Her Last Whisper (18 page)

Michael’s clothes were as gray and burnt-looking as he was.

“So if this works I’m just supposed to run around naked afterward?”

“Drop your clothes in the tub. Maybe the spell will work on them, maybe it won’t.” Tam shot an exasperated glance at Charlie. “This would go faster if the spirit were cooperative.”

“Would you just
do it
?” Charlie hissed at Michael as Tam positioned the candles on the ledge surrounding the tub, with one on each corner at either side of the faucets, one on each side of the ledge about three quarters of the way up the tub, and one all by itself in the center of the ledge on the far end.

“Ah, hell,” Michael muttered. It was, Charlie knew, surrender. Despite everything, she almost had to smile as, standing inside the tub now, he turned his back and started to pull his shirt over his
head. Under some circumstances, it seemed, her big, bad ghost was surprisingly modest. Her smile quickly died as she saw how withered and discolored his usually breathtaking body was. What was happening to him was starting to remind her of—it came to her in an instant—the fate of Gollum, the corrupted creature from the
Lord of the Rings
books.

The comparison terrified her anew.

With the candles in place, Tam opened one of the containers and started sprinkling a substance—salt, Charlie saw—between the candles.

Now that she really looked at them, she realized that the candles had been set out in the shape of a classic pentagram and the salt would link them. When Tam finished, Michael would be imprisoned behind the barrier she was creating.

Charlie’s heart started beating faster. Like Tam, she’d always tried to distance herself from the darker edges of the supernatural world. Practicing voodoo with dead chicken parts and pentagrams in a hotel room was a pretty good step beyond the boundaries of what she was comfortable with.

“That salt?” Michael inquired of Tam. Of course he knew what the salt was for.

“Yes.” Tam’s tone wasn’t encouraging.

“There a reason you’re locking me into this here tub?”

“There is. The barrier is there in case anything goes wrong. In case the pain is so bad you try to flee. In case something else comes through, so that it cannot get out into the room. In case you should lose your mind and try to attack me.”

“Shit,” Michael said, his eyes seeking Charlie.

“It’s the only way,” she told him. “It’ll work.”

It has to
. But she said that only to herself.

“Would you turn off the light, please?” Tam asked, before her gaze swung back toward Michael. “And you, spirit, finish undressing. Quickly.”

“Shit,” Michael said again.

A small orange flame appearing out of nowhere captured Charlie’s attention even as she turned off the light and plunged the room
into total darkness. Having apparently just dug a cigarette lighter out of the bag, Tam had flicked it to life and was at that moment touching it to the candle nearest her. Long shadows leaped up the walls and danced across the floor as the wick lit.

Charlie felt her insides twist. Her mouth went dry, and she swallowed hard.

Tam was about to begin the spell. Charlie couldn’t even let herself think about what would happen if it didn’t work. Maybe it was wrong to pray for an apparently damned soul, but—

This was Michael.
Please God
—

“Babe. One more thing: you need to pack up your stuff and get the hell out of the Ridge and stay out of it.” Michael was talking fast again as he pulled off his boots; it was clear from the urgency of his tone that what he was telling her was something he thought she might need to know if he was no longer around. “There was Hendricks, then me, then Spivey today. That’s three death row inmates dying violently in less than four months. Something ain’t right about that, and you don’t want any part of it. You hear me?”

Charlie only linked the three deaths as he spoke, and then the wrongness of it hit her like a thunderclap. Ordinarily, she thought, she would have noticed sooner, but then, she’d been distracted. By Michael. Which she still was. Which made the deaths at the Ridge just that much more material to be shoved into her mental
stuff to think about later
file.

“I hear you.” At this point, she was prepared to agree with anything he said.

“Death row inmate?” Having finished lighting the third candle, Tam straightened to frown at Charlie. “The spirit was on death row?”

“Does it matter?” By this time, Charlie was so anxious that she was practically chewing her nails. She realized from Tam’s tone that the news ratcheted up the other woman’s misgivings about what she was about to do to a whole new level, and groaned inwardly. “He isn’t guilty of what he was charged with, okay?”

