World Tree Girl

by Kerry Schafer

  There’s certainly nothing in the luggage that’s pointing toward Jill as either a secret agent or a villain. Her passport is unexceptional. Her clothing is fashionable and expensive. No listening devices or snooping devices or anything remotely unusual except for a small key, which might fit a locker or a padlock.

  Jake, forgetting his scruples, examines the suitcase for a false bottom or a secret compartment, and I take advantage of his distraction to slip the little key into my pocket. If something turns up that it fits, it’s better for him if he doesn’t know.

  Frankly, I’m disappointed in Jill. I expected she’d have some kind of contraband, but the only thing that turns up is six bottles of booze—less than 4 ounces each, stashed in an easy access compartment. Vodka. Four are empty. Not enough to get an accustomed drinker truly drunk.

  “Can you get a lab to test these?”

  He snorts. “This is Shadow Valley, remember? If Jill dies, maybe. And, officially, we have not searched her belongings. At least I haven’t.”

  “Fine. I’ll hold on to them then.” I sniff an empty bottle. Then a full one. Nothing.

  Jake starts to say something, hesitates, then says, “I’m off duty, I’m tired, and I’m going home to bed. Are we done?”

  We’re done. He walks me out of Jill’s suite and across the hall to my own, waiting while I unlock the locks.

  “I’m not exactly in need of a male protector,” I tell him, unnerved by his close proximity and an impulse to invite him in.

  “Humor me,” he says. “It’s been a long day. Do take some sort of precautions, will you?”

  “Hey, I’ve got the cat to warn me and the dog for protection.” I groan. The damn dog will need to go out. We really do need to track down Sophronia, and soon.

  Jake frowns as the door opens and Morpheus comes bounding out, demanding to be petted. “She really has run off somewhere, then, hasn’t she? She’d never just leave the dog.” He rubs the creature’s ears. Morpheus whines, his tail thumping. “I’ll take him out for you. Be right back.”

  I leave the door open behind me, listening for footsteps, taking precautions to secure the door to the secret staircase. A salt barrier. A silver cross.

  Anubis sleeping peacefully on the back of the bloody couch is a sign that no wandering spirits are hanging out in my suite right now. After a little while, Morpheus bounds into the room, far too excited from his little outing, nosing at the cat and getting slapped for his efforts.

  Jake doesn’t come in. “I’ll be back for a council of war first thing tomorrow. Sleep well.”

  As I lock my door behind him, I’m conscious of a fatigue so deep I don’t bother to take off my clothes before falling into bed. Even so, the last emotion I’m aware of, as sleep claims me, is regret that Jake’s warm body isn’t in the bed at my side.

  • • •

  The hours I spend in bed are too few and too restless. Untangling myself both from my sheets and a twisting dream of looking for something lost and long buried, I head for the kitchenette on autopilot, stubbing my toe and staring at the coffee maker for a good thirty seconds before I remember what happened to the carafe.

  Which leads me to all of the problems needing to be solved: Phil’s ashes. Jill’s blood. Jill in the ICU. Sophie missing and presumed responsible. My suite still a wilderness of boxes and misplaced furniture. My ruined couch.

  It’s enough to make a body want to go back to bed and stay there.

  Fortunately, I thrive on crises and there are plenty here to keep me occupied. Anubis is still asleep at the foot of the bed, curled up into a ball with his nose buried in his tail. Morpheus is another issue. He whines and goes to the door, giving me a soulful look.

  Dogs. So damn needy. I should have had the foresight to send him home with G, the middle schooler, or pawn him off on Matt. I throw on a clean pair of jeans and a T-shirt, jam a ball cap on my head, and make for the kitchen, the dog at my heels.

  It’s only 5:36 a.m. and I expect Matt to be still sleeping, but the smell of coffee meets me halfway down the hall. He’s leaning on the counter, unshaven, uncombed, still beautiful, but looking more like a fallen angel than a Greek god.

  Without a word, he pours me a mug and hands it over.

