Chapter 4
Four
Idipped into my magic again and felt for whatever was nearby. Outside, the rain pelted down, fat drops of water rejoicing at returning to the earth. It was a chant of delight as they hit the roof, slid down to the gutter, and then flowed down the drainpipe.
That didn’t help. I felt down below me. There. Something familiar, showing up in my mind’s eye like a lighthouse. Salt?
A lot of salt. If I could get it up here, that would be a weapon I could use.
It felt like it was in a container near water. A water softener? Of course my client would shell out for one. He probably just didn’t want to have to pay to have someone scrub hard water deposits off the showers.
I yanked the salt up, feeling it struggle, break something and then flow upwards, shooting up into the attic from a water pipe in the bathroom under our feet.
There was a spray of salty water and then a sluggish dribble of salt puddled on the floor.
Great. What was I supposed to do with a salt slushy?
On its own, I might be able to work with the salt, but the water confused the whole situation.
The ghost flickered and I took a long stride so that I was standing in the middle of the salty mess.
It felt like being in a noisy bar. The salt was trying to talk, but kept being overwhelmed by the joyous shouting of the house water and the shriek of the rainwater hitting the roof.
The sludgy salt moved slightly as I forced magic into it. On the far side of the attic, the ghost circled me, trying to find a way past the salt puddle I stood in. More salt dribbled up through the pipe.
The salt wasn’t going to listen to me while all the water bogged it down.
It was too heavy for the crystals and even when I managed to move them, they disintegrated into the water, leaving me with a puddle so salty that the Dead Sea would probably tell it to lay off the sodium.
With one last heft, I realized I wasn’t going to be able to move this mess.
In the corner of the attic where a couple of loose roof shingles let in stray droplets, the rainwater called to me. It was a pure, high note in the chaos of noise. It gave me an idea.
If I couldn’t move the salt with the water, I needed to move the water first so that I was left with the pure sodium chloride.
“Hey, puddle,” I said. “It’s so warm in here, doesn’t it feel like evaporation temperature? I mean, you can hear the rain outside. Doesn’t it sound like it’s having fun?”
It took a shift of my magic, but I had plenty, an unused well of it in my bones. The water evaporated, leaving us with a steamy sauna of an attic, and me standing in a pile of pure salt.
The salt wouldn’t be as easy to move as the water that could shift forms with a suggestion—ice to water to vapor. Salt was a crystal, a solid form that didn’t move. But, I could definitely convince the salt that the wind was blowing it.
Bending low, I ran my fingers over the salty residue that the evaporated water had left behind. The ripple of my magic woke the salt, which was, hilariously salty at its position. It had enjoyed being brine and had some very choice words about being dry.
“Yes. In fact you’re so dry because it’s a windstorm,” I said. “Can’t you feel the wind? It’s blowing you everywhere. It’s chaos.”
Some of the salt shifted. I saw a few granules float up and then crash down.
“Can’t you feel it? It’s so much wind! How’re you still on the ground?” I asked, feeding the salt more magic. Around me, a swirl of salt began to rise in the air. My own miniature salt tornado.
It spun across the room, salt spraying all over, in defiance of gravity and physics.
The ghost’s eyes went wide, and she shrieked.
Where the granules passed through her, her form began to shred. It left holes in her that looked like gaps between the worlds. I didn’t look too hard at the darkness exposed by her fragmenting body.
The salt water still gurgling onto the attic floor from the broken pipe kept her trapped with me. She couldn’t get through it to follow King, and she couldn’t leave through the roof because of whatever spell had summoned her here.
My goal wasn’t to kill her, just to keep her busy long enough to let King get her remains into the trap. But it looked like where the table salt earlier had annoyed her, being shredded pissed her off.
She came toward me, the sandstorm of salt burning through her cheekbones and forehead, and I could hear her words practically in my head, “They brought me here and you will not send me back.”
I ducked, but her hand brushed my head and a vision hit me hard. Where we’d found her bones sat a group of people in formalwear, drunk and laughing as they called her into existence, using a mess of witchcraft and alchemy. I huffed.
