by H. P. Bayne
“Damn it, Sully. I warned you, didn’t I? Why would you do this, huh?”
Sully had already been checked out and had escaped with bruises, bumps and scrapes. And one hell of a case of guilt. He’d spoken to his brother on the way back into town, had learned Dez felt hands shove him from the path. Hands they both knew weren’t attached to a living, breathing person. Sully tried repeatedly to apologize to his brother, but Dez—the consummate big brother—wouldn’t allow it.
Now all Sully could do was make the same attempt with Eva.
“I know. You’re right. It’s my fault he was there, that he got hurt. I knew he wasn’t crazy about the idea. I didn’t think I had a choice.”
“You had a choice,” she said. “You just chose your ghosts over your brother. Think about it. Every time you go off and do something stupid, he follows. He could have died today. He almost did. Is that what you want?”
Sully had been staring at his knees, but the question had him snapping eyes on her. “Of course it isn’t. How can you even ask me something like that?”
“Because in a way, it’s fine for you. If he dies, you still get to see him. I don’t.”
Ordinarily, those words would have had Eva staring at his disappearing back. But they had sparked tears in her, and Sully knew he couldn’t walk away from her if she was crying. Especially her. Between Dez and Eva, Dez was the one far more likely to shed tears—over upsetting news, a stressful day at work or a sappy movie. Eva just wasn’t a crier.
“Eva—”
“Just leave me alone, all right? I need a few minutes by myself.”
Sully obeyed—to a point. They were in one of the ER’s soft rooms and he had no intention of going anywhere. He needed to know Dez was okay, and he wasn’t leaving Eva until then. So he left the room but took one of the chairs immediately outside the door, trying to decide how long to give her before going back in to check on her. He knew Eva well, knew her words had been sparked more by fear for Dez than anger at Sully. What she said had hurt, but not so much for the way it had been said as for the fact he knew it was true.
He hadn’t called Flynn or Mara yet, didn’t want to worry them until they had some news. Anyway, Kayleigh was with Mara, and Sully knew Dez wouldn’t want his daughter seeing him until he could stand on his own two feet to greet her with a grin and a big hug.
Sully lowered his face into his hands, combing through his still-drying hair as he breathed out a pained sigh and closed his eyes. The moment he did, all he could see was Gabriella’s face in front of his in the water, her ghostly yet unsettlingly solid fingers coming to wrap around his throat. The image of her dancing, buoyed by drug-induced euphoria, whirling in her own breeze.
Falling ….
Sully’s eyes popped open. But he didn’t just see his own boot tops. A second pair of feet stood just in front of his.
Sully’s shock came in a strangled cry as he took in the ghost of Breanna Bird. Her hands were reaching out to him, so close her fingers nearly brushed his nose.
“Not now, okay?” he whispered. “Not here.”
Not ever, if he had any say in the matter. Dez and Eva had been right. The danger was growing. And now it was affecting Dez.
As far as Sully was concerned, that crossed an unforgivable line.
But Breanna wasn’t leaving; her hands remained clenched together. They were moving now, as if crushing something between them.
“I said I can’t.” He risked raising his voice a little. “Don’t you get it? I can’t do this anymore. Please leave me alone. Please, just leave me alone.”
Breanna’s hands parted and Sully watched as purple petals—iris petals—fluttered to the ground, settling around his feet.
The message was clear enough.
Sully exhaled a resigned sigh. “Sparrow’s going to die, isn’t she?”
Breanna’s head gave an almost imperceptible nod.
“Soon?”
Another nod. Damn it.
“Can you lead me to her?”
This time, a head-shake, no.
Sully knew he’d never survive it if anything happened to Dez because of him. And he could try, and try hard, to ignore the dead. But he couldn’t turn his back on the living. And, for now at least, that included Sparrow.
“I’ll help you, all right? I just need to deal with some stuff here. I won’t be long.”
Eva’s voice, sounding from over his shoulder, made Sully jump. “You’re talking to one of them, aren’t you?”
Sully hadn’t had a chance to answer before Eva turned toward what, to her, would just be empty air. “You leave my family alone, you hear me? They’re mine, not yours. Your problems aren’t ours, and it’s not up to us to fix them.”
“Eva, you realize you’re a police officer, right?”
“Shut up. Is she the one who pushed Dez?”
“No. It wasn’t her.”
Eva’s eyes widened. “God, how many are there?” Again, she didn’t wait on a reply before returning attention to the ghost. “If you hurt anyone I love, I swear to God I’ll have you exorcised.”
“Eva?”
“What?”
“She’s gone. And, just so you know? You can’t exorcise ghosts. That’s demons.”
“Feels like the same thing to me.” Eva’s expression lost its fury. “You said she’s gone but it’s not for good, is it?”
Sully forced what he could of a smile. There was no point answering. She wouldn’t want to hear what he had to tell her.
“Can we talk for a minute? In the room?”
Sully followed Eva and took the seat on the couch she was patting beside her. She met his eye, but only for a moment, shifting to stare at the wall across the room. The moment of eye contact was long enough that he could see something inside her had broken.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have said the things I said to you a few minutes ago. You know I love you, right?”
