Plague Cult (12 page)

“Zach’s an enchanter?” Ruth echoed. She’d met Shawn on the front porch on his return from town, and now trailed him inside.

“Yes. Where’s the grimoire?” Shawn was moving fast.

“On the coffee table in the parlor.”

From the doorway, she watched him pick it up and felt the flare of his magic. “It wasn’t enchanted. I tested it.”

“So did I, last night, but I want to be sure.”

Slipping into mage sight, she saw white light flare around the grimoire. “Zach probably couldn’t risk enchanting a book of spells. That is seriously dangerous. The spells can pick up the magic and twist.”

“We can’t assume Zach knows the rules and risks of the magic he uses.” Shawn put the book back on the table. “But it is clean.”

“I doubt Carla would have let it into Rose House if it wasn’t.” Ruth was coming to terms with having a ghost’s company. At least Carla was quiet—and currently, gone. “But an enchanter…that’s rare. I thought he’d be a mage or witch. Someone with minor magic.”

“I think Zach’s magic was minor originally. He probably used it in a small way at first. The Collegium briefing said he used to be a real estate agent. He could have enchanted the business cards he handed out to people, and used the cards to ensure he got their business and maybe a higher price.”

“Minor greedy magics.” Ruth walked over to the fireplace and added another log to the fire. “Then he wanted more. Possibly the market crash spooked him and he stretched his magic and found it could do more.”

“And now, he’s discovered the power boost of death magic.”

“Ugh.” She stirred the coals with a poker. Sparks flew upwards. “What do you think he wants to do with that power?”

Shawn shrugged. “I don’t much care.”

“You don’t think it matters?” She set the poker aside.

“Not immediately. Do you have an idea how you can undo the curse Whitney set?”

She came back to the coffee table and picked up the grimoire. “The spell is basic. It would fade with time if Whitney didn’t have the cult repeating the chant every three days. That extends its life.”

“Otherwise it would need another sacrifice?”

“Yes.” She sighed. “The irony is that if Zach hadn’t drained the energy of the death of Whitney’s first victim from her, the spell would be much stronger.”

“I won’t be thanking him.” Shawn rolled his shoulders, stretched and paced to the window. He looked out through the uncurtained window, out across the wet garden to the road. “Zach being an enchanter makes everything more complicated.” There was a warning in his voice.

Ruth didn’t need it. She’d already realized that her simple plan for shutting down the spell couldn’t be risked, now. “Zach being an enchanter explains how he could set both the original compulsion for Whitney to try the death magic spell, and the ongoing method of draining the spell’s power through her to him. She must be wearing an object or objects to tie her to him.”

“Her wedding ring,” Shawn said heavily. He turned from the window to face Ruth. “I thought of it on the drive home. What wouldn’t Whitney ever take off? Zach probably enchanted it years ago as a way to control her.”

“That’s evil.” Ruth caught herself. Of course it was evil. It was what Shawn’s hollerider nature had detected all along: Zach was evil. “But to do that to your wife.” She hugged her arms around herself.

Shawn crossed the room to her and rubbed her arms.

The comforting gesture helped, a bit. She looked up at him. “If Zach has enchanted Whitney’s wedding ring to control her, it’s incredibly intimate, woven into her psyche and aura.”

“And possibly shaping it.” He tugged Ruth against him.

She welcomed his warmth and strength. “Vengeance,” she whispered. “Oh dear heaven. What if Zach set all of it up, including the presence of the one man he knew Whitney hated, her friend’s user husband?”

“If he didn’t, then coincidence was mighty obliging to him.”

Now, Ruth understood why Shawn was so tense, and his mood ominous. “You think Zach is setting Whitney up to unleash a plague.”

“Think of it from his perspective. A plague would bring him endless power from death after death.”

“It’s a nightmare. It would destroy Whitney. Her sanity couldn’t survive the corrosive passing of all that death magic through her.” Ruth’s healer’s nature was appalled.

“Which is why Zach used Whitney rather than set the spell himself,” Shawn said.

“Dear God.”

They ate baked potatoes, wrapped in foil and tucked into the coals of the fire, and steak that Shawn grilled over the flames.

