Possession (26 page)

Luke was watching me. Understanding slid into his
eyes. “That’s why you let go of my hand. Why you’re suddenly afraid of me.”

“I’m not afraid of you.” I tapped him on the
chest. “I’m afraid of what might be hiding inside you.”

“You think there are three of us in here?” He
looked like he didn’t believe it.

“Or maybe two. His mother told me an evil spirit possessed
him before he came here and fooled her and his entire guild for weeks. I don’t
know Dean, and his mother only spends a few hours with him every week. What if
the person we’re dealing with isn’t Dean at all? What if it’s the killer
pretending to be Dean?”

Luke raised him arm. “Touch me, Wendy. See what
you can feel.”

Wendy’s eyes were wide. She took a step forward
and then wrapped her fingers around Luke’s wrist. The moment she touched him
her head whipped back, her eyes rolled up into her eye sockets, and she started
speaking in tongues. But there was no janitor around to translate this time. We
stood watching her as she uttered words that didn’t make any sense, talking so
fast she didn’t stop for breath.

And then she stopped.

“What did you see?” I asked.

Her eyes focused on me. “Hellhounds. Hellhounds
and a ring of fire.”

“Did you see or feel
Weatherton
?”
Luke demanded.

She shook her head.

I was hoping when Wendy touched him we would have
some answers. We found the killer’s ritual room, we found his trinkets. We even
found two dead bodies he left behind. But we were no closer to finding
him
.

Weatherton
slit Larry’s
throat. Was it with an enchanted dagger? Was it some sort of sacrifice like
another madman had once done to my father? If Larry was killed as a sacrifice,
why had Caroline been killed with a hammer? It must be a horrible way to die, having
nails hammered into the back of your skull. I gave a prayer up to the Goddess
that Caroline was already dead when it happened. But I knew deep down that she
probably hadn’t been. In my visions, the killer enjoyed watching his victims writhe
in pain. I could still hear their cries of agony. I could still hear the
beating of their hearts.

Wendy’s fingers still circled Luke’s arm.

I looked at her. “Do you think that if the killer
was in there, you could tell?”

“I think I would hear him. But I can’t be sure. I
can
hear Dean, though.”

“You can?” Her answered surprised me.

Her eyes got unfocused again. “Yes. He’s far off,
in a small, dark place.”

She’d said she couldn’t be 100 percent sure that
Weatherton
wasn’t inside Dean, but she was a strong
reader—one of the strongest, she had told me. I was desperate to believe
that
Weatherton
wasn’t sharing a body with Luke. She
surely would have heard him if he were in there.

“Satisfied?” Luke asked, his voice tinged with
anger.

I took a step forward and placed my hand on his
chest. “I’m sorry.”

He offered up a small smile as he grabbed my hand.
“I don’t blame you for being careful. If he was inside me and he hurt you…” He
didn’t finish the sentence.

Wendy turned and looked once more at the altar. “
Weatherton’s
normally extremely calculated and controlled,
but not now. He’s not thinking…he’s just seeing red.” She pointed a finger at
me. “He scrawled your name on the wall. Maybe he knows we’re trying to stop
him. Maybe you were supposed to be his next victim. Whatever the reason, it’s
obvious he’s now fixated on you.”

“Terrific. We have the medallion and the Ouija
board. We can still call the spirits to me to tell us where he is.” I ignored
the voice of doubt in my mind that added,
And
know once and for all that he isn’t inside Dean.
“The spell has to be done
after midnight, right?”

Luke nodded his head. “During the witching hour.”

“We have to find a quiet place to do the spell
without getting caught.” I looked out the window. The wind had stopped, and
rain no longer pounded against the glass. “How about outside? We could do the
spell in the woods where Gloria Kincaid was killed. Maybe being out there where
she was buried will make it easier to connect with her spirit.”

Neither Luke nor Wendy objected to the plan. They
just looked at me in silence.

I turned to Luke. “What else do you need for the
spell? I was just thinking of the Ouija, but I remember from last time that there
was other stuff around the board—a bowl and feathers.”