She wouldn’t see him nod, so he answered in words. “Yeah.”
“And I know you care about us as much as we do you.”
“You guys are everything to me.”
For some reason, that drew a noise from Eva’s throat that sounded suspiciously like a choked sob. But Eva didn’t break, sucking back her emotion and concealing the pain beneath a mask of stone. “I don’t want to say this to you, but I need you to give us some space. Dez adores you, but he has a daughter to worry about. I know you can’t help the things you see, and I know you feel like you have a duty to them, the same way Dez and I have a duty to protect the public while we’re on the job. But you need to do something for me, for Dez, even for yourself. If you’re in the middle of something like this, then I don’t want you coming around or asking for his help. If anything happened to him, it would destroy all of us. Me, Kayleigh, your parents, you. All of us. He’s our heart, Sully, and if he stops beating, we’re all lost. Do you understand?”
Sully was working past the lump in his own throat, but hadn’t quite gotten there when he choked out the words she needed to hear. “I understand.”
The doctor chose that moment to come in, and it was just as well they were in a hospital waiting on word about a loved one as that would provide adequate explanation for the tears in both their eyes.
There was good news, at least. No sign of a head injury and no indication of any damage from Dez’s having gone briefly without air. The doctor—one it appeared Dez and Eva knew, likely through work—wanted him here for another few hours to monitor him, and advised Dez book off sick for the night shift he was supposed to be starting soon. But all in all, it seemed Dez had avoided major repercussions from his near-drowning.
The doctor left after providing the location of Dez’s room in the ER.
And, for Sully, there was only one thing left to say. “Tell Dez I love him, okay, Eva? And tell him I’m sorry.”
The iris petals were still on the floor outside the soft room door as Sully walked down the hall.
Out the sliding
glass doors.
Out into the storm.
14
There was no point beating around the bush. If Marc Echoles was the man responsible for the deaths of Breanna Bird and Gabriella Aguado, then that was where Sully was going.
The problem was, he didn’t know where to go.
It was closing in on seven in the evening, and the doors to the university’s arts building were locked tight. He pulled out his phone, doing a quick 4-1-1 search of the name, but discovered Marc was unlisted. Naturally. Anyone who was a practicing Wiccan was likely to want to remain unlisted in order to avoid the freaks—both occultists and Christian zealots—who might come banging down his door.
Ordinarily, this was the point at which Sully might ask Dez, Eva or Flynn to check Marc’s address, an easy enough task since it had been the location of a break-in a year ago. Now that was no longer an option.
But that gave him a thought. It had been a college kid the police had picked up for the incident, so it was likely at least a few students knew where Marc lived.
The next problem would be figuring out where to find them.
Sully had learned earlier that Marc was the professor of two sociology classes: social deviance and history of the occult. Sully could start by picking his way through gatherings of students in dorm common areas or the university’s bar. Or he could take what he hoped would be the quicker approach.
While most of the buildings were closed, the library wasn’t one of them. As he sloshed through the lobby to a set of elevators, he added his own wet footprints to numerous others. Final papers were more or less in now, and it was time for students to start cramming for summer session exams.
A board next to the elevator told him what he needed to know, and he made his way up to the fourth floor where the sociology and psychology sections were. From there, it was just a matter of picking his way through the stacks until he found the right area.
He located it near the back of the library, a couple rows in. There was no one currently in the stacks here, where books on the occult and new age were kept, but there were a handful of students sitting at the tables. From a gap between books and upper shelf, Sully scanned the students, trying to catch a glimpse of book titles. Unfortunately, most of the books were open, so that was out of the question.
The solution came in the form of a pentagram, a small silver pendant that dangled from a black velvet choker around the neck of a girl with long, glossy black hair and ear buds dangling down the front of her black shirt. Turning back to the shelf, Sully scanned them for something he could use as an icebreaker. He took his time, working hard to summon up the courage to head over there and speak with her. He’d never been good at approaching people he didn’t know, let alone pretty girls, and it felt even worse given he was going in with a lie.
He knew how to lie; there had been times in his life he’d had to. He hated doing it, but there was no getting around it. Not tonight.
He located and pulled out a book about the Salem witch trials and circled the stacks, approaching the girl with the choker. He could make out the sound of a Rob Zombie song coming from the earphones, but she still glanced up at his approach.
“Mind if I sit here?” he asked in his library voice, indicating the chair opposite her.
The girl grinned and shook her head a little too fast. Sully had never been much of a judge of these things, always felt he was either too thin when next to Dez, that his hair was too shaggy, or that he wasn’t outgoing enough to last in the dating scene. And yet, he never seemed to have trouble finding girls who looked at him the way this one was right now, smile lingering around her lips as she pulled the earbuds from her ears.
It seemed Rob Zombie was taking an intermission.
He was still trying to figure out how to start the conversation in a way that wouldn’t immediately give away his purpose when she settled the problem for him.
“Salem witch trials, huh?”
“Yeah. I saw a show on it and was thinking about taking a class in that area. I’m just fumbling around right now with a bunch of classes that don’t mean anything to me.”
“Well, as it happens, you’ve just sat next to an expert. I can—”
She was interrupted by a sharp shushing from an annoyed young woman at the next table.
