Plague Cult (15 page)

The hospital was in the next town over, past the big hardware store on the highway. Ruth sailed along in the truck, windows wound down and enjoying the fresh scent of the country after yesterday’s storm.

Even if Whitney’s situation was bad, Ruth would be going home to Shawn after helping the woman. That made the coming emotional scene easier to accept.

She parked the truck in the hospital car park and sat there a moment, not so much centering her magic as calming her soul so that she could connect with Whitney, empathize with and help heal the woman’s heartbreak, but not absorb her negative energy. Healers could be too empathetic. Self-care was essential or Ruth would burn out.

And the first thing she had to do was heal Whitney’s aura of the damage done by using death magic—and by Zach controlling and exploiting her. Using her.

Anger bit at Ruth as she thought of Zach’s betrayal. Shawn called the man evil. Ruth understood why, but she had her own term for Zach Stirling: psychopath.

Psychopath’s were dangerous because by instinct or life-learning they knew that their greatest power came from abusing personal relationships. Such attacks were insidious and could be sustained over decades. In popular culture, people imagined psychopaths as serial killers or mad dictators. It was as if by imagining psychopathy as an extreme condition people comforted themselves that it would never touch their lives.

Ruth got out of the truck, jumping down with a little thud onto the leaf-strewn car park. She slammed shut the door and beeped the lock.

The truth of psychopathy was similar to that of most psychological disorders: it ranged along a spectrum. Zach Stirling had caused so much damage not because he ran amok with an ax, but because he quietly, cleverly exploited the fears and trust of those near him.

Ruth would suggest to Whitney that she get counselling to recover from Zach’s betrayal and not let it scar and shape the remainder of her life.

There would be closure. Ruth couldn’t imagine Shawn allowing Zach to escape. Once he had permission from the commander of the Collegium guardians to pursue the ex-cult leader, she knew Shawn’s hollerider nature wouldn’t rest till he’d caught him.

The hospital doors opened automatically as she approached, releasing a gust of warm, musty fusty, disinfectant smells. To smell that air was to instantly know you were in a hospital.

Ruth ignored the reception desk. Given Whitney’s status as the ex-cult leader’s wife, the hospital wouldn’t be giving out her whereabouts to strangers who might be journalists, or were simply nosy. Fortunately, although Ruth’s magic wasn’t as hunt-focused as Shawn’s, she had clearly identified Whitney’s magic and aura, and could follow a scan spell to home in on where Whitney was in the hospital.

Darn
. She couldn’t locate Whitney’s bed. Ruth veered away from her confident approach to the bank of escalators and stood by a window, gazing out to the highway. She didn’t see the traffic, though. Instead, she recalled the flickering feel of Whitney’s magic and re-scanned the hospital.

Nothing! Could Whitney be awake and blocking a search spell? If so, intensifying the power of her own scan might scare the witch.

Ruth hit the elevators’ call button and the nearest door opened. She stepped in. She would find Whitney the old-fashioned, mundane way: by heading for the wing most likely to hold a woman admitted for shock and kept in for observation. Ruth exited to the general women’s ward.

She walked along it, glancing swiftly and with apparent casualness into each room. In mage sight, she could see the auras of the people inside. None were Whitney, although two rooms and three beds in common rooms were empty. Ruth retraced her steps, slowly. Had the hospital put Whitney somewhere else? Perhaps discharged her at breakfast time? It seemed unlikely.

“May I help you?” a nurse challenged her.

Ruth paused. “I’m looking for Whitney Stirling.”

The nurse’s tired, professionally sympathetic face firmed into sternness. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

“She’s not here.” Ruth stood firm.

“Mrs. Stirling is—pardon?”

“I can’t find Whitney in any of the rooms. She should be here, shouldn’t she?”

The nurse’s gaze darted down the corridor to one of the empty private rooms. “Who are you?”
What right do you have to question Whitney’s whereabouts
, she meant.

