by King, R. L.
“A—spirit?” Her expression was still stunned, shocked. She seemed to be having trouble forming a thought.
Stone nodded. “Please, Mrs. Washburn. No one is accusing you or your friends of anything. These things happen sometimes, even when there wasn’t any conscious intent behind them. But we need to know as much of the detail as we can.”
“Why?” she whispered. “What—what are you going to do?”
“We’re going to try to stop it, if we can.”
She frowned; she’d barely blinked since Stone had dropped his bombshell. “You—can do that?” And to Lopez, she added, “The police know about this?”
“Not officially,” Lopez replied. “Not formally. But the murders are increasing, and I’m convinced that Dr. Stone is on to something here. The evidence I’ve seen is too strong for me to doubt it.”
“As for your other question: I don’t know if we can stop it,” Stone said softly. “But we’re going to do everything we can. And I do know that if we’re to have a chance at it, we’ll need all the information you can give us.”
She didn’t move. Dropping her gaze down to her ring-bedecked hands, she wrung at one of the napkins.
“Mrs. Washburn?”
“No,” she whispered. “This is—crazy.” A tear trickled from one eye and wandered down her cheek, cutting a track through her perfect makeup. “We can’t have—” She reached out and picked up the knife, scooping out some of the brie and spreading it on a cracker. Her hand shook, her shoulders stiffening.
Stone wasn’t sure why he chose that exact moment to engage his magical senses: perhaps it was something odd in her movement, or just some sort of supernatural hunch. But in any case, he noticed the greenish aura only a second before Suzanne glanced back up.
“You are resourceful, mageling,” He of Many Faces said using her voice, roughening it and adding its strange inflection. “But you will not follow this avenue.”
Before Stone could lunge forward, Suzanne, her eyes now shining with an unearthly red-orange glow, leaped from her chair and danced several steps backward, still clutching the knife.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
“What the hell—?” Lopez demanded.
Stone was already standing, his chair clattering over behind him and nearly falling into the pool. “Let her go,” he ordered, eyes blazing.
“When I am ready,” the Suzanne-thing said. “You surprise me. I nearly ripped your flesh from your bones, and still you come after me. You are even more foolish than I thought.”
In the periphery of his vision, Stone sensed Lopez moving up behind him. He held a hand out and back in a wait gesture. “I’m not going to give up. None of us are. We’ve got your little plan figured out now, and it’s just a matter of time before we send you slinking back to wherever you came from. Now let her go.”
It laughed, a sound like gargling acid. “I think not, mageling.”
It raised the knife and plunged it toward Suzanne’s chest.
Lopez yelled and dived forward, but Stone was expecting the move. As soon as Suzanne’s arm lifted, he magically seized the knife in a telekinetic grip far stronger than he could have managed with his physical body. The Suzanne-thing only got it down a few inches before an invisible force stopped it in midair. A second later it wrenched free of her hand and flew over the pool, dropping in with a splash.
Lopez, still moving, grabbed her arm and held it, only loosening his grip when he realized that she was no longer holding the knife.
Suzanne sagged a bit as if she had lost her balance. She blinked and her eyes returned to normal, fixed first on Lopez and then on Stone in panic. “What are you doing?” she demanded. “Let go of me!” She yanked her arm from Lopez’s grasp; he immediately let her go.
“Mrs. Washburn, wait. Please,” Stone began, but Suzanne was already backing away toward the house.
“I don’t know what you did to me,” she said, voice shaking, “but I’m calling the police!”
“Wait!” Lopez called. “It’s not like that!”
“Mrs. Washburn. Please hear us out,” Stone said urgently, moving toward her. “You were just possessed by the spirit I was telling you about. That’s what it does. It possesses people, and they don’t remember anything it when it leaves them.”
“Well, that’s convenient, isn’t it?” she snapped. “You must think I’m an idiot.” She continued backing toward the house, her eyes darting between the two of them as if she expected them to jump her again.