  My leg aches with a vengeance, as does the tight place in my side, and I perch on the edge of a stool, the mug cradled between my two hands. Breathing in the steamy aroma is almost as good as swallowing the scalding brew.

  The dog whines, urgently. “I’ll take him,” Matt says. “Come on, boy.”

  When he reappears a few minutes later, a much happier Morpheus trotting down the hall ahead of him with his tongue hanging out, Jake is with him.

  “Couldn’t sleep,” Jake says, pouring himself a mug of coffee and doctoring it with cream.

  I’ve never seen him anything other than clean shaven, and the shadow looks good on him.

  “What’s on the docket?” Matt asks, waiting until I signal an acceptable level of caffeination by making eye contact.

  The dog flops onto the floor and lays his head on my foot. I eye him dubiously, wishing he’d choose another human. “First off—the party line. Any reference to last night’s adventures is met with some sort of comment indicating a haunted house or some such. There are two types of people. Most of them will believe it, because they don’t want to believe anything else. The others already know about the paranormal world and should be smart enough by this age to keep their mouths shut.”

  “What about that kid?” Matt asks.

  “G? I doubt you’ll have a problem there,” Jake says. “Her mom’s an addict, not unwilling to raise a kid but incapable. Her dad loves her okay, but she takes care of him, not the other way around. She’s exactly the type to buy into a secret society and die before she betrays it.”

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

  They both startle, as if I’ve said something drastic, rather than a reminder of the truth and what we’re doing here.

  “I don’t want her involved,” Jake says.

  “She involved herself,” I say, moving on. There’s nothing to be done about G at this point. Besides, I suspect she has gifts of her own and she’ll be better served learning how to use them than by hanging out with people who pretend they don’t exist.

  “Hit social media today and see what the buzz is. I’ll check Dason’s feeds and hack into Sophie’s. Jake, can you do searches for the World Tree Girl? Throw some tattoo pics out there, see if anybody knows the artist?”

  Jake nods assent.

  “Matt—”

  “I’ll be contacting the Unit.” He catches my expression and half smiles. “You’re going to have to trust me on this one, Maureen. I’m not giving away anything about Soph, but if they can tell me something that will help us find her, then I have to try.”

  Of course, he’s right. It worries me, though. I had felt the need to reach out to Abel, too, when he went missing. He ended up dead and I’m not entirely sure my phone call didn’t cause that chain of events. Guilt never solved anything, though, and I push it aside and get to my feet.

  “Good luck. Let’s get to it.”

  I don’t even mention the mess down in the lab. I figure that’s my job. The ashes of my dead former lover, not to mention the possibility of his wrathful spirit. Cleaning up the mess is not at the top of my priority list, although it rests uneasily in my mind, no matter what else I am trying to do. I’m pretty sure the spirits aren’t done, and I’m also pretty sure I don’t want to attempt conversation again anytime soon.

  Still, my other efforts lead nowhere. No ghostly messages from beyond. Nothing of interest on social media. Dason was careful and circumspect. A few posts about this and that, reposts, mostly, of cat pictures and motivational quotes. Sophie doesn’t have an online presence at all, as far as I can tell. This seems odd for a girl of her age, but wondering about it doesn’t lead me to any answers.

  As for the boxes and the clutter, the task of opening and sorting throug
h the items feels almost as overwhelming as the basement. I’m not one to not do something, just because it’s difficult, but I really don’t feel up to the problem of Phil.

  A phone call saves me.

  “I need to show you something.”

  “Mac. Good morning to you, too.”

  “Come on down. Wear something warm.”

  I look out my balcony window, and sure enough, there’s a Harley in the parking lot, straddled by a man in motorcycle leathers. He waves up at me.

  Silence travels through my phone like a sentient thing.

  “It’s cold. I can smell snow.”

  “All the better reason to go now. Before the snow.”

  The weather does not look promising. Gray sky touches down all around the horizon. There’s snow on the higher elevations I can see in the distance. The truth is, I’ve never much liked the cold. And the damnable hardware in my leg would make a ride in this weather a misery.

