Red house, p.8
Red House, page 8
For a long moment all I could do was gape, aghast at the suggestion that I might lose my head over a man like Blake Harvill. Then I pushed aside my own troubles and zeroed in on Daniel. Something was going on with him and it wasn’t just too much whiskey in his O positive. “Bubba, what’s going on? Is something wrong?”
There was a scratchy silence for almost a full minute. “No, honey, I’m fine. Everything’s copacetic. You don’t need to worry about me.”
“Are you sure? I can come on home now if you want.”
“No, you do whatever you got to do. I’ll see you tonight. Just don’t let that man talk you into anything crazy. Maybe he really does love you, but that doesn’t mean he’s good for you.”
He said goodbye quickly and I could barely respond. I wanted to focus on Daniel, find out just what exactly was going on that would make him sound so unlike his usual composed self. All I could hear in my head was his assertion that Blake loved me. The thought filled my mind, expanding in a bloom of dark colors washed with star trails.
* * * *
“The other name for black cohosh.” Rozella’s teacher voice was firm, a little louder than her normal speaking voice, and brooked no nonsense.
“Black snake root,” I answered. I lifted the bucket of floor wash and climbed up a few more steps. Dipping my gloved hand and wash rag in the water, then squeezing out the excess, I went to work on washing down the next few steps. I’d done the first floor the day before and would do the second floor on the next day. The floor wash was water with a little bit of ammonia and three teaspoons of a special herbal mixture designed for a more spiritual type of cleaning. I’d been wanting to try it at home ever since Rozella taught me the recipe, thought it might have helped ease some of the tension, but I knew if I was found out it would cause more harm than good.
“Its uses.” Rozella sat on the sofa with a quilting project arrayed around her. A neighbor was expecting a baby so Rozella was making a blanket for the child.
I answered with confidence. “Protection and strength.”
“What else?”
I paused mid-scrub, raising my head and flipping my braid over my shoulder. Nothing else came to mind.
She eyed me over her quilting. “What was in the tea I gave you when you were hurting last week?”
I slapped the washrag on a step. “PMS and hot flashes.”
“Did you pay any attention to what I put in that tea?”
Ooh, that was not a good line of questioning. “No, ma’am,” I replied guiltily. “I felt so bad I just drank it.”
The look she gave me could have set that bucket of floor wash to boiling but she said nothing. She knew she didn’t have to, the glare was enough. I knew better than to eat or drink something without knowing what was in it, especially when it was given to me by a practitioner. I had a feeling there would be a few weeks of “name that ingredient” to emphasize the point.
We went over a few more herbs before the jukebox got to the song that always made Rozella stop what she was doing. That jukebox was a thing of beauty. She’d gotten it in payment for work–root work. It was one of the big floor models popular in juke joints and clubs and Rozella had plenty of records to keep it going. Blues and soul were her favorites. The jukebox provided a steady stream of background music but when Jimmy Reed’s Little Rain started, it had Rozella’s full attention.
Near the end of the song she rose from the couch and strode to the jukebox to play it again. I’d seen her do this before but she never offered any explanation or comment. I sure knew better than to ask, too.
“Coriander seeds,” she said in a demanding voice.
“Uh, usually for love spells.”
“Love, passion and fidelity,” she corrected. “Use it with rose petals and honeysuckle flowers. A little cherry bark. Some catnip. But the best thing for a love spell is Queen Elizabeth root. That’s a powerful root there.”
Her intensity made me nervous. “Does it work every time?” I only asked just to be talking.
“Yes it does.” She returned to her seat on the couch, picking up her quilting. “Balm of Gilead.”
It took me a second to realize we were back to quizzing as her voice lacked its usual sharpness. “It’s for comfort, I think. Is it for a broken heart?”
“Yes," she replied so quietly I barely heard her.