“Stop!” Lopez ordered, his tone commanding—the sort of tone he would use on a suspect he was about to apprehend.
She stopped, briefly, looking like a cornered animal.
“What if we can prove it to you?” he asked.
“How can you do that?” she demanded, voice high with panic.
Stone was looking at him in astonishment. “Yes—how can you do that?”
He pointed up toward the roofline of the house. “That’s a security camera, right? Does it work? Please tell me you don’t have one of those fake ones.”
Warily, she said, “It works. There are several of them around the house. I never used them much before, but since the murders started—”
“Go look at your tape,” he told her. “We’ll wait out here. See what it shows you. Just do it before you call the police. If you see what I think you’ll see, you probably won’t want to.”
“Wait,” Stone said. “Where do you keep the recorder for the cameras?”
She looked confused by his question. “In Lester’s study,” she said, waving toward one of the windows along the wall. “Why?”
“We want to be able to keep an eye on you,” he said. “Isn’t that right, Sergeant?”
Lopez looked almost as confused as Suzanne, but went with it. “Uh…yeah. Just to be safe.”
She seemed uncertain, but finally she nodded. “All right,” she said. “I’ll go in and look. But you stay here. I’ll open the curtains so you can see in, but I don’t want you coming in with me. I’ve still got Lester’s guns in the house—if you try to break in, I’ll shoot you.”
She backed the rest of the way to the French doors, opened them, slipped inside, and clicked the lock. After a moment, the curtains to the room she’d indicated opened. She began fiddling with something on a desk.
Stone let his breath out and walked over to station himself next to the window so he could keep watch. “Nicely done,” he told Lopez. “I didn’t even notice the cameras.”
“It’s one of the things you get used to looking for when you’re a cop,” Lopez said. He nodded at the window. “How did you know she was possessed?”
“Green aura, remember?” Stone kept his attention focused closely on Suzanne as his heart rate slowly returned to normal. He didn’t have any intention of showing Many Faces (or even Lopez), but the encounter, the first since his too-close brush with death, had spooked him more than he cared to admit.
Lopez went back to the table, righted Stone’s fallen chair, and sank into it. “I sure hope something shows on that tape,” he said. “Otherwise we’re up shit creek. If she calls the police, I’m not even sure I can convince Casner not to haul both our asses in.” He glanced at Stone. “Why are you so concerned about keeping an eye on her, anyway? You don’t really think she’s going to shoot us, do you? Or run away?”
Stone didn’t turn away from the window. “I’m more worried about what she might do to herself. I haven’t done anything to prevent Many Faces from reoccupying her.”
“You know, you could have gone all day without saying that.”
It was fifteen minutes before Suzanne finished what she was doing inside. She left the room, and a moment later the French doors opened again. Stone and Lopez both stiffened, but Suzanne came out slowly, empty-handed. She looked pale, shell-shocked. Stone shifted to magical sight to check her, but her own aura, a
disturbed muddy gold that was probably much brighter when she wasn’t agitated, showed no sign of Many Faces. “Are you all right, Mrs. Washburn?” Stone asked.
She shook her head. “No.”
He and Lopez carefully approached her. They led her over to the table and helped her sit down; she didn’t object. When they too were reseated, she looked at them with haunted eyes. “I—I watched the tape.”
“Yes—?” Stone prompted.
She took a deep, shuddering breath. “I don’t even know what to say,” she said bleakly. “I don’t know what to think. I don’t even remember doing any of what I saw. I don’t remember getting up, or grabbing that knife. And—it looked like I was going to stab myself if you hadn’t stopped me, Sergeant.”
Lopez started to say something, but Stone tapped his arm and shook his head. If Suzanne wanted to believe it was Lopez who’d stopped her, that was all the longer before Stone would have to explain anything inexplicable. Thank goodness for cameras that were sharp enough to see what was going on, but blurry enough not to show detail.
