by Keta Diablo
Trip bent down to draw Ruby up and away from the flames, but eyes wide, Ruby stared past him at the fire, and Trip realized that she was repeating two words over and over.
"Not again."
Chapter Seven
Grabbing Ruby around the waist, Trip spun her away from the fire, setting her on her feet behind him before turning back to put out the fire on the carpet.
As the last of the flames died out under the force of his boots, an ominous rustling, creaking sound filled the church. Something thick and heavy flew past his head and crashed into the nearest wall. As it slid to the floor, he realized it was a hymnal.
The sound of the book hitting the wall jarred Ruby out of her terror, and she took hold of his hand. Over the sound of the hymnals rising into the air from the pews around him and flinging themselves through the air, she shouted, "Follow me."
Only one of the heavy books managed to deal him a glancing blow off one shoulder before Ruby had pulled him around the altar and through the door into the sacristy at the back of the building. He shoved the door closed behind them, leaning against it as several of the books slammed against it, the impacts thrumming through his body and underscoring their near-miss.
His eyes strained in the darkness.
"We need a match," Ruby said, and he heard her rummaging through something. The light flared and the sharp, sulfurous smell was quickly replaced by the scent of melting wax as she lit a candle and held it up while they examined their surroundings.
The storage room was small and lined with shelves.
No place for a demon or a poltergeist to hide.
He breathed easier for a moment, but a quick glance around the church’s storeroom for religious items quickly brought his concern crashing back. There were far too many things in here for the town’s ghost...poltergeist...demon...whatever was haunting them...to toss around. Trip didn’t think it would take the creature long to get down to harassing the two agents where they were.
"Is there a back door out of this place?" he whispered.
"I don’t think so," Ruby replied. Leaning toward the door, she narrowed her eyes. "I don’t hear anything out there now. We could make a run for it."
Picturing the long aisle leading to the heavy doors, Trip shook his head. "Did the doors shut? I don’t think we’ll be able to open them to get out, even if we make it that far."
"How do you propose we get out, then?" Ruby asked.
Trip picked up a silver candlestick and hefted it in his hand. "There’s a window on each side of the altar. We can break one and escape that way."
Ruby lifted the bag she had held on to—rather miraculously under the circumstances, Trip thought—and said, "But I haven’t completed any banishing rituals yet. If this is not the demon, if it’s merely the town’s poltergeist, I might be able to exorcise it now."
"You don’t think it’s some sort of apparition, do you?"
She shook her head. "Not at all. I do, however, plan to be certain before terrifying these good people with tales of demons and hell-fire."
Despite a fast-growing desire to be gone from the haunted church, Trip did not actually disagree with Ruby. There was much to be gained from quickly expelling the ghostly force, and little to be lost.
Except, of course, possibly our lives.
"Very well," he muttered. "I will...." He paused, trying to determine how to complete that thought.
"Watch guard?" Ruby supplied.
"Yes." Testing the weight of the candlestick in his palm again, he wondered exactly how he might use it against an unseen force that created tornadoes of broken glass and cause heavy hymnals to hurl themselves across otherwise empty churches.
"What kinds of supplies did you bring?" he asked. His own arsenal against the supernatural was relatively slim, concentrating as he usually did on finding ways to convince ghosts to leave this earthly realm rather than forcing them out.
"The usual." Ruby pulled out several stoppered glass jars. "Salt. Sage. Blessed candles, holy water, a Bible." She set the items out in front of her and began choosing from them, pulling out the stopper from one of the jars and gathering a handful of salt from it. Leaning around him as he stood with his back to the door, she sprinkled it across the threshold of the closed door, muttering what Trip assumed was a protective prayer. He wasn’t certain—at her nearness, the strange rushing sound of his own heartbeat filled his ears, and he held his breath to stop himself from inhaling her scent.
This is no time to have your head turned by a woman, Austin.
And given what he knew about this woman and the partner she had lost, there was a good chance it would never be the right time.
Trip concentrated on watching what she was doing, instead, and breathed easier once she stepped back again. The sound of his pulse faded, and he focused his attention on listening for any sounds from outside the door.
In the main part of the church, he again heard creaking and rustling, but nothing heavy thumped against the door.
"There. That should hold us for a while. Now we need another match." She dove back into her carpet bag. When she held one up triumphantly, Trip didn’t know whether to cheer or groan, so he settled for merely nodding.
As long as whatever she was about to do got them out of the church, Trip was willing to follow her lead.
* * *
Ruby pulled a half-burned smudge stick out of her bag. The bundle of sage, tied together tightly with hemp string at regular intervals, had belonged to Flint, and she had to bite the inside of her cheek to force herself to pay attention to the physical pain rather than concentrate on her memories of him using it at various sites they had worked together.
It wouldn’t do to allow her grief to distract her while she completed the cleansing rituals. At best, she would make herself miserable. At worst, she might invite a negative spirit to attach itself to her or to the location, and she refused to leave the town worse off than it was when she arrived.