“There you go,” Michael said in an approving tone. “That’s what I’ve been waiting to hear.”

Except for throwing an exasperated glance his way—it was too shadowy to see much more of him than a large shape, but she didn’t think he’d yet shucked the jeans—Charlie ignored that. Instead, she concentrated on Tam.

Tam, who was now frowning heavily, had just let the flame on the lighter die. Even as the scent of lilac from the burning candles started to fill the air, Charlie knew that Tam’s cooperation hung in the balance.

“Cherie,” Tam said in a low, earnest voice. “This spell, if it works, may increase the darkness in him. Sometimes those who are evil grow in strength from it. Please, I’m asking you, let him go.”

“He doesn’t deserve what’s happening to him,” she told Tam fiercely. “I know him. I vouch for him. He is—was—a good man.”

Michael said, “Babe, I’m touched. You just made my heart go pitter-pat.”

“Shut up,” Charlie snapped as Tam threw him a doubting look. “You’re not helping. And take off your pants.”

She didn’t watch to see if he obeyed. Her attention was all on Tam.

“I’ve forgotten something,” Tam said. Her fingers curled tightly around the unlit lighter. “For this to succeed, I have to have something of his—a personal item. Hair, fingernail clippings, a favored possession. Something that was his in life.”

Charlie held Tam’s gaze. She knew her friend well. A direct refusal to help would never be Tam’s way. Just as she preferred to avoid the dark areas of the supernatural world, she preferred to avoid the unpleasant facets of the human one, such as open confrontation. Tam’s expression told Charlie as plainly as words could have that this supposed hitch in the plan was, in fact, a last-ditch effort on Tam’s part to save Charlie from herself.

“We’re in luck,” Charlie said. “I have his watch.”

Tam’s lips compressed as Charlie slipped the heavy metal bracelet off her arm and held it out. From the other woman’s expression, Charlie knew that she’d been right. Tam looked at the watch, but didn’t take it.

“He’s important to me,” Charlie said quietly, and waited for
Michael to say something jokey. He didn’t, and she didn’t so much as glance in his direction. Instead she held Tam’s gaze. “If he gets destroyed in this way, it will break my heart.”

Tam looked at her for an instant, then made a face. “We women, we are all of us fools,” she muttered with disgust, and took the watch. Then she flicked the lighter back on, and turned to light the remaining candles.

Charlie let out an inner sigh of relief.

“I saw the white light you’re always talking about, when you drowned,” Michael said as Tam lit the fifth candle. His admission surprised her: Michael had never believed in the existence of the white light that greeted most souls when they died, and for him to have seen it was surprising enough to overcome her reluctance to look at him. Still, Charlie met those black, soulless eyes almost unwillingly. Admitting emotion never came easily to her, and admitting how she felt about him to Michael seemed about as smart as playing Russian roulette with a fully loaded gun. He’d managed to jackhammer his way into her heart because of his looks, she told herself firmly, because he was gorgeous and for some reason he was apparently her particular brand of sexual catnip; and by an inexplicable quirk of chemistry, sex with him was absolutely phenomenal.
That’s all it is, an intense physical attraction
. Then she looked at him standing there in the tub. Naked now and barely veiled by shadows, he looked so unlike himself, so
not
the tawny-gold Greek god–looking guy who’d spent the last six weeks or so rocking her world, that she should have had at least an instant of clarity, an instant of revulsion where the truth of what he actually meant to her became glaringly apparent, but she didn’t. He was scary and burnt and damaged, and his voice was so hoarse and changed that it was almost unrecognizable, and his eyes burned like they were looking at her straight out of the bowels of hell, and still she trembled on the brink of losing her heart to him.

Taking a deep breath, she tried to push the knowledge out of her mind. Some things it was better not to face.

She could smell the scent of lilacs, feel the energy, palpable as a rising wind, building in the room.

Michael was still talking to her. His voice was low and rough,
and his words were hurried, as if he feared they were running out of time, which they were.

“The light came for you, not for me,” Michael said. “You tried to get me to walk into it with you, before you went back to your body. After you left, it was still there. I could feel it beckoning at me. I thought about trying it out, seeing if it would take me to wherever. You know why I didn’t? I didn’t want to leave you.”

