Bone Cold: A Soul Shamans Novel (Volume 2) (18 page)

“Well, because we saw him inside her house.”

“Did she have him tied up? Did he look like he was in immediate danger?”

“No, but there’s no way he’d just be there.” I frowned into the phone. “He got attacked in the cemetery, so it’s obvious she’s targeting him for this spirit thing she’s doing.”

“Look.” Constantine sighed heavily into the phone. “I saw this girl. It’s clear she isn’t a shaman, so it’s impossible for her to be in possession of a way to control spirits. I know this isn’t what you want to hear, but it’s the truth.”

“What are you saying?” It took all of my control not to shout into the phone, and my cell almost cracked under the pressure of my fisted palm.

“I’m saying that I’m here when there’s an emergency, but right now, it’s clear there’s no emergency.”

“She was doing some sort of creepy magic in the woods.” The anger boiled inside my head as I tried to fight the hysteria down. “She killed a rat. She burned those tarot cards. She’s not an innocent in this!”

“So you said.” Silence passed for several long moments while my pulse banged against my skull. This guy gave me a migraine that could rival a Hulk-sized fist to the head. Didn’t he realize I wouldn’t want to hear his irritating voice unless I really needed his help? Why else would he think I’d call him? “I’ll talk to your dad about the situation. I don’t think he’ll want to send the manpower to investigate a strange girl in the woods, but maybe he’ll make an exception for you.”

“So, you won’t come then.” I rolled my eyes at Laura who pressed her lips together so hard, they morphed into straight, white sticks.

“I said I’d talk to your father,” John said. “He’ll be the one to know if there’s any legitimate reason to be worried about a regular girl allegedly performing magic.”

“Instead of just taking my word for it.”

“I wasn’t there to see what you saw,” John said.

“Yeah, well, who’s fault is that? You’re the one who got the hell out of dodge when things got a little sticky.”

“You didn’t want my help,” Constantine shot back. “You made that abundantly clear. So, all I have now is the word of a girl with an overactive imagination.”

“Overactive imagination?” I barked out a laugh. “You don’t know me
at all
.”

“No, and you made damn well certain I never will.” A click reverberated in my ear, and I let out a grunt as I slammed my phone against my thigh. Constantine might be the most irritating person I’d ever met, and that included Anthony Freaking Lombardi, who was haunting me from his grave.

“So, I’m guessing that conversation didn’t go well?” Laura asked, raising her eyebrows as she brought me a fresh mug of coffee.

“That guy.” Standing, I snatched the coffee mug and squeezed it with white-knuckled hands. “He refuses to come help because we didn’t obey his freakin’ stupid orders from earlier.”

“He’s not worth the anger.” Laura eased into the recliner and tucked her legs underneath her as she sipped at the warm liquid. “We’ll just have to come up with a plan on our own.”

“We need to find out how to counteract a witch’s spell,” I said. “And we need to get some sort of ammunition against George.”

Laura nodded. “I think if we could get ahold of directions for her spell, we could easily break it.”

“Yeah, she doesn’t know who she’s messing with.” My eyes narrowed as I reached for my laptop. Targeting my boyfriend was an express ticket to big trouble for George Proctor. She’d chosen the wrong shaman to mess with.

“Any idea how we’re going to find that info?” Laura asked.

“Yep,” I said with a bitter smile as I opened my laptop. “It’s time we took a field trip to Salem.”

CHAPTER 16

S
alem was only a half hour drive from Seaport, a nice little drive along the coast of Massachusetts. Even though I’d visited several times before, it’d always been with a bemused and skeptical mindset. The whole world viewed Salem as a joke of a tourist trap, but a fun one to play along with. Witches, potions, wands, and broomsticks were at every turn. All the trappings of the stereotypical magician. Things were different this time, though. I was beginning to realize there might be more to the world than I’d ever thought and that Salem’s history might be the key to all of that.