I gave up on the scrubbing to watch her for a moment. She was intent on her quilting but there was a shadow across her face. Years later her son would show me photographs of Rozella when she was young. Beautiful and stylish with a smile on her face, she looked happy. But the pictures were torn in half, someone stricken from her past. There were plenty of pictures of her late husband–her son’s father–so we didn’t think that’s who this mystery man was. And it was surely a man based on tell-tale signs of a man’s suit and masculine hands. There were so many things Rozella never talked about, so many secrets she took to the grave.
“Does it work every time?” I finally asked.
“No.”
That was the end of the conversation. I went back to work, the hollow ring in her voice silencing my questions.
Chapter 8
Daniel paced, his wiry frame full of nervous tension. “How much longer?”
I hit the button to light up my cellphone. “Eighteen minutes. Two minutes less than the last time you asked.” At full dark it would be safe to leave the house. As the last minutes of the day ticked by we waited impatiently, both stewing in our own unspoken problems.
Bouncing on the balls of his feet and swinging his arms, Daniel put me in mind of a sugared-up toddler. At least he wasn’t singing. Yet. I sat on the bottom of the stairs, backpack full of ghost-evicting goodies at my feet. The phone lit up with another message. I’d turned the sound off earlier, not wanting comments from my peanut gallery of one. “Hey, why don’t you go do some yoga or get a drink or something? You’re making me tense.”
He turned his world-renowned “bitch, please” face on me. “I’ll go get a drink. But I am not what’s making you tense.” After a pointed look at my phone he walked away in a graceful shuffle, humming.
I dialed voicemail. Blake’s voice filled me with longing.
“Roxie, I know you’re angry. I deserve your anger. I know that too. I knew it was wrong but I missed you so much. It feels like my whole life has spun out of control and I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. All I know is I want to be with you. You wanna make me beg, I’ll do it. I’ll walk through fire for you. Just talk to me. Just let me make it up to you. Baby, please. Please.”
Astral projection was certainly something I knew about but had no experience with. The idea of my consciousness leaving my body did not sit well with me. Too fraught with potential danger, which was probably what attracted Blake to the practice. Even with his admission I was having a hard time accepting that he invaded my dreams. I believed he had the ability to do it, and the fluid morality to do that to someone without their express permission. The hard part to swallow was whatever bond existed between us wasn’t special enough to make him think twice before doing something so unethical to me. It made me question whether any bond existed at all. From the beginning I’d wanted to think we had more than just a physical attraction but maybe I was fooling myself.
No. I wasn’t fooling myself. That physical attraction made it harder to think clearly around him, harder to make smart decisions. But there was no denying there was something more between us. I just didn’t know if it meant enough to me to get past him doing something like this. Or if it meant enough to him to make him understand why he couldn’t do things like that to me.
I listened to the message, and a few others he’d left, just to hear the sound of his voice. Forgiving Blake would be easy. The trusting part, that would be the part that would get us in trouble.
An off-key chorus of Louisiana Hot Sauce alerted me to Daniel’s return. I snapped the phone shut and stood. “I’m driving.”
“The hell you say.” His mouth curled in a pout.
“And you will follow the rule.” That long-standing rule being, driver picks the music.
He cursed. “You’re gonna torture me with some emo crap.”
“Nope. Make you listen to Katy Perry.”
“What the hell did I do to you?”
“Quit your bitchin’ and go poke your head out the door. I’m ready to get this show on the road.”
Glaring, a hint of fang showing, he stalked to the door and flung it open. Silky warm air and blessed darkness lay on the other side. He stepped out onto the porch, the muscles of his shoulders visibly relaxing under his t-shirt. I picked up the backpack and followed.
The night folded around us, cradling us in a welcome familiarity. I should have been scared of the dark, knowing what sort of nasties went bumping around out there. Instead it drew me with a siren song of danger, the lure of the strange and the unknown. The vampire at my side was my family, the spirit-filled night my home. Taking Daniel’s hand, knowing he felt the same kinship with me and with the night, I led us into its embrace.
