Chapter 5
Five
King looked at me, and I gave him the sort of look that said what I thought of his promise to protect and serve. He pursed his lips in annoyance.
“Do we know anything else that will hurt these things?” he said.
“These ghosts?” I said. “These poltergeists? These beings from beyond the veil? The afterlife?”
“These things,” he said. “Which may or may not be ghosts. Or they could be the remnants of a spell gone awry.”
“I mean, salt,” I said. “Iron, probably.”
I pulled out the book, but it hadn’t changed since the first time I’d skimmed it: specific on killing, vague on the how-to.
Laurel had said that it wasn’t her specialty, and that there were people who specialized in getting rid of ghosts.
Her opinion was that my client, Mr. I Was the Top Rated Rental of 2019, What Are These One Star Reviews, wanted a bargain basement ghost hunter.
Seeing these ghosts, I did feel like I’d bitten off a little more than I could chew with this one. Maybe I’d charge him double. If he didn’t sue me into next year for all the water damage I’d left in the attic.
King was reading over my shoulder and raised an eyebrow. “This isn’t very helpful.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t know any alchemy texts that would be better,” I muttered. “The fire poker is maybe iron?”
Not that I wanted to test it in front of him. Iron and me don’t mix. I don’t burn if I touch it, but it isn’t good either.
“Are we ok to leave the circle?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I mean, do we have a choice?”
With a sharp nod, he took a quick step out of the circle and over to the fireplace. He picked up the fire poker and the shovel for good measure, although that one looked like it was about as flimsy as something could get. I took out the canister of salt.
While King examined his weapons, I looked towards the attic. I could feel the salt still flowing upwards from the water softener and pooling in the attic. It was dripping down the stairs we’d left open, a slurry of salt and liquid that none of the ghosts could cross.
Oh. I had an idea, but it would take work and the assumption that King knew as much about witchcraft as I knew about alchemy.
“The rain,” I said.
He squinted at me, and I realized that he couldn’t hear me through his spell. Bracing myself, I left the circle and came close to where he was standing.
“The rain,” I repeated. “I know a spell that might be able to make it a weapon.”
He nodded. “Okay, so what are we looking for?”
“Any evidence of bones?” I said. “Or hair. Or a spell.”
“From the 1800s?” he said, gesturing around to the pristine white walls, the new crown molding, the polished floors.
Point to the officer.
“Well, something,” I said. “Anything.”
We started in the living room, with the assumption that that was where she would have practiced her fake seances.
There wasn’t anything but the scent of cinnamon that we tracked to a plug-in room freshener.
He was right. The floors might have been the original, but the contractors had sanded them down and stained them.
Nothing was out of place and there wasn’t any obvious spell work. I made a face.
“Maybe her bedroom?” I suggested.
We crept upstairs, King in the lead with his iron poker, me with the salt.
Nothing cold hit us, and after all the exertion from the rushing around and casting, the balmy seventy-eight-degree temperature seemed hot.
Since King’s back was to me, I took the risk of starting to draw the salty water from the attic to me.
It had dripped down the attic stairs and puddled in the hallway, soaking into the carpet runner. I could even feel it seeping between the wood planks. This was going to be a mess when it was over. With a murmur, I called it to life.
When water vibrates fast enough, it becomes vapor. All it took was convincing the water that the heated air was about thirty degrees hotter than it actually was. It steamed, filling the surrounding air.
Then I called on the salt, reminding it how much fun it had had earlier with the salt version of a sandstorm. It went eagerly, dancing around the hallway.
I kept it small, hoping that King was too focused on the ghosts to notice. He didn’t even glance at me. Maybe he thought the sudden humidity was related to the haunting.
The master bedroom was beyond the wall that King crashed through, and when we passed it, something niggled at me about the guest bedroom.
It was probably just the gaping hole in the wall, but it didn’t put my mind at ease.
King reached the master bedroom two doors down and jerked his head for me to go in first.
I spread a fine line of salt across the doorway, hoping that just blocking the liminal space would be enough to keep the ghosts out. Then we searched the room, pushing aside the large rug, even moving the bed to look for anything hidden under there.