If shamans could exist and communicate with violent beings that lived on another plane of existence, why couldn’t some other type of magic-user exist, too? It didn’t take that big of a leap to get from shamans to witches or even to someone else entirely that I hadn’t though of yet. Mom would know, of course, but her phone continued to remain silent and still no matter how many times I tried to call.

The next morning, Laura and I decided to skip school and pack the truck full of shaman supplies for our trip to Salem, just in case, including the weapon Constantine had left behind for me. Even though he was turning out to be more of a dick than I’d originally thought, at least he hadn’t taken that away. Unless he’d forgotten to grab it during his hasty escape. That was probably the more likely scenario.

The morning drive was quiet, a heaviness hanging over the atmosphere in the truck. Leaving Seaport meant leaving Nathan, but there wasn’t much we could do for him without some more information. I didn’t know if George’s alarm system could tell her who exactly had set it off, but if it had, at least we wouldn’t be in Seaport if she decided to come calling.

We weren’t ready to face her yet, though a huge part of me ached for a confrontation, stat. One in which my fists would make friends with her eyeballs.

When we turned onto the main drag of Salem, my eyes drank in the sights I’d seen a dozen times before but never fully acknowledged. Shops hocking magical supplies of all kinds lined the streets, and everywhere I looked, there was something that spoke to the witchy events of the town’s past.

Laura slowed the truck and pulled into an empty parking spot just in front of a quaint shop that proclaimed to sell demon-repelling potions. Just off the the side, a crowd gathered around a snow-dusted witch handing out candy canes to squealing kids. Laura pointed at the shop sign and shrugged.

“Could be a good place to start?” Her voice turned high-pitched at the end, as if she was suddenly nervous to go snooping around into George’s past. I couldn’t blame her. If these people were indeed witches and were somehow in league with George, we could find ourselves neck-deep in dark magic trouble quicker than the Flash could run a marathon.

“Let’s try it,” I said with a nod before hopping out of the truck and into the arctic winter air. Blowing warm air on my hands, I approached the store with unease rippling through my veins. Maybe this was a bad idea. Just because George had fled from Salem didn’t mean these people would want to sell her out. Shaking my head to knock the nerves out of my brain, I pushed open the shop door, and a twinkling bell announced our presence to the smiling owner behind the counter.

I stopped short. Bright orange hair, fully-manicured nails, and a crooked smile painted onto fully pursed lips. She looked just like Wanda. Only not. There were subtle differences in this woman’s appearance. Where Wanda’s eyes were a light green, this woman’s were brown and pale. The forehead wrinkles were missing, as well as the deep spiderwebs that framed Wanda’s eyes. This woman was much younger, maybe a thirty-year-old version of the strange enigma who had set up shop in Seaport, Massachusetts. And who was now dead. Because of George.

The Wanda look-a-like glanced up when I approached the counter. Her smile lifted the corners of her lips, a genuine expression that looked nothing like Wanda’s all-knowing, creepy grin. She tapped a button on her cash register and slid the drawer shut. Everything was clean and tidy. No dirt, no cobwebs, no musty books advertising Dark Magicks. If it weren’t for the hair, I might never had made the connection to Wanda’s dust-painted store.

“How can I help you girls?” she asked, taking Laura and me in with one long sweeping gaze.

Like Wanda, this woman wasn’t a shaman, but she quickly adopted that ‘I know something’ look that Wanda always wore.

“Some chicken bones, perhaps?” she asked in a chirpy voice. “I believe I have a few left in stock.”

Laura stiffened beside me, but I decided to freeze my face in a mask of indifference.

“No, we’re actually looking for the reverse of a particular spell,” I said, keeping my voice smooth. “We need to undo something that was cast by a…witch?”

The lighthearted expression fell away. “I see. I’m not sure I can help you with that. As you can see, my shop specializes in demon deterrents.”

She gestured toward the tidy shelves of herbal candles, parchment paper, and, strangely enough, bones.