* * * *
The soldier’s ghost was easy to identify, especially since he was the one chasing me through the house. Taking the steps two at a time, I hurtled up the stairs with a mass of cold air hard at my heels. Sparing a glance over my shoulder as I rounded the corner at the top of the stairs, I saw a haze of watery gray framed by angry red. The red was part of what I thought of as the auric field but the rest was his uniform. Ester’s attacker, no doubt the same spirit who held me down and tried to choke me during my first visit to the house.
Some ghosts did things out of a sense of blind mischief, like a child who doesn’t know better. That was not the case with this one. He seethed with malevolence and to be honest, I didn’t think his intention had been to merely choke me. I ran into a bedroom, slamming the door. Salt charged with my will went in front of the door. I considered using the heavy antique dresser as a barrier too but I didn’t want to trap myself.
I sat on the floor in a corner by the bed and went through my backpack. We’d tried a suped-up version of my usual ghost eviction rite with a few touches added from Rozella’s spell book. It worked so well we’d found ourselves split up and chased through the house. Which was to say, it worked not at all. My inventory consisted of various small bags of herbs and roots, two spare charged mojo hands, brass knuckles inlaid with a strip of silver across the top, a taser, a sheathed athame I rarely used, and a sandwich baggie with a special concoction I thought might be effective.
Grabbing the baggie and zipping the pack closed, I pulled my phone from a pocket and called Daniel. The hands-free device he’d clipped to his ear before we’d entered the house let him answer quickly.
“Fuck,” he screamed. Things must have been going just as well for him.
“I’m on the second floor.” Items on the dresser began to dance across its surface, a few decorative glass bottles crashing to the hardwood floor.
“On my way.” The line went dead.
Cold energy filled the room as the temperature dropped. Ghostly hands and faces given form by the wallpaper bulged in multiple spots on the walls. One knocked a painting to the floor, a corner of the frame cracking. The expressions were hard to read but they were transmitting their intention at full volume on a clear channel. They wanted out of this house as much as I did, but something was holding them here. Taking refuge in this room was not a sustainable option. As soon as Daniel arrived we needed to find a way out of the house.
The door knob rattled.
“Bubba?”
No answer. I slid across the floor, testing the knob with my hand. It wasn’t as bad as laying my palm on a hot stove eye, but it was pretty close. Yanking my hand away, I swore. The walls continued to ripple but nothing attacked. That double dose of mojo in the backpack seemed to be doing its job, mostly. There was at least one spirit in the house too strong to be deterred by something like that for long and he was the one scratching at the door. The door I would have to open to let Daniel in, or myself out.
There was a lot Daniel could help me with in tough evictions. Handling the really effective herbs, the stuff that provided major protective mojo, was out of the question. That stuff would repel or hurt a vampire just as much as it would anything else. Not only could he not touch the stuff, but I had to be careful about tossing it around in his presence. I didn’t want to hurt him or make him angry when his adrenaline was already up. Waving a bloody steak at a predator was never a good idea, no matter how domesticated they might seem.
This handicap had led Daniel to adapt a few methods of his own. His favorite was black salt or witch’s salt, a mixture of sea salt, charcoal, iron shavings, and a little black and red pepper. It worked great as a fast and dirty repellant against ghosts and some other things and we’d mixed and ground a big container of it for him. Just throwing it at a ghost probably would have worked but that wasn’t enough for Daniel. No, he had to kick it up a notch and use a shotgun. I’d convinced him to save it as a last resort only to be used in dire emergencies. What concerned me was the possibility that our definitions of dire might not match up.
I didn’t have to wonder long if he’d use the shotgun. The blast echoed in the hallway, followed by him pounding on the door.
“Okay, okay.” With my boot I cleared the salt out of the way as I quickly rolled down my sleeve, wrapping the door knob in cloth to protect my hand from burning as I twisted it.
