Plague Cult (16 page)

Last night, Ruth had broken Zach’s enchantment of Whitney’s ring by possessing it by shedding her blood. That was a mild form of what she intended to attempt, now. “I’ll explain later. If I survive.” It was meant to be a macabre joke, a whistling-in-the-wind challenge to fate, but the anguish that swept across Shawn’s face, the galvanic jerk of his body, removed all humor and left their emotions naked. “I have to, Shawn.”

He cupped the back of her head. “Come back to me.”

She smiled waveringly because he’d guessed what she intended. In a sense, she was leaving him. Forever, if she failed. She sank down, sitting cross-legged beside Whitney’s unconscious body, and put both hands five inches above the woman’s solar plexus.

Centuries ago the medieval Christian world had known a practice called sin-eating. The most abject of the poor and outcast had scrabbled for survival by taking on the eternal punishment, the damnation, of people who’d died unexpectedly. The families of the dead had paid for this non-atoning transfer of guilt with food and perhaps a coin. Ruth intended something similar to the legend of sin-eating. She would transfer the death magic that ran through Whitney and had created the lonely hearts plague to herself.

Once she owned the death magic, she had one chance to recall it.

She would have to surrender her own soul and body to death, and return.

Ruth entered the trance state that was half-magic and half-spirit. This was the realm of shamanism, where illogic revealed the deepest truths. She’d been here before. Three times. She recognized herself as the sunflower in the middle of an empty field. An empty field where the earth was tilled and ready for planting. Not desolate, but full of promise. Her flower face was turned to the sun and she absorbed its energy, floated in it.

It was a wrench, a major struggle that felt as if her roots were being pulled out of the ground, but she turned her face from the sun to face the darkness. And then her vision was sucked into a spiraling black hole.

In the real world, her palms froze as, extended over Whitney’s solar plexus, the death magic reached up and coiled around her hands.
More
. She had to absorb all of it.

She plunged fully into the trance state and walked in the dark night of the soul where despair howled. Her body was racked by invisible forces, the bones seeming to pull apart, the muscles to twist and writhe away from each other. Agony. It rattled through her, the pain that was death.

The darkness blazed red. Blood torrented down, bowing her sunflower self and flooding the earth. The ground washed away, and her roots sucked up blood, pumping it through the stem of the sunflower, discoloring her leaves and turning the flower face crimson. The death magic owned her, but she owned it.

She floated with it. Agonizingly slowly, her trance self shifted form. From blood-soaked sunflower, she became bacteria. A whole colony, a growing, spreading, microscopically beautiful construct of twisting patterns and replicating structure.

Oh, thank God.
It meant the she was one with the plague. She had followed the link to it that Whitney had forged, and now, it was hers. She felt it press against the containment ward Shawn held. The plague—she, as plague—was so hungry. Ravenous. She needed to eat, to consume, to claim the vengeance of her origin.

Her own magic surged, and punched the containment ward.

She screamed silently, tasting energy and recognizing Shawn’s.
No!

The plague’s hunger fought the spark of Ruth that survived. She clung to a vanishing sense of self. And it wasn’t enough. Again the plague struck the containment ward. A third strike and it would be through. Ruth couldn’t form the thought. She was emotion and instinct.

But strip away everything civilized and trained. Pare her back to her primitive self, and one truth shone silver against the dark blood of the plague. She loved Shawn. They had still to test and learn their relationship, but she already loved him.

She locked her last sense of self to the silver pool glimmering at the edge of her vision state. Silver for her hollerider, the huntsman of evil. She sent her energy into it and saw the silver pool widen and lengthen, and suddenly enclose the bacteria colony. Silver gleamed between the blood and the containment ward.

Shawn was safe.

But the pressure built.

The silver—the truth of her love for Shawn—helped Ruth return to herself. She was still within the plague, but she could think again. She could reason and remember.

The plague, her other self now, roiled within its cage. It would kill Mason and Peggy. It was too strong. Tightening the silver pool in this trance state, pulling it inwards, might strangle the plague, but not before the press of it claimed two of her family’s lives. She had to destroy the lonely hearts plague some other way.

