Chain of Souls (Salem VI) (2 page)

WHEN JOHN ANDREWS WALKED DOWNSTAIRS THE
next morning to make coffee, he stopped at the bottom of the staircase and looked into the living room at the portrait of his ancestor, Rebecca Nurse.

"Please talk to me," he said, gazing up at the painting.

Just like almost any portrait of a Puritan woman, Rebecca Nurse was unquestionably not pretty in her black dress with a high white collar. She sat in a rocking chair working on a piece of embroidery as her unsmiling face gazed out of the portrait.

Until very recently, John had hated the portrait, which had come as part of the furnishings of the house he'd inherited from his great aunt. His aunt's one condition on giving him the house had been that Rebecca's portrait had to remain hanging in the house. For years John had never understood his aunt's reasoning, but he had honored that condition, hanging the portrait out of sight.

He used to joke that Rebecca Nurse had been "as ugly as a Rottweiler with a sore ass," but that was before the spirit of Rebecca Nurse helped him avenge the murder of his late wife. Until a few weeks ago, John Andrews would have scoffed at the idea of spirits, and when Rebecca first appeared to him, he had feared he was losing his mind. However, after the events of the past few weeks, his cynicism, or what he might have called his reporter's skepticism, had been totally demolished. He no longer had any doubt spirits existed or that they could communicate with the living, or, for that matter, that Devil worshippers had been living around him in Salem.

It turned out the Coven had operated in Salem for the past three hundred years and been responsible not only for the Salem witch trials, of which Rebecca Nurse had been the final victim, but also for countless blood sacrifices over the intervening centuries. John Andrews knew he was a man whose sense of certainty about everything in life had been badly weakened.

In fact, he now acknowledged that the spirit of Rebecca Nurse was the reason he had survived the events of the past month. She had been the key to unlocking the Coven's foul secrets and had shown him the secret door that allowed him to attack them in their underground lair. In so doing she had opened him up to the mystical or spiritual power—whatever it had been, he still had no idea what to call it—that had allowed him to kill the leaders of the Coven. As a result, John had moved Rebecca's portrait and it now hung where it belonged, in the place of highest respect and visibility in his home, right above the mantelshelf.

Having spent his professional life as a journalist, Andrews had been armored with a heavy sense of skepticism and doubt that would have made it nearly impossible for anyone to convince him of the things he had now experienced personally. These days he not only believed that the spirits of the dead could communicate with the living, he actually missed having that communication and wished Rebecca Nurse would continue to guide him as she had in the days when they struggled together against the Salem Coven. However, as if their victory over the Coven had somehow released her spirit to go wherever spirits went when they were at peace, Rebecca Nurse remained silent as she had in the days following Andrews's final battle with the Salem Coven.

Andrews stood in front of the painting for another few seconds. "Not talking to me again today? You even there any more, or have you gone on permanent vacation? Not that you don't deserve a permanent vacation, of course, after everything that happened to you. I hope you're someplace with palm trees and a nice beach and people to bring you those little drinks with umbrellas in them. And no offense, but I hope you can finally get out of those heavy black clothes, maybe get some shorts and sandals." Finally, he shrugged, knowing anyone who overheard him would think he was absolutely nuts, and he went to the front door to bring in the morning papers. He grabbed
The New York Times, Wall Street Journal,
and
Washington Post,
tossed them onto the counter, went to the coffeemaker and hit the on button then went back, pulled the papers from their plastic tubes and started scanning the morning headlines.

He always read
The New York Times
first and skimmed over the paper's descriptions of disasters and conflicts around the world: another battle in Afghanistan, a car bombing in Iraq targeting Shiites, flooding in Thailand, a riot over growing unemployment in Spain. Strangely, when Andrews read world events, he actually found they relaxed him. At least these were straightforward things that happened month in and month out, year after year. A man could deal with wars and famines and floods, he joked to himself, but not with Satan-worshipping Covens doing blood sacrifices in his own backyard.

As the aroma of brewing coffee filled the kitchen Andrews started to feel better, and his memory of the nightmare that had awakened him a short time earlier faded from his memory. That was when he turned the page and saw the article about a drought in Great Britain. Something about it nagged at him, and he saw the girl from his dream again, her footsteps kicking up small puffs of dust. The dream's setting with the rural lane, the stone wall along the road, and the grassy hillside with herds of sheep had been so quintessentially British, all except for the dryness.

The other thing that troubled him was that he had been so preoccupied recently with matters closer to home he didn't think he'd even been aware the U.K. was suffering a drought. So why would he have dreamed it? Was it just some massive coincidence? Did the dream mean something, or was it simply a bad dream? He couldn't shake the feeling it actually meant something, and the whole thing gave him chills.

He stepped over to where he had his cell phone on the charger to look up the number for Captain Andrew Card. Card was a Massachusetts State Police detective John had taken down into the warren of underground passages in order to show Card where he had fought and killed the leaders of the Coven. However, when they had reached the room where the fight took place, John had been shocked to find that the dead bodies and all the other evidence had been removed. As stupefied as John had been, Card had seemed unsurprised, and that was when he had let slip the fact that he knew far more about the Covens and Devil worship than he had previously admitted.

John had tried to call Card several other times since they'd discovered the bodies were missing, but Card had never returned his calls. John assumed the detective was extremely busy, and that he'd also probably assumed John wanted to talk things out, rehash what had happened and ask a lot of questions Card might be unwilling to answer.