“I need a raven feather. And candles,” Luke
answered.

Wendy reached out and grabbed the candle sitting
on the altar. “Will this do?”

I didn’t want to use anything the killer had touched.
But he already handled the medallion,
I reminded myself.

“Two would be better,” he said.

“We could go back to the other room and grab a
couple of the candles around the pentagram.” I could tell by the expression on
his face that he didn’t like the idea any more than I did. I was trying to
remember everything he’d used during the spell. “Wasn’t there some kind of reddish-black
goo you wiped on the board?”

Luke walked over to the window and looked out. “It
was pig’s blood, but we could use human blood instead. We’re going to the place
she was killed. There should be a strong connection there. Her spirit should be
close by. If we get a raven feather, we’ll have everything we need.”

“Wendy, do you think you can scavenge up a raven
feather?” I asked.

“I can try,” she answered.

“Okay, that’s taken care of.” I switched gears,
remembering how we got distracted to begin with. “Mildred.”

Luke’s arm came around and circled my waist. “All
right. We get her
out,
we do the spell…then
what?”

With a
sigh,
I leaned against him. “If the spirit tells us
who’s
possessed
, we figure out a way to get
Weatherton’s
spirit out. Then I’ll send
Weatherton
to hell where he
belongs, and we’ll get the heck out of here.”

“Assuming it’s not me. But if it is
—
”

I reached up and put my hand to his lips. “It’s
not. Wendy would have felt him inside you.”
Weatherton
isn’t inside Luke
. I wanted to believe it with all my heart, but
deep down I still held a kernel of doubt.

He
frowned,
but said, “Okay.”

“Okay,” I answered back.
I hope I sound like I mean it.
Weatherton
is
not in Luke. He’s not
. I repeated it over and over in my mind and hoped
desperately
it was true.

Wendy was now beside us.

“Before we go… Can I have the flashlight for a
second?” I asked.

Luke passed me the light.

“I just want to double-check. Maybe he left some
clue in all this stuff.” I forced myself to walk back to the altar. I took a
deep breath and lifted each item. They
were
spread
over a thick layer of flowers and leaves. I reached into the
leaves
and my fingers brushed against
something. I pushed the leaves aside. It was a small brown book the size of my
palm.

“What did you find?” Luke came up beside me. He’d
already picked up several of the items, turning them in his hands slowly. With
a nod, he pocketed a nondescript-looking fork and a small, cracked crystal.

“A book.” I handed my find over to him.

“I think it’s from Barton’s office.” He opened the
cover. “Yes, look—Barton always scrawls his name and the date he got the
book inside.”

“Why would the killer take one of Barton’s books?”

“I don’t know. There are spells in here I
recognize. It’s death dealer magic. But the killer isn’t using death dealer
magic.
Those symbols in the room
…I got a
good look at them. They’re not Latin, or anything I’ve seen before. The
patterns drawn on the floor are animals.”

Wendy was now standing with us. “I saw the outline
of a snake on the floor.”

Luke flipped through the book. “You said in your
vision you saw a skull with feathers on top. It sounds like an older magic than
ours. There are a lot of tribal
magics
that predate
clan magic and death dealer magic.
Magics
based on
animal spirits. I don’t know much about them. I know people I could ask, but…”

I finished his sentence. “They would kill me on
sight.”

We looked at each other for a long moment before
he spoke again. “There has to be a reason he took this book. When I get to
Barton’s office, I’ll go through it and see what I can find.”

I wiped my fingers on my pants and looked around
the room. “Let’s get out of here as quickly as we can. I’ve had my fill of dead
bodies and spooky hospital wings.”

* * *

When we got to the ritual room, Luke insisted he should go
in alone to get the candles. By the look on his face, he wasn’t in the mood to
listen to any arguments. He passed me the blue shopping bag that held the Ouija
board, and I watched him stride into the room full of death. It was a tense few
moments, waiting outside in the hallway for him to reappear. When he finally
did, he had two candles cradled in the crook of his right arm.

