The poltergeist reached towards me, and I could feel the heat radiating off its hand, almost feverish and pulsating with a sickness and rage that were beyond words.
And then, just like that, something else had its attention. Its hand was only inches from my face, but close enough that I could feel my skin heat and begin to peel, as if badly sunburnt. I started frantically scrambling backwards across the porch, trying to put some distance between us.
It wasn’t even paying the remotest bit of attention to me anymore. The poltergeist’s eyes were fixed out in the middle of the yard, its rage completely redirected.
Gretchen stood there, feet shoulder width apart, in a pair of flannel pajama pants and a tank top. Even from here I could see drops of blood dripping from her clenched fists. She had a spell in the works.
That only barely registered. What really hit me then was how sick she really was. She was gaunt. Her normally tanned skin, a mark of her Sioux heritage on her mother’s side, had a pallor to it that reminded me of hospital fluorescents and antiseptic. I think my heart broke a little, and the fear that consumed me only seconds ago was now replaced with a fear that would haunt me for the rest of my life.
She was dying.
The woman who had been like a mother to me after my own mother had left us was dying.
And she was still terrifying.
“That’s my Jonah,” she said, eyes locked on the poltergeist and full of murderous intent, “and since you want to lay hands on him, me and you are about to have one hell of a disagreement.”
The poltergeist reared back and launched itself towards Gretchen, trailing heat and motes of whatever blue-gray matter that it was made out of in its wake.
Gretchen waited until the poltergeist was maybe ten feet away and then dropped to one knee, slamming the bloodied palm of each hand onto the ground, activating the spell she’d had in the works.
The result was instantaneous.
There was a hissing noise, like someone had lit the fuse on a firecracker, and the darkness erupted with light, a magic so intense that I could see it without opening my sight up to the world of spirits and magic. A second later, I was hit with a shock wave. It wasn’t hard enough to knock me off my feet, but it blew the hair back from my face and gave a bit of cool relief to my parched and burned skin.
Gretchen’s spell ignited the grass around her in a perfect, elaborate, binding circle, the flames dying out as quickly as they had come into being, leaving nothing but smoldering vegetation in its wake. The poltergeist was now trapped. Not cut off from its anchor, but trapped. The problem was, Gretchen was trapped in the circle with it. If she stepped over the circle it would break, setting the poltergeist free and potentially discharging any residual power contained within it. Given that the summoning itself had been like a bomb going off—and that was controlled—I didn’t want to think about what would happen if that much energy was set free all at once.
I stood there slack-jawed, in complete awe at what I had just seen.
“Move your ass, Jonah!” Gretchen yelled at me, squaring up with the poltergeist. “Open your eyes! Find whoever this thing is anchored to and get a circle up!”
The poltergeist let out a shriek and threw itself towards Gretchen. She tossed what I can only assume was a combination of herbs infused with her blood—to act as a catalyst for the latent energies inside the plants—towards the poltergeist. There was a wash of blue-green sparks, bright enough to light up the entirety of Eli’s property. The poltergeist recoiled, and even on the porch, I could hear the sizzling of what Gretchen had thrown against its, er, skin?
“Today, Jonah!” Gretchen yelled, and this time, she managed to penetrate my thick skull. I grabbed my bag in one hand, leapt the railing, and landed in a crouch in the grass next to the porch. I could all but feel the power of the circle thrumming through the ground, radiating like the plucked string of a bass guitar.
Gretchen told me to open my eyes. She wanted me to see the other side, to follow the rope-like tendril of energy and emotion that bound the poltergeist to its anchor.
I knew for a fact if I tried, for the second time in as many days, I’d be flat on my back in the grass. Gretchen would be left to face this thing alone, and while I had no doubts she could hold her own, she would eventually get tired. Especially given the condition she was in. The more spells and magic she threw, the more she’d have to bleed to power it. Her body would give out long before her tenacity. She was too stubborn to run, too good to let it loose to hurt someone else now that she had it. It would eventually wear her down and finish her off.
I could make an effort to run around, searching without seeing the other side, hoping I’d eventually find out who it was anchored to, but what would happen in the meantime?
I growled, frustrated with myself. My head pounded, self-doubt and cowardice warring with each other in the back of mind, clouding my ability to come up with a plan.