“It was a wedding party?” I bent, brushing my fingers over some granules of salt that had fallen to the floor and pushing enough magic into them to send them back up, hitting her cleanly in the chest. “My money was on ghost hunters.”
She shrieked as the shower of salt burned through her, eyes gaping black and fingers growing into long claws that promised a lot of pain and blood if they caught me.
Then, abruptly, she stopped. Her whole being flickered, and I thought she’d found an escape, but as the salt continued to blow throughout the attic, she melted. She was ice left out in the sun, her form disintegrating into a puddle that disappeared in waves of vapor.
My shoulders relaxed. King must have gotten to the trap. Gently, I let the magic out of the room and the water that made up a giant cloud against the roof beams, crashed to the floor. The salt storm splashed down into it, making salty water again.
I looked around at the soaked attic and winced. There was going to be significant water damage.
Luckily, my client, with his five thousand dollar holiday decorator, had fantastic home insurance. I hoped.
Climbing down the ladder, I found a panting King rushing back to me. He raised his eyebrows. “We good?”
“She’s gone,” I said. “You ready to admit that she was—”
“Summoned by a human, some vestigial part of the spell that they did. I’d bet that one of the casters is still feeling the drain from it, a headache that they can’t get rid of because they were still powering the spell,” King said.
His eyes crinkled in the corners. “That was spellcraft, not a ghost.”
“That was a summoning spell,” I argued. “They were summoning a ghost. You know, we could continue this argument over dinner.”
He smirked, the expression twisting his lips attractively, and I was curious to see what other expressions I could get him to make. Then his mouth dropped open, and he flew backwards through the wall.
I swore, and pulled the salt out of my bag, hands clumsy. It couldn’t be Bowman. With her remains inside the containment spell, she was bound. She should be whatever the ghost equivalent of dead was. I’d seen her disappear.
There was a giggle right next to my ear, and I blindly threw the salt and heard a hiss.
The ghost dodged down the hall, doing the same flickering thing that Bowman had done.
But when I got a good look at her, she was different.
Everything about her was white, except where blood lined her eyes.
It looked like she was crying the stuff, and fat drops of it hit the new wood floors.
Each droplet hissed and burned like acid, popping and sizzling the wood, leaving charred marks behind.
I jumped through the hole in the wall that King had made, expecting to find him dead.
The small bedroom was charmingly decorated—a Christmas quilt covered the double bed, the fabric featuring stylized Christmas trees and reindeer.
From the bedside table, a Santa figurine stared at us blankly.
King was on the floor, and I bent to check if he was alive. He was gasping and pushed himself up on his elbows. Reaching down, I helped him up, running my hands over his back, my eyes wide.
Even a werewolf, with their healing and strength would have been laid out by being shoved through a wall. I managed a, “What—You—”
“It’s a protection circle,” he said. He pulled his uniform shirt down a couple of inches to reveal a black circle drawn on his white undershirt. The circle glowed green, and the magic crackled. After taking that hit, the spell looked like it didn’t have much protection left.
“You put protection circles on your clothes?” I asked.
“My mom does,” he said. “She gets worried about me.”
“Does she do your laundry, too?” I couldn’t help tease. My brain was shorting out. This guy could have been dead, and then I would have ended up in the sort of trouble that ends with a life sentence. Who’s going to believe that a ghost did it with a dead officer and another headed for the nuthouse?
Rolling his eyes, he said, “No, Ferro, I can do my own laundry. What was that?”
“I think it was another ghost,” I said. “We have to get to your partner.”
“Another one? But the only bones we found are in that binding circle,” King said. He gave me a suspicious look, and I glared back at him.
“My binding circle is fine,” I said. “It just means that we have to find more remains.”
He raised an eyebrow, and I shook my head. “We need to get downstairs. Maybe if Bowman was the one who locked us in, we can at least get out and call for reinforcements.”
For him, that probably meant the Paranormal Crimes squad. For me, that meant my sister. Nodding, he shook his shoulders and reached out with his hand. I poured him a handful of salt and took one for myself. The container had been nearly full when I’d taken it. Now it was half empty.
Hopefully we could get out of the house before we ran out of the only ammunition that seemed to bother the ghosts. If I’d known salt would actually work, I would have filled my bag with the stuff.