Magic Rising (30 page)

She didn’t have long to ponder it as the blood, the small amounts that had filled the simple engravings, rolled out, became gallons. Deirdre wanted to run, tried to, but the men stood like a living wall. She couldn’t stop the red mess from touching her shoes, getting near her skin. She didn’t want to kill; never had she wanted to kill before Niam. Still, she cried for the sin she’d committed. The red blood turned black as it flowed over the hull that had been Niam. Drops covered his eyes and touched his lips. Something growled from within the corpse and she started to wonder if he was really dead. Maybe there was magic, maybe he couldn’t die.

She started to panic, wishing for a way out of the wall of men that had created a living prison. From the corner of her eye, she saw the corpse move with the blood in the circle, then a ghost eased from his mouth. Smoky and horrible, it rose holding some semblance of Niam’s face in misty lines.

The scene was too horrible, too much. She had killed the monster and somehow made something worse. The smoky creature crept near her and she screamed. Her voice filled the stone work and the ghost kept coming. She closed her mouth as she realized too late the ghost’s intent. Even as she backed away, unable to leave the circle because of the men, the smoke entered her.

“No!” She tried to blow it out of her mouth, her nose. Her sword couldn’t cut it and still it came until her senses were filled with cold smoky nothing. Then so was she, cold, nothing. Her legs buckled, darkness filled her vision to the point that not even the lighted torches were visible anymore.

“No,” was the last thing she said.

Chapter Twenty

Sabrine woke with a start. Dread filled her belly and a thin layer of sweat coated her skin. The air felt strange. At first she didn’t move, only breathed deeply and tried to figure out if she was dreaming or awake.

The room seemed caught in a pressure. She’d experienced it before when scuba diving. If she forgot to clear her ears regularly, the pressure hurt. The same thing happened now except she sat in a dry bed.

All at once the pressure released. She felt her ears pop, a mild ache following. She rubbed her eyes while trying to figure out what had just happened. There were no strange sounds, nothing to indicate a problem.

The house was quiet, the hum of the furnace the only sound in the cold mansion. She’d gone to bed at two in the morning. Tech relieved her then, convincing her that he couldn’t sleep. She had been tired and although Tech had gotten less sleep, he looked wired. Sometimes he got that way, thoughts forcing him to stay away for days at a time.

Something was wrong though. Sabrine sensed it in her core and rolled out of bed. She’d slept in her clothes, a standard routine when on a job. She slid on her shoes, moving quietly in the darkness, then creaked open the door. There was no light in the hallway, odd. She’d left one on when she went to bed as well as one on the stairs. Despite her attempts at lighting the way, darkness bathed everything.

She reached back into the room for her dagger and pistol. She’d left both on the dresser within easy reach in case this job turned messy. She put the short dagger, much like a letter opener, in her back pocket and started into the hallway while keeping her pistol in her hand.

Turning on a light would help her see, but it would also give away her location to any intruders in the house. According to Deirdre, this place had the best security system money could buy, but Sabrine had never trusted those things. Money could also buy ways inside any mansion.

She went to the front door, noting that it was still locked and the alarm set. The next stop was the library. She turned the knob, listening to the barely audible sound of the bottom of the door sweeping against the carpet.

Usually anywhere Tech went, the sound of machines filled the air with fans whirling, cooling off hard drives, monitors going, and printers running off page after page of information. Instead the library was silent.

If he fell asleep, I’ll kill him.

A more disturbing notion filled her when she put on the lights to an empty room. There were his computers, no files though. No papers or personal effects littered the tables. Every sign Tech had ever entered that huge library had been removed beyond the mechanical items.

Pain surged through her belly at his strange absence. If it were anyone else, she would assume something traitorous had occurred. Her first thought couldn’t be true. Tech was her friend, her lover. He meant the world to her. They shared more than their bodies, they’d shared their hearts and she trusted him. Damn it all, she loved him.