There was no way I couldn’t at least try. Gretchen depended on it, depended on me. So I closed my eyes and let the walls in my mind slowly slip away.
When I opened my eyes my senses were assaulted. I could see the waves of power radiating off the circle, each one like an ocean tide washing over my legs. Gretchen was practically lit up with magical energies, her entire body wreathed in a pillar of what looked like green flame. The poltergeist, from this vantage point, was huge, easily three times the size of what I’d seen before. I could see the tendril of energy that fueled it, someone’s pain and rage, stretching out towards the tree line.
I closed my eyes and shut everything out, then took off towards the trees. Behind me, I could see more flashes of color, hear more of those screams from the poltergeist. When I heard Gretchen cry out I almost ran back, but I knew that if I did, the poltergeist would have me and the next screams would probably be mine.
I saw the anchor at the edge of the tree line, partially obscured by a massive growth of Queen Anne’s lace, or what the locals called “chigger bushes.”
It was Micah’s sister. Suddenly, the raw power of the poltergeist made sense. Nothing could possibly hurt more or cause more anger in a child than the death of a parent.
If she saw me coming, she gave no indication whatsoever. She stood perfectly still, her face registering no expression at my approach.
I was going faster and harder than I thought and had to lunge to the side to keep myself from plowing into her. I took a header into the bushes, landing hard on my side, and slid through a tangle of blackberry bushes I hadn’t seen, tons of tiny thorns tearing and scratching at my face.
I scrambled to my knees, throwing open my bag and digging through the contents, throwing random notebooks, pens, and bags of herbs that were useless in a situation like this onto the ground.
“Hey! Kid!” I shouted as I dug through the bag, hoping to get her attention. Maybe she’d go along with this whole thing willingly.
She kept staring into nothingness, not moving save for the occasional ruffle of her dress when Gretchen and the poltergeist traded more intense shots.
“Oh, for crying out loud! Hey! Kid! Look at me, would you?” I shouted again, finally finding the herb I needed.
Agrimony was a pretty common plant in Appalachia. People all over had used the stalks and little yellow flowers to cure a multitude of ailments, from skin problems to the runs. Mixed with a shaman’s blood, it was one of the most potent exorcism and protection herbs on the planet. It would do quite nicely for creating a circle and cutting off the power exchange from the little girl to the poltergeist, leaving Gretchen to mop the floor with it quite easily.
I crawled towards the girl on hands and knees and started dumping the herb around her feet in a small circle. I didn’t have a lot of the powdered flower, maybe just enough to make a circle roughly twelve inches across, but it would do the trick.
“The hell is this?” said someone just behind me.
“Get the hell away from my sister, pervert!” Micah growled, stomping towards me.
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“It’s not what it looks like,” I said, which was a pretty lame thing to say, regardless of how true it was.
“Oh? It’s not? You wanna tell me what it is then? Because it looks like you’re a pervert.”
“You know what she’s doing,” I said.
Micah stopped.
“What’re you talking about?”
“This isn’t the first time she’s been out sleepwalking, is it? This isn’t the first time you’ve had to track her down,” I said.
Micah didn’t say anything, but judging from the way he wasn’t punching me in the face, I figured I was on to something.
“She was at the woman’s house last night, wasn’t she?”
Micah muttered something barely audible. I took the handful of dried chamomile flower petals I’d managed to sneak out of my bag and threw them in his face. Mixed with the blood I’d wiped from my nose, the chamomile’s natural sleep-inducing properties were amplified by a hundred. The smattering of glowing purple motes hit Micah square in the face, and within a second he was slumped on the ground and snoring soundly.
I grabbed the baggie full of Agrimony and crawled back over to Micah’s sister, completing the circle. In the distance, I heard the poltergeist again, its screams louder and angrier. Gretchen’s followed it. Hers were screams of pain.
She was losing.
I wiped my hand across my nose again, looked down at the circle, and focused my will on the herb, on the magical energy held inside it. I pictured a wall of pure light surging upwards, cutting off the connection between the little girl and the spirit. With that picture firmly in mind, I slapped my hand down onto the herbs, willing what I’d seen in my head to become reality.
For a second, nothing happened. Then pure power shot up my arm, leaving everything from my finger tips to my shoulder feeling like it was on pins and needles. There was a small concussive wave, enough to put me flat on my back and knock Micah’s sister down.