Sully’s tablemate rolled her eyes and leaned over to whisper to him. “Tell you what. Leave the book and come with me. I’ll buy you a coffee and tell you anything you ever wanted to know about witches.”
“Aren’t you studying?”
“If I read another line, I’m going to start looking for a window to jump out of. I need a distraction, and you’re a good one. Come on.”
There was no time for talk on the way to the campus coffee house—open and doing decent business thanks to the cramming students—as the wind and rain now held so much force they were forced to sprint.
They ordered coffee, Sully getting the strongest he could find given his expectation he could easily be up all night on this search. A table at the back came open just as they got their order, and Sully’s companion made a beeline for it, achieving a narrow win over a cranky-looking young guy who’d just come in from outside.
“So what’s your name?” she asked, taking a measured sip of her coffee.
“Sullivan. What’s yours?”
“Takara, but I prefer to go by Ara. My parents ….” She didn’t elaborate, as if that statement said it all.
“So, not to assume or anything, but are you a practicing witch?”
“I dabble, I guess. I’m not part of a coven or anything. But I read a lot, and I’ve tried out a few spells.” She broke into a coy smile. “I’m hoping maybe one of them actually worked.”
It dawned on Sully what she meant, and he made a show of focusing on his coffee. Where Dez panicked when forced to talk about the occult or supernatural, Sully dreaded conversations like this. Not that he wasn’t interested; Ara was incredibly beautiful. But there was something unnatural to him in that type of chat, a pretence he’d never been able to master.
“You’re shy,” she said, picking up on the crush of signals he knew he was emitting without trying. “That’s cute.”
He managed a smile—and that would be about all he’d manage unless he could successfully steer this conversation back to his intended topic.
“You said you know about witchcraft,” he said.
She laughed, and he found he liked the sound. “Okay, okay, point taken. What do you want to know? Ask me anything.”
He’d given it some thought prior to approaching her at the library, and decided he’d have to play it through a bit. He asked a couple questions and let her ramble a bit about pagan religious history, the birth of Wicca and the historical persecution of women and social misfits. He didn’t have to feign interest, but he did find he struggled to hang onto her words. The longer he sat here, the more he was drawn in by her deep brown, almond-shaped eyes, how they sparkled when she laughed ….
“You still with me, Sullivan?”
“Uh, yeah, sorry. Just didn’t sleep much last night. Listen, I was doing some checking into classes and I noticed Marc Echoles teaches some stuff in this area. Are you familiar with him?”
“Oh, yeah. Everyone knows Marc. He’s your man if you want to learn about anything pagan or occult. And he practices the craft too, so there’s that.”
“Didn’t I hear someone broke into his house last year?”
“Yeah, some nut job, probably looking for something to pawn for drug money.”
“Does he live near here?” Sully was grasping, he knew. No way this was a natural topic of conversation. But Ara’s suspicions didn’t seem to have been triggered.
“Yeah, actually. There are a few professors who bought up places around here. Marc’s is on Brightmore Crescent, only about three blocks away. Kind of a fitting place for a practicing witch, given that it kind of looks like a miniature castle. It’s got a turret and everything. Naturally, the turret is where he keeps hi
s altar. Not that I’ve seen it firsthand or anything, but that’s what people say.”
She leaned closer, grinning as if about to impart a delicate conspiracy. “Some people even say he performs human sacrifices. Houses around here have old stone cellars and solid foundations. People could scream for hours in the basement, and no one would ever hear them.”
Sully guessed he looked how he felt as Ara broke into a wild giggle. “You should see your face. It’s just a story, Sullivan. No one actually believes it, you know.”
And that, right there, could be just the problem. If it were true, and no one believed it, who could say how much Marc Echoles had gotten away with already?
Prying himself away from Ara only after accepting her phone number, Sully headed back out into the rain and hoofed it over to Brightmore Crescent.
He was thoroughly soaked through within minutes, a state that was fast becoming second nature. The storm would have to let up eventually, and Sully couldn’t wait for the moment when his clothing didn’t feel like it weighed more than he did.
Ara hadn’t provided an address, and Sully didn’t dare ask for one. It was welcome surprise enough that he’d made it as far as he had, finding someone who knew how to find the professor.
And Ara’s directions and description proved more than enough. Sully forced himself to walk rather than run through Brightmore Crescent, not wanting to stick out more than he already did. No one would willingly be out in this right now, at least no one with all their mental faculties intact. The last thing he needed was to have the police show up and start questioning him as a suspicious person.
Although, if he were honest, the idea of having some armed backup nearby didn’t feel like such a bad thing right now.
The turreted house was easy to find on the small crescent as the architecture appeared unique to this property. Sully could make out a couple lights on inside, one somewhere toward the back of the house on the main floor, visible through what he imagined was a living room window; the other up in the turret itself.
Sully didn’t stand there long, ducking through an open wrought-iron gate framed by a pair of elm trees. Leaning against one of the thick trunks, he sought to conceal himself in the shadow created by a nearby streetlight. He needed a moment to get his head screwed on before he attempted an approach. If he was going in there, he needed to be ready for anything.