There was no time to indulge her emotions. She ran out of the library and up the stairs. When she opened the door where Lora should be sleeping, the same eerie silence filled her. No breathing came from the pile of covers, no soft snoring or movement in blankets. Sabrine flipped on the light and found the room empty. Lora’s things had also been taken. Her duffle bag no longer sat on the floor, there was no sign the little girl had ever entered the house.

Sabrine pulled her cell phone off her belt clip. She dialed Deirdre’s number but there was no answer. The phone went to voice mail and Sabrine felt lost. She couldn’t report Lora missing or kidnapped to the authorities. The grandmother would have to do it.

She went back to the doorway heading toward Gladys’s room when the first shot was fired, splitting the air with the reverberations mixed with the scent of gunpowder. Pain filled her hip and Sabrine tumbled backward, landing on her butt in the hall. She raised her gun, firing blindly into the darkness until a shadow ahead fell back against the wall.

Gladys’s bedroom door swung open, more shots were fired but the older lady’s reflexes were good, shooting back and knocking someone down the stairs. Sabrine stayed low, not sure how well Gladys could see in the dark.

“Gladys, they’ve taken Lora.” Sabrine spoke loudly, hoping Gladys could pinpoint her location through sound so Sabrine could start moving again.

The light above came on, Gladys at the switch. Sabrine looked down, examining the injury. It wasn’t too bad. A low velocity round had struck her in the hip, not shattering the bone. It amounted to a painful graze.

“Who’s taken Lora?”

Tech was gone, Lora gone and she had to admit that Tech had been acting strange lately. She thought it was over their mutual friend Deirdre, but perhaps more troubled the man. Tech was the only one missing from the house where Lora was taken. If it wasn’t an inside job then someone else had the numbers to the alarm system and knew they had the time to take all the evidence with them.

“I’m not sure. You need to call the police while I search the house.”

They’d left people behind in the building, one groaned a few feet from her, blood covering his chest, a ski mask hiding his face. She leaned over removing the mask, frightened it would be Tech. Thankfully, it was a stranger.

Whoever was responsible had left people to kill Gladys and any witnesses. The idea left a bad taste in her mouth. If Tech were involved, then he’d set a trap hoping she would die.

Please let this be a mistake.

Sabrine heard Gladys on the phone as she looked at the man’s face. He was bleeding heavily but still conscious. With catlike moves, she hovered above him, one leg on each side, straddling the bloodied body.

“Who sent you?”

“Fuck off.”

She reached to the first wound, squeezing the flesh around it. The man yelped. Sabrine knew how bad it hurt to have torn flesh twisted. It gave her no pleasure to hurt this man and some part of her grew nauseous, sharing his pain.

“Who sent you?” She repeated the words slowly, with distinction.

His mouth opened then from nowhere a shadow passed over his face, the agony changing to a placid expression as his life ended. Sabrine looked up, trying to find the source of the distortion of light, but there was nothing and no cause for the change. Either way the man died beneath her. On his lips were the words of who’d sent him and it remained a secret.

The man on the stairs had died instantly, leaving no clues as to where Lora had been taken. Feeling cheated, Sabrine returned to Lora’s room, hoping for some clue, something to give her a lead on the abductor. There was nothing. All of Lora’s clothes had been taken, her shoes, even the small toy bear she’d brought as a keepsake was gone. The only sign that the girl had ever occupied the bed was the rumpled sheets, twisted as if Lora had been caught in a nightmare when she’d been taken. Sabrine ripped the top cover off, wadding it onto the floor. From the mass of cloth rolled out a silver charm, Lora’s luck charm.

Sabrine walked out of the room again, knowing that if Lora was hiding, her things wouldn’t be gone. Gathering one’s possessions took time, which again implicated Tech. He was the only one awake and he had lots of time.

Upset, feeling too alone and small in this large house, Sabrine looked out the window. Well, she almost looked out if not for the red smudge on the glass, grabbing her attention from anything lurking in the night. A small red smear clung there and it was in the shape of a little girl’s thumb.