“We are never doing this again,” Ruth said, as the fat from the steak spit in the fire and the smoke had a greasy taste. “If the curtains were still up, they’d smell of that grease.”

“Once won’t hurt,” Shawn said easily.

Outside, the rain had settled into a stormy night. The wind howled and was the reason Ruth hadn’t tried to set up on the porch the portable barbeque her dad had brought over that morning. Nor had she or Shawn wanted to go into town for a meal.

They could have eaten in the dining room, but the fire made the parlor cozy, so they sat on the floor and ate at the coffee table, clearing away quickly and going back to the work they had scattered around their individual armchairs.

Shawn had a notepad that he brainstormed in, jotting notes with emphatic arrows, before tearing off each page, crumpling it, and throwing it in the fire. A couple of sheets weren’t consigned to the fire, but lay on the floor by his feet.

Ruth worked on her laptop, calling up reference material from the Collegium database and amending her plan accordingly. Enchanted objects could acquire a personality of their own, twisting with the patterns of use they were subject to.

A wedding ring, its hopeful promise perverted, could be dangerous.

Ruth couldn’t guess what would happen if Whitney learned of Zach’s treachery before they could break the curse. What if she channeled vengeance through the ring at Zach, who’d enchanted and used the ring to drain power from her?

So many variables, and Ruth was just guessing—although the odds were high—that he had enchanted the ring and not something else. It wasn’t possible to enchant a person, but could you enchant breast implants?

Ordinarily reversing a curse was simple. A mage either cleansed it or reversed it. But a curse powered by death magic needed more than salt to purify it, and reversing it was out of the question. She was a healer: she prevented death, not caused it. And then, there was the complication of multiple people being involved in maintaining this curse. Dismantling the curse had to include freeing the cult members of its taint.

That afternoon, after Thelma and the Granger sisters departed, Ruth had half-outlined a plan for dealing with these complications, but the new information that Zach was an enchanter blasted that plan out of contention. The magic released when the curse was broken could lodge in an enchanted object if one had been linked to the curse’s operation. Such an object then became problematic in its own right. Ruth thought of the infamous Ice Queen’s Goblet and shivered.

So, she had to go back to first principles to dismantle the curse and its power.

First, the sacrifice, the jay bird Whitney had killed, would have to be disinterred and cleansed before being reburied. The tricky bit was with the curse deprived of its anchor, the bird’s corpse, the curse might try to re-anchor to Whitney’s wedding ring—if that was the enchanted object Zach used to control and drain power from his wife.

Easier was cleansing the cult members. Their participation in the curse had been unknowing. She’d smudge them or, if time required short cuts, shove them all in the river. Running water would cancel the curse’s light ties to them. She didn’t think they’d have suffered any long term damage; although Whitney would need the psychic damage to her aura healed. A person couldn’t be the conduit for death magic without incurring scars.

Ruth’s left knee jiggled as her thoughts circled unhappily around Zach. True, direct action against evil was Shawn’s strength and responsibility, but she had to work with Shawn on this mission.

Her phone rang and she nearly jumped out of her skin. “Hello? William.” Relief made his name a sigh. Her boss might be severe and demanding, but he was reliable. “Shawn’s here. I’ll put you on speaker.”

The two men exchanged brief greetings before William got down to business. “We’ve finally tracked down Theresa Valle, Whitney Stirling’s stepmother. The woman is in a detox center. She signed in under a false name, which is what took us so long. She is exhibiting a sudden onset of severe fever, difficulty breathing and irregular heartbeat.”

Ruth’s muscles tensed. Whitney had said she felt the wrench of the curse locking onto her stepmother, but Ruth had hoped she was wrong.

William’s voice remained calm. “The clock is ticking. This could be an ordinary fever related to the woman’s terrible state of health. Long term drug abuse is self-destructive. However, the healer on site—they are near Colorado—thinks the fever is magical. You need to stop the curse now, because the potential for plague is imminent.”

He hung up.

In slow motion, Ruth switched her phone back off speaker.