We walked at a brisk pace through the empty,
crumbling hospital wing. I stopped at the abandoned wing’s exit to the outside
world and unlocked it. Holding my breath, I swung it open, waiting for running
orderlies and blaring alarms…but nothing happened.

I jammed a piece of broken trim into the catch so
that it couldn’t lock and looked longingly out into the rain at the woods
beyond the tall fence. As I watched, a tree branch blew against the fence from
the wind, and a small blue flash of arching electricity lit the air.

They really need to cut the trees back, or the
fence will start a fire. Wouldn’t that be a shame
…
I squinted more closely at the tall fence. At some point nature
had started to reclaim the empty space around the asylum, and the fence now
enclosed a small forest of its own, a cluster of trees younger than the aged
ones outside the wire. The fence itself was old and rusty with numerous patches
of shining newer wire where it had been repaired. Piecemeal as it was, it still
looked tall and substantial, with a coil of barbed wire running around the top.
From Mildred I knew that the electricity was broken as often as it was working,
but they seem to have it on now. We would have to come up with a plan to deal
with that if we were ever going to escape. I closed the door carefully, making
sure it would open again without a key, and turned back to my friends.

Wendy took the lead, guiding us up and down a maze
of hallways as though she had some kind of mental map of the place. When we
finally went through a set of swinging doors and found ourselves under working
fluorescent lights, I gave a loud sigh of relief. We survived, for the moment.
We made it through another dangerous, crazy situation. We were lucky.

I wondered how long our luck would last.

The hallways were clear. Hopefully the night staff
was still asleep at their desks. Two of them were dead. I wondered if that’s
how
Weatherton
got Caroline—did he sneak up on
her when she wasn’t paying attention? Or was
Weatherton
squatting in the body of someone she knew and trusted? Did she go willingly to
her death? Why had the killer veered off from his normal pattern? Why had he
killed both of them? Wendy said it was because he was losing control. I
shuddered at the thought. A crazed killer becoming more unstable was the last
thing this whacked-out asylum needed.

Luke watched me. I couldn’t help but wonder what
he was thinking.

Wendy looked over at us. “I think it’s best we
separate.” I started to protest, and she raised her hand to stop me. She was
looking straight at me. Her voice was strong and confident. “I have to go shake
down some patients and see if anyone has a raven feather stashed. You two
should go after Mildred.”

Separating wasn’t a smart plan. “It’s not safe for
you to wander the empty halls by yourself.”

Wendy didn’t back down. “I can feel him if he’s
near.” She could see by my skeptical expression that I wasn’t convinced. Her
voice took on a reassuring tone. “I’ll be careful. We can meet up in the woods.
Use the door you blocked open. Look, we’re running out of time.”

She was right. Our window to do the spell was
quickly closing. If we were going to do it, we had to do it soon.

I looked over at Luke. I could tell he wasn’t
happy with Wendy’s plan.

“Fine, but watch your back,” I said.

She smiled. “You, too.”

I watched her walk down the hallway and disappear
around the corner. “She’ll be okay. She’s a strong reader. She’ll sense if
she’s in danger. Weird, though. She was so assertive about going on her own.
Normally she’s much more timid.”

“Readers are strange. My kind—
our
kind—is hated, but her kind is
feared. They have incredible powers that make many people uncomfortable,” Luke
said.

“Because of the mind reading thing?” It never
stopped surprising and annoying me when she did it. Being around a reader would
make anyone feel uncomfortable.

“That, and the ability to manipulate other
people’s thoughts,” he answered.

His words stopped me cold. “Come again?”

“There are some readers who are powerful enough to
change your perception of the world. Only in small ways, but no one likes to be
manipulated. It leaves an echo, and strong people can feel it happening.”

“If it’s just influence, and you can resist it,
why fear it?” But I knew. The idea that someone could influence you or steal
your will was even more terrifying than banshees and zombies. It was much
harder to fight an unseen threat.