Instead, she concentrated on the Lord’s Prayer as she first lit the smudge stick, then gently blew out the flame so that the herb continued to smolder, letting off a slow trickle of smoke.
There were potentially better prayers, but that one had the force of habit behind it, so she often defaulted to it. As she waved the sage in the air, she added her own requests for peace and cleansing, some aloud, but even more silently.
She pulled upon her own power to add force to the requests. At one point, she even reached out and touched Trip's arm to better access some of the additional power she was able to draw from him. He jumped a little at the contact, but did not attempt to pull away.
After she completed the exorcism ritual, she took a short break, then prepared to check her work. "If it was successful," she told Trip, "I won't be able to feel the manifestation's presence in the church."
Closing her eyes, she delicately placed one hand on Trip's sleeve. The connection between them flared bright behind her eyes, and with her sixth sense, she sent that additional energy questing out into the church.
"Anything?" Trip asked.
"Nothing yet," she murmured. The church itself felt shadowed and chill to her mystical senses, but that might be a remnant of the specter's presence rather than something imminently dangerous.
When that coldness became icy, though, Ruby gasped. Her sense of power flickered around the deep blackness of an ice-cold void in the church.
No. Not quite void.
In its depths pulsed a malevolent fire, a banked inferno waiting to blaze to life again.
"Is it still here?" Trip's voice drew her attention back to the sacristy.
"Yes," she whispered. "But it seems to be disabled, at least momentarily."
"What does that mean?"
She took a moment to consider. "I think we should move now."
At that moment, the presence in the church renewed its attack against the door.
Apparently that freeze didn't last long.
"Or perhaps not," she amended.
&nb
sp; The poltergeist—or maybe the demon, as Ruby was more and more inclined to believe—attacked with force. The sound of wood splintering and glass shattering echoed through the church, all of it slamming against the door that protected them, but with her salt line and her smudge stick smoke, all reinforced by the power of prayer in this holy place, there was little the evil spirit outside could do to get to them.
"I suspect we will be here a spell," Trip said, crossing his legs and dropping to the ground, camp-style. "Might as well get comfortable."
Not entirely possible in a dress, but Ruby would do her best.
The candlelight flickered, sending shadows crawling up the wall, but they seemed less creepy than they might have, had an invisible force not been attacking the other side of the walls.
Shadows don't hold much terror when there's an actual monster at the door.
"I have a question," Trip said after a moment.
Ruby nodded her permission, expecting something about the rituals she had performed, or perhaps how long their sanctuary might hold out against the entity’s assault.
Instead, the agent stretched out on one side, apparently totally at ease, his head propped up on his elbow and his long legs crossed at the ankle. For the first time, Ruby realized that, although he might be young—certainly no older than she was, and much younger than Flint had been—Trip Austin was an attractive man.
She blinked to dispel the thought and focused on his question.
"How is it, exactly, that a renowned demon hunter like yourself ended up working as an agent—no, not just an agent, but a junior agent—for the Tremayne P.S.I Agency?"
A frown flitted across her face. How to explain that empty place after Flint died, that utter void where everything that made her a person should have been?
Oddly enough, here in this small closet—a tiny space stuffed full of religious relics, lit by one guttering candle, and beset by something monstrous from the outside—Ruby found herself able to say the words out loud, even if she wasn’t able to look Trip in the eye as she did it.
It was a space for a lot of firsts, apparently.
"Flint was married, you know. Not to me." A quick glance at Trip caught an expression of surprise on his face, though he looked away quickly to try to hide it. "To hear him tell it, she was some harpy from back East who headed home the first chance she got. I don’t know for sure, of course. Didn’t care, either. As long as she wasn’t out here, it was fine by me."
Trip was chewing that over, for sure. Those Tremayne Agency rules, with their focus on propriety, could have him all wound about over this. He finally gestured around the sacristy. "But you’re a religious woman."
Ruby shrugged. "I’m a practical woman. I do believe in the Almighty. I’ve seen too much to think all that highly of the rest of it. We have ways of reaching out to the Great Beyond. We have ways of keeping order on this side. They’re all simply tools, in the end."
Trip’s expression turned thoughtful. Yes. Definitely better to tell him all of it now. If they continued to work together, he would need to know.
"Flint was older than me, too, though he never would tell me his real age." A small smile played around her lips. "He trained me in the art of demon-hunting. And it is an art. Part ghost-trapping, part spell-casting, part prayer, with a few special weapons thrown in for good measure.
"We were good together. The best. Everyone knew for that kind of trouble, you needed Argent and Donahue. Even some of the Indian tribes called on us for help a few times. We learned about smudging from them." She gestured at the bundled herbs.
Trip wanted to ask questions, they were practically written across his face, but she needed to get this out—she knew, deep down inside her soul, that it was important for her to tell him all of it.
"Your boss offered us jobs, you know. A standing offer from the mysterious Nat Tremayne himself."
"Or herself," Trip murmured, and Ruby laughed, but only a little.
"Or herself," she acknowledged. "We declined, of course. Everything was perfect. We loved our life, loved being together, loved being out here, free to take the jobs we wanted to take and keep working on clearing the entire land of whatever these creatures may be."
