Red House (20 page)

Maneuvering between them, I put my hands on the trembling boy’s shoulders and tried to make eye contact. “Tyler, my name is Roxanne. I work for your grandmother. She’s waiting for you outside and we’re going to take you to her. We’re not going to let anything happen to you.” I tried to be as calm and comforting as I could but it didn’t seem to do much good.

Tyler edged away from me, shrugging off my hands. “Just keep Shelby away from me.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. She just went crazy. Screaming. Saying real bad stuff. She tried to hurt me.” He looked younger than his sixteen years and on the verge of tears. “I told her she had to quit reading those books. I told her I’d tell Mom if she didn’t. I should have. Mom would have taken them away from her.”

“This isn’t happening because of any books Shelby read, trust me. Your grandmother’s house is haunted, Tyler.”

Tyler looked doubtful. Blake said, “What happened when she tried to hurt you? Was she acting different? Sound different?”

Tyler nodded, hair falling in his face. “Yeah, she didn’t seem the same. I mean, she’s always a bitch but this was different.”

I said to Blake, “So when he’s possessing her he goes after her family. That tracks with what I know of Haschall.”

“She’s aware of it, at least on some level,” Blake said. “That’s why she ran.”

“Yeah.” I said to Tyler, “Whatever happened, it wasn’t your sister in control. There is a spirit in this house and it’s very strong and it took her over. Do you understand?”

“Oh, I get it all right.” Contempt rolled off the kid in a noxious wave. “My sister’s a devil worshiping bitch. She made this happen.”

Tyler would get along great with my family. I knew there was no point in arguing or trying to convince him he was mistaken. The only truth people in that mindset believed was the one they wanted to believe. “Let’s go.”

He may not have been the brightest light on the Christmas tree but I could tell from his narrowed eyes and pinched expression he hadn’t missed the anger in my voice. The important thing was that he didn’t fight when we led him from the room and down the hall. I took point, the boy in the middle, Blake bringing up the rear with one hand on the kid’s shoulder. I glanced back at Blake as we paused at the stairs. “Walkie-talkies would be good right now.”

“Would they work?”

I shrugged. “Better chance with them than cellphones. Although in this soup probably nothing would work.” I wanted to ask Tyler what he could see, what he could sense, but figured it was pointless. For one thing, he was scared and hostile. For another, either Blake wasn’t trying to project calming energy by keeping a hand on the kid’s shoulder or Tyler was one of those people so insensitive to the world around them it did no good. My guess was the latter.

Blake’s disco ball of light moved with him. That was definitely a trick I wanted to learn. Some of the light I was seeing was only visible in the auric field. I had never seen so many spirits at once. Some milled about aimlessly. Some were caught in the echo of their past performing actions that were second nature when they were alive. Many did not seem to be aware of us, or much of anything at all. There were others who watched us, the light of their faint watery gray eyes tracking us as we moved through the house.

A few times cold ghostly hands raked through me. I suppressed a shiver and kept going, drawing closer to the others. Blake followed my lead, the two of us closing ranks around the boy. I wanted to call out for Daniel and Shelby but was afraid to draw attention to us.

We reached the sunroom. There was no sign of Daniel or Shelby, or Haschall for that matter. Blake said, “What do you want to do?”

“You take him out and I go look for the others.” I didn’t expect him to agree.

Blake, however, was full of surprises. “How about we see if he can leave on his own now and if he can’t, I’ll take him out. You stay put and I come right back, then we go look for them. Deal?”

I nodded, glad he was being reasonable. Did that mean he was possessed too?

“We tried to get out before,” Tyler said. His earlier anger had been replaced by fear again. “None of the doors would open. We couldn’t even break the glass.”

Blake tried the door. It opened with no resistance, letting in the cooling night air. Testing with one hand, he drew back. “It’s hot.”

“Red, too.” The barrier we’d come through earlier was back up. “What do you think?”

He took my hand. “Let’s give it a shot.”