The floor was smooth, the walls smoother, where they’d peeled off the old wallpaper and painted it a friendly blue. When we came up empty, I even squeezed into the closet to check if there was anything on the closet ceiling or floor. Nothing.
Huffing in annoyance, I unfolded myself out of small space and saw King smirking. “Having fun in the closet?”
“Now who’s making puns,” I muttered. “I don’t see anything. Let’s check the other bedrooms.”
“Okay,” he agreed.
Stepping out into the hallway, I looked between our choices.
The room that King had been thrown into earlier made me frown, but the room across from the master was closer.
Eenie, meenie, minie, mo. I picked the room across from the master and stepped inside.
A shiver jerked up my spine like the doorway had electrocuted me. Goosebumps rose on my arms.
I tried to back out of the room, but something slightly pliant kept me inside.
Looking behind me, I saw a boundary reminiscent of the barrier King had put up to protect Richmond.
Only this one was dark. Black wisps crawled over the air.
Trapped on the other side, King pressed his hand against it and frowned.
He clearly couldn’t get through either.
I turned in a tight circle and tossed a handful of salt on the ground. With one hand, I spun it into another miniature sandstorm. It wasn’t nearly as much salt as in the attic, but it would have to do.
King was staring at me, his brows tight.
He raised his poker, and it bounced off the barrier, even as it left a golden burn in its wake.
I started chanting one of the easier spells that I knew, the one my foster mom had taught me to keep water warm.
Hopefully he could just see my lips moving and not hear me, because I had a feeling that he spoke Latin and this bathwater charm wouldn’t hold up to scrutiny.
One of the male ghosts crawled out from under the bed like a cockroach, his arms twisted at an odd angle so that he was nearly flat against the floor. Before he could reach me, I wrapped his head in a salty whirlwind and he hissed.
He scrambled back, and I felt a flash of victory before an icy hand closed on my neck. What felt like a snake wrapped twice around my throat, cutting off my air. I pumped as much magic as I could into the salt I had under my control and shoved it backward, into whatever was behind me.
The hiss of contact made me grin even as I felt the grip tighten.
With my thumbnail, I opened the salt canister and tossed some over my shoulder.
The grip loosened enough for me to wrap a thick layer of salt around my throat.
When the creature went to tighten its grip again, it shrieked, rattling the windows.
I saw a flash of green and then King was in the room with me, swinging at something behind me.
If he was taking care of the ghost behind me, I had time to get rid of the one in front of me.
I mumbled a few witchcraft sounding words, and pulled the salt together into small crystals the size of a pebbles.
It took some convincing, but eventually the salt went along with it. The pebbles drilled through the cockroach ghost, his face getting pockmarked where the salt drove through him. With a final hiss, he withdrew, and I turned to see King swinging at the female ghost.
Her arms were long; she must have wrapped her entire arm around me. The iron was doing its work, though, and wherever it hit her, it sliced a glowing white cut in her skin. With a shriek of rage, she disappeared.
“So,” King said. He swung the poker in a quick circle like he was a knight getting ready for a sword fight. “The iron works. Whatever your spell with the salt seemed to work, too.”
I hoped that he got most of his witchcraft knowledge from TV, because if he ever asked an actual witch about what I’d been doing with the salt and water, they would have called him crazy.
“I think they’re trying to keep us away from something,” I said. “This felt like a trap.”
“Yeah,” King agreed. The dark boundary had disappeared, and I saw a paper with a circle drawn on it flutter to the ground. The circle had burned itself out.
“You got in,” I said. “How?”
“With a lot of energy,” King said. “I don’t know that I could do it again.”
“It’s a good sign,” I said. “It means that our magic works against them.”
“Yeah, but I’m not prepared,” he said. “I don’t have enough circles drawn to use them as an offense. You?”
I could dig into my satchel and pull out things that would make his eyes pop out of his head, but that would be more headache than it was worth. Instead, I shook my head.