Again Sabrine tried to call Deirdre and again she got her voice mail. Everyone had left her and she was in charge while a little girl faced who knows what terror, stolen from her bed in the middle of the night.

“Gladys. Did you call the cops?”

“Yes.” Gladys came to the door. Stress and worry hanging on her features making her appear ancient. “They’re on their way.”

“I’m going to search the grounds.”

“Hey, Sabrine, will we find my grandbaby?”

“I hope so. I will do my best.”

Sabrine went out the front, disengaging the alarm before throwing open the door on the cool clear night. She could hear the ocean, not far, but not close enough to see. Unfortunately, she couldn’t hear any engines.

Without a flashlight, she kept walking, surveying the driveway. There sat her Jeep. Tech hadn’t taken it and he didn’t know their destination before Sabrine had pulled up in the driveway. It would’ve made planning a getaway difficult. He had to have called someone after they’d arrived.

No. Tech wouldn’t do this.

She kept walking, finding the front gate engaged. Not surprising considering the house alarms hadn’t gone off. Tech had all the codes, making it easy for him to bring someone through the gate, load up, and leave while everyone slept.

Cars could be quiet. While she safely slept, one could pull in. Lora never screamed though. On assignments Sabrine was a light sleeper. One peep and she would’ve known it. Of course Tech knew Sabrine’s habits. He would’ve kept Lora quiet.

She walked down the drive looking for tire marks or any signs pointing her in the right direction. When she saw nothing from the road side, she circled the mansion. Sabrine didn’t want to face Gladys. Before bed, Sabrine had promised that Lora would be safe. It was a bad promise to make, but the pain in Gladys’s eyes forced her to say something to soothe it away. Worse, Gladys had believed her.

Sabrine knew the only clues would be near the road. With nothing there to go on she walked around the outside of the home, making mental notes of rooms that she passed. At the library, she hesitated. The lights were on inside that room now, showing it clear against the dark night. On the glass at the library was another bloody marking better yet, a man’s thumbprint followed by the tips of three fingers.

After looking closer, she realized that it wasn’t just his fingers but his entire hand. Only the thumb and what would be the middle finger made a clearest mark, the rest a dim red outline, drying brown. He’d been bleeding.

She reached and touched the red, smearing it. The blood was on the outside. It couldn’t have been Tech’s print. He would’ve been on the inside of the library. She kept walking but no other windows had anything on them beyond a bad smudge from a quick cleaning by the maid earlier in the day.

Returning inside, Sabrine went upstairs, back to Lora’s room. The police would have a fit but Sabrine had to touch the window, the thumbprint. Again, as with the one at the library, this print was on the outside of the glass, the outside of a window on the second floor with no trellis to climb.

A logical explanation had to exist. Sabrine ran down the stairs, nearly knocking over Gladys, who was crying next to the man she’d shot. There wasn’t time to console her now. Sabrine ran outside to the spot below the bedroom window. The ground was bare, no landscaping except for grass. No blemishes marred the green carpet, no ladder had been used, no tires tracks, nothing.

Two people vanish, along with their belongings from a locked house leaving only their fingerprints behind. Even Tech couldn’t come up with a plan like this. It would be too time consuming when a simple kidnapping would work.

“What the hell happened here?”

For a moment Sabrine hoped she was still dreaming. None of this could be happening. People didn’t disappear. This didn’t make sense. Her hip burned as a not so gentle reminder that this was very real. Two people she cared about had vanished.

Her thoughts returned to Deirdre, her cryptic stories. She’d said that the people from Stone House could do things. What things she hadn’t a clue, but the red imprint on glass seemed to watch her as she walked back around to the library. The blood was a warning or a last cry for help.

The air around her chilled and, although Sabrine hadn’t been to church in three years, she crossed herself and said a quick prayer. She’d never believed in anything supernatural but stealing people from their rooms would be a small miracle. There, alone in the darkness, she would believe anything possible.