Hell Fire (16 page)

And it hurt him. I saw the shadow of it in his eyes. It was more than the fact that I’d shared something with Jesse—that he’d saved me. Chance felt iced out, treated as peripheral when he wanted to be center stage with me. Well, good. Let him see how it felt to be manipulated and kept in the dark.

And Jesse was a son of a bitch too. He would’ve sensed what was going on in the bathroom, so he’d informed his rival how he saved my life, a talent Chance seemed to lack. In fact, sometimes he actively endangered it. He’d probably also reminded Chance how he rode to my rescue, coming a thousand miles to save me.

“You’re both assholes,” I said aloud.

They jumped. There was oil in the next room if they wanted to play at Greco-Roman wrestling. Hell, if they enjoyed it, they could always settle down together, and leave me alone.

Before either of them could reply, three things happened at once.

Thunder boomed so loud it shook the house, but there was no resultant lightning, no onslaught of rain. The night felt deadly quiet.

A young girl’s voice called out, “Is anyone there?”

And a dead man’s radio began to play.

 

 

 

 

The house filled with the bizarre but crystal clear strains of “Fools Rush In,” Sinatra’s version, if I wasn’t mistaken. It fit Kilmer’s air of yesteryear perfectly.

I didn’t call, “Come in” to whoever—or whatever—waited for us outside. A knock sounded at the door, and I went to investigate. The guys fell in behind me as I peered around the chain like Miz Ruth.

Shannon from the bed-and-breakfast stood on the front porch, looking nervous. She wore a black hoodie and a plaid miniskirt over black leggings. At first I wondered how she’d gotten here, and then I saw the bike leaning up against the side of the porch.

“Can I come in?” she asked in a rush.

It might be a trick. I studied her for a few seconds and then glanced at Jesse, who murmured, “She’s scared.”

“Sure.” I unchained the door and stepped back.

It was a testament to her abstraction that she paid almost no attention to the men flanking me—or maybe they were too old to register on her hot scale. She rubbed her hands on her thighs and then shook hands. This time, I watched for the spark, and as when she’d touched me, it came when she greeted Jesse—not Chance.

That confirmed it. Chance wasn’t like Jesse, or me, or Shannon. Whatever he was hiding about his paternity, it had left him with a gift that didn’t register as human. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that, but it didn’t matter. It wasn’t likely he was ever going to confide his secrets in me, and without that level of trust, I’d never risk being with him again.

“Let’s sit down,” Chance said. He’d apparently put aside his feelings about my keeping from him what happened in the woods earlier, at least for the time being.

“How’d you find us?” I asked as we arranged ourselves.

I wound up on the love seat next to Shannon, who shrugged. The guys sat down at opposite ends of the sofa.

“Everybody knows everything that happens in town,” she said. “I asked around and found out you rented this place.”

I didn’t know if we should continue with the questions; teenagers tended not to respond well to them. With a glance, I took a survey. Chance didn’t even meet my gaze, but Jesse shook his head slightly. Okay, so we’d let her spit it out in time.

“Well, you found us. Want something to drink? I could make some tea.”

Nobody looked enthusiastic, so I didn’t bother. Thunder rumbled again; the clarity of the music in the background made this seem like a scene from an old movie.

Shannon hunched forward, elbows on her knees. She was so thin and awkward that she resembled a crow hatch-ling, down to the blue tips of her hair. I hoped I had the patience not to scare her off.

“I heard about you,” she finally mumbled. “People still talk, you know. About how weird you were. But you got away.” She looked up, china blue eyes matted with old mascara and too-thick kohl. “That’s what I want. I know you’re not going to stay forever. You came for a reason, and when you’re done here, you’ll leave.” After drawing a deep breath, she finished in a rush: “I want you to take me with you.”

Jesse looked worried. “How old are you?”

“Eighteen,” she said, defiant. “I just had a birthday.”

“You’re still in school,” Chance pointed out.

She shrugged. “I have to get out of here. I can get a GED anywhere.”

That much was true. I’d stayed until I finished high school, thinking that would help me get a job somewhere else, but her body language conveyed genuine urgency.

“Why do you have to leave, Shannon?” I figured she’d tell me her parents didn’t understand her and refused to let her get a barbwire tattoo around her right biceps.