But Ruth had her answer. Whitney had been meant to be in that private room. “Never mind.” Ruth headed fast for the elevators. When she glanced back, the nurse was hurrying into the empty room.

Ruth called Shawn as she exited the hospital. “Whitney’s gone. She’s not in the hospital, and I don’t think she discharged herself.”

“Come straight home.” Shawn closed his phone and stared a moment at the side wall of the kitchen, fighting the urge to throw the phone against it.
My fault.
He had waited for the Collegium to approve his pursuit of Zach Stirling. He’d squashed his hollerider instincts, always so wary of being controlled by them, and the result could be that Whitney Stirling had been kidnapped by her husband.

Ruth had no evidence that Whitney had been kidnapped. But authorities like the FBI would have told the nurses if they were taking her in for questioning.

Could Whitney have walked out herself?

Impatiently, he pulled on the shirt he’d discarded during the slow, arduous levering up of the linoleum stuck to the kitchen floor. He didn’t have a vehicle, but that didn’t mean he was stuck at Rose House till Ruth’s return.

“Carla?” he shouted. His mamaw said she spoke with haunts. The ghost here had said she’d keep evil out. If she would, and could, then he wanted her on duty. “Carla, if you’re listening, look out for Ruth. She’ll be coming back here. I’m going out hunting.”

He walked out the front door, left the warded house unlocked, and
blurred
. The fast travel of his hollerider nature had him at the cult’s compound within a minute. He stayed back, in the woods, assessing the situation. A man and a woman poked about in the ruins of the main building. Arson inspectors. It wasn’t just the FBI and police who’d be interested in the situation. Insurance companies would be just as alert to the chance
not
to pay out on a policy. A cop watched the arson investigators from the dubious comfort of his car. The woods smelled sour from the wet, burned building.

Shawn concentrated. He needed to know if Zach was here or if anything in the compound held the sort of power that Zach might be tempted to return for it.

Last night, Ruth had cleared the site of the taint of death magic. The woods were no longer secretive and oppressive. They rustled with the brisk weather of fall. The activity and continuing human presence had driven away game, but birds flitted among the trees. Shawn sighted a jay, and took it as a good omen. He skirted around the main building, but no matter where he stood, there was no sense of active evil.

He cast around for Zach’s trail. The man had fled here last night. Shawn had thought Zach would go as far and fast as he could, leaving not just the area, but Texas. However, with Whitney missing, Shawn had to rethink his assumptions. He had to test them.

He was here to start again, from the beginning.

Zach had gotten into his car and driven out along the driveway. Shawn blurred along the edge of it, paused and cast again for the scent of evil. With so many people passing this way, and many of them—the ex-cult members in particular—highly agitated, the trail was obscured. He couldn’t be sure that Zach had turned right, back into town, but that’s what his intuition said. However, commonsense would have had Zach drive away from where he was known.

Shawn frowned, staring back towards the bridge. Finally, he moved. Now wasn’t the time to doubt his instincts. He blurred towards town.

Ruth drove down the driveway to Rose House, straining for her first glimpse of the front porch. Her shoulders sagged even as her spine stiffened. Someone waited on the porch, but it wasn’t Shawn. She hadn’t really expected he’d be here, even as he’d insisted she return to the warded safety of her home.

Carla drifted down to the bottom step. “Shawn asked me to stand guard. He said there’s evil loose.”

“There could be.” Ruth shivered despite the sun. The day was beautiful, as if nature was trying to make up for the devastation of last night’s storm. Faintly, from far in the distance, came the sound of chainsaws. Somewhere people were tidying up damaged trees. “Whitney’s the witch who used death magic and whose curse I broke. No, before you condemn her, she was under her husband’s compulsion. I don’t believe she ever intended to become immersed in death magic. Zach Stirling used her, and he’s whom Shawn is hunting. The man is an enchanter and a psychopath.”

“And not welcome here,” Carla said.