Charlie’s heart pounded like it was trying to beat its way out of her chest. She looked at him, and she couldn’t breathe. She knew what he wasn’t saying to her: the same thing she wasn’t saying to him.

I think I’ve fallen in love with you
.

It was the last thing she’d ever wanted to happen. The last thing she’d ever dreamed could happen. But in that moment, she found the certainty that she was striding full-steam ahead into disaster just didn’t matter.

All that mattered was him.

“Michael—” Her heart was in her voice.

“Oh, my God, are you really going to play out this Romeo and Juliet thing with him
now
? There is no
time
.” Tam’s exasperation as she rounded on Charlie was palpable. “You need to leave us. Go on.
Shoo.
”

“But—” Charlie protested, while Michael said, “Wait.”

“I need to concentrate.” Tam interrupted them both ruthlessly. Taking Charlie’s arm, she walked her to the door. “You’ll just be a distraction.”

Panicking slightly, Charlie looked back over her shoulder. “Michael—”

“I’ll be all right. Babe, I—”

“If I screw this up he’ll be toast,” Tam told her grimly, opening the door.

“—don’t regret a thing,” Michael finished. “Whatever happens, it’s all good.”

“Go,”
Tam ordered, and thrust her through the door.

“I’ll be right outside,” she told Michael as Tam closed it on her. Charlie heard the
click
as Tam locked it.

For a moment she just stood there looking at the closed door.
She could almost hear the
throm
of the spell gathering on the other side. (And yes, as she had learned from her association with Tam and her mother, spells make their own sound.) Her heart reached out to Michael, her fingers closed around the doorknob, and then she accepted the fact that whatever happened was out of her hands, that there was nothing she could do.

She had no idea how long she stood there in the starlit bedroom, one hand on the knob, her cheek resting against the smooth wooden panel, watching hazy fingers of orange candlelight reaching through the crack under the door. She heard Tam say, “Michael Allen Garland,” sharply. A deep, guttural groan—Michael?—followed that. Then Tam’s voice began rising in a chant. Even though she listened intently, Charlie was only able to hear the words in intermittent bursts.

“Spiritus anime mei,”
Tam intoned, and then, a little later and far more loudly, “
Flamma, aqua, terra, aeris
, quintessence.”

That last was accompanied by a muffled
boom
, and a bright flash of light that was visible as a red sunburst flaring out from under the door. It was followed seconds later by the strong, unmistakable odor of sulfur.

Charlie caught her breath. She felt her blood drain toward her toes. That smell, for her, was irretrievably associated with the weeks she’d spent years ago visiting Tam in New Orleans, when Tam several times had taken her out to the murky reaches of some swamp or another to watch her mother at work. In the instance Charlie remembered best, it had been midnight, full moon, the whole foggy, spooky swamp deal, and Madame Zora, as everyone except Tam called her mother, had been engaged in what Tam had explained in a whisper was casting a demon back into hell. There had certainly been something trapped in the center of the fiery circle Madame Zora had created, something that snarled and growled and finally shrieked as it vanished in a puff of malodorous smoke. That malodorous scent had been sulfur, and even as Charlie made the connection Michael screamed.

The sound cut through the night like a knife. It was so loud it seemed to explode through the walls, and anguished enough to make the hair stand up on the back of Charlie’s neck. It should have
brought half the hotel running, except she and Tam were the only people who could hear it.

“Michael,” she cried, trying the doorknob uselessly, listening in helpless terror as the last echoes of his scream died away. After that, there was nothing. The bathroom, as far as she could tell, was now dead silent. The candles seemed to have been extinguished. The red glow was gone. Darkness was all that could be seen in the crack under the door. Only the scent of sulfur remained.

The air was suddenly heavy with what felt like static electricity.

“Tam?” Charlie tried, rattling the doorknob. There was no response to that, either.

Goose bumps swept over her in a wave. Her heart pounded like she had been running. Her breathing came shallow and fast.

Then the doorknob turned beneath her hand.

Heart in her throat, Charlie stepped back.