I motioned to Tyler. “Stand right here. I tell you to go, you run. Your grandmother is waiting in her car at the bottom of the driveway. Go straight to her, okay?”

Tyler nodded. He looked at the doorway. I didn’t think he could sense anything but he knew something had kept them in the house. “What about Shelby?”

“We’ll find her and get her out too. Get ready to run.”

Quivering with tension, Tyler swallowed, clenching his hands. I exchanged a look with Blake. “On three,” he said.

I reached out, tapping into the magic that flowed like a river under the house, opening myself to it again. Letting it pour through me and awaken every part of my being. I channeled it, shaping it to my will and preparing to send it back out to carve a space in the red barrier that smothered this house. I didn’t hear Blake count down to three so much as feel when our energy synced. We gave a push at the same time and the red dropped in front of Tyler.

“Go!”

The kid made it out in the space of seconds before the barrier returned. I felt the explosion of energy a split second before I saw it, red waves arcing out to send Blake and me flying. He crashed into the back of a sofa, tumbling over it and landing half on it and half on the glass coffee table in front of it. The glass shattered, deafening in the eerie silence, pieces of it settling around him. I landed on the floor in front of the sofa, the hardwood bruising my hip.

I reached him quickly, trying to be careful of the jagged glass. “Can you move?”

Blake tried to stand but rolled off the sofa instead, swearing as the glass sliced his hands. “I’m okay.”

Trying to support him as best I could with my hands on his sides, I led him away from the mess to sit on the floor. Blood was smeared over his hands. He began to pick out slivers of glass as I opened my bag to get a small first aid kit. “We should find a bathroom, see if the water still works. Can you manage?” I plucked a small piece of glass from Blake’s hair, smoothing the strands back into place. A splash of red-gold shimmered through his aura, Blake the Badass Sorcerer gearing up for a fight.

“Yeah.”

I helped him keep his balance as he rose. We found a bathroom halfway down the hall, a small half-bath with a good-sized sink. The water worked fine. In no time I had Blake’s hands cleaned, disinfected, and wrapped in gauze.

“I think we’re gonna have to do both spells, yours and hers.” Blake’s voice was pitched low. He sounded tired.

“Yeah, I was thinking that too.” I finished securing the gauze with tape and repacked the first aid kit. “I’m gonna need Shelby. Daniel too.”

“You need him to be part of the circle?” I nodded. “How does that work with him? I mean, Daniel’s technically dead.”

“He’s only mostly dead.” A nervous giggle slipped out. Blake raised a wicked eyebrow and I did my best to look embarrassed. If it was wrong to make
Princess Bride
jokes at inappropriate moments, I didn’t want to be right. “He can’t do magic like we can but there is a life force there. I think I can draw from that to help with what we need to do, if it’s necessary.”

Blake looked dubious. “You think? You’ve never done it before?”

“No.” I stood on tiptoe and kissed Blake, snaking my hand around his neck. He wrapped an arm around me, pulling me to him. I had meant to distract him a little, maybe myself too, worried about the damage to his hands and what was ahead. He clung to me, hunger in his lips, his energy in disarray. He’d been hit hard by that barrier twice now. I didn’t want to think it might be affecting more than his pride.

I broke the kiss with reluctance. “We can do this. Fake it ’til you make it, right? Isn’t that what you Chaotes believe?”

Before Blake could answer, the sound of screaming drew me into the hall. Nothing to the right. Bearing down on us from the left side was Shelby, eyes burning red with Haschall’s spirit, her aura smothered by it. Blood smeared her hands, her shirt, one cheek. She was alone.

“Bubba!”

Like a Terminator in a bad mood, Shelby kept coming. “Where’s Daniel?” I screamed. “What did you do to him?”

The voice that issued from her mouth was deeper than Shelby’s with a heavier accent. “I killed him, slut.” She raised one small hand, palm out, and threw me down the hall with a blast of heat and force.

