by Sonya Clark
I’d lived on my own for years, but Andrew Parker shared the family home with others. This room, however, was clearly his domain. Full of everything he used in his magical practice, it had to be where he kept whatever he was using to bind his granddaughter’s ghost.
Or was that his daughter’s ghost? God, I didn’t want to think about that possibility too much.
Sudden cold replaced the heat from the hallway fire. I blew out a breath, watching it steam in the air. “Britney,” I said. “Are you here?”
A noise came from behind the wing chair near the fireplace. As I approached, the high energy of blood shone in the auric field across the floor. The person slumped on the ground, though, looked like a flashlight with the batteries on its final minutes. Dim and wavering and very near death. I recognized the woman from Ray’s files on the case - it was Joanne Parker, Britney’s mother. Maybe. Hopefully.
I knelt at her side. “Mrs. Parker, can you hear me?” Her pulse was weak and her skin clammy.
“She killed Britney.” A wet hacking cough stopped her. The front of her cream blouse was a sodden mass of blood. “She killed my girl.”
“You pathetic bitch. She was never your girl.”
I turned on the balls of my feet to see Andrew outlined in the entrance to the garden. Darkness covered his face and malevolent magic seethed all around him. “You think because we let you pretend to be her mother that she was ever really your girl?” He laughed, the sound a jagged knife in the quiet of the room.
I said, “So she was yours and Peggy’s daughter?” Joanne reached for my hand behind the cover of my body. I stayed still so as not to draw attention, following her movement with my eyes instead. Under her leg, in another pool of blood, lay a purple spiral journal. It looked the right size to match the pages of Britney’s diary that had been sent to me.
“She went after you, didn’t she? Peggy?” Andrew stepped further into the room.
Joanne pushed the diary out from under her leg. I stood, placing a boot on top of it. “I’m here and Peggy’s not. Guess that should tell you everything you need to know about how it went.”
The cold intensified. Britney was close but not showing herself. Could Andrew feel her presence or was he not sensitive to ghosts? I couldn’t tell and his face was still hidden in shadows.
“You’re no match for my Peggy.” His voice wobbled and for the first time he seemed his age.
“You don’t sound too sure.” I moved my foot to test if I had control of the diary underneath. With the other side of my body I drew energy from the earth below.
Andrew stepped close enough I had a clear view of him. He’d aged hard in a short time, deep lines cutting into his face and a haunted cast to his eyes. “I know my Peggy. I would feel it if she was dead. You hurt her, to be sure, but she’ll be here soon.”
If that was even remotely possible I needed to make something happen fast. “Did you feel it when Britney and her baby died? When Peggy had them killed?”
He shook his head, slashing the air with one hand. “No! No, that’s not what happened.”
“She told me she killed her daughter. Is that what you meant?” I pointed at Joanne Parker, whose breaths were getting slower. “When you said Britney was never her girl? You and your daughter were Britney’s birth parents and you let your son and his wife pretend to the rest of the world she was theirs. Is that it?”
The diary under my boot gave off a pulse of energy, wisps of ghostly gray seeping into the auric spectrum around it. The binding spell buried in its pages felt similar to the one Peggy had used on me.
Andrew shuffled closer, one hand holding on to the edge of the glass display case in the center of the room. Maybe the cane had been more than just an affectation and the way he housed a magic wand. “Diluting the blood made the magic weak. That’s how I got worthless sons. I knew with my daughter any progeny would be powerful, and she was. But she wasted it. Treated her gifts like they were nothing.”
I didn’t want to hear his diatribe again and his use of the word progeny had an unclean flavor of ownership to it. Plus I was tired, wet, and muddy, and I wanted to go home. Wherever that was. I had to admit to myself I was no longer sure.
“Andrew,” I said. I shook my head. “Shit. Look, old man, I’ll all out of snappy one liners right now. Just pretend I said something clever.”