“We’re better off with the salt and the iron,” I said. “Can you draw your circles now?”
With a quick nod, King pulled out his special pen and notepad. He started drawing, his hands steady. I wondered how long he’d trained that he was so fluent with his circles. He wasn’t even pausing to think.
How did he end up a uniformed cop?
His eyes cut to mine. He was depending on me to defend him if they attacked us again.
I nodded and let my eyes go slightly distant as I felt for the salty brine in the carpet around us.
I tried reaching farther, to see if I had any more weapons at my disposal, but at the walls of the house, my senses grew fuzzy, like I was listening through water.
The sound of King’s pen was quiet, and he flipped to a new page, then another. I called some of the salt from out in the hall to me. Hopefully wouldn’t notice that our salt had increased from maybe half a cup to several pounds.
Finally, he said, “That’ll be about all I have the power to do.”
“Okay,” I said. “I think the only room we haven’t tried is the one that you got blown into earlier. They’re trying to trap us here, or keep us from something. Whatever it is, I think it’s there.”
With his hand hovering over one of his hasty circles, King followed me out of the room. I headed for the guest room. Before we got there, cold shivered up the back of my arms.
King shouted something and powered up the circle he’d chosen.
When the circle glowed green, he tossed the paper into the air.
It spider-webbed out, the circle growing exponentially as it created a barrier between us and the two male ghosts poised to attack.
They slammed into the wall, their fingers leaving dark trails where they scratched at it.
Running to the room, I rounded the doorway and skidded to a stop in the middle of the small space. Looking around, I couldn’t see anything obvious. If it had been obvious, though, we would have noticed it the first time.
A hand reached through the floor and grabbed at my ankle, wrapping around my calf familiarly. Oh, no, the little boa constrictor wouldn’t trap me the same way twice.
Pumping magic into the air, I turned the salt around me into a crystal that wrapped around her fingers. She hissed, the crystal staying on her arm until she pulled it back into the floor.
I glanced at King, but he was focused on the barrier he’d put up.
It had trapped the two male ghosts like flies in a sticky web, and as they struggled to get out, it tightened around them.
No wonder he said he’d only be able to power a few spells.
If this was the level he was talking about, he was going to burn every ounce of magic he had left in his body.
With a shriek like something out of a nightmare, one of the ghosts pushed itself halfway through the spell, dripping acid onto the floor where the circle cut through its skin.
A shiver danced up my spine, and I began searching, shoving aside the small table, looking everywhere for any hint of a spell or remains.
Nothing but a smooth floor with a gorgeous, dark stain. I huffed and squinted at the bed. It wasn’t in the right place.
The double bed took up a considerable portion of the room, and it was situated right next to the door, so you had to almost squeeze past it to get all the way in.
Maybe the intention was to give enough space for people to have a lot of room to get ready for weddings, but I couldn’t see any bride wanting the guest room instead of the master.
In fact, it would have made more sense to push the bed under the window and leave enough space as you came in to drop bags, change, do whatever you needed there. The bed looked classic, the headboard a white painted wood, but I saw a hint of wheels underneath the feet.
As King panted, the strain of the magic getting to him, I shoved the bed to the side, pushing it into the doorway. King, who was standing in the doorway, danced back into the hallway, throwing me a confused look.
The moment of distraction loosened his hold on the spell and the ghost that had gotten halfway through freed itself, lurching at King. He pulled out the fire poker and swung it at the ghost. I yanked back the rug positioned under the bed.
Bingo.
Someone had burned a circle into the wood.
I couldn’t read what it had been initially for, if it was actual alchemy or a bastardized witchcraft, whoever had done the floors had tried to sand it away, the floor curving from how far down they’d sanded.
But it was etched so deeply that they would have had to replace the entire section to get rid of it.
In fact, examining a sharp cut in the wood, it looked like they had replaced the section. I’d bet that it grew back no matter how many times they replaced the wood. How many times would my client have paid to replace it before shrugging and giving up?
And he hadn’t even told me about it. What a dick.
A hand burst through the center of the circle going straight for my throat.