Chapter 16

The time between losing my grip on the tree and hitting the surface of the rushing water stretched, full of dread and futile struggle as I grasped at empty air. The impact on the water was a shock. How could something so seemingly insubstantial hurt so much? The force of it emptied my lungs just before it pulled me under.

I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t swim. There was nothing to hold onto but what I could conjure up out of the depths of desperation and magic. Stale smoke, cheap whiskey, and a hint of music teased at the edge of my awareness. The current pushed me up and I broke the surface, taking a deep lungful of air.

Instead of sky and water and the familiar sights of my land I saw a haze of red wrapped in a suffocating blanket around a small dark-haired form. Then I was dragged under again and closed my eyes against the onslaught of water.

A scream tore the world in two, the flood nightmare collapsing under the weight of reality. I lay gasping, solid floor beneath me, a starfield aura hovering above. Blake knelt at my side, two fingers on my wrist checking my pulse. “Can you move?”

Shelby huddled against the wall sobbing. Sitting up slowly went okay, so I stood. Not too steady but good enough. I nodded, gesturing vaguely.

“We need a good sized room where we can work,” Blake said. “You know the house well enough to find us one?”

“Ballroom on the third floor.” I coughed, my throat raw from swallowing flood water. Rather, from reliving the experience of swallowing flood water. Haschall had some nasty tricks.

“Lead the way.” He knelt to pick up Shelby. She looked so small and fragile cradled in his large frame, crying as she stared at the blood on her hands.

“Does he still have his head?” Bad timing be damned, I had to know.

“Roxie,” Blake admonished, giving me a hard look.

I ignored him. “Was Daniel decapitated?”

Shelby took a shuddery breath and shook her head once. “There was a knife. Oh God.” Then she could speak no more, ragged sobs the only sound from her.

Relief coursed through me. I squeezed her shoulder. “It’s gonna be okay, I promise.”

In minutes we left the servants’ stairs and entered the ballroom. Several ghosts loitered in the room. I dug in my bag for one of Rozella’s old special recipes, a golf ball sized bundle of herbs and other natural ingredients for repelling spirits in a hurry. “Leave this space,” I commanded. I threw the ball as hard as I could to the floor, kicking the spell into high gear with a push of will. “Now!”

The spirits dispersed, leaving the room to the living. Blake enlarged the disco ball with a motion of his hand, flooding the room with enough light to work by. I barred every point of entry with salt. The room was huge, taking up over half an entire floor. Potted rubber trees and other large plants were stationed at various points around the perimeter. A long rectangular banquet table sat at the front with an arrangement of dead flowers long wilted in the center. White folding chairs were arranged in several rows in the center. An enormous portrait of Nathan Bedford Forrest hung on the wall behind the banquet table, with a Tennessee flag on one side of him and an American flag on the other. A mix of paintings and old portraits hung on the other walls. Most of it looked to be Civil War related. One in particular caught my eye. I recognized it from Shelby’s file. Susan McCrickard stared down impassively on the space where she must have hosted numerous balls and parties, painted in a demure matronly blue with dark hair and eyes. I could see an echo of both Julia and Shelby there.

Blake had placed Shelby on the banquet table, leaning over her as he spoke quietly. I watched from a distance, glad he seemed to have a calming effect on her.

Blake met me several feet from the table. I said, “How is she?”

“She stopped crying but she’s in bad shape. She thinks she killed Daniel. I don’t know what to tell her.”

“First of all, she didn’t do anything. It was all Haschall. We have got to make her understand that.”

“And when Daniel wakes up and either one of us goes looking for him and brings him up here, or he wanders up on his own, then what? How do we explain that? She put a Bowie knife in his heart.”

“Haschall put a Bowie knife in his heart.”

“What the hell was something like that doing lying around, anyway? Who leaves a knife like that sitting out?”

“Blake, this is Tennessee. It could have just as easily been an AR-15.”

He looked confused. I forged ahead, asking, “How did you get Haschall out of her?”