Chapter 6
Six
Ijerked back, falling onto my ass and crab walking away from the literal horror show until I hit the carpet I’d tossed aside. King had thrown up another circle and didn’t even glance at me.
“You good?” he called.
“Yeah,” I said. “I found our spell. It doesn’t look great. I think whatever’s keeping them here is permanent.”
“How permanent?” he asked. “In the foundations?”
The ghost clawed her way out of the circle and came toward me. I flung a handful of salt at her, and watched as it hit her skin, leaving behind burn marks similar to the circle that wouldn’t be sanded away.
“No,” I said. Bowman wouldn’t have put their remains in concrete. She needed them nearby, close enough to touch. “I think they’re under the floorboards.”
While the salt distracted the ghost, I moved back to the circle and pressed my fingers around the edges, looking to see if whoever had installed the new boards had left me a way in. Nothing.
The ghost opened her mouth and, yes, those were fangs. They were the sharp teeth you’d expect to see in a lion or a tiger as they leapt toward your face. More smoke rose from the circle, and I saw additional symbols appear.
Okay, so maybe my client hadn’t forgotten to tell me about his circle problem. If it was still appearing now, whatever spell the drunk bridal party had done had also reactivated this one. Still, there had to be a reason that the bed was here, and not in a more convenient location.
Why would you want to make this one spot particularly hard to access?
King pulled out his remaining two circles and had his back to me as he held off the two male ghosts. I took a chance and drew a circle of salt around me, reinforcing it by encouraging it to spin in a circle with me in its center. Then I got to work.
As a cover, I chanted a spell that I’d learned to keep my gym shoes from smelling like teenage boy.
Still reciting, I drew deep and pressed my magic into the wood.
It woke slowly, an elder who had been asleep so long it barely recognized itself.
This was the original wood, from a tree that had been felled and sanded and turned into something it didn’t want to be long before almost anything else I’d spoken to.
Hey, I said. I think there’s something underneath you that’s like a pebble in your shoe. It niggles at you, doesn’t it?
The wood groaned, expanding with the moisture in the air, and wondering why it felt so tight. It remembered the cool forest and the deep water that fed its roots.
Yeah, I said. I’ll bet you miss the water. In fact, I bet you miss the whole tree thing. Long branches, tall trunk. Strong. Warmed by the sun.
Confused, the wood shifted. Wood wasn’t as malleable as water, but it held more power. After a moment of thought, the nails keeping the wood secured popped up one by one. The wood splintered and realigned itself. It grew.
A few planks wrapped around each other, slowly, slowly reforming a trunk. Another kinked and twisted, becoming a branch. I saw a pale leaf sprout off of it.
This old and this treated, it didn’t get too far, but enough of the planks loosened themselves that I could pull them apart with my hands.
I withdrew my magic gently, and the wood went back to sleep. I took a long shard of the floor and put it in my bag. Whatever trees they made this floor with, they were strong and old. Which were two things I liked to keep around.
Finally getting under the floorboards, I squinted.
Only part of the circle had been ripped up, but with a hard tug, I got a piece that bisected the middle up.
Underneath was carnage. Someone had tossed bones and skulls together, mixing up the remains of our ghosts.
Shreds of clothing or skin, I couldn’t tell which, wrapped around a few of the longer bones.
My whole spine shivered at the desecration.
No, not at the desecration. The room’s temperature had dropped, turning it into an icebox. King spun, his eyes wide. He shouted something, but it was like hearing under water again.
I swung to the hole in the wall where the ghosts had thrown King through earlier and saw Richmond climb through it like a spider. His hands somehow kept him on the wall, and he turned his head almost a hundred and eighty degrees to give me a look of pure hate.
“Get out,” he said.
“Get out?” I said. “I would happily get out of this nightmare. You’re the one who trapped us here.”
This stilled him, and I could see King groan and roll his eyes upward. Then Richmond dropped down, and when he turned he had long teeth and holes where his eyes should have been.
“Bowman?” I asked. “No, you’re trapped in the circle.”
“Too slow,” he said, his words a final verdict that meant we were fighting four ghosts with an exhausted alchemist, me at half power, a few handfuls of salt and a fire poker.