Daniel burst in the room and I slammed the door behind him. “Are you hurt?” A letter opener stuck out of his left shoulder at an odd angle. Blood on his face was the only evidence of cuts that had already healed. More blood stained his shirt.
“One of them chased me, the same one that ran me out yesterday. What did you see?”
He shook his head as if he didn’t want to tell me. “I don’t think everything here wants to be here.”
That tracked with the emotions I was picking up. There was as much fear as anger in the house. “Yeah, that’s what I’m getting. I can feel it. How can you tell?”
He yanked out the letter opener, letting it fall to the floor with a clang. “Ever seen one ghost hurt another ghost?”
Sickening dread leached through my veins. “No, but I’ve heard stories about ones that can.” Sweat slicked my skin as my nerves jangled. We had to get out, fast.
The spirits pressing through the wallpaper became more agitated, shaking pictures off the walls and tearing the paper. Their moans filled the room with a terrible racket. A chill shook me as the temperature dropped. Everything not nailed down began to move, rattling like a violent earthquake. Suddenly the spirits disappeared, leaving a taste of fear in their wake.
The door boomed open, a ghost I recognized filling the frame, one bad enough to make me wish for the soldier. He wore hand-sewn clothes from another time, washed out in that gray murky way of incorporeal beings. Except for the splashes of scarlet on his shirt and coat, his sallow face. The bloodstains shone like liquid rubies and leached out of his form to blend with the haze that covered the entire house. Malevolent energy flowed from him in a noxious wave.
The ghost’s form took on a more solid appearance, his familiar flat black eyes freight-training terror through my blood. My heart slammed out of control as I began to hyperventilate. I may have whispered no, or maybe it was a prayer that passed my lips. The ghost stretched his thin lips into a smile and I screamed.
Daniel erupted in flames. A roiling mass of orange and red fire obscured him from head to toe. Guttural cries of pain were the only response when I yelled his name. This would kill him in moments if I didn’t stop it.
I couldn’t make magic out of nothing. If I was going to pull a rabbit, I needed a hat to pull it from. That was one of the first lessons Rozella taught me. Another early lesson–the will of a powerful witch was one big fucking hat. None of the tools I had on me could touch this level of malfeasance. Not the mojo hands or the black salt or anything else. I reached deep inside to the high wire in me that ran heavy with magic, the energy a writhing living thing. I reached out of myself to capture energy from the earth underneath, the air I breathed, even the fire itself. Most of all, I reached for water. Calling it forth and bending it to my will, I filled the room with a downpour matching the ferocity of the rains that brought the flood.
I could only channel that much power for a bare twenty seconds but it felt like hours. It was long enough to send the ghost away and even more important, douse the flames covering Daniel. We dropped to the floor almost simultaneously. He sat on his knees, hugging himself and shaking. His flesh and clothes looked untouched by the fire.
The fire hadn’t been real. I sagged on the floor, coughing. “Bubba, we gotta go.”
Red unfurled from his aura, his eyes crackling with blood hunger. Fangs out, he said, “That thing set me on fire.”
“It made you think you were on fire. Made us both think it.” I climbed to my feet, grabbing on to a bedpost for help. “That’s what he’s good at.”
“You’ve seen him before?” The struggle for control was evident in his features.
“Yeah and we don’t have long until he comes back.” I started for the door. On top of everything else, now there would be water damage in Maple Hill. I felt bad about that but it couldn’t be helped.
Daniel rose, picking his shotgun out of the inch of water on the floor. “Fuck going through the house, I got a better idea.”
At this point I was too numb to feel the unease I should have. Daniel opened the window, popping out the screen and looking down. He held out his hand. “Just a flower bed. Come on.”
Now that hurt my pride. “I am not running away from some piss ant ghost.”
His only response was another “bitch please” look. I made a face. “Okay, so I will sometimes run away from ghosts. But I’m not jumping out of a window.”
