Red House (11 page)

I dialed voicemail. Blake’s voice filled me with longing.

“Roxie, I know you’re angry. I deserve your anger. I know that too. I knew it was wrong but I missed you so much. It feels like my whole life has spun out of control and I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.
 
All I know is I want to be with you. You wanna make me beg, I’ll do it. I’ll walk through fire for you. Just talk to me. Just let me make it up to you. Baby, please. Please.”

Astral projection was certainly something I knew about but had no experience with. The idea of my consciousness leaving my body did not sit well with me. Too fraught with potential danger, which was probably what attracted Blake to the practice. Even with his admission I was having a hard time accepting that he invaded my dreams. I believed he had the ability to do it, and the fluid morality to do that to someone without their express permission. The hard part to swallow was whatever bond existed between us wasn’t special enough to make him think twice before doing something so unethical to me. It made me question whether any bond existed at all. From the beginning I’d wanted to think we had more than just a physical attraction but maybe I was fooling myself.

No. I wasn’t fooling myself. That physical attraction made it harder to think clearly around him, harder to make smart decisions. But there was no denying there was something more between us. I just didn’t know if it meant enough to me to get past him doing something like this. Or if it meant enough to him to make him understand why he couldn’t do things like that to me.

I listened to the message, and a few others he’d left, just to hear the sound of his voice. Forgiving Blake would be easy. The trusting part, that would be the part that would get us in trouble.

An off-key chorus of
Louisiana Hot Sauce
alerted me to Daniel’s return. I snapped the phone shut and stood. “I’m driving.”

“The hell you say.” His mouth curled in a pout.

“And you will follow the rule.” That long-standing rule being, driver picks the music.

He cursed. “You’re gonna torture me with some emo crap.”

“Nope. Make you listen to Katy Perry.”

“What the hell did I do to you?”

“Quit your bitchin’ and go poke your head out the door. I’m ready to get this show on the road.”

Glaring, a hint of fang showing, he stalked to the door and flung it open. Silky warm air and blessed darkness lay on the other side. He stepped out onto the porch, the muscles of his shoulders visibly relaxing under his t-shirt. I picked up the backpack and followed.

The night folded around us, cradling us in a welcome familiarity. I should have been scared of the dark, knowing what sort of nasties went bumping around out there. Instead it drew me with a siren song of danger, the lure of the strange and the unknown. The vampire at my side was my family, the spirit-filled night my home. Taking Daniel’s hand, knowing he felt the same kinship with me and with the night, I led us into its embrace.

* * * *

The soldier’s ghost was easy to identify, especially since he was the one chasing me through the house. Taking the steps two at a time, I hurtled up the stairs with a mass of cold air hard at my heels. Sparing a glance over my shoulder as I rounded the corner at the top of the stairs, I saw a haze of watery gray framed by angry red. The red was part of what I thought of as the auric field but the rest was his uniform. Ester’s attacker, no doubt the same spirit who held me down and tried to choke me during my first visit to the house.

Some ghosts did things out of a sense of blind mischief, like a child who doesn’t know better. That was not the case with this one. He seethed with malevolence and to be honest, I didn’t think his intention had been to merely choke me. I ran into a bedroom, slamming the door. Salt charged with my will went in front of the door. I considered using the heavy antique dresser as a barrier too but I didn’t want to trap myself.

I sat on the floor in a corner by the bed and went through my backpack. We’d tried a suped-up version of my usual ghost eviction rite with a few touches added from Rozella’s spell book. It worked so well we’d found ourselves split up and chased through the house. Which was to say, it worked not at all. My inventory consisted of various small bags of herbs and roots, two spare charged mojo hands, brass knuckles inlaid with a strip of silver across the top, a taser, a sheathed athame I rarely used, and a sandwich baggie with a special concoction I thought might be effective.

Grabbing the baggie and zipping the pack closed, I pulled my phone from a pocket and called Daniel. The hands-free device he’d clipped to his ear before we’d entered the house let him answer quickly.

“Fuck,” he screamed. Things must have been going just as well for him.

“I’m on the second floor.” Items on the dresser began to dance across its surface, a few decorative glass bottles crashing to the hardwood floor.

“On my way.” The line went dead.

Cold energy filled the room as the temperature dropped. Ghostly hands and faces given form by the wallpaper bulged in multiple spots on the walls. One knocked a painting to the floor, a corner of the frame cracking. The expressions were hard to read but they were transmitting their intention at full volume on a clear channel. They wanted out of this house as much as I did, but something was holding them here. Taking refuge in this room was not a sustainable option. As soon as Daniel arrived we needed to find a way out of the house.

The door knob rattled.

“Bubba?”

No answer. I slid across the floor, testing the knob with my hand. It wasn’t as bad as laying my palm on a hot stove eye, but it was pretty close. Yanking my hand away, I swore. The walls continued to ripple but nothing attacked. That double dose of mojo in the backpack seemed to be doing its job, mostly. There was at least one spirit in the house too strong to be deterred by something like that for long and he was the one scratching at the door. The door I would have to open to let Daniel in, or myself out.

There was a lot Daniel could help me with in tough evictions. Handling the really effective herbs, the stuff that provided major protective mojo, was out of the question. That stuff would repel or hurt a vampire just as much as it would anything else. Not only could he not touch the stuff, but I had to be careful about tossing it around in his presence. I didn’t want to hurt him or make him angry when his adrenaline was already up. Waving a bloody steak at a predator was never a good idea, no matter how domesticated they might seem.