  There’s also the fact that Mac isn’t on my list of people I know I can trust. I scrawl a quick note for Jake and tape it inside Dason’s laptop, then put the whole thing back under my mattress. If I disappear, Jake will find it. My favorite knife—the one that Jill stabbed me with so many years ago—is in my ankle sheath. I have another looped around my belt, along with Phil’s special flashlight. My gun goes into one pocket of my winter coat, ammo into the other.

  “You ready?” Mac asks, when I arrive in the parking lot.

  I look up at the heavy sky. There’s a different quality to the air, an alteration in the light. I sigh.

  “Yep. Let’s go.”

  He hands me a helmet and waits while I strap it on, not offering a hand or even looking in my direction while I struggle to get my stiff leg up and over the seat and settle myself.

  The engine roars into life, the big beast of a bike vibrating with power, and we’re off.

  Cold is an insipid word, meaningless and overused. It has absolutely no weight in the face of the biting, hungry force that envelops us as Mac shifts into ever higher gears and the bike picks up speed. In a matter of moments my face goes from pins and needles to numb. My feet, protected by nothing more than a thin pair of sneakers, follow rapidly. It takes longer for my hands in their knitted gloves. My body is shielded by his, and retains a reasonable amount of heat, but my bad leg feels like its freezing from the inside out, the metal plate an instrument of torture designed to inflict maximum pain. It occurs to me I might need my gun hand, and I let go of his waist and shelter it between our torsos.

  The pain is more than balanced by a rush of pleasure at the wild freedom of the open road, the roar of the engine, the insanity of riding a bike in this kind of weather, and the sharp edge of danger. By the time he turns off the highway onto a dirt trail that winds up into the trees, I’m riding an adrenaline high that would sell for a small fortune if it could be bottled.

  When the bike stops and Mac kills the engine, I can still feel it throbbing beneath me. A rushing fills my ears—there’s a river nearby. Maybe a waterfall. My leg is nearly numb, but it obligingly swings over the bike and holds me, standing. The ground seems to vibrate beneath my feet, but only for a moment. I flex the fingers of my right hand, still warm enough to be functional, and take off the helmet, handing it to Mac.

  Hands thrust into my pockets, I edge away from him, toward a clearing surrounded by towering red pines. The trees have a presence. Silent. Waiting. Not so much as a breeze touches their branches. The grass outside the circle is sere and brown, but in the circle it is a lush, spring green. At least there is not a body laid out on the altar-like stone at the center. Not yet, anyway.

  I’m not especially tuned to such things, a handicap for a paranormal investigator, but even I can feel that this is a place of power. I venture over to run fingertips over the stone, wondering whether the rust-colored veins are iron based, or whether blood has been shed here.

  It doesn’t dawn on me that I’m standing dead center of a sacred circle, broken only where the rough track breaks through a gap in the trees, until Mac swings off the bike and blocks the opening.

  I feel the circle snap shut.

  Every ounce of his mind, body, and soul is focused on me. Always a large man, in this place he looms over me. His bronzed skin looks darker, his hair blacker, and there’s something primal and untamed in his eyes. My fingers tighten around the gun in my pocket.

  “Why did you bring me here?”

  “It’s pretty, no?”

  Looking around at the sentinel trees and the stone that seems to have done past service as an altar, pretty is not a word that comes to mind. Majestic. Eerie. Awe-inspiring. Deadly. These are words I might use. I have a highly unfamiliar desire to drop to my knees on the cold earth and bow before some unnamed deity. This is not a place for idle chitchat.

  Mac is waiting for something. The trees are waiting for something. I have questions, but I can see he won’t answer if I ask, or give anything away.

  My eyes go back to the stone. No lichens cling to it, no moss. A vein of quartz runs down the center. I let my fingers trail across it, registering a layer of grit. It is colder than the air, and the phrase “stone cold” flits through my brain.

  “She died here,” Mac says.

  “Who?” I ask.

  He doesn’t answer, and I know. I picture the World Tree Girl—so young, little more than a child—laid out here, the stone ready to receive her blood. My belly heats into a simmering rage.