The house subtly vibrated with her words. Ruth felt the surge of energy, felt it reinforce the wards of the yard. “No, he’s not welcome here,” she agreed quietly, joining her refusal of welcome to Carla’s.

The ghost stopped barring the bottom step. “You need coffee.”

“I sure do.” Ruth had promised Shawn she’d come home, so she hadn’t stopped at her mom’s diner. “Did Shawn make any?” Hey, it was worth hoping!

Her phone rang.

“Sh-hello?” She’d expected it to be Shawn and answered without checking the caller ID. Only at the last moment did she have a sudden strike of instinct and alter her greeting. She glanced up at the sky, but it remained clear. A cloud hadn’t covered the sun, so why had she shivered? She recognized the stuttering voice. “Aunt Peggy?”

Shawn halted on the edge of town, near the school. Children were out, shouting and playing. Two were turning clumsy cartwheels. The intensity of his hollerider nature’s need to hunt burned in his veins, but against that was the discipline the Collegium had drilled into him. He needed transport. The fast travel, the blurring, required magic. Masking it, or rather masking the hollerider terror that accompanied it so that he didn’t scare the town, required even more magic. And magic might be needed to deal with Zach.

He pulled out his phone. He’d call Ruth. If she was nearly home, he’d meet her there. Otherwise, he’d run to the diner and borrow her mom’s car.

The punch of major magic from the far side of town stopped him cold. It reverberated through him like a shockwave. His hollerider nature snarled, but not to attack, not in response to evil. It was on high alert for a threat to him.

And to Ruth?

He blurred back to Rose House. If Ruth wasn’t home yet, he’d phone her from there. Urgency and the need to conceal his fast-speed travel had him cutting across country. He was at Rose House in seconds; swiftly enough to see Carla blocking Ruth on the porch, barring her from the steps by a vigorously wielded broom.

“Damn it, Carla. Let me past!”

“It’s not safe.” If ghosts could pant, Carla was. “Stay here. Shawn wants you safe.”

“That was my aunt.” Ruth tried to climb over the porch railing. Carla shoved her back with a broom head to the solar plexus. It wasn’t a hard blow, but it was determined. Ruth landed back on the porch. “Carla, didn’t you feel the magic?”

“I did,” Shawn answered.

Both women spun towards him. Carla lowered the broom and Ruth ran down the porch steps.

“It’s the plague,” Ruth said urgently. “I don’t know how or why, but it has exploded. It’s real and it’s powerful and…I was talking on the phone with Aunt Peggy and I heard a gunshot, and then, she just cut out. She made a gurgling sound and…nothing. We have to go to Mason’s house.”

“Why?” He resisted her urgent pull on his arm.

“Because Aunt Peggy went looking for Mason when he didn’t come into the diner for breakfast like normal and he wasn’t answering his phone. She finished off the breakfast rush before driving out to his place.” Ruth stared at him, the few freckles on her face stood out against the pallor of her skin. “She phone me because when she turned up, she walked around to enter via the back door, like family, and through a window she heard and saw Whitney and Zach Stirling. She said Whitney had a gun and was talking wildly about magic. Aunt Peggy thought magic meant maybe I should respond, not the sheriff.”

“I’ll go.” Shawn tugged the truck’s keys out of her hand.

“I have to go,” Ruth said. “You must have felt the magic. That was the plague unleashing. The power of it. Whitney or Zach must be dead, and their death ignited the old curse.”

“Evil.” Carla hugged her elbows. She stood at the edge of the porch wearing a black jacket and trousers and sturdy boots.

“We have to stop it,” Ruth said.

Shawn nodded. As much as he wanted Ruth to stay at home, to stay safe, unlike Carla he wouldn’t try and make her. Ruth might be the town, and possibly, the country’s only hope of containing the lethal lonely hearts plague.