"You call them demons. Do you not believe that’s what they are?"
She shrugged. "Close enough. They’re from the other side, they have power, and they’re evil."
"You have power, too."
"I like to think I’m not evil."
"So what happened?"
"We took the job in New Mexico." Ruby couldn’t help but notice he hadn’t engaged her claim that she wasn’t evil.
Too much of that Agency training.
She thought of a line from one of the training manuals she had left behind, back in the room the Tremayne Agency had rented for her during her training stint in St. Louis: "Reputation is everything."
Looked like maybe Trip believed that.
That’s why it’s best to tell him all of it now.
Her voice lowered. "We were over-confident. So sure of being the best that we dropped our guards."
Outside the tiny room where they sat, a supernatural wind howled. In here, though, the still air seemed to pile Ruby’s own words around her, an invisible mound packing her in like the wadding in a muzzle-loader, waiting for a spark to set off the gunpowder of her guilt.
The best she could hope for was to be aimed the right direction when it all exploded.
To keep from wounding Trip in the blast, she needed to be certain he understood.
"What happened in the church?" he finally asked when she remained silent too long, trying to find the words that would force him to see her for the danger she was, the risk she presented to him.
She had never told this story before, though, and in the end, the most she was able to do was give the barest recitation of events.
When she spoke this time, her voice was little more than a hoarse whisper. "We didn't prepare enough." God knew she had spent enough time since then going over all the things they hadn't done.
The litany pounded through her head: no blessed circle, no pentagram, no invocation of the elements, no prayers. The list went on and on.
She drowned out the internal noise by continuing her narrative. "Nothing we did worked. Not smudging, not salt, not silver. Flint’s six-shooter melted in his hand." His remembered scream sent a shiver up her spine. "A fire broke out between us and the door, and the demon’s face appeared in the flames." The more she spoke, the faster the words came, pouring out of her in a molten torrent of pain. "The heat drove us toward the altar. Flint grabbed my hand and shoved all his own power into me. He started saying something, either an incantation or a prayer, and whatever it was, it picked me up and threw me toward the door, over the fire."
She paused to take a breath, slowing again as she tried to decide what to say. "I tried to get back to him, but the flames blocked my way. Then I saw them. The demon had Flint stretched out on the altar, like some kind of sacrifice, and stood over him, a red-hot knife raised up, ready to plunge into Flint’s heart.
"And the last thing Flint did, the very final action he took in this life, was to turn his head and look me straight in the eyes as he flung out his arm and used every last bit of his supernatural ability to throw open the church doors and hurl me out into the New Mexico night."
The supernatural wind outside the door had abated a bit, as if the fiend were listening to Ruby’s story, too.
Maybe it was.
Let it, then.
Let the damned thing hear everything that powered Ruby’s rage, her sorrow, her anguish.
Let it know that this time, I will not stop until I know for certain that it has been utterly destroyed.
She closed her eyes, tears pouring down her face, but her voice remained steady. "I passed out—maybe from the force of that much power hitting me at once, or maybe I hit my head when I landed. Either way, it was dawn when I woke up. The church was still standing. Inside wasn’t as burned as I
expected. Only a blackened circle around the altar—almost like the demon had gathered all that heat into himself and used it to keep Flint contained.
"In the center of that circle, nothing had burned." Her jaw clenched as she worked to get the next words out. "Flint lay stretched out, eyes shut, like he was sleeping. But so cold." She opened and closed her hand in memory.
Her next words were as cold as Flint had been. "I lit a match, dropped it, waited until I was sure it caught, and I walked away."
Opening her eyes, she captured Trip’s gaze with hers. "I knew that demon was still out there—knew it in my bones—and I walked away. I rode hard and fast to the nearest train station, sold my horse, bought the first ticket out to St. Louis for me and Flint's horse, changed my name, and took a job with the Tremayne P.S.I Agency."
She took a deep breath. "That’s why I’m going to do everything I can to kill that monster now. I won’t let anything stand in my way, not even you. If you want to back out now, I won’t blame you. This is a fight to the death."
Pausing, she made sure he was staring directly into her eyes before she spoke again, emphasizing each word as she did. "A fight I do not expect to survive."
Chapter Eight
Ruby clearly wanted Trip to condemn her for her actions, confirm the guilt she felt. He refused. He’d been a ghost hunter for the Tremayne Agency for a couple of years now, and he had never run across anything as terrifying as the scene she described.
Honestly, the presence thumping outside the door against his back right now was the most frightening one he had come across. Usually, he helped those dealing with a haunting determine what the spirit wanted—almost always some kind of understanding about how the specter had died—and urged the ghost to move on. If that didn’t work, if the ghost was more determined, or more evil, than your average soul, he read a standard exorcism prayer and banished the shade from that place.
Until now, that had always been good enough. Oh, the Agency wanted him to do some kind of complicated hoopla, rituals and spells and such, but he had figured out pretty quick that it was mostly unnecessary, at least for your standard ghost-hunter without any special magical talent.
