Red House (18 page)

I took my glasses off, stowing them in their case in my backpack. Red bands of etheric energy sealed the house up tight, every door and window saturated with angry color. Daniel had brute vampire strength and a better sense of paranormal energy than mortals, but being sort of dead he couldn’t help me much in the magic department. Blake and I were going to have to punch a hole through that red and get the three of us inside that house. I’d worry about getting back out once I had Julia’s grandkids safely with us.

“Where’s your daughter?”

“She left for a conference in San Diego. I didn’t know whether to call her or not. What would I tell her? She thinks this is all foolishness.” Julia gripped my hand, the pressure of her rings biting into my fingers.

Julia had been so composed in our other meetings, it was disconcerting to see her this way. Her grandbabies were in danger though. They might have been teenagers but to her they would always be babies. I squeezed her hand. “I don’t want you to call her just yet. Let me see what I can do.”

“I know someone with a backhoe. I will tear that house down to the ground if I have to.”

“Hopefully it won’t come to that. I want to try to keep the police out of this too. You understand, don’t you?” If I couldn’t get in the house then she might very well call her friend with a backhoe, but I didn’t think that would do any good. She’d just have a torn up backhoe in her yard. The police were another matter and the main reason I wanted to hold off on calling the mother. Julia had some understanding of what was going on and why, but if her daughter was a skeptic then we needed to keep her in the dark, at least for a while. It felt wrong and bad and oh damn, so very wrong, but a panicked mother would want to call the police and that never ended well in situations like this.

Julia bit her lip, one hand at her throat as she stared at the house. “She doesn’t believe in ghosts or any of this. She got mad at Shelby for encouraging me to call someone like you.”

So who did the woman think killed that kitten? It always amazed me what people were willing to ignore just so the apple cart of their world view wouldn’t be upset. “Shelby called me. She emailed me a bunch of stuff. Did you know that?”

Julia nodded. “She told me. She said she wanted to help. I think she became frustrated when I suggested this was something for adults to handle.”

“How old is she?”

“Eighteen. Tyler’s sixteen. Oh, I know she’s technically an adult but this is not something she has any idea how to handle.” She fought back another bout of tears.

“Okay, here’s what I want you to do.” I steered her back toward her car. “I want you to either stay inside your car or go home.”

“I am not leaving.”

“I didn’t think so. I just wanted you to know it was okay if you did. I want you safe, though, so you need to stay in your car. Maybe move it to the bottom of the drive too. You go to church, Julia?” Pretty sure I already knew the answer. She nodded. “Okay. I want you to pray for Tyler and Shelby. I want you to pray for their safety.” I paused, wondering how far off the map of what she was probably used to could I get. “You made them baby blankets, didn’t you?”

“Of course. Several. Crocheted and quilted.”

“I want you to…when you pray for them, think about your prayers being another blanket for them. And you’re wrapping them up in safety and in your love. I know that may sound weird but I’d like you to try it.”

“It sounds like something Shelby would say.” She gave me a look, an awareness burning in her eyes. Ooh boy. Yeah, when this was over with I needed to have a long talk with Shelby.

“Okay, then.” I glanced behind us to where Daniel was standing by the SUV. Blake was closer to the house, his aura lit with power. I’d need every bit of it. Much as I hated to admit it, I’d been a little intimidated by him, by his level of magical ability, right from the start. Tonight I was grateful for it. “Go on.” I gestured at her car.

Julia gave my hand one last squeeze, then got in her car and moved it to the bottom of the drive.

Daniel said, “What’s the plan, Roxie?”

I joined them. Jerking my chin at Blake I said, “What are you getting?”

He rubbed his chest, lips curling into a grimace. “A migraine. There’s so much power rolling out of that house it’s unreal.”

Daniel asked him, “So you can’t see it like she can but you can feel it?”

Blake nodded. He mounted the steps and wrapped his hand around the door knob. A lash of energy threw him to the yard where he landed on his back.

“That looked like it hurt.” His only answer was a glare.

I said, “I want to walk around the house, see if I can find an opening.”

“You won’t,” Blake said. “The place is probably locked up tight.”

“We’re gonna do a walk around anyway. It’s how I work.”

“I think we should stick together.” Daniel withdrew his shotgun from the SUV. “It’ll be safer that way.”

I didn’t wait for either them to agree or disagree or say anything else. My usual routine for a job called for walking around the site clockwise, making observations, watching for energy signatures. The only energy I saw around the entire large house was red.

Daniel lobbed a few small rocks at the house, bemused as they bounced off the energy barrier. I was more interested in what Blake was doing. He’d wandered off, still within sight but far enough away I would have to yell to speak to him. I chose to walk to him instead.

Sweat rolled down my back as I made my way across the back lawn. The day may have ended but the heat was still going strong. A gibbous moon hung just above the treetops. The air should have been full of noise, insects and birds and whatever animals lived in the woods at the back of the property. Instead there was silence, as if everything sentient had fled the scene. It was like that before the flood but I had paid it no mind, expecting a downpour but not…not what happened.

I reached Blake. I said nothing, raising my eyebrows.

“It’s not just what’s taken up residence in the house.”

“What do you mean?”

He licked his lips, eyes scanning the property. His aura rippled with a purple magenta, a hue I was seeing from him more and more. I’d done some reading on Chaos magic since meeting Blake. One thing that particularly interested me was something about color correspondences. Most of them were pretty standard, dovetailing with correspondences used in other practices as well as the chakra system. Except for one–the color of magic. That was different and highly personal for each practitioner. I hadn’t had a chance to talk to Blake about this but I wondered if I was seeing his personal color of his magic.

He held out one hand, palm flat and facing the ground. “Can you see it?”

