Storm Road (Old School Book 3)

by Jenny Schwartz

  “That, too.”

  They grinned at each other, before their smiles faded.

  Dean swallowed the last of his coffee. The afternoon seemed eons ago, separated from now by more than a few hours. He hadn’t been so scared in years. “I poked around the house and barns. Most of Aunt Millie’s belongings are still there. Or the remains of them. The fire burned hot.”

  “Such fires always do.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Electrical fires?”

  Her gaze came back from some distant, haunted memory. Her eyes focused on him and cleared. “Go on.”

  “Evening came. I had a flashlight, so I kept looking. When a home is destroyed by a fire or bombing, it draws you in with the knowledge of all that has been lost. You don’t forget it. You can’t just go.” He closed his right hand in a fist. “I thought that I could find something of Aunt Millie in her home. I couldn’t leave with nothing.

  “And then, I couldn’t leave at all.” He held Beulah’s gaze, trying to compel her to believe him, to understand what he couldn’t. “Terror descended, choking me. It was everywhere, forcing me to the ground, trying to throw me against the chimney that still stands in the ruins of the kitchen. It wasn’t a panic attack!”

  The air in the cabin seemed to vibrate with the echo of his emotions. He locked them down. What he’d encountered at Aunt Millie’s farm had unnerved him.

  Outside, an owl hooted and wind sang through the trees as if the pines sighed.

  He stared at the oak grain of the table, inhaled and raised his gaze to Beulah’s concerned, beautiful face. “There is something evil at Aunt Millie’s farmhouse. It tried to kill me.”

  “What do you think the police can do?” Beulah asked the question neutrally. Her brain spun through possibilities and worries. Dean was right to suspect that she knew more than she was saying about his aunt’s disappearance. But none of what she knew indicated that anything at the burned out farmhouse ought to cause a problem.

  Then again, fire could release things that had been bound.

  Reminded of fire, she half-rose to put a log in the fireplace in the living room, then changed her mind. Best not to build up the fire when she might be leaving.

  She scrubbed her hands over her face. She wanted to stay in her cozy cabin and ignore the world, but Major Dean Fortescue had found her, and she’d let him in. That made whatever this was her problem.

  “Maybe the police can’t do anything,” he said in answer to the question she’d almost forgotten. “But I have to warn someone about what’s at the farm.”

  “Even if you don’t know what you’re warning them against?”

  Abruptly, he leaned across the table, and for the first time he was intimidating. “What puzzles me is that you haven’t kicked me out for being an over-imaginative, possibly crazy, definitely dangerous stranger. You act as if you believe me.”

  She stood up. “I need to see the farmhouse for myself.”

  He froze, before slowly sitting back. His blue eyes tracked her movements as she cleared the table.

  The cabin lacked a dishwasher. She rinsed everything and left them in the sink for later.

  “You can’t go up there, tonight,” he said. “It’s dangerous. I barely got away.”

  “From an unseen, evil force.” She wasn’t mocking him. She remembered the pressure she’d felt riding home; how both she and Vicky the vintage motorcycle had struggled. Considered from a different perspective, and recalling how her magic had failed the first time, had something been trying to keep her out of what it considered its territory? Only she had magic of her own, and she’d been coming home. The entity hadn’t been strong enough to bar her from her land. “Major Fortescue, was it hard for you to leave Millie’s farmhouse?”

  “My name’s Dean, and yes, hell yes. I had to crawl.” He turned his hands over to study his palms, and blinked, as if surprised not to see blood. “Then I could stagger. It was only about half a mile from here that suddenly I felt able to move freely.”

  Half a mile? She thought of how confusing the woods could be, even for a marine. She’d bet that Dean had been able to move freely once he’d crossed the ward and stepped onto her land. Whatever evil had hunted him, the ward kept it out.

  Good to know. When she went to Millie’s tonight to poke a stick at whatever lurked there, it was reassuring to know she had a safe place to retreat to.

  “You can stay here, tonight,” she said to him abruptly. “The town’s too small for a motel and I don’t intend to drive any further.” And if whatever chased you still wants you, you’re safe within my ward.