I kicked the diary toward the fireplace, raising my left hand to give it a last push to land directly on leftover ash. Then with my right hand I called on fire and set the journal ablaze. It crackled, spitting sparks as a scream rent the air. The binding spell snapped like a psychic rubber band, the backlash knocking me to the floor. Andrew was thrown over the display case against the far wall. Britney whirled around and over him, a ghostly tornado of furious energy.
The glass of the display case cracked, pieces of it flying about the room. The whirlwind of magical energy unleashed by the breaking spell began to tear apart the room. It sent old man Parker’s collection of occult paraphernalia flying, tore books from the shelves, split the heavy wood furniture open as if invisible axes were being flung around. I hid behind the throne-like chair, doing my best to cover Joanne Parker from debris.
The injured woman added her own scream to the cacophony of smashing knick-knacks and howling ghost. She reached for the flickering image of the young woman she’d called daughter, crying out the dead girl’s name. I tried to pull her back to safety, my hands slipping on her blood-slicked skin.
Andrew cried out as the ghost continued to menace him. Britney popped in and out of sight, flashing and flickering in a seizure-inducing display. The old man clutched his right arm, his face mangled in a rictus of terror. The ghost continued to wail, the sound building louder and louder into a deafening siren.
Just as suddenly as it began, the wailing stopped. The temperature in the room plunged further. Golden light like a summer dawn opened up above Britney. Her lips moved but her voice was lost in the pressing silence. My ears popped and the air shimmered. A sense of peace filled me. Warmth and completeness. The light bathed Britney in its radiance, her expression pure ecstasy. For a brief few seconds I sensed another presence, one that belonged with her, was part of her.
Her baby.
Then Britney was gone, and so was the golden light.
Chapter 41
By morning the body count was high. Joanne Parker died a few hours after giving a rambling, barely coherent statement that she’d been shot by Peggy Parker, who according to Joanne was Britney’s birth mother. Terry Parker was found dead in another part of the house, also shot. Andrew Parker died of a massive heart attack. Peggy was missing. My statement to officials was deliberately vague but privately I made it clear to Ray that Peggy was likely dead. We’d have time later to get into details.
Sometime shortly before dawn I collapsed, out cold for a few minutes. When I woke I had to fight to keep Ray from putting me in an ambulance. All that magic had blown a few circuits. Using myself as a conduit was getting too taxing on my body. I was going to have to look into using talismans and charms more often. The old mojo hand Ray had given me was nothing but a handful of disintegrated lint when I pulled it from my pocket. It had done its job and was probably the reason I was able to walk and talk after my brief collapse.
It was hours before cops were able to find Mackie Parker. I was sitting in the lobby of City Hall, which shared a building with city police, when he was guided in by officers. Mackie reeked of booze, his clothes rumpled and hair in disarray. I watched him over the top of a paper cup full of bad coffee, thinking of something Peggy had said.
“The card reader. The one who hides behind a veil of alcohol. You. The little girl who talks to trees.”
He made the mistake of meeting my eyes. Mackie Parker was as sober as I was. In a matter of seconds I finally saw what I’d missed in every other encounter with him, when I thought of him as the useless drunk prodigal of a powerful family like everyone else did. What I saw in those seconds was a predatory intel
ligence, calculation, and something very few others would have recognized.
A flicker of magic, expertly hidden.
Then he looked away and followed the officers to the back. I stared into my coffee, wondering at the implications. A while later Ray joined me on the bench.
“Your momma come to check on you?”
I rolled my eyes.
He made a noise as if to say he understood. “I can leave now. Want a ride?”
“Yeah.” I stood, every bone and muscle protesting. “The coffee here sucks.”
Daniel was locked up in his room when we arrived. He’d left me a note on the kitchen table, just a few words to let me know he was okay. His normally careful handwriting was shaky and barely legible in spots. Either he was still suffering from what had been done to him when he wrote the note or barely made it back to the house in time before daybreak, or possibly both. We’d talk about it later.
Ray waited for me while I showered. Over coffee and toast I told him everything about what happened with Peggy, and inside the Parker house.