The odds weren’t in our favor.
Luckily for everyone involved, I was never very good at math, so I didn’t turn tail and run like I should have. Instead, I threw a little salt at his face and started pulling out handfuls bones from the now-broken circle.
I expected him to tackle me and winced when I heard the impact of flesh on flesh.
But when I looked up, it was King holding him back, the fire poker against his partner’s throat.
If Bowman had possessed him before we’d put her in the circle, then all we needed to do was get him into a circle, and that should cut off her oxygen.
I continued yanking out the bones, because I figured we needed to take care of everything at once. If I was going to expend my energy on a binding circle, I might as well make a big one.
When I dragged the last skull free, I noticed a stillness in the air. It felt tense, something uncomfortable and dangerous. I was a mouse in the jungle, and there was a snake that I didn’t want to see me through the leaves.
“King,” I said. “Come here.”
Shoving Richmond back until he hit the wall, King took a long step towards me.
“Wha—” he said. I held up a hand.
The three ghosts were coming out of the literal walls. The two men reached inside Richmond and yanked, as if the man was just tissue paper around a gift. A piece seemed to come free, then another, then another as they pulled at Bowman’s soul.
Screaming, Richmond reached out. To my shock, his hand knocked the ghosts back. He grabbed one of the men, lifting the spirit off the ground and holding him aloft.
I looked down between the bones and the ghost and then back to the shattered circle.
“Great. We have more bones?” King said. “We need those in a binding circle.”
“Give me a second,” I said. I squeezed my eyes shut for half a moment. “Okay, so, tell me if this tracks. Bowman is so desperate to get her street cred back that she makes some ghosts.”
“You think she killed them?” King asked, frowning.
I gestured to where the two other ghosts were circling Richmond/Bowman like lions waiting for the water buffalo to show weakness. Richmond whipped around and smacked the female ghost but loosened his hold on the ghost he was holding by the neck.
It slithered out and reached into Richmond’s chest, pulling out a handful of whatever ghosts were made of. Ectoplasm? Glancing at King, I raised my eyebrows.
“Okay, so she killed them, bound them with a circle, and then?” King said.
“I think they were free when she was dead,” I said. “Or bound to the house, or wherever ghosts go when they’re dead. But once the drunk wedding party called her back...”
“It called them back, too,” King said, nodding. “I don’t know the details of her spell, but that makes sense. When you—”
He broke off, finally getting a look at the wood, the twisted attempt at a trunk, the planks that had returned to their branch-shape.
“Broke Bowman’s circle,” I said, drawing back his attention. “Yeah, I think that freed them. I don’t know how long it’ll last, though. The circle remade itself once already. So we have a short window.”
“What do you need?” King asked.
“I’m going to start the binding circle,” I said. “And then we need to get Richmond inside it.”
Nodding, King positioned himself between me and the ghosts as I pulled a piece of chalk from my bag and started sketching the spell.
I went with a full circle this time, instead of a triangle which meant I had to put down five spell points, each to reinforce the other.
It felt a little Russian nesting doll by the fourth, but I kept going.
The ghosts were still picking at each other, but something appeared under the bones in the circle. The spell was coming back, a charred bit of Latin, the tail of a shape that held the power sigils. I was working with borrowed time.
I didn’t want to close the spell like I had the first one because as soon as I did, our ghostly attackers would disappear, and then it would be just us and Bowman.
She’d escaped once into Richmond, I couldn’t take the chance that she’d get into King.
He might have depleted his magic, but he was clearly a powerhouse, and that meant that if she possessed him, she’d have his strength at her disposal.
As I stood, hand hovering over where I needed to draw the last sigil, I saw King bend low, swinging the poker at Richmond’s knee when he turned his back to King. It was a practiced, fluid move, maybe one that King had learned in training.
Richmond went down with a groan, and then pitched forward, twitching. He rose awkwardly, like a marionette that had strings lifting it up, his head tilted at an odd angle from his body. He turned to King, a glare that ate away at his face.
“We’ve got business, asshole,” King said. I wasn’t sure if he was talking to Richmond or Bowman. The feeling in my gut said the former.
He swung again and the puppet master danced Richmond’s body away, hips no longer moving quite right.