“How can that be?” she demanded, sounding like she was wanted to cry, or scream, or leap up from her chair and run away.
“That’s what this spirit does, Mrs. Washburn,” Stone said gently. “It possesses people and forces them to do things. Often it forces them to kill themselves, or other people. That’s why the police don’t have any suspects: because there aren’t any suspects in most cases.” He leaned forward, his gaze intense but kind. “Do you believe us now, at least that this could be possible?”
Her slow nod was reluctant. Her frightened eyes came up to meet his. “I’ve always been interested in the supernatural, Dr. Stone. I wasn’t lying to you when I said I thought I felt Les’s spirit in the house. But—this is something different. Something—horrible.” Her eyes widened. “Oh, my God,” she whispered. “This has something to do with what happened to that poor woman they thought you—” She trailed off, but didn’t take her eyes off Stone.
He nodded, his jaw clenching. “Yes.”
Once again tears began to run down her cheeks. “I just want to wake up and find out this was all a nightmare.”
“I know,” Stone said, his voice soothing as he tried to put the image of Lindsey out of his mind. “I know. I think we all wish that. But I still need your help, Mrs. Washburn. I need you to tell me what you know. That’s the only way we can stop this nightmare.”
Suzanne looked down at her hands for a long time. Then she drew a deep breath. “Ask your questions. I’ll—I’ll do my best.”
“Thank you,” Stone said. “What I need to know is anything you remember about rituals you did when you were in your sophomore year.”
She thought about that. “I—I used to write them all up,” she said. “All the rituals and meetings. I still have the write-ups. I could find them, if it would help—”
That was better than Stone could have hoped for. “That would be brilliant, Mrs. Washburn. Can you find those for us now?”
“I think so,” she said, standing.
Stone stood too. “We’d best go with you, I think. Now that you believe us, it would be safer.”
“Safer—why?”
“I’m concerned that the spirit might try to possess you again and make you do something to yourself when you’re alone.”
Her eyes widened and she went even more pale. “Oh, God,” she moaned. “What about after you’re gone? Will it—”
“I can help you with that,” Stone said. “I can teach you a mental technique that’s effective in keeping it out.” He didn’t tell her that what he really planned to do was put a block on her mind, as well as at least a minimal ward around her house. That was for later, as soon as he figured out how to tell her what he was doing without letting on that he was performing real magic.
She looked dubious, but nodded. “Come on,” she said. “I’ll find you those write-ups.”
Twenty minutes later Stone and Lopez were seated in the living room, watching Suzanne leaf through spiral-bound notebooks whose covers were decorated with unicorns, rainbows, fairies, and other whimsical stickers. “Hardly the type you’d expect to be summoning spirits of vengeance,” Stone muttered to Lopez, indicating the notebooks with a quick head gesture.
“Here it is,” she announced. She held up one of the notebooks. “We only did a couple rituals that year. Like I told you before, the whole thing had started to wind down by then. Most of the time, we got together for a meeting but ended up watching movies and gossiping about boys instead.” She pointed at the notebook. “I remember this one, though. It was right after Tansy joined the group. She wanted to do a curse.”
Stone frowned. “A curse? I take it that wasn’t your usual activity.”
“Oh, no. Our spells were all ‘good witch’ stuff: health and happiness for us and our families, ‘love potions,’ that kind of thing.”
“What sort of curse was it?”
“Something to do with a boy. I think he’d dumped her, and she wanted to get even with him.”
“And you went along with it?” Lopez asked.
She shrugged. “Sure. It’s not like we believed any of it was real. Although—” She gasped. “Oh, my God.”
“What?” Stone leaned forward. “Are you all right?”
“How could I have forgotten about that?” she whispered. “At the time we thought it was just coincidence, but it still scared us enough that we never did another curse again.”
“What are you talking about, Mrs. Washburn?”
She met his gaze. “The boy,” she said, her voice shaking. “The one Carly wanted to put the curse on. A couple days later, he was attacked in the high school locker room by another boy who tried to stab him.”