When Shawn had masked her magic with his, they’d meshed.

She needed to mesh the silver energy of her love with the blood of the plague, and so crumble the plague from within. She concentrated and a million silver threads pierced the plague. The bacteria colony frayed, blotched and disintegrated. And she felt its dying. She was its dying.

Her heart stopped.

Ruth fell out of her trance state.

Her heart thumped.

Shawn was holding her. He was seated on the floor and she was in his arms, her back against his chest, completely wrapped in him. “Ruth?” His mouth was against her ear, his voice nearly soundless.

She turned her head, and they kissed. Her cold lips warmed. The flavor of him brought her fully back to consciousness. His energy returned vitality to her limbs gone cold. She scrambled around, onto her knees to hold him and hug him and be grateful she was alive. The pulse at the base of his throat was beautiful. Life.

“I have to help Mason and Aunt Peggy.” She wanted to stay in his arms. Did he love her? Did she love him in the forever kind of way? Who knew the future, but here and now, he’d been her lifeline. Her instinct said he always would be.

She sniffed unromantically, fighting tears of relief and exhaustion.

“Ruth?” Peggy’s voice. “I called you.”

For an instant, Shawn wouldn’t let her go. “Is the plague gone?” he asked too quietly for Peggy to hear.

“Yes.” She braced a hand on his shoulder to stand.

He was up an instant later and supporting her across to her aunt and cousin. Mason was still unconscious, but the flush of fever had faded and the sweat was drying on his face.

“Dear heaven. She really shot Zach.” Peggy hauled herself up by gripping the edge of the sofa and then its arm. “And I fainted like a ninny.” Embarrassment crumpled her face before she focused on Mason, who opened his eyes. Peggy patted his leg. “Are you okay?”

Shawn interrupted. “Ruth and I need to go. Don’t mention us when you call this into the sheriff,” he added.

Mason stared at him muzzily.

Peggy looked from Mason to Ruth. “There was a problem. Whitney was raving, so I phoned you.”

“There was a problem, but it’s fixed.” Ruth’s magic was exhausted, all she could do was check Peggy and Mason’s auras and relax to find them whole. They’d recover on their own, or the healers William sent could help them.

“Nearly fixed,” Shawn corrected. “I need to handle one more thing.”

Gosh
. She’d forgotten. The men, possibly mages, who were congregating at Lynx Lookout wanted to collect rings enchanted to control those around them. Zach’s evil couldn’t be allowed to outlive him. And in a bizarre irony, it would have gotten a boost from his death. Death magic didn’t care who it consumed. “We have to go.”
If my legs will move.

Shawn half-carried her out to the truck. She felt him use a flicker of magic to smudge the evidence that they’d ever been at Mason’s house.

“I’m taking you home.” His tone of voice was final.

If he expected an argument, he was wrong. “Thanks.” She was too tired to be anything other than a hindrance to him. “Are you fit to—”

His hollerider nature brushed against her aura, sparking.

She smiled tiredly. “Happy hunting.”

Shawn left Ruth and the truck at Rose House and blurred to Lynx Lookout. He didn’t waste power masking his magic, and so terror rode on the outskirts of his passing. He hoped that the terror that travelled before him would scatter the men gathering at the lookout, but he doubted it. Men who knew to enact an enchantment at a nexus—and who weren’t deterred by the FBI and other authorities swarming the area on the hunt for Zach—wouldn’t run from him.

More fool them.

Lynx Lookout was the highest point for miles around, but it was off the main roads, and difficult to access—by car. Blurring, Shawn was there in two minutes.

Twelve men, and Zach would have been the thirteenth.

They wore business suits or expensive sweaters and jeans. All ages, but all characterized by avidity. They were ravenous for power.

They’d sensed his approach. It showed in the stiff uneasiness of their posture and the way they glanced at each other and around. They stood in a rough circle, terrified.

Shawn halted. In mage sight he saw the symbols Zach had inscribed on the ground. The spell had the scent of the dead enchanter’s magic.