King circled him and drove him back, almost into the circle.
At the last second, Richmond lurched forward, his head turning grotesquely to stare at me, even as his hands wrested for control of the poker with King.
Smoke rose from Richmond’s palms.
“Too. Slow,” he said to me.
We weren’t going to get him in the circle without doing damage to Richmond’s body that would be hard to explain. I winced a sigh and realized that we had to get Bowman out. Given that she’d just gotten her first taste of possession, that was going to be hard.
The circle was almost complete, it just needed a final chalk stroke, and some magic infused into it. I narrowed my eyes.
The three ghosts circled Richmond, pulling at him, even as he yanked the poker free, sending King flailing backward. Richmond swung the poker at the ghosts, slicing through the woman. She shrieked.
New plan.
I finished the circle with the trap door and pumped as much power as I could into it. The other ghosts disappeared, crumbling like dust. Eyes sharp, Bowman turned to me.
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s right. You take me over and this piddly summoning B.S. is the least of what you can do.”
Bowman tilted Richmond’s head at an angle that shouldn’t have left him with a neck to speak of. I really hoped that this was all her, and his body ended up intact. King tackled Richmond, the impact sending them both sprawling into the circle.
Too slow.
I felt Bowman slide into me, like she was pulling on a tight jacket. My body shuddered and my eyes rolled backwards. For a moment, all I knew was a filthy, dark feeling where my soul should be. I shuddered and gagged, bringing up bile and the half a sandwich I’d eaten for lunch.
It burned, and then I was just hacking out stomach acid, the taste sour and hot. I went to my knees and felt her sliding into every part of my skin, from my fingers to my toes. She pulled my face back into a rictus of pleasure.
“Ferro,” King said, standing. He looked at me with narrowed eyes. “Bowman.”
She started to speak, but then it hit her. I drew the magic up and through me, pulling it straight from that well inside me. It was pure light.
What—
I yanked more, every ounce I’d wasted on party tricks and witchcraft.
Drawing deep, I felt it awaken me like it was a jolt of lightning.
Around me, the wood in the room rose as well, a forest trying to sprout.
The water in the air condensed into rain, drumming a familiar beat that the wooden floor answered enthusiastically.
What are you? she shrieked in my mind.
It was too late, I felt her crisp, blackening under the assault of pure, elemental magic. No human was meant to contain this. No human could contain it.
She tried to leave, to save herself, but I had control of my feet again and I shoved backward a step toward the circle. Holding onto her tight, I had to get into the circle. I wasn’t going to make it, I realized. Too slow.
Strong arms wrapped around me, yanking me and Bowman both into the circle. Relaxing against King’s muscular chest, I slumped backward, my spine arching.
Bowman snuffed out after a moment, a candle under a glass jar. Without the ambient magic, trapped without her link to the corporeal realm, she disappeared. Hopefully for good, but that would depend on how the cops handled her remains.
“Parker,” King said. “You good?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“That was a stupid move,” he said.
“So says the guy who tackled a possessed cop into a trap,” I said. “What if I’d put an incineration lock on it?”
“Did you?” King asked. “Because to me, it looks like a haphazard containment spell.”
“Like you could do better in five minutes,” I said. “With your little pen, all your perfect circles. You would have taken an hour to do it.”
He laughed, the sound vibrating his chest. Which I was still pressed against. I forced myself to stand and step out of the circle. He followed, and we both looked down at Richmond, who was laid out on top of a pile of bones.
Richmond snored. I sighed in relief. The last thing I needed was for him to have gotten hurt collapsing on some old bones. My insurance definitely did not cover that.
It wouldn’t even cover the damage I’d done to the house.
Everything wooden in the room was trying to become a tree, and water had coated the ground in puddles that dripped down through the holes in the floor.
There was enough white residue to make it look like the fake snow around a SoCal mall Santa.
Hopefully my client’s insurance covered exorcism-related damage. Maybe he could just claim it was a wedding gone wrong. Groomzilla on a rampage after being left at the altar.
“Dispatch, this is Officer King, I need a bus, and Paranormal Crimes. We have some evidence of…” His eyes caught mine. “Ghosts. There’s an officer in need of medical attention.”