“Told you,” Cole said without a touch of humor. “I’m going to hit the breaker. Check it again when I do.”
She jogged down the stairs and switched off the main breaker to the house.
“It’s still lit,” Kaylyn yelled.
Cole sighed and flipped the switch again. That meant that whatever was causing it, it wasn’t coming from the main power in the house.
“Hey, Cole,” Kay’s voice echoed down the stairs as Cole began to climb. “There’s a light on in the garage. And it stayed on when you hit the power.”
Cole stared out the window. The garage hadn’t been lit the previous night during their investigation, but she assumed that Archie and Raymond could have left the light on when Archie was attacked by the dog.
“Call Leon,” Kaylyn sighed. “We need another body.... And I need to talk to Jonah. It’s kind of something I need to do in person.”
“You saw him fifteen minutes ago. What on earth could you need to tell him that you couldn’t have said then?” Cole asked, pulling out her cell, but Kaylyn shook her head and backed out of the room.
“I’m going to need your car.”
Kaylyn left without further explanation the moment Leon arrived, and Cole spent the next few minutes walking through the house with him to get another sweep while briefing him on as many of the new details as she could without going into detail about Kaylyn and her guardian spirit.
Or whatever it was.
She wanted to be mad that Kaylyn hadn’t told her anything about it—and wouldn’t have if she hadn’t been backed into a corner. On the other hand, Cole got it. As far as a secret for a secret goes, she had kept everything at home from everyone except for Jonah. Might be’s and maybe’s were too difficult to explain and sometimes not worth the effort until something pans out.
However, Cole also imagined that Kaylyn knew a hell of a lot more about this spirit than she was ready to let on. It was personal for Kaylyn, so Cole was trying to give her time, but it didn’t make it any easier to accept that Kaylyn was once again running to Jonah first.
She and Leon sat in the living room and went over the notes, clips, and journal one more time.
Leon sat back and tucked his hands behind his head. He wasn’t supposed to have been her mentor. She’d started with a younger investigator, Rocky West. And the two of them had hit it off. He was the kind who could turn on the charm and get information out of nearly everyone—street smart more than book smart, he also had a quick wit, and sometimes a short temper.
The problem occurred when he turned that charm on Kaylyn.
Cole warned her sister not to mix work and romance, but as always, Kaylyn did things her way. The two of them had lasted four weeks before Kaylyn got bored. That, of course, wasn’t how Kaylyn put it. She said she was tired of being the center of his attention constantly—it was impossible to get away, especially since Rocky tended to get his way in most matters. She came up with a dozen other reasons as well, when she finally put a stop to their relationship.
Then, she went off to a conference in Ontario, hooked up with Nick Bellis, and as soon as she returned, Rocky asked for a transfer. At the time, Cole thought Kaylyn did it out of spite, but then, she and Nick were on again, off again until Kaylyn started dating Ian.
Cole almost needed an entire journal to keep up with her sister’s exploits, but Rocky was the one that nearly tore the sisters apart. After all of the drama, Cole gave both Kaylyn, and by association, Leon, the cold shoulder for the first few weeks they all worked together. After a while though, they slowly worked things out and became quite the trio. Leon, although laid back, was the voice of reason. He typically got his way, not from smooth talking—although he was damn good with people—but because of the way he could weave facts together.
“You two didn’t check the garage?” Leon asked.
Cole patted the journal and slid it across the coffee table toward him. “Did you miss the part where grandpa lost his leg?”
Leon merely shook his head and rose to his feet, grabbing the current tester. “Let’s check the water again. Did you check the faucets in the rest of the house?”
“No, all of the others have brass handles and I wasn’t taking any chances.”
With a quiet scoff, Leon carefully flipped on the kitchen faucet and took a reading. “Still hot. Grab your coat and a recorder.”
Cole grimaced at the sink as he turned off the water. Her gut told her they were better off staying in the main house, and this was one occasion she wanted to listen and play it safe. On the other hand, Leon had a point, and they couldn’t half-ass the investigation, because of one more cryptic pieces of evidence didn’t fit.
The grandfather wasn’t even attacked in the garage, she reminded herself. It was the old barn.
She noticed a strange glow when she entered the living room, and it didn’t take long to pinpoint the source. “Hey, Lee, TV came on.”
He came in and stood next to her for a moment as they both stared down the phantom TV.
“Have you ever been on a case like this?” she asked. “It’s almost constant.”
“Yeah. It’s trying to get our attention.” Leon ignored the TV and pulled on his thick Carhartt coat, checking the battery on a handheld recorder before he folded it into his pocket.
“Then, why not give us the message. We’re listening, so let’s be done with it.”
“Maybe it doesn’t have a message,” he explained. “Considering everything you’ve described, it sounds like a trickster. The more attention it gets, the more it wants.”
Once they were braced against the cold and armed with cameras, Leon ushered Cole toward the back door. The overhead lights browned then flickered when he reached for the door knob. When he opened the door, the cabinets began to rattle.
“I’m thinking it doesn’t want us to leave,” Cole said. Her voice was tight and pinched, but if Leon was right, leaving only meant it wouldn’t get attention. She hoped that was its motivation.
“Then it shouldn’t have left the light on in the garage.”
All of the lights in the house went out.
Cole hesitated, staring down the garage. It was mid-day, not usually the most active time of day for any of the entities she’d encountered. “This thing is powerful.”
If this entity controlled the garage as well, it seemed that it would have turned the light off to keep them in the house. Although it was equally viable to think that the family had come back to get something and left the light on. Maybe there wasn’t anything to the garage at all.
Leon turned on his camera and scanned the ground between the house and garage. “Keep your camera on, and stay close to me, no matter what.”
Cole nodded and swallowed the lump in her throat. “Just how terrified should we be of a trickster?” she asked.
“Most of them aren’t a danger. Have you smelled sulfur? Bad eggs? Seen hordes of flies? Heard voices threatening to kill you?”
“No.”
Leon shrugged. “Then, I’m sure we’ll live.”
“Comforting, Lee, very comforting.”
“Didn’t I cover this in training?”
Training, Cole thought. She couldn’t think of a single other case where she’d seen so much concentrated activity. Typically the entities she death with wanted to hide