“Imminent?” Shawn watched her carefully controlled movements. “I don’t get it. If William has a healer with this Theresa Valle, even if she did become contagious, if her death did trigger a plague, the healer could contain it. At minimum, they can isolate the woman.”

“It doesn’t work like that.” Ruth crossed to the fire and held her hands to it. The flames darted red and orange, shimmering. “A plague would start here.” She looked at Shawn. “It would spread out from everyone who chanted the curse. By involving the cult members, Whitney changed the nature of the spell, from a single woman’s vengeance to something less calculable. Any one of the cult members who wanted vengeance against a person, who felt cheated or heart-broken, the curse would deliver it. If it becomes a plague, it will spontaneously infect the cult members’ perceived enemies first.”

“And they could be anyone, anywhere,” Shawn said slowly. “So we have to act, tonight.”

Ruth looked out the window at the storm. “Yes.”

“Okay.” He scrunched up all of his scribbled papers and tossed them around her, into the fire. “I’ve been thinking how to tackle this. We have two problems. Zach is mine. Cancelling the curse is yours.”

She nodded. The division of responsibility was clear to her, too.

“I need to deal with Zach first, since he’s actively hostile.” Which was the nature of evil. “Easy enough when I thought he was a mage, but an enchanter can store magic in things and hide them as latent traps. Zach has had time to booby-trap the cult’s compound. We entered and left safely last time, but he wasn’t present then, and he didn’t feel personally threatened.”

Studying the cool hazel gray of Shawn’s eyes, his determined expression and the coiled power in his body, Ruth thought that Zach wouldn’t even have to sense Shawn’s hollerider magic to be afraid. Shawn was already mentally engaged in combat, and he looked like a deadly warrior. Even the faded formality of the parlor didn’t lessen his impact.

“Walking into the compound tonight will be like crossing a minefield,” he continued. “I have the scent of Zach’s magic, and if I move carefully, I can avoid his enchantments. I have a theory on first steps for destroying the curse, but I need to check it with you.”

“Go on.”

“We don’t have a lot of time, especially because we don’t know what enchantments Zach has laid around his control of Whitney, and through her, of the curse. As a hollerider, I can move fast, and by that, I mean cross the country from here to the compound in a minute.”

Ruth blinked.

“The world blurs around me. The fairytale of seven league boots is real for me. But I can’t take anyone with me.”

“I can’t stay here,” she said. “I need to be there to undo the curse. I need to monitor Whitney.”

“I’ll come back for you. We’ll take the truck. It’ll look natural…” He paused. “I’m going to blow up the main building at Healing Hearts Ranch. I’ll be back here a minute after you hear the explosion. We’ll drive there together, like everyone else will be doing.”

“Shawn, you can’t blow up the building!”

“A minor detonation to ensure Whitney and Zach wake up and get out. Then a major boom and I’ll burn the place to the ground. That’s why I need to be there, to confirm a safe explosion. Fire will cancel the sacrifice of the bird, and disrupt the curse.”

She couldn’t comprehend the drama of his decision. “Isn’t there something…smaller scale?”

“Not with as great a chance of success, and not in the timeframe. We need to act, now. I can translocate in explosive materials. Explosions are bewildering to civilians. Zach’s confusion will give us an edge, and later, the FBI will believe that the leader of a cult-like group might stockpile explosives. They’ll begin investigating Zach.”

“What will they find?”

Shawn grinned at her, a fierce, satisfied smile. “I had a friend in the Forecasting Department at the Collegium look into Zach’s financials. He got back to me an hour ago with a more thorough investigation than the briefing William provided us.”

Ruth felt an obscure need to defend her boss. “It was only preliminary, background material. William didn’t know Zach was responsible for the curse.”

Shawn waved that aside. “The point is, Zach isn’t as clever as he thinks he is. He’s taken money from cult members and stashed it in an offshore bank account. Apart from moral issues, there are taxes he should have paid, and hasn’t. There are also other revenue streams that Brian’s investigating for me. Zach is investing in medical and disaster response companies.”

Her stomach went in to freefall, before rage restored her energy. “He’s a monster. He’s preparing to benefit financially from the plague he’s creating.”

“And we’re going to stop him.”