  Of course, he couldn’t guess that last bit, so he made his own assumptions, and he wasn’t wrong. “You can’t drive me because you’re going to Aunt Millie’s,” he said heavily. “Damn.” Like her, he stood. “If you’re dead set on experiencing the heebie-jeebies for yourself, then I’ll go with you.”

  “No.” She twisted the towel she’d been drying her hands with.

  “Or we wait for daylight,” he offered.

  She considered her options. Daylight weakened a number of evils, but she wasn’t going to Millie’s to fight this evil immediately, but to identify it. So she needed to go, tonight, while it was active.

  As for Dean…she wasn’t his babysitter.

  “Go or stay,” she said to him. “But I can look after myself.” She walked into her bedroom and closed the door, changing swiftly into a sweater, jeans, boots and a jacket with handy pockets. Into the pockets went a crucifix and a bottle of holy water, a gift from her grandmother after a visit to Lourdes. She tucked a knife into an ankle sheath.

  When she emerged from the bedroom, Dean stood by the front living room window, staring out across the valley. He turned and gave her a somber look. He had the impassive expression of a soldier—a marine—who’d locked away all emotion before going into battle.

  “It’ll be okay,” she said to him.

  He shook his head, but didn’t argue. “When we get back, you’ll tell me where Aunt Millie is.”

  “I can’t tell you what I don’t know.” She paused. “But my neighbor, Mrs. Johnson who made the pie, she’s a friend of Millie’s. I’ll take you to meet her in the morning.”

  He stared at her for a long, critical moment, then nodded. “Thank you.”

  The tension lifted, or shifted. Beulah concentrated on practical matters. While she’d been changing, he’d banked the fire. They were ready to roll. “Do you have your car keys?” she asked.

  He held up a rental car’s key.

  She collected her own keys from a hook inside a kitchen cupboard door. “Hopefully, we’ll have a chance for you to retrieve your car. My pickup truck’s in the garage. We’ll take that.” As they walked out into the cool night, the song of frogs from the river drifted up to them. If a large predator had been around, the frogs would have been silent.

  Dean stepped forward and opened the garage door.

  Beulah didn’t bother to switch on a light. Their eyes were adjusting to the gloom, and the moonlight illuminated things sufficiently that they wouldn’t trip over their own feet. She glanced at his shadowed form across the back of the pickup. “If things go wrong at Millie’s, come back here. My home, my land, is safe.”

  “An interesting comment,” he observed.

  She opened the driver’s door. “You want answers? Let’s go find them.”

  Chapter 2

  The pickup started readily thanks to Tyler Johnson’s weekly task of running the engine while Beulah was away. Beulah drove to Millie’s burned out farmhouse with the pickup’s windows down. She wanted to feel the night wind, to let her magic touch it and detect if there were any messages carried on the air. But everything felt normal; perhaps lacking some of its usual vitality, but that could be her fault. She was tired and worried, running low on energy and serenity. She’d come home for the mountains to work their peaceful magic on her, and instead… “Do you believe in magic, Dean?”

  “No.”

  She
wasn’t deterred; had even expected that answer. “Millie does.”

  From the corner of her eye, she watched him turn to her.

  “My aunt’s too sensible to believe…” His voice trailed off. Possibly he was recalling his own experiences this night. Then he shook his head decisively. “Magic isn’t real. Witches and wizards are fantasies. They live in books and movies.”

  And in real life. Beulah refrained from arguing with him or from offering proof. They were nearly at the top of the hill where, on the ride home, she’d changed the barometric pressure and lifted the feeling of oppression that had been dragging on her.

  She held her breath as they crested the hill, but nothing changed. Nothing leapt at the pickup. Why would it? The oppression had started further out. This wasn’t a border. Whatever had attacked Dean at Millie’s house had a wide territory.

  If they left its territory, would Beulah be able to break in a second time or would it be ready for her? Why would it want to keep her out?

  But they weren’t leaving its territory—if her theory was right. The evil centered on Millie’s ruined farmhouse.