  “Why here? Did her death fuel a ritual?”

  Still he is silent.

  “Did she die slowly? Was she tortured? Or did somebody make it quick?”

  His poker face registers nothing.

  “What is it with coroners in this county? Is there some sort of murderer’s club you have to be part of before you can serve in the role? If you know she died here, either you participated in the killing, or covered it up. And now you’ve brought me back to the scene of the crime. Maybe to commit another.”

  The gun in my hand feels extraordinarily heavy, colder than it should, despite the warmth of my pocket.

  “If you’re planning to shoot me, I’d advise against it. This place would not take kindly to the spilling of my blood.”

  “But would happily drink up mine. I get it.”

  Given a choice between a clearing that thinks for itself and a score of vampires or werewolves or even another one of those intestine-hungry slugs that damn near killed me, I’d opt for the critters. Nasty as those suckers are, at least you can see them and fight. This spirit bullshit is a force I can do nothing about.

  Every hair on my body is standing upright, and the full-on chill I feel has nothing to do with the weather. I’ve been a fool. By the time Jake finds my note, I’ll be nothing but a statistic.

  And then it hits me. My blood runs even colder. If the girl was killed here, then a lot of people are involved in covering up her death. Including the Shadow Valley sheriff’s department.

  Now Mac starts asking questions. “Who are you, really? What’s your affiliation?”

  There’s an unusual weight to his words. The pressure to answer is compelling. My mouth opens without my consent and I snap it shut again, almost catching my tongue. The words tremble at the edge of speaking, pushing for utterance.

  “I would advise that you speak only truth in this place.”

  “And the consequences if I don’t?”

  He just waits.

  I feel the earth through the soles of my shoes, alive, sensing me, tasting. I weigh my words carefully before I let them cross my lips. “You already know my name. My affiliation, as you put it, is none of your business. And now one for you. What did it cost to buy your silence?”

  “I had nothing to do with her death,” he says, finally. “I don’t know who killed her, or why it was done here.”

  “You would have been called. The sheriff would have been called.” The words feel bitter on my tongue.

  I wish for him to dispute them. He does not.
r />   “Why did you bring me here?”

  “Her death sullies this place,” he says, after a long silence. A wind moves through the tree tops at his words, and they seem to lean in, pressing on me, passing judgment. Mac doesn’t move a muscle, and yet he feels closer. More dangerous.

  The wind dies down. All is still.

  “Why bring me here?” I ask, for the second time.

  “To judge the truth of you.”

  I laugh, a startling sound, disruptive to the energy of this place. “The truth of me? Let me tell you what I think happened. The girl was found here, dead. It came to your attention. How, I don’t know. Who comes out to a place like this? But she was found. You did your duty. Called the sheriff, sent the body to Spokane for forensics. And then one day a stranger came to you—maybe two of them, together. They told you to forget ever seeing the body. They warned it would be better for everybody. How is the public going to react to stories of a bloodless body laid out on a stone altar in the middle of the forest?”

  “How do you know this?” His voice is low, more lethal than shouting could ever be.

  “Because I’ve done that job, been that person. Hush up all the paranormal events, make people believe all supernatural juju is just for movies. Let everybody think the poor suckers who actually saw something are crazy. Eliminate the evidence. I’m guessing there’s not even a police report. Do the parents even know she’s been found?”

  Oh, Jake. You lied to me. I can’t ever trust you after this.

  “So you were with this special FBI group,” Mac says, evading my questions. “But no longer. Why?”

  I’m going to have to tell him everything, which twists me from the inside out. I’ve already trusted three people with this information. And two of them are likely suspects in what is going on here. I say as little as I can, hoping it’s enough to gain his cooperation while still keeping him enough in the dark.

  “Because I know something they don’t want me to know, connected to the paranormal I believe killed this girl. They want me silenced. They sent a hit man after me.”

  “So that’s what all of that fuss was about up at the Manor. I never did believe the story that went out. And your goal?”