.
Harvey cursed louder and followed after Walker, beating at the bushes to warn the snakes.
“I’m guessing she’s not praying now?” Walker said wryly, leaping from rock to rock. For one insane moment, he wondered if Valdis might be channeling his father.
“She may have a broken ankle,” Sam called back in the voice of sanity. Walker wafted another. . . normal. . . prayer to the powers that be.
“They have all the dinero, the easy job, and I live in a hovel!” It was Valdis speaking, but in a gruff voice with a slight accent.
“Juan,” Harvey said in horror. “She’s channeling Juan.”
“Sam, ask who shot Juan,” Walker called. Not that he believed Val was channeling ghosts so much as voices in her head, but he needed the distraction to keep his mind focused as he looked for safe places to put his boots.
He could hear her more clearly, so they were getting closer.
“Who shot you?” Sam asked, as if she were sitting in an interrogation room talking to a damned ghost.
“That freak Francois told his boyfriend,” the sepulchral voice shouted furiously. “How could I know he was listening? It was a private conversation!”
“Did Francois shoot you?” Sam asked in a carefully neutral voice.
“He got the gun! No way that sleaze would have one. The Kennedys ought to pay!” the weird voice cried.
Walker’s hackles rose even more. He was almost as reluctant as Harvey to climb higher. This was worse than watching some weird horror film. He expected a freakish puppet to twirl out of the darkness at any moment. But Sam was up there—he had to reach Sam.
/> “They get away with murder, they should pay,” the voice continued angrily.
“Who did the Kennedys murder?” Sam asked in genuine puzzlement.
Walker climbed faster. Was Valdis a danger when she was hallucinating like this?
Hell, yes. He just had to pray she didn’t have a gun. But she was strong, stronger than Sam.
Heart in throat, he lengthened his stride, while Harvey beat the shrubs with his stick.
Chapter 26
Late evening, June 22
* * *
“Who killed you?” Sam asked again, not daring to touch Valdis. Her aunt sat on a precarious ledge that couldn’t hold more than one. She swayed when she spoke.
Sam had fought past her terror of snakes to reach her aunt. Only now she was almost as afraid of Val’s insanity as the snakes.
“The old fraud,” Valdis muttered in the guttural tone Sam had to assume was Juan. What had Cass said? Juan’s spirit was angry and would linger to speak when he was ready. Did she believe that out here on this eerie hillside, Valdis was channeling the security guard’s spirit? Or was this more theater?
“What old fraud?” Sam asked, unable to do more than listen for ominous rattles and to Walker climbing closer. She didn’t think she could even hand her aunt a bottle of water while she was in this state.
“I thought the boss did it,” the spirit voice grumbled. “But he was there then. Maybe it was him all the time. Killer!”
Apparently spirits didn’t remember names.
Valdis spoke more quietly and was starting to shudder. That couldn’t be good. What should she do now? Sam wished Cass was here.
Take her hands. Talk her down, a voice whispered in her head.
Sam freaked for half a second. Voices in her head were even worse than Val’s spirit voices. But then, insanely, she recognized Cass, who had apparently occupied her head for nearly a week. And the advice made sense, so she wouldn’t freak just yet.
Sapphire Nights Page 24