  It hadn’t been an electrical fault that started the fire that burned down the house and barns. When she discovered the nature of what now lurked in the ruins, Beulah would make damn sure that the bastards that released it with their ruthless, careless arrogance, got the job of cleaning up.

  “Problem?” Dean’s low voice cut into her thoughts.

  She blinked and realized she was strangling the steering wheel. Her shoulder muscles were knotted with tension and sourness curdled in her stomach. “I was thinking of something better left in the past.”

  He made no comment. As a man in his early thirties, and a former marine, he’d know the dangers of looking back.

  The woods looked different at night, even for her after nine years of visiting and living among them. The cool, green friendliness of wildflower-starred roadsides and inviting, shady trees, became a place of shadows and secrets. She slowed down so as not to miss the turning to the narrow road Millie lived on. Had lived on.

  Oh, God. Beulah wouldn’t be able to avoid the issue much longer. Once she and Dean had faced whatever evil waited for them at the farmhouse, she’d report it to the appropriate people for action, and then, she’d have to make a decision.

  She’d just flown in from Boston, choosing to fly back from Chile via Boston so as to check in with her friend Sadie—to check on her, if Beulah were honest—and Sadie had had quite a story to tell.

  It was odd how small the magical world was. People’s lives intersected. Sadie, a finder talent, had gone looking for an amulet that would enable the wearer to see through glamours. She’d found Millie in possession of just such a powerful tool, and ready to pass it on. Sadie hadn’t known Millie as Beulah’s neighbor.

  Beulah hadn’t known that Millie was dying of lung cancer. Millie had confided the truth to Sadie, and in the last contact Sadie’d had with the woman, via an intermediary, Millie had asked that Sadie with her finder’s talent, not look for her. That intermediary was Beulah’s neighbor, Mrs. Johnson.

  If Millie was in hiding, how much of her situation could Beulah share with the woman’s nephew; with Major Dean Fortescue whose marine sergeant father might be forever haunted by regret if he lost his sister without a chance for a final good-bye?

  Or could Millie’s family ties be used against her in some complicated plot?

  Beulah could believe anything of the men who’d burned down the farmhouse.

  She drove slowly along the bumpy farm driveway.

  Beside her, Dean’s breathing was regular and unhurried. He mightn’t want to return, but he was doing so in a disciplined combat mindset. He was ready for anything—except magic.

  What does he think we’re facing? Beulah thought, impatiently. A ghost? Ghosts didn’t exist.

  She parked the pickup in the graveled space in front of the burned down barns.

  Dean had done the same with his rental car, earlier in the day. A very ordinary white family sedan waited, apparently undamaged.

  The pickup’s headlights illuminated the total devastation of the two barns. They were flattened, black ruins. But it had been two months since the fire. Weeds pushed up among the ashes and charred boards.

  “Just a tick.” She reversed the pickup, and angled it so that its headlights shone on the ruins of the house. She switched off the engine. Some walls remained partly upright. The roof had collapsed, but a chimney stood tall. It was heartbreaking.

  For the first time, she considered the possibility that Dean had simply imagined an evil force attacking him. The burned out ruins could have triggered a post-traumatic response in him, and her strange experience with her magic and the atmosphere on the road could have been due to her tiredness.

  There was only one way to know for sure. “There’s a flashlight in the glovebox.” She opened her door and jumped out. She’d use the light on her phone.

  Dean met her in front of the pickup. Its headlights sent their shadows in two long dark lines across the damaged skeleton of the house. “Don’t trust the porch steps.” He switched on the flashlight and shone it briefly at the crooked and charred front porch. “I entered around the back.”

  “Lead the way.”

  The unwavering beam of light proved the steadiness of his hand. They walked along what had been the side lawn, now rank grass. A couple of rose bushes had survived the fire, and the heavy romantic scent of their flowers hung on the air.

  He stopped. “I went in there.”

  The back wall had burned down completely. Beulah played her light over the kitchen, the melted vinyl floor, and the ruin of the stove. She paused at the chimney. “Is that where you were when you felt…”

  “Something hit me, but it didn’t have a physical body. It pressed me to the ground.” His flashlight beam darted away, sweeping wide, as he scanned the house and surrounds.