“There’s a couple of guys who worked for the family,” Ray said. “One did the yard work, the other took care of the cars and general maintenance on the house. They’re missing.”
“I bet if you show me pictures, that’ll be the ones with Peggy.”
“You really think she’s dead?”
I didn’t like the idea that I might have killed someone, but I knew she’d given me no choice but to defend myself. “I don’t know. If she’s alive, where is she?” I tapped the table with a fingernail. “Unless Mackie’s hiding her.” I explained what I’d seen in Mackie in the City Hall lobby.
“Mackie Parker? A witch? You really think so?” Ray wasn’t buying it.
“The card reader. That’s Valerie, and she’s fine. I called her while you were busy. The one who hides behind a veil of alcohol. That sounds like it could be Mackie. If it is, he may have been the one who killed Martin Holt.”
“How do you figure that?”
“Somebody in the family paid him off to lie on the autopsy. Maybe he wanted more money. Maybe he wanted to come clean. Either way, Holt became a problem. Either Peggy or Mackie hexed him to get rid of the problem. What I’d like to know is, did Mackie know that Peggy killed Britney? And did he know why?”
Peggy had wanted to end the family line, magically speaking, as well as rid the town of any other practitioners. Why that meant killing Terry and Joanne as well, I couldn’t fathom. But families have plenty of secrets, fault lines over which the bonds of blood crack. I said, “The only way we’ll ever know everything is if Mackie talks and I don’t think that’s too likely.”
“I hate cases like this,” Ray said. “They’re always the most frustrating. All the threads left hanging. The unanswered questions.”
“I don’t think I want to know everything that went on inside the Parker house.”
“Are you sure about Britney? That she’s…that she moved on? At peace?”
“She’s with her baby.” Unexpected tears caught me by surprise. I wiped them away, recalling the beauty of that golden light. “They’re where they should be.”
I was able to hold myself together for about a minute, then the tears came and I didn’t fight them. “All these years I’ve seen ghosts. Ray, I’ve never seen anything like that. I never even let myself think about that too much, about what comes after.” Another sob slipped out.
He pulled my chair closer to his and drew me into his lap. “You’re exhausted. A lot’s happened and you haven’t had any time to process any of it. I want you to get some sleep.”
I dried my face on my sleeve and tried to extricate myself from his arms. “I’ll be fine.”
“You need sleep,” he insisted. “I’ll come back tonight and we’ll go have dinner. Talk about things. Just relax.” He combed my hair back from my face with his fingers. I wanted to drown in the tenderness in his eyes.
“I’m sorry I ran out last night.”
“We’ll talk about that, too.”
“Ray, I don’t know-’’
“I know. And I’m not gonna push. You take all the time you need to make up your mind what you want. We’ll be friends. We are friends. So until you decide you want more, this’ll be the last time I kiss you.”
There was no hesitation, just his lips on mine and the sweet invasion of his tongue and his hands on my body. His passion tasted of our shared past, stolen nights and secret meetings. His arms around me felt like something so close to the word home, I wanted to run away as far as I could get and I wanted to hold on so tight there was no distance between us, at the same time. It was his eyes that scared me the most, the tenderness there, and the glimmer of a possible future that was like nothing I’d ever imagined for myself.
I didn’t want to ever stop kissing him, but I had to or there would be no rational thinking about anything. So I pulled away, slowly, reluctantly. He leaned his forehead against mine, his arms around my waist. We stayed that way a long time, saying nothing.
* * *
Hours later, Stack woke me with an inconsiderate thump of his boots on the end of my bed. I sat up, tempted to throw a pillow at him but he’d already moved back into a less than solid form. “I guess whichever Parker was trying to work a spell against you is either dead or quit.”
“It wasn’t one of them.” He flickered twice, then became solid enough to leave a dent in the covers when he sat on the bed. “You know who it was.”
Shit. I had really been hoping it wouldn’t come to this. “Blake,” I whispered.