“Wait,” Lopez said. “The kid who almost died was the one she put the curse on?”
Suzanne nodded. “We—we were all afraid that God was punishing us for doing something so awful, even though we knew it couldn’t have been our fault. Even Carly was scared.” She stiffened. “I remember—it was in the papers, of course. The boy who did it claimed he had no idea what he was doing, or why. They barely even knew who each other were.” She stared at Stone. “It was the same thing, wasn’t it? Like what just happened to me.”
“Almost certainly,” Stone said.
“Then—it was our fault!” She grasped the notebook in shaking hands, erupting into tears again. “Oh, God, it was our fault—”
“Mrs. Washburn, please. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. You didn’t know.”
“But—” she said in a trembling voice, “Why did it stop? You said it killed other people. You said it was back. We—summoned it again? After it was gone?” She looked utterly miserable, letting the notebook drop back into the box.
Stone nodded. “It appears so.” He tried to keep his voice gentle, but he couldn’t take the time to try to comfort her right now. He needed to get this information. “Mrs. Washburn—when you got together to do the ritual two weeks ago—what was the subject? What were you trying to accomplish with it?”
She shrugged without looking up. “Nothing special. It—it wasn’t a curse or anything bad. Just wishing us all continued health and happiness.”
“Did you have any sort of new materials to use?”
That time she did look up. “You know, I did,” she said. “I had a book—I’d found it a few months ago, at Bart’s. It had all these passages in Latin, and I thought it might make the ritual sound more—authentic.”
Stone sighed. Mundanes. “Do you still have the book?”
“Of course. Do you want to see it?”
“Please. And—do you know Latin, Mrs. Washburn?”
She gave him a damp, wan smile. “Not a word. They didn’t teach it in high school, and I didn’t study it in college. It just seemed—magical.” She stood. “It’s in the library. Will you come with me?�
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She led them down another hall and into a small room. All four walls were lined with bookshelves; the only other furnishings were a comfortable chair, a pole lamp near the window, and a desk in the middle of the room. Stone glanced around, scanning some of the titles; it was a highly eclectic collection dominated by swashbuckling adventures, romances, and ‘pop-occult’ volumes. Switching to magical senses, he wasn’t surprised that he didn’t immediately notice anything that glowed with an aura indicating it was more than it seemed.
Until he directed his gaze toward the area where Suzanne had headed.
He saw it before she plucked it off the shelf: an old, leather-bound tome larger than a modern hardcover, its cracking binding held together with a single, equally ancient leather strap. Several multicolored slips of paper poked out from between its pages. “Here it is,” she said. “I find a lot of things at Bart’s. Usually I just buy anything that looks interesting, especially if it’s related to the supernatural. I got this one a few months ago, and it’s always intrigued me even though I can’t read anything in it. I just got a vibe from it, you know?” She held it out, offering it to Stone.
He wasn’t surprised that she had gotten a ‘vibe,’ even despite her being completely mundane. The book fairly radiated magic, its aura glowing so brightly that it obscured the other books behind it. When he took it in his hands he felt a faint buzz, like an electrical current was running through it. “You got this at Bart’s?”
She nodded. “The owner told me that a whole bunch of books had come in from an old man who died. I was there the day they came in, so he let me look through them before he put them out for sale. When I looked through that one, I got the idea for getting the Sisterhood back together at the reunion for one last ceremony.”
Stone tore his attention from the book long enough to verify that nothing else magically interesting resided on the dark wooden shelves. “Is it all right if take a look inside?” he asked. His voice sounded a little oddly husky: aside from this book’s potential for being the ‘artifact’ that Many Faces had spoken of, it was also a very old and highly magical tome. Alternative name, at least where Stone was concerned: ‘mage catnip.’ The temptation to take the book somewhere private and spend the next two or three days delving into its secrets was overwhelming, but they didn’t have time for that right now.