Bone Cold: A Soul Shamans Novel (Volume 2) (6 page)

And I sure as hell didn’t miss the thrill of the con. Not one tiny bit. Or at least that’s what I kept telling myself.

“Don’t worry,” George said before I could form a coherent response. “I won’t tell anyone. Just as long as you let me come with you to put out this raging fire you’re running straight into.”

I cocked my head. “Wait a minute. Are you saying you want to come along to a con? Because we don’t really work that way.”

“I don’t care about your so-called cons.” George tugged on her cross necklace and motioned toward the door. “So, lucky for me, this isn’t one.”

I opened my mouth to speak, but I was at a loss for words.

“How do you know that?” Laura asked in a low voice.

“Intuition.” George grinned and shoved past me and Laura, pushing open the heavy door. Wind gusted into the store, icy droplets peppering my skin and clinging to my hair. The door slammed shut behind her as she stepped out into the storm, and Laura dug her nails into my arm.

She hissed when she spoke. “George isn’t a shaman. Unless my powers have stopped working.”

“No, she isn’t, so what the hell is she?”

One of our many powers is the ability to identify a shaman the second we lay eyes on him. It’s a strange tugging sensation I barely notice now because I see Laura and my mom on a daily basis. But I know when it’s there, and I’ve never felt that sensation when I’ve looked at George. Or Wanda for that matter.

“I know what she is,” Wanda’s voice slithered the short distance across the store. I’d been aware of her eavesdropping on every word of our conversation. I just hoped she wouldn’t start passing on the rumor that Holly Bennett was a con artist, following in the footsteps of her fugitive dad.

“So, what is she?” Laura propped her hands on her hips and strode toward Wanda.

“If you’d let me play out all the cards, you would have gotten your answer.” Wanda smiled, lipstick staining her teeth and giving off the appearance of a vampire who had just fed on her latest victim. For some reason, that victim felt like it was me.

“Turn the cards over then,” I said, reaching toward the middle card, but Wanda scooped it off the counter before I could get the edge of my fingernail on the black rectangle.

She tsked at me. “You can’t continue a tarot card session after the customer has left.”

“Just tell us who she is, Wanda,” Laura said. “What’s the deal?”

“You’ll find out in your own time,” she said, shuffling the cards together so that we had no chance of finding out unless she gifted us with the answer. “Now, don’t you have something you need to scuttle of to? A banishment, perhaps?”

My heart throbbed. Jason. He needed me right now, which was far more important than Wanda’s secrets. Squaring my shoulders, I pushed open the door and stepped out into the swirling snow. The way the wind howled around us, forming the snow into shifting patterns, reminded me of the Borderland. Where we had to go to save Jason’s life. Again.

Laura grabbed my arm to whisper in my ear before we joined George in the truck. “Wait. Are you sure it’s a good idea to take her?”

“I don’t think we have another choice.”

***

Jason’s massive house was in a new development for the wealthier residents of Seaport, though that was about ninety-five percent of the population. His three-story blue-panelled home usually looked regal and quaint at the same time, at least during the day. At night, it hunkered on a sloping hill, rising high to blot out the moon. A dark silhouette holding something terrible inside.

He was waiting in the driveway when we all piled out of the truck. His gaze swept across me and Laura before landing on George. Luckily, he seemed too shaken to ask why the hell this random stranger was here.

“The spirit is inside, and it’s everywhere.” His teeth clattered together as he shoved his hands into his Shakespeare sweatshirt. “It’s just like last time, Holly. I don’t know what to do.”

“Just stay out here in the yard. Laura and I will get rid of it like last time.”

“How is it back?” he asked. “I thought you’d banished it and cast that bone spell.”

Frowning, I thought back to the night in question. My memories of that whole experience were fuzzy. So much had happened in such a short timeframe, and all I could remember was the sweet and bitter sensation of someone else’s life pouring into mine. Shuddering, I banished those thoughts from my brain.