“This is really important.” Laura stepped closer to the counter. “This witch has trapped someone we care about behind a powerful invisible wall thing, and we need to get him out of there before she does something terrible to him.”

The woman cocked her head and pursed her lips. “You don’t know anything about the olde magicks, do you girls?”

Laura and I locked gazes while I tried to decide how much I would share with this stranger. The truth, as hard as it was to part with, might be the only way to gain the information we needed to break Nathan free.

“We know about shamanism,” I finally said, Laura nodding along with my words. “Which I think you’re aware of if you were offering us chicken bones. We don’t know about any other magic though. It’s only been in the past couple of days that we’ve found out there might be more of it than we thought.”

“Your eyes are beginning to open to the world around you,” the woman said with a slight nod. “This is a good thing.”

“There’s a new girl at school who used to live here in Salem,” Laura said. “We saw her cast some kind of spell in the woods last night at the same time we found out she’s trapped our friend behind this invisible wall. We just need some information to help us fight back.”

The woman sighed. “Your parents are the ones who should be explaining all of this to you girls.”

“Please.” I reached out and put one hand over hers. She flinched, but she didn’t pull away. “My boyfriend’s life is at stake.”

“Okay.” She pulled free of my grasp, sinking her elbows onto the counter and lowering her voice. “As I hope you know, shamanism developed in South America as a way to protect humanity from what you call spirits and what we call demons. Your magic enables you to communicate and control them. Am I correct in saying you know all of this?”

“Yep, we’ve got that covered,” Laura said.

“Good.” Her shoulders released some of their tension. “Unfortunately, your magic can sometimes cause an imbalance between our worlds, and the olde magicks were developed as a direct response to this.”

“What do you mean?” I frowned. Here was that balancing the universe nonsense again, something Mom had only mentioned to me in passing. Not that she’d explained much of anything of the shaman world.

“Nature needs balance. Those of us who use the olde magicks are able to control the elements in order to ensure balance. This sometimes means restoring it when shaman magic has caused a rift.” She paused and met our eyes to make sure we were still following. “Now, just as in shamanism, some sorcerers and sorceresses turn to the dark ways. It sounds to me like you’ve encountered one such sorceress.”

“But why would someone turn to the dark ways?” Laura asked. “What’s the whole point of it?”

The woman shrugged. “I can’t tell you this without knowing more. It’s different for every person. Most likely she’s after power and life. We’ve seen it hundreds of time. The allure of an infinite lifetime and all-consuming power is too much for some to resist. It’s intoxicating to those who find it.”

My mind immediately flicked to mental snapshots of Anthony Lombardi’s face. “We’ve seen the same thing with a shaman before.”

“Shamans and sorcerers aren’t so different.” She pushed off the counter and smiled. “We just have different ways of channeling magic and different purposes for existing.”

“So, then this wall spell we told you about,” Laura said, getting right back down to business. “Could a shaman break it somehow or does a witch have to do it?”

“Sorcerer.” The woman showed her teeth when she smiled, impossibly straight and pure white. “Or sorceress. And yes, I’m sorry to say that a shaman won’t be able to negate any spell that a sorceress has cast. Just as we’re unable negate a spell of yours. It’s something we’ve both long sought to change, but I suppose that’s nature’s way of ensuring neither of us has too much power over the other.”

Nathan
, my heart squeezed. I leaned forward and placed my hands flat on the counter. The woman didn’t pull away like I’d expected her to do. Instead, she brought her face only inches from mine and met my fierce gaze, her eyes unblinking.

“I know what you’re going to ask,” she said before I could open my mouth. “And the answer is no. I’m not going to get involved in a war between a sorceress and a shaman. That way leads to nothing but chaos.”

“This won’t become a war if we can get Nathan out of there,” I said. “Unharmed.”

“And it may become a war if you do,” she said. “Whatever reason this sorceress has behind keeping your friend captive, I’m certain she won’t be happy if you take that away from her. She’ll turn her wrath onto whoever had a part in destroying her plan, and that would include me if I helped.”