Still, those questions had been eating at him. How much more did Card know? Why wasn't he willing to be more forthcoming? John needed answers, not only because the journalist inside him craved information, but also because what he had said to Amy earlier in bed was true. It wasn't over. He felt it in his guts like an essential truth, but he couldn't say why. He needed someone who knew more than he did to help him understand, but there was no doubt in his mind the danger still existed. It wasn't as close as it had been, but it was out there in the darkness. His nightmare had been a reminder of that truth, but was it more? Was it an omen of something in the future or a warning he should act on now? He needed to know these things. As foolish as he might sound recounting all this to anyone else, he was willing to take the risk, and Card was the only person John could think of to call. Card's cell phone rang until a recording asked John to leave a message.

"Andrew," John said, leaving another message. "I had a dream last night and . . . look, I know this sounds totally hysterical, but I'm pretty sure I was seeing a girl who was about to be taken by the Coven. But it wasn't this Coven; it was a different one, someplace else. Maybe in England, but I can't be certain. It looked like England, but it could have been a lot of places. I don't know who else to tell this to. Please call me."

AN HOUR LATER, AFTER SEVERAL CUPS OF STRONG
coffee, John shoved his concern about the nightmare into the background and forgot about the Coven enough to focus on what he liked to call "the real world," which for him was the
Salem News,
the daily paper where he was executive editor.

A few minutes before eight, with his pulse almost in the normal range, he and Amy walked out the door and headed up Pickering Wharf in the direction of the paper's offices. Finally able to get out of his own head, John noticed Amy had been unusually quiet that morning. She had come downstairs just a few minutes before they needed to leave, grabbed a quick cup of coffee, and swallowed it fast. Since their relationship was so new, having blossomed only in the past week or two into something much more than friendship, John wasn't sure how to interpret her silence or what, if anything, to say or do.

Now as they walked along Salem's streets of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century houses, Amy held her arms tight across her chest, perhaps because of the early morning chill and damp wind that gusted off the Atlantic, but perhaps because she was upset.

"Something the matter?" John asked after they had gone a block in silence.

"What did you mean when you said it's not over?" she asked.

He took a deep breath, wondering how much he should tell her. It wasn't that he wanted to keep anything from her, quite the opposite in fact, but he knew how much of a terrible shock she had been through, nearly losing her life to the Coven in a blood sacrifice, and he was reluctant to burden her with more. He glanced at her hands, still bandaged from where Cabby Corwin had cut them in the first stages of the sacrifice.

She caught him looking and said in a sharper tone, "What did you mean, John?"

He shook his head and blew out the breath he'd been holding. "I saw something in my dream last night, a girl walking along a country lane. It wasn't local; it was some other part of the world, but she was walking into terrible danger."

"It was a nightmare."

"Yes," he said in a halting voice.

"But you think it was real somehow, don't you?"

He ran a hand over his face. "I can't help but think . . . I just don't know."

"John," she said, laying a hand on his arm, "you've been through unbelievable stress. We both have."

"I know," he said, wanting to believe that she was right and stress was the cause, "but I keep thinking about my last conversation with Andrew Card."

Amy nodded. "And he told you there are Covens other places."

"Yes."

"But they're not here. That counts for something."

John shook his head. "That's not true. I killed the leaders of the Coven, but I'm sure that wasn't all of them. We have no idea how many others there are. Rich Harvey, my
friend,
was one of them. I look around this city and every person I see, I wonder if they're a member of the Coven. I wonder who I can trust, who I'll ever be able to trust."

"You sound paranoid."

"That's because I
am
paranoid. Aren't you?"

She was quiet for half a block before she said, "Yes, I'm feeling very paranoid, too, but it really pisses me off. I don't want to worry that every person in this town might be a secret Devil worshipper. I don't want to think that this is just
our
problem."

"You're suggesting that we're supposed to ignore them?"

She shook her head and looked at the ground. "No, of course not. I just feel like these people have invaded our lives, and I want them gone. I want the world to be what I always thought it was before a week ago, a place where there were a few bad people but mostly good people and the Devil didn't really exist."

"But the world wasn't
really
that way at all. We just thought it was. Do you really want to be ignorant?"

She let out a humorless laugh and put her arm through his and gave it a squeeze. "No, but I also don't want to be looking over my shoulder for the rest of my life, wondering if the person behind me on the sidewalk or in the supermarket line is really a Devil worshipper who wants to kidnap me and kill me in a blood sacrifice."

"So, how do we keep from letting that happen?"

Amy shook her head, but then she seemed to get a fresh burst of spirit. "Tell me about your dream. Where did you think this girl was? Vermont?"

John shook his head. "It could have been, but I'm pretty sure it was England."

"Why England?"

"I don't know, maybe the stone walls or the hills and the sheep, maybe the gray sky."

"Where in England?"

"Haven't got a clue."

He felt a shudder go through her, and she asked, "What do you think you're supposed to do about dreams like that?"

"I don't know."

The walked another half block in silence, but then Amy let out a reluctant sigh. "You're right. If you have dreams like that and you think they're real, you can't just do nothing."

John nodded, finally putting words to what had been bothering him since he woke up. "I know. If I try to ignore them, they'll drive me insane, but how do I do something to save a girl who's walking on a road and I don't know where in the world it is?"