Even though we’d taken down a spirit in Jason’s house that night, it was unlikely to be the same one. But still, we’d cast a strong protection spell around Jason’s house to keep
all
spirits out for good. Nothing should have been able to come back into his home. Laura and I had made sure of it.

“What about the bones?” I asked. “Could your parents have found them?”

Jason shook his head. “I checked earlier. They’re still under the floorboards where you put them.”

A few days after Jason’s attack, Laura and I had come back one night when his entire family was out of the house. He’d been having nightmares, terrified a spirit would come back and kill his siblings. So, we’d cast an extra spell and hidden the bones under sections we carved into the floorboards, so that no one in his family would stumble upon them and start asking questions.

If the bones had been moved, that would explain how the spirit got inside the house. But it didn’t sound like that was the case.

“Let’s go in and take a look,” Laura said, giving me a quick nod. “George, you stay out here with Jason.”

“Hell no,” George said, following us as we climbed the curving stairs. “I’m not missing this.”

I didn’t have the energy to argue. Instead, I strode through the front door that swung eerily on cracked hinges and glanced around at the high-vaulted ceilings and looming staircase. Everything was quiet and still. But cold.

Suddenly, a cloud of bitter wind swept into the hallway, knocking over an antique vase and smashing it to the ground. I reached out and took Laura’s hand in mine, gritting my teeth against a supernatural onslaught we couldn’t see. None of it made any sense, but Jason was right. A spirit was here.

Laura and I didn’t have time to cast a binding spell. Instead, I dropped to the floor while Laura chanted against the wind whipping through the room. I drew the rune onto the flapping parchment and lit the match, but the flickering flame died against the wind. There was no way we’d be able to cast the spell that would let us enter the Borderland. Not like this.

“Outside!” I yelled to Laura, and we pushed against the wind until we were back out on the front lawn, gasping for breath and wiping the hair out of our eyes.

“So,” George said, and I jumped. “You’ve got yourselves a demon.”

“Yeah, that’s an accurate description,” I said, dropping onto the grass and rustling through my bag. We’d have to enter the Borderland out here before confronting the spirit inside the house. That was the one annoying thing about shamanism. I wished I could toss some fireballs at the spirit’s head, but instead, we had to take our time, draw runes, and wander around tossing bones everywhere we went.

I was definitely no Wolverine.

“No, I mean an actual demon.” George’s hand found her necklace as she watched me dump my collection of candles onto the grass. “You should probably just leave him alone, or you’ll piss him off.”

I gave George a sharp look, frowning at where she lounged against a tree that had been stripped of all its leafy dressings. Now that she was away from Wanda, she looked as if she was lazing about on the beach instead of talking about evil creatures that lived on another plane of existence.

“Listen, I guess since you’re in this you’re in this.” My hands found a black candle, and I tossed it to Laura. “That thing in there is called a spirit. Not a ghost. Not a demon. A spirit. If we don’t banish it, then it’ll suck the life out of whoever lives in that house. That happens to include Jason, one of my only friends in this town.”

“You just have to get the balance right.” George raised her eyebrows as if we were the ones talking nonsense, not her. “But if you’re going to attack it, I’m out. I don’t want to stick around for the fallout from that.”

“Fine.” I stood from the ground, my hands full of candles, matches, and bones. “That’s probably for the best anyway.”

She shook her head before glancing at Laura. “When you decide you want to do things differently, let me know.”

“What are you talking about?” Laura asked.

George frowned and strode halfway down the driveway before turning back. “You’ll understand eventually if you don’t already.”

I opened my mouth to say something but just shook my head instead. If she was going to talk in riddles, then so be it. I had more important things to worry about right now. Jason strode toward me, still huddling in his sweatshirt. He took my hands between his palms and stared down at me. Even though he usually towered over the top of my head, like everyone else in the world, his height didn’t do anything to keep him from looking small tonight. Like a wounded animal. Tears leaked out of his eyes, and I reached up to brush them off his cheeks.