This handicap had led Daniel to adapt a few methods of his own. His favorite was black salt or witch’s salt, a mixture of sea salt, charcoal, iron shavings, and a little black and red pepper. It worked great as a fast and dirty repellant against ghosts and some other things and we’d mixed and ground a big container of it for him. Just throwing it at a ghost probably would have worked but that wasn’t enough for Daniel. No, he had to kick it up a notch and use a shotgun. I’d convinced him to save it as a last resort only to be used in dire emergencies. What concerned me was the possibility that our definitions of dire might not match up.

I didn’t have to wonder long if he’d use the shotgun. The blast echoed in the hallway, followed by him pounding on the door.

“Okay, okay.” With my boot I cleared the salt out of the way as I quickly rolled down my sleeve, wrapping the door knob in cloth to protect my hand from burning as I twisted it.

Daniel burst in the room and I slammed the door behind him. “Are you hurt?” A letter opener stuck out of his left shoulder at an odd angle. Blood on his face was the only evidence of cuts that had already healed. More blood stained his shirt.

“One of them chased me, the same one that ran me out yesterday. What did you see?”

He shook his head as if he didn’t want to tell me. “I don’t think everything here wants to be here.”

That tracked with the emotions I was picking up. There was as much fear as anger in the house. “Yeah, that’s what I’m getting. I can feel it. How can you tell?”

He yanked out the letter opener, letting it fall to the floor with a clang. “Ever seen one ghost hurt another ghost?”

Sickening dread leached through my veins. “No, but I’ve heard stories about ones that can.” Sweat slicked my skin as my nerves jangled. We had to get out, fast.

The spirits pressing through the wallpaper became more agitated, shaking pictures off the walls and tearing the paper. Their moans filled the room with a terrible racket. A chill shook me as the temperature dropped. Everything not nailed down began to move, rattling like a violent earthquake. Suddenly the spirits disappeared, leaving a taste of fear in their wake.

The door boomed open, a ghost I recognized filling the frame, one bad enough to make me wish for the soldier. He wore hand-sewn clothes from another time, washed out in that gray murky way of incorporeal beings. Except for the splashes of scarlet on his shirt and coat, his sallow face. The bloodstains shone like liquid rubies and leached out of his form to blend with the haze that covered the entire house. Malevolent energy flowed from him in a noxious wave.

The ghost’s form took on a more solid appearance, his familiar flat black eyes freight-training terror through my blood. My heart slammed out of control as I began to hyperventilate. I may have whispered no, or maybe it was a prayer that passed my lips. The ghost stretched his thin lips into a smile and I screamed.

Daniel erupted in flames. A roiling mass of orange and red fire obscured him from head to toe. Guttural cries of pain were the only response when I yelled his name. This would kill him in moments if I didn’t stop it.

I couldn’t make magic out of nothing. If I was going to pull a rabbit, I needed a hat to pull it from. That was one of the first lessons Rozella taught me. Another early lesson–the will of a powerful witch was one big fucking hat. None of the tools I had on me could touch this level of malfeasance. Not the mojo hands or the black salt or anything else. I reached deep inside to the high wire in me that ran heavy with magic, the energy a writhing living thing. I reached out of myself to capture energy from the earth underneath, the air I breathed, even the fire itself. Most of all, I reached for water. Calling it forth and bending it to my will, I filled the room with a downpour matching the ferocity of the rains that brought the flood.

I could only channel that much power for a bare twenty seconds but it felt like hours. It was long enough to send the ghost away and even more important, douse the flames covering Daniel. We dropped to the floor almost simultaneously. He sat on his knees, hugging himself and shaking. His flesh and clothes looked untouched by the fire.

The fire hadn’t been real. I sagged on the floor, coughing. “Bubba, we gotta go.”

Red unfurled from his aura, his eyes crackling with blood hunger. Fangs out, he said, “That thing set me on fire.”

“It made you think you were on fire. Made us both think it.” I climbed to my feet, grabbing on to a bedpost for help. “That’s what he’s good at.”

“You’ve seen him before?” The struggle for control was evident in his features.

“Yeah and we don’t have long until he comes back.” I started for the door. On top of everything else, now there would be water damage in Maple Hill. I felt bad about that but it couldn’t be helped.

Daniel rose, picking his shotgun out of the inch of water on the floor. “Fuck going through the house, I got a better idea.”

At this point I was too numb to feel the unease I should have. Daniel opened the window, popping out the screen and looking down. He held out his hand. “Just a flower bed. Come on.”

Now that hurt my pride. “I am not running away from some piss ant ghost.”

His only response was another “bitch please” look. I made a face. “Okay, so I will sometimes run away from ghosts. But I’m not jumping out of a window.”

“That thing turned me into a bonfire. I say we get out the quickest way we can before he comes back and sets all this water to boiling.” He gestured broadly at the soaked room.

Spooked by the thought of my feet in boiling water, I relented. In a further blow to my dignity, he threw me over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. My hair obscured the view as we dropped, something for which I was thankful.

Fleeing Maple Hill was turning into a bad habit.

Chapter 9

I slept on the way home, or maybe blacked out. Either way, I woke up on the couch with Daniel holding a cold cloth to my forehead and my wrist in his other hand. Grumbling meaningless words, I tried to sit up. He rudely pushed me back down.

“Your pulse is weak. I think you’re going into shock.”

“I am not going into shock.” Actually I might have been but I wasn’t going to admit that to him. “Let me up.”

He eyed me with suspicion but did as I asked. “How do you feel?”

“Like someone blew my head off,” I answered truthfully as I moved into a sitting position, tossing the wet rag aside. “What about you?”

“Extra crispy.” Seating himself next to me, Daniel picked up a bag of blood from the coffee table. He sucked on it like a kid with a juice box. My stomach did a funny little flop and I had to look away. “And damp.”

I snorted. “Yeah. Go me.” A half-hearted attempt to pump my fist only got my hand a few inches in the air.

“You ever done anything like that before?”