Ruth gave clear if terse directions to her cousin Mason’s house and Shawn barreled the truck through town. The day was so perfect, achingly beautiful. The blue of the sky, the sunlight striking gold on fall leaves or deepening the green of pine needles, the shops and houses washed clean of dust by the previous night’s storm, all struck Ruth with the power of home and how much she loved Bideer and its people.

Fear for them, for Shawn and for herself felt like a compression bandage wrapped around her whole body and squeezing.

So this was plague. She hadn’t even seen its effects yet, and she could feel the ominous force of its unleashing. There was no way anyone could describe the experience of confronting a magically-created plague. She had her Collegium training. She knew how to construct containment wards, lower a fever, hold onto the thread of life in a person and feed it energy. But a plague. This plague…

“Stop!” she shouted.

Shawn hit the brakes.

They both jolted hard against their seatbelts. Ruth barely noticed. Her attention was for the fog of gray shot through with veins of red that rolled slowly but relentlessly towards them. She grabbed Shawn’s hand and pushed extra magic through the wards she’d put around him and herself. “That’s Mason’s driveway. Turn in there.”

He put the truck in gear. “What do you see? I can sense your magic around me, clean and fresh, but I can’t see the threat.”

“The plague is here. It’s pushing forward. Slowly, thank God. But moving on. We’re inside it, now.” They drove down the short driveway to Mason’s ranch house. It was such an ordinary scene.
“It’s oppressive. Aunt Peggy and Mason—”

Shawn squeezed her hand. “You’ll save them.”

“Last time…” She broke off. Last time, when Mason crashed his car, she’d been fourteen. She’d barely understood her magic, was still growing into it. This time the stakes were unimaginably higher.

“Anything I can do to help, it’s yours,” Shawn continued. “You don’t have to ask. If you can use my magic, then add its power to yours.”

She nodded, but she wasn’t sure her healer’s magic could combine with the terror of Shawn’s hollerider nature.

He stopped behind two cars parked—or abandoned, they were askew—in front of the wide garage. Everything was level, designed for Mason’s wheelchair.

“Wait.” As much as she wanted to rush into the house to help her aunt and cousin, she had to make the heart-breaking decision to save the most lives. “I phoned William with news of the plague. He’ll be sending support. I need to contain it till they get here.”

She was grateful when Shawn didn’t question if she could.

“Do what you have to.” He opened the driver’s door. “If it’s Zach who triggered this, I need to deal with him. Don’t worry, I’ll keep you safe.”

She smiled, sad and worried, yet amused. It was she who had to keep Shawn safe. This plague…

Years ago, training at the Collegium, she’d been exposed to the bubonic plague. It had felt like this. The texture of its magical origins and the devastation of its symptoms resonated through its aura.

She gathered her magic. It coiled at her center, but it wouldn’t be enough on its own. It would be the spark to draw in more power from the world around her: from the freshness of the wind, the photosynthesis of the trees and grass, the very pulse of the earth. She sank deeper into herself, plunged through her own magical center and tapped the healing energy, the life force, of the land. Then she threw up a containment shield, sealing in the plague.

The rolling fog of the magical plague smashed into her shield.

She shuddered. She was one person and she had to channel the immense power needed to contain the pressure of the plague pushing at the shield.

The passenger door of the truck opened and Shawn reached in and grasped her shoulders.

She recognized his energy and the feel of his hold, but it took seconds for her eyes to bring him into focus.

“Take my energy.” His eyes were stormy with his hollerider nature.

“Zach?” One word, all she could manage.

But Shawn understood her question: the worry that he’d need his magic to handle the enchanter. “Dead.”

Ruth’s relief wasn’t for news of the man’s death, but because it meant she could share this burden, the need to maintain the containment ward, with Shawn—if his hollerider nature would accept it.

She visualized her control of the shield coalescing in the palm of her right hand. She felt it strengthen, even burn, with energy. She held it out to Shawn.