His mother was dead, and I’d done nothing to stop it. If my spell had failed, it was all my fault.

“Are you going to be able to fix it?”

“We will. Don’t worry.”

He glanced away, his jaw clenching as he stared at his house, his expression full of pain and anger. “How did this happen, Holly?”

“I don’t know.” My shoulders sagged. “I really don’t know. I’m sorry.”

“You know my mom. She was annoying as hell. Always going on about how I needed to be a better role model for the kids.
The kids
.” He sighed and shut his eyes. “Like I never was one. And I always got pissed at her for it, and now…”

“It’s okay, Jason,” I said. “We all get pissed at our parents sometimes.”

“Yeah, but lately I was always pissed off. She knew I’ve been smoking pot. She kept telling me she could smell it on me, so she went through my stuff, looking for evidence.” His voice cracked. “The last thing I told her was to fuck off. Last night. Before the bonfire.”

I’d never heard Jason talk like this before. It was so different from how he usually was. Normally, Jason reminded me of a leaf in the wind, blowing happily along without a care in the world. His greatest goal in life was to make people laugh. No one was laughing now.

“You can’t think like this, Jason.” I squeezed his hands. “You didn’t know this was going to happen.”

“No, but I never should have said it.”

I fell silent, the only sound the whistle of the wind through the trees and Laura’s uneasy rustle through the supplies. The bones in her hands clinked together, a tinkling sound, much lighter than the heaviness that draped over us right now.

“You know, I never told you this,” I said, desperate for the words that could cut through Jason’s pain. “But my mom was sick for a long time. Like, really sick. So sick I thought she was going to die.” I swallowed hard. “Until then, I didn’t realize how awful I was to her sometimes. We’d get in arguments. I’d yell at her. She was always running off on another work trip, leaving me behind to fend for myself. I regretted every single word of those arguments when I thought she was gone for good.”

“But she got better, didn’t she?” Jason’s voice was flat. “My mom never will.”

“I’m so sorry, Jason.” Tears slid from my eyes to join the many that painted his face. “The only thing I can do is banish this spirit to make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else in your family. We’ll recast the protection spell. We’ll make it doubly strong. I will do whatever it takes to protect your brothers and sisters. And you.”

He gave me a pained smile. “Thank you, Holly.”

With a quick nod to Laura, we planted ourselves on the cold, hard ground and placed a candle between us. Something rustled in the trees across the street, an undisturbed patch of woods that hadn’t yet been destroyed for housing developments.

Frowning, I squinted at the trees, but the leaves and branches were statuesque. Nothing shifted in the darkness. Not even the slightest whisper of movement. I turned back to the candle and sparked a match just as the sound of heavy boots pounded the pavement. Jason’s strangled yell jolted my heart, and I jumped up to see black-clad men burst out of the woods with guns raised in our direction.

My skin prickled and my heart clattered against my ribs. My hands raised high in the air as my eyes drank in the sight of high-powered rifles, military uniforms, and hard expressions. One man stepped out from behind the others, his weapon lowering and his face registering surprise.

Every muscle in my body went weak.

“Dad?”

CHAPTER 6

“D
ad, what the hell is going on?” My heart beat out a hectic rhythm. I jumped up from the ground, my hands still raised. Every single one of the rifles followed my movement, except for the one in my dad’s darkly tanned and calloused hands. How could this be happening?

“Holly?” The familiar frown I hadn’t seen in years made an appearance on his lined face. “What are you doing here? Get away from that house. Now.”

“Why? Tell me what’s going on.” Every cell in my body screamed for more. More questions, more answers, more words, but all I could do was stare at my dad as if I’d just seen a ghost. And I had. It had been two and a half years since he’d graced me with his presence, and now he was here. In Seaport. Training a gun on me and my friends.