Her face paled even further, going almost gray. “Something bad is going to happen,” she whispered. “I’ve been digging around, and something bad always happens on December 21. That’s next month. And I won’t be able to get away on my own. I don’t have a car or money—” Her voice stressed and broke; her hands went white-knuckled in her lap.

Anyone else probably would have dismissed her fear, but I’d lived in this town, and I needed to know what
she
knew. Though I didn’t touch people much, I put my hand on her shoulder, expecting a rebuff. She quieted instead, as if I somehow gave her strength.

“It’s okay,” Jesse said. “We’re not going to let anybody hurt you.”

Her blue eyes looked big and guileless in her narrow face. She had him now; he was a sucker for a damsel in distress. If she didn’t come with us in the Mustang, she’d go with Jesse in his Forester when we left. He wouldn’t leave her. I’d never met a guy with a bigger white knight complex.

“Why don’t you tell us the whole story, Shannon?” Chance used his warmest expression, and even a bundle of nerves like the girl next to me couldn’t resist.

She relaxed enough to settle against the back of the love seat, no longer sitting as if she might need to run at any moment. “Everyone thinks I’m nuts,” she began.

Well, that sounded familiar. I didn’t interrupt; I already knew she was Gifted. I wanted to know why the town thought she was crazy. We all sat quiet, offering our most attentive expressions.

“I was around thirteen when it started.” She refused to look at any of us, staring fiercely at a worn spot on the floor. “I started reading sad poetry. I guess that’s pretty common.” She shrugged. “Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton.”

“The death girls,” I put in with a nod.

She chanced a look at me. “You read them too?”

“Not anymore,” I said quietly.

Shannon accepted that without requesting clarification, but my answer prompted the first smile we’d seen from her, a soft little flutter that dissolved almost at once as she resumed her story. “I started thinking about death a lot. I researched the Holocaust. And I got curious about Kilmer.” Jesse started to speak, but she anticipated his question. “How people died here. How often. I spent a lot of time in the library archives.”

A morbid curiosity, to be sure, but adolescence took some kids like that. I had a feeling I wouldn’t like what was coming, but I asked, anyway. “What did you find out?”

“Bad things happen on December 21,” she said simply. “People die.”

The date chilled me.

“So it’s been more than just my family?” I spoke almost to myself. “There must be a pattern to it.”

Shannon nodded. “From what me and Mr. McGee could figure out—”

“You knew Mr. McGee?” That captured my attention.

“Kinda.” She scowled at me. Some of the edge had come off her fear. Maybe she sensed she sat inside a well-warded house, or maybe Chance and Jesse reassured her. “We got friendly, I guess, while I was poking around. The librarian didn’t like me much, but Mr. McGee was nice, and he let me look in the paper files downstairs.”

“Us too,” I said.
Well, he used to.
“He was about to answer some questions for us when he . . .”
Had a fit and died, frothing at the mouth like a mad badger.
That didn’t seem suitable, so I said aloud, “Passed on unexpectedly this afternoon.”

Fear clouded her eyes again as she gazed at the three of us. “I heard. And . . . I don’t think that was right. I mean,” she hastened to add, “I don’t believe you had anything to do with it. But somebody did.”

Our sound track suddenly switched from “Fools Rush In,” which had been looping seamlessly, to “Bye Bye Love.” We’d ignored the phenomenon long enough. I got up and went over to my bag, digging for the old radio I’d stolen off John McGee’s worktable. By her look, Shannon recognized it, but I couldn’t interpret her expression.

I tried to reassure her. “He was telling us about it when he died. He said—”

“Folks could hear ghosts in the snow between channels, if they’re close to death themselves.” I heard an echo of old McGee in the words she’d obviously heard from the man more than once. “It’s true,” she added, not meeting my gaze. “
I
can.”

“Is that what you were working on with Mr. McGee?” Chance asked.

Shannon nodded. “Yeah, that and our research. He got interested in all the people dying too. It used to only happen on December 21—and not all the time, either. Sometimes years would pass, and nothing went bad. But lately . . . something’s different. I can’t explain it.” She shrugged helplessly. “I can just
feel
it.”