His hand and his magic locked around it. Energy blazed up, ran through and interwove with her magic, and claimed the containment ward.

As healer, she’d need to maintain it, but Shawn’s magic, his connection to the world, would sustain it.

“Got it,” he said. “Now, you’re needed in the house.” He helped her down from the truck.

For an instant she leaned into him. “How bad is it?” she whispered.

“Whitney is seated on the floor in the living room by Zach’s body, cradling a gun and rocking back and forward. Mason is on a sofa, collapsed. Peggy’s on the floor beside him. They look sick.”

Ruth had been in Mason’s house twice. Walking in the front door, straight into the living room, she felt a stranger. She disregarded the gun Whitney held, confident that Shawn would handle any violent danger, even as he fed the containment ward.

Whitney turned bloodshot eyes in Ruth’s direction.

They were so haunted, so damaged, that despite her aunt and cousin burning up with fever, Ruth went to the witch.

Shawn took the gun from her.

Whitney seemed not to notice. She looked at Ruth. Dying people had that fixed look, that desperate yet condemned gaze. “I had to kill him.”

To Ruth’s right, Mason groaned on the sofa. Love for family, and old guilt, would have sent her to him, but her healer’s instincts knew she needed to be with Whitney. “Why?” she clasped Whitney’s hands. Death magic, like an oil slick, coated her fingers and palms. Ruth swallowed nausea. “Why did you kill Zach?”

“I didn’t sleep. I lay in that hospital bed and everything he’d done to me, everything he was, I saw it all. He’d bespelled me. He’d used my wedding ring.” Agony in her hoarse whisper. “He told me things. He gloated over things. And then he’d order me to forget. But I remembered. I remembered last night. He had to die. And now, look what I have done. Kill me.”

“Whitney, death is never the answer.”

“Look at your aunt, your cousin. I did this to them by killing Zach. He had to die.” Finally, tears appeared in her bloodshot eyes. “I didn’t know it would restart the curse.”

Ruth’s hands tightened. Whitney didn’t know it was so much more than the old curse. This was a virulent plague, born of her hatred and the abuse Zach had put her through. Because he’d channeled death magic through Whitney—and used it—when she killed him it hadn’t needed a specific spell to generate the plague. Vengeance had created this horror.

“We’ll fix this, Whitney. We’ll contain the plague.” Ruth stopped as the other woman’s near-catatonic state shattered.

“Plague?”

Shawn crouched beside Ruth. “Whitney, Ruth needs to help Peggy and Mason, and see how to undo the plague you unleashed.” Whitney flinched, but he continued steadily. “You and I are going to stay with her. If we can help, we will. But let’s get you up off the floor.”

Whitney stared at Shawn.

Ruth wondered if the stern justice of his expression and the leashed power of his hollerider nature that vibrated through the containment ward, would send the witch fleeing or into unconsciousness. But Whitney surprised her.

With Shawn’s help, Whitney stood. While Ruth bent over first Peggy, then Mason, checking their condition, Shawn seated Whitney in a chair turned away from Zach’s shotgun-blasted body.

Ruth concentrated on her aunt and cousin, finding similarities to the bubonic plague’s high fever and delirium, and also the unhealthy growth of malignancy inside them, converging on their hearts. The lonely hearts plague.

But she’d not let Aunt Peggy or Mason’s hearts rupture.

In the corner, Whitney poured out her confession to Shawn, a background murmur that drifted in and out of Ruth’s awareness. “I stole a nurse’s car keys. Beeped locks till I found the car that opened…Jared had guns at his house. I drove there. He wasn’t home. If he had been, maybe he could have stopped me. I took the shotgun.”

“How did you know Zach was at Mason’s house?”

“I know him. Knew him.” Whitney’s voice was so bitter it soured the already plague-laden air. “Zach would hide where someone was vulnerable. Someone alone, who couldn’t fight back. Mason in his wheelchair…victim.”

On the sofa, Mason muttered in some feverish nightmare.