  “All right.” She needed to get closer. She might be a weathermage, and hence, unable to do or analyze wizarding and witch spells, but she’d had an excellent education. She knew the patterns to look for, the symbols of death magic, and the aura of evil.

  Actually, she could thank her ex-husband for her experience of the latter.

  She gave her shoulders a shake. Now was not the time to think of Samuel. “Wait here.”

  Dean instantly moved in front of her. “I’ll go first.”

  “Is that your marine voice?” She wasn’t impressed.

  To be fair to him, she had to remember that he didn’t believe in magic. As far as he knew, he was bigger and stronger than her. He was being protective; misguided but protective.

  “It’s my I-got-you-into-this-I’m-going-first voice.” There was no room for debate in his tone.

  She grinned faintly and put a hand briefly on his back. “Fine. You’ll remember the safe places to tread. I don’t want to fall through the floor.”

  He moved lightly for a big man.

  Stepping through a wall that no longer existed was an unsettling experience. She halted to examine the sensation of skin-crawling wrongness. Was it the lack of the wall that bothered her, or something worse? “By the pricking of my thumbs, something evil this way comes…Shakespeare knew his stuff. This place is eerie at night.” Her instincts shouted that evil was stirring.

  Dean halted, hand up, signaling that he’d caught the sensation, too. “If we have to run, I’d like to get the rental car out of here. You go first in your pickup and I’ll follow you.”

  He took a deliberate step toward the chimney.

  She darted her light here and there, especially to the floor, looking for occult symbols and finding only dirt, ashes, and debris. “It’s a miracle you didn’t cut your hands.” There was glass and shattered china everywhere. It crunched underfoot.

  “I crawled out past the chimney and over where the wall had fallen in.” The flashlight beam marked his escape route.

  “He should have bled.”

  Beul
ah froze. The voice wasn’t hers and it wasn’t Dean’s. She switched off her light and stuffed her phone into a jacket pocket where she couldn’t lose it. She kept her hand in the pocket, fingers finding and curling around the crucifix. Its power lay in the fact that it was a holy symbol for her, a symbol of faith and hope. Of resurrection. Talismans of hope were powerful when you confronted evil.

  Dean swung around, flashlight beam stabbing, trying to find the speaker. In quick succession he illuminated the chimney, the half-broken wall to the parlor, and the side garden.

  “If he’d bled, he’d be mine.”

  The sense of evil intensified to suffocation point. Beulah and Dean retreated nearer each other. “Is this what you felt?” she asked him.

  “I didn’t hear a voice.”

  Her knees wobbled. She wanted to fall to the ground, to give up and let her life—

  He gripped her arm tightly enough to hurt. “Don’t fall! There’s glass here. You’ll cut yourself and bleed.” He moved backwards, bringing her with him.

  “I owe you an apology,” she managed. “You felt this, got out, and still came back with me. You’re a freaking hero. We should have waited till morning.”

  “Would that have helped?” he asked, tensely.

  “Noooo.” The voice was as cold as the grave, as lost and remorseless. “You’re mine!”

  Beulah screamed as the entity materialized. She’d expected a curse; at the worst, a fantastical creature. What stood behind her and Dean, blocking the exit they’d been creeping toward, was so much worse.

  It was something she’d never seen before, never read about.

  “Ghosts aren’t real,” she said aloud.

  “I don’t think it’s a ghost.” Dean released her hand and put himself between her and the entity. “Who’s heard of a blue ghost?” His voice was strained. He reached blindly back and gave her shoulder a push sideways, urging her to move with his sidestep.

  Taking one step to match his, Beulah felt as if she’d run a marathon. Her heart thundered in a panicked rhythm. The compression of her lungs was a hundred times worse than on the motorcycle ride home—which gave her an idea. If her magic had released her from the entity’s control once before, then, maybe it could again. She couldn’t guarantee it, but maybe it could give her and Dean a chance.