“He turned the soil against me.”
“What do you mean?”
“The land, your land. He poisoned it against me with salt, iron, herbs, everything he could think of. A warding rite aimed right at me, and at your vampire. Neither of us can cross the property line now. No telling how long it would take to find everything and clean it up.”
The last of sleep burned away as my blood pressure rose to a slow boil. “Are you…no, you’ve got to be kidding. Blake wouldn’t have done this.”
“I told you from the start, hoodoo woman. He’s got a piece of evil in him that can’t be cut out.”
Stack had indeed said those exact words to me about Blake, but I hadn’t listened. Just like I hadn’t listened to Daniel’s warnings about the sorcerer. Well, I was listening now, God damn it. I was listening to what Blake himself was telling me.
“Bubba!” I found Daniel in the living room staring at a cooking show on the television. “Can you believe this shit?” I relayed to him what Stack had told me.
The vampire’s eyes never left the TV. He sipped calmly from a glass of what looked suspiciously like iced tea. “I’m sure you can undo it, if you want to bother.”
“Of course I can undo it! What do you mean, if I want to bother? Why wouldn’t I bother?”
He gave me his bitch please look. I wanted to knock it off his face, but I settled for grabbing the remote and turning off the TV. “What are you trying to say?”
Daniel sat forward and placed the tea glass on the table. “I’m saying I’ve been doing some thinking. I’m saying I don’t know if I’m going back.”
“You mean to Nashville?” I dropped onto the couch next to him, all my anger gone.
“I’ve been playing vampire of the manor in that stupid house. The most useful thing I do with myself is work with you. I’ve had down times like this before and there’s nothing wrong with it. You live this long, you need it. But it’s time for me to get up off my ass and figure out something worthwhile to do.”
“You can’t do that in Nashville?”
“I need to do something worthwhile, but that doesn’t mean I want to be on my own. And you and I both know you’re not going back.”
“Blake doesn’t get to make decisions like that for me. I won’t let him run me out of my home.”
“He’s not the reason you’re not going back to Nashville and you know it.” Daniel rose and picked up the glass. “I�
�m gonna find some juice or something.” He wrinkled his nose. “Going cold turkey on the booze really sucks.”
I went back to my room. Stack was still there, hovering in front of the stereo on the dresser. The Raconteurs played Blue Veins. Stack nodded his head in time with the music. Behind the closet door I changed into fresh jeans and a black long sleeve tee, then I joined him at the dresser and picked up my brush. A headache was already blooming. I needed new glasses, and soon.
Was my decision really that much of a foregone conclusion? True, Daniel knew me probably better than anyone, but still, it rankled. Whatever Blake had done to my home back in Nashville, I could fix. It might take some time and trouble, but I could do it. I didn’t like the idea of him forcing my hand.
I could run my online business from anywhere, but it didn’t pay the bills yet. What else would I do in Blythe? Live in this little vacation house with Daniel? Move in with Ray? Neither option appealed. I could sell my property in Nashville and use the money to buy a small place here, but I’d still need more regular income than my internet business could provide. Did I set up shop as the town witch? Maybe go into business with Valerie? She could read tarot cards and I could devise spells for trouble in love and the law, like Rozella had done.
My mentor had helped a lot of people doing that. There were other things to consider. Somewhere in the county was a little girl who could talk to trees, someone Peggy Parker had identified as a witch. Peggy, who was missing, and her brother Mackie, who might be almost as dangerous as his sister. Was it possible either of them might target that little girl at some point? Even if this unknown girl was safe, Mackie was still a danger as far as I was concerned. Like it or not, there was no one else able to curb him if he decided to continue his family’s darker tendencies.
There was also Ray to think about. Did I want to be with him again? Could it even work?
Too damn many questions, and none of them had easy answers. Or any answers at all.
I left Stack to commune with the music. Daniel was at the front door, speaking to someone I couldn’t see. Since they were entirely blocked by Daniel I knew it wasn’t Ray.