Ruth chanted, using words to help her concentrate, attempting to drive down the fever in her two patients even as she maintained her and Shawn’s personal wards and the vital containment shield. Her magic seemed to shred at the edges. She kept chanting.

“Why would you think Zach was still in the area?” Shawn was directing Whitney’s confession into a low key interrogation.

“He had to stay!” She sounded surprised at the question. “The men were coming.”

Ruth stopped chanting. She turned her head, but kept her hands over Mason and Peggy’s chests. Her gaze met Shawn’s.
The men were coming?

“Who were coming? For what purpose?”

“The Pinkie Ring Brigade. Zach told me to forget. Everything was planned to bring them here. Bideer is sited at a nexus. It increases the power of spells and enchantments.”

The nexus was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it had given the plague virulence. On the other, it helped her and Shawn channel sufficient power to currently contain it. She just had to keep Mason and Peggy alive till help arrived. But Collegium guardians, even travelling via the portal to San Antonio and then by helicopter to Bideer were at least an hour away.

Mason and Peggy didn’t have an hour. Their lungs were laboring to breathe. So near the unleashing point, the plague was insanely virulent. Their hearts were filling with fluid.

“Lobbyists and businessmen,” Whitney said. Her voice was drifting. She was tired to the point of collapse, no longer driven by her emotions. “Zach promised them enchanted rings. They were to gather at Lynx Look-out. He said the nexus erupted there. They are fools.” She laughed, harsh like a banshee. “They thought the rings would grant them the power to influence those around them, to dance them like puppets on the string. But they would have been Zach’s puppets, like I was. That was why I knew he wouldn’t leave. The pinkie rings were to be enchanted today.”

“But you killed him. You stopped it.”

“I stopped him.” She was sliding off her chair, sliding into unconsciousness.

Shawn grabbed her, easing her off the chair onto the floor as she collapsed. “What do you mean?”

Her eyelids fluttered open. Closed. “The spell is in place. The men just need to shed their blood on their own rings. Zach had it all set up.” She fainted.

Shawn stretched her out on the floor and looked across at Ruth. “Men?”

She exhaled, trying to control her stress. She couldn’t handle any more revelations, and she shared Shawn’s suspicions expressed in that one question.

“Men aware of magic? Mages, perhaps, in their own right.” He flexed his large hands. People in positions of power, or jockeying for power, preparing themselves to abuse that position, were his usual target. Collegium guardians protected the magical population and mundanes from those who would abuse them. But today, he couldn’t. He had to stay and hold the containment shield.

Unless Ruth could undo the plague.

She trembled. A plague once unleashed could be recalled, but not easily. Not without intense suffering. However, the longer a plague existed, the stronger it established itself. “Shawn, the containment ward I set up, can you hold it even without me?”

His gaze pierced her. The awesome instinct to protect ruled his life. The muscles of his shoulders and chest strained. He so obviously fought not to question her, to give her what she needed—as he’d promised outside—even if her decision placed her in danger. He took a deep breath. “Yes.”

“Then hold it.” She released the containment ward to him, but warily, ready to resume maintenance of it if his non-healer nature couldn’t hold it alone.

The shield vibrated. Shawn’s jaw clenched. He inhaled and steadied. The shield held. The plague remained contained. But it was a precarious, temporary victory.

“All right.” Ruth reluctantly removed her hands from Peggy and Mason.
Hold on
, she pleaded with them silently. She crossed to Shawn and to Whitney, who lay at his feet. “William’s sending reinforcements. Whatever happens to me, they’ll be here, soon.”

“Ruth?”

“I can call the plague back, now.” She wouldn’t tell him the cost. Knowing that the longer the plague existed, the harder recalling it would be, she had to try. Given its virulence, in an hour, it might be beyond removal. Then, she and the other healers would be fighting it.

“How? Whitney couldn’t destroy it, and she’s its creator.”