“Put on your rings,” a gray-haired man ordered.

“I want to know what’s out there, first.” A guy about Shawn’s age wasn’t taking orders from anyone. “And where’s Zach?”

“Haven’t you watched the news?” Mr. Sarcasm was short and chubby.

“Put your damn rings on,” the initial speaker snarled. “I don’t want to lose mine because you’re all gutless cowards.”

There was a wordless mutter of resentment, but everyone shoved on their rings.

“Now, the chant.”

Shawn wasn’t going to wait for the spell. There was evil here; low level but with the potential for so much worse. He flung his magic at the spell Zach had inscribed on the rocky ground.

It exploded.

Shawn just had time to recognize the irony that Zach’s old spell had exploded in his face, after he’d set up Zach’s fall from grace with the FBI via plastic explosives. Then the nexus ripped open.

Ruth sat in the truck, staring at the front of Rose House and not seeing it. Shawn had just vanished. She could feel the terror he left behind, the impact of his unmasked hollerider nature, but it didn’t affect her. What had her sitting there stunned, and what had kept her silent on the way home, was one thought.

At Mason’s house she’d become the plague, the essence of death and devastation, and her hollerider had still held her. The silver she’d seen in her trance hadn’t simply been her love for Shawn. It had been their love. He’d held her and given her the lifeline back from near-death to life.

Carla, however, hadn’t just experienced an epiphany. The ghost shouted impatiently from the front porch. “Ruth! Ruth, are you all right? Where has Shawn gone?”

Ruth opened the truck door and dropped to the ground, the thud of her feet hitting it jarred up through her bones and reminded her just how tired she was. “I’m fine. The plague is…I destroyed it.” She wished there was a railing on the porch steps. She’d have used it to pull herself up. As it was, she plodded up the five steps till she stood facing Carla. “Shawn has just gone to deal with a few possibly magical idiots before they cause trouble.”

With anyone else, after they’d held that containment ward, she’d have worried at them confronting the group of potential mages at Lynx Lookout. However, she’d checked Shawn’s aura during the drive and his magic wasn’t depleted. It was why she hadn’t fought his going alone. That, and he wouldn’t have listened—unless she’d lied and said she needed him to stay with her. And she’d never do that. She had too much self-respect, and too much hope for their long term relationship.

“Carla,” Ruth said wearily as the ghost stood between her and the door. “I need to sit down.” Lie down. Collapse. Whatever.

The ghost extended a hand, as if to help Ruth, then sighed. “Can’t touch you. I have the fire going in the parlor.”

“Thank—”

Boom!
Magic crashed, pouring across the country, rolling through town to Rose House and beyond.

Ruth spun around. “That’s from Lynx Lookout.” And it hadn’t felt like Shawn’s magic. “I have to…keys! Where did Shawn leave the…in the ignition!” She’d been too tired, and he too preoccupied. The key was still in the truck.

“Wait!”

Cold gripped Ruth’s elbow. Freezing cold, clamping and creeping through her veins. She whimpered.

Carla released her instantly. “I’m sorry. Sorry! But, please. Before you go to help Shawn. You said he went to fight mages.”

Shawn had thought they might be mages. The crash of magic pretty much confirmed it. “Yes,” Ruth said.

“Then you need to take this.”

“What?” Ruth couldn’t see that the ghost held anything, and for herself, she was desperate to go to Shawn.
I left him to fight alone.
He hadn’t left her to battle the plague alone.
I should have gone with him.
Only, she was so tired. What help could she be?

“It’s inside. I can’t tell you what it is. I can’t bring it to you. You have to go into the turret part of the parlor. I told you. I dropped hints.” Carla agitatedly pushed open the front door. “Please, you need this to fight evil.”

Ruth glanced towards Lynx Lookout. No further magic crashed towards her, but she didn’t know if that meant she should be relieved or worried. However, one thing was indisputable: she’d exhausted her own magic. Even with the nexus nearby, she didn’t know how much help she could give Shawn. If Carla truly had something that could help in the fight…Ruth stumbled after Carla into the parlor.