I heard the poltergeist yowl again, then Gretchen. Then everything went black.
• • •
I woke up the next day in the back seat of Gretchen’s car, early morning sunlight making the interior feel a little too bright and a little too stuffy. All things considered, I felt alright. My nose was sore and I was about fifteen different kinds of tired, but other than that, I was whole.
“’Bout time,” Gretchen said, watching me in the rearview.
I sat up, pushed some of my hair out of my face, and wiped a rather undignified streak of spit and drool off my cheek with the back of my hand.
“Morning,” I grumbled.
Gretchen grabbed a cup from the console and passed it to me.
Coffee.
Warm, glorious, magnificent nectar of the gods. With cream and sugar.
“I love you,” I grumbled around the edge of the cup.
“Yeah? Kiss ass,” Gretchen said, steering the car off the exit.
“So, what happened?”
“Well, poltergeist is gone. Eli’s going to look after Micah and the little girl. Kid didn’t know what she was doing. She was sleepwalking.”
“That’s something.”
“Her brother was worried about you. Felt bad for callin’ you a pervert, once I explained everything to him.”
“I guess that’s something,” I said.
“Sometimes it works out okay, sometimes it doesn’t,” Gretchen said.
I shrugged.
“Did you seriously tell him your name was David Bowie?” Gretchen asked.
“I panicked.”
“Wow,” she said. “Jonah, you are one horrible, horrible liar.”
“I’ll try and practice harder next time,” I grumbled.
“Please don’t,” Gretchen said, turning up the radio.
I wish I’d paid more attention to what song was playing.
• • •
I didn’t see Gretchen for the next three months. She didn’t come over to the house, didn’t give my dad a hard time for not taking care of himself, and didn’t show up to train me. I kept practicing, learning how to work my magics, how to get better control of my sight, but I did it without her.
I knew it was because she was sick.
I didn’t know how sick until I got the phone call on Christmas Eve, just after breakfast. It was her daughter on the other end.
“Jonah Heywood?”
“Yeah? Who’s this?”
“Heidi Redstone, Gretchen’s daughter. She wanted me to call you.”
“Okay?” I said.
“You should probably come to the hospital.”
“I’m sorry?”
“The hospital. Mission. You should get down here. She doesn’t have a lot of time left.”
I didn’t answer. A weight settled on me. Something heavy and cold that I couldn’t make sense of. Getting to the hospital was a blur at best. I remember walking outside and finding my father. I remember mumbling my way through what I was told on the phone. I remember riding in the car to the hospital and meeting Gretchen’s daughter, but I can’t for the life of me remember what she looked like, or what we said, except that Gretchen had lung cancer and it was bad. The doctors didn’t expect she’d last more than another day or two, at best—and that was hopeful.
Somewhere along the line, my father left me alone with Gretchen.
She wasn’t the person I remembered. Her skin had gone gray and nearly translucent. Her eyes, normally alive with a spark of defiance, looked flat, their color washed out. She was thin to the point of being fragile, which was a word I’d never in a million years associate with her. She looked more like a fading memory than a person.
I took the chair next to her bed and slid my hand into hers. There were a million things I wanted to say, but each word died before they could reach my lips.
So I didn’t say anything.
I cried.
She held my hand in hers.
When I managed to get myself together enough to speak, I said the only thing I could think of.
“Please don’t leave me.”
“Hush,” Gretchen said.
I stammered, not even sure what I was trying to say.
“I said, hush,” she said, each word coming as little more than a forced whisper.
“I’m proud,” she said, and inhaled sharply. “I always have been. I’m proud of what you are.”
And just like that, with a slow, steady sigh, Gretchen was gone.
I wasn’t sure how long I sat there, holding her hand. I saw the girl, the blonde girl with the cat on her t-shirt, appear.
I knew what she was: a death spirit.
I saw Gretchen beside her, watching me, her eyes full of life and pride. They were both gone as quickly as they appeared.
When my father finally came to get me, there were staff waiting outside the door to take her body away.
The funeral was three days later.
I tried not to cry. I wanted her to keep being proud.
THE END
About the Author
PATRICK DONOVAN is the author of the Demon Jack and Jonah Heywood Chronicles urban fantasy series. He currently lives in the Piedmont Region of North Carolina, where he divides his time between teaching, writing, and pretending to act like a responsible adult.
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