I knew exactly what she meant. I’d sensed it in the forest, but tendrils of it wove throughout the town as well, dank and terrible. I didn’t want say so, but Shannon’s own mother had scared the crap out of me, as had the librarian, Edna.

Jesse smiled at her, pure warmth and reassurance. “Did you try to warn anybody?”

“Sure. Nobody would listen. I’m a weird kid, and McGee was a crazy old coot. It couldn’t have been worse for our credibility if we’d planned it.”

As if in response to her words, the song changed to “Ain’t That a Shame.”

Chance cocked a brow. “You get the feeling somebody’s trying to tell us something?”

“That’s Mr. McGee’s kind of music,” Shannon told us.

“You said before, you can talk to dead people on the radio,” I prompted gently.

She scowled, checking our faces to see if we were messing with her. “Don’t be stupid—I have no mic. I can
hear
them, not talk to them. Just have to find their frequency.”

I couldn’t imagine how that would work, but she’d fallen among the right crowd to display her talent. She wouldn’t find skepticism here. We needed to talk to her about being Gifted, but first things first.

“Here.” I handed her the radio. “Knock yourself out.” Shannon studied my face with a half frown that melted away when she realized I wasn’t joking. “You believe me?”

“Absolutely.” I flashed my left palm, the one with the inexplicable brand. “We’re all weird here, Shannon. In one way or another. You came to the right place.”

“Okay.” She bent her spiky blue and black head to the task, fiddling with the knobs. Once she touched the device, the unnatural music ceased, and I heard only snow, full of echoes and ghostly whispers, too many to distinguish. But Shannon had the power to give one voice dominion over the rest. We all froze as the “station” came into focus in her hands.

“They killed me,” John McGee said tonelessly. “The rotten sons of bitches killed me.” The ancient speakers crackled, tinny and strange. McGee repeated the words again and again, until they reached a thunderous crescendo, and then fell into a whispered moan. With that much rage, he had a fair start toward turning into a poltergeist, I thought. It hurt me just to listen to it.

I wasn’t sure what good this would do, however, if we couldn’t ask questions. Interesting though it was, a one-way feed provided limited usefulness. If McGee was out in the ether somewhere, broadcasting his pain and anger, then he wouldn’t hear our questions. If we could summon him, somehow—

Well, Shannon had known him best. What could it hurt to try? We might learn something about her gift, as I’d certainly never heard of anything like it. Kilmer
did
birth some weird ones, and yes, I meant myself too.

“Try calling him,” I suggested. “If we can get him in the room with us—”

“The wards,” Jesse cut in. “He can’t come in. We blocked anything that means us harm, and confused as he is right now, he might not know friend from foe.”

“Ideas?” I glanced at Chance, hoping he wasn’t still mad.

He was. I saw it in the set of his jaw and the tilt of his eyes. That didn’t stop him from saying, “If you’re determined to do this, we could go out on the porch. That way, if things go bad, we can run back inside.”

The notion sent a cold chill through me, and I wanted to immediately reject it. It didn’t seem wise to step outside our protective walls after dark, but I waited to see what everyone else would say. Saldana considered.

“We’d need to prop the door open with something heavy,” Jesse said finally. “If we get locked out, we’re sitting ducks out there, and my gun isn’t going to help.” At Shannon’s worried look, he added, “Don’t worry. I’m a cop.”

Evidently she didn’t like the police any better than I did. If Robinson set the standard in Kilmer, I could see why she shared my bias. But Sheriff Pasco, who had the job when I lived here, had been worse.

I raised a brow. “So y’all want to go outside in the dark—in sight of those scary woods—and call up an angry dead man to see what he has to say?”

The looks I received in answer to my question registered as the facial equivalent of a shrug. Shannon seemed least concerned, but she either figured she could run faster than us, or she hadn’t seen as much trouble. Either way, I had a bad feeling.

Butch whimpered.

“Yes or no? Show of hands.”

I wanted to vote no; I really did. But it was my fault we were here in the first place, and if Mr. McGee could tell us something about what was killing Kilmer, we had to find out what he knew. It would be better if Chuch were here, but we’d do the best we could under the circumstances. With a sigh, I raised my hand. Slowly, Jesse did the same. Shannon’s hand went up next—and when she stopped touching the radio, it lapsed into signal snow. Chance’s vote didn’t matter.