I shook my head. “What is it?”

“How deep can you look into things? Can you … can you visually break down the energy and see into something?”

I had tried that very thing with air trapped inside a jar the other day. This was not the best time to be experimenting but Blake was practically vibrating with excitement. He took my hand, guiding me to a spot that looked completely normal, if a little fuzzy due to my near-sightedness. We knelt, my knees sinking into thick well-tended grass.

Blake took deep breaths, eyes closed. His aura expanded slowly as if it were a bowl being filled. A hint of a smile tugged at the corners of his lips as an almost sexual sound escaped his mouth.

I could feel it through the contact of our entwined hands and where my body met the earth. A great river of energy flowed beneath us. I didn’t so much make the decision to open myself to it as accept that there was no way I couldn’t. This was stronger than anything I’d ever felt before, more powerful even than the flood.

He opened his eyes. Instead of the usual gold his dark brown eyes sparkled with flecks of magenta. “Can you see it, Roxie?”

I lowered my gaze to the ground, let my eyes unfocus, and soon I was able to see it. It cut a wide swath thought the earth, like an underground river. Only this wasn’t water. It was energy. It was magic. So white it had a bluish cast at the edges, it looked like lightning and it traveled through the earth in a driving rhythm. A drum, a heartbeat, the rushing sound of life at its most primal.

Excess energy leaked out of the line and into me through physical contact. It burned a path through my veins. Blake raised a hand, his index finger touching the spot between and just above my eyes where the brow chakra or third eye sat. “Do you know how to open this?”

I thought it was pretty much open all the time, what with the auric vision, and I said as much.

Blake moved closer. “That’s nothing compared to what you’re capable of. You just have to tap into it.” He kissed me, his lips warm and demanding, arms snaking around my waist. Remembering where we were and why, I pulled away after a moment, sitting on my haunches. He cupped my cheek, rubbing his thumb across my skin. “This can help us.”

Either that or fry my brain. This was pure power he wanted me to plug into.

My magical practice consisted mostly of hoodoo with a smattering of whatever worked. I knew about chakras, of course. Seven wheels of energy from the top of the head to the base of the spine that governed mental and physical health as well as the spirit and psychic ability–that was the easy definition. Meditation had never been my strong suit so I didn’t do much chakra energy work. I did believe there was something to it though. Even before I’d ever heard the word, the colors I was seeing and how I was interpreting them lined up with the chakra color correspondences.

“I don’t know about this.”

He plunged his hands into my hair, fingers kneading my scalp. “Just get yourself into that space, where you go when you call up magic. Do you chant?”

I made a sound embarrassingly close to a snort. “No.”

“She hums.” Daniel knelt at my side. “I once saw a Sufi put himself into a trance with humming and spinning. What she does reminds me of that.” He addressed me. “But you don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

We had to get inside the house, find those two kids, then get back out again. And to do that I was pretty sure we’d have to take on whatever spirits were inside the house, keeping it locked up and holding the kids hostage. What I wanted to do didn’t enter the equation.

“Okay. Okay, just, both of you, back off.” I waved Daniel away and scooted back several inches from Blake. Closing my eyes, resting my hands on my thighs, I tried to relax. Deep cleansing breaths and all that warm fuzzy shit. God, I was so not good at the warm fuzzy shit.

I shook those thoughts off. What I needed was music. Something rhythmic, easy to keep going in my head and easy to hum. It took a long moment but something came to me.

Rolling guitar wended through my head. I focused on it, urging it into a tighter rhythm. Soon my fingers tapped against my thighs. My head may have bobbed back and forth, I may have hummed a little. I don’t know. It didn’t matter what was happening on the outside. On the inside, I could feel it. The sound expanded in me, spreading through my nervous system, skittering up and down my spine, reaching into my arms and legs, sinking into my blood. Deep down into that place where the magic lay dormant until I called it forth. A bass line tapped against a spinning door. I made the call and the door, chakra, whatever, opened wide.

Raw energy poured into me, hurtling at bullet train speed. It was too much for me to handle, white hot and blistering cold and crackling into every particle of my being. But I made no effort to stop it, not at first. Instead I rode it, battling to be a hawk on the wind rather than debris in a tornado.

It was a hell of a call and response.

The edges of my consciousness blurred. A stomach-turning sensation of falling enveloped me. A pair of warm hands caught me, slowly bringing me back to awareness. I opened my eyes to find myself leaning over, fingers dug into the grass. Blake was at my side, one arm draped over my back while the other held my arm. I shook as if I’d collapsed from a hard run.

Daniel said, “What the hell was that?” He stood several feet away, body coiled with tension.

I sat and ran a hand over my face. “It’s a ley line.”

“It’s not the only one here.” Blake climbed to his feet. I glanced at him then had to immediately look away. His aura was too much right now. Beautiful in a terrifying sort of way, but too much for me to look at. He pointed toward the tree line on the east side of the property. “There’s another one there, not quite as big.”

“Do they cross?” I asked.

The set of his face, his posture, everything about him in that moment had very little to do with his identity as a man named Blake and everything to do with a sorcerer who called himself Kalidas in the sacred circle. “Right under the house. It’s sitting on top of a convergence.”

Daniel offered me his hand to help me up. I took it, stumbling a little as I felt some of his energy leach out. Great, now I got to be hyper sensitive for no telling how long. He said, “I don’t know anything about ley lines but that sounds like an oh shit kind of thing.”

“You said it, Bubba. Basically it means the land is a psychic hot spot. There’s a lot of power here. A lot. It probably attracted the spirits when the flood threw everything into chaos.”

“Does it make them stronger?”

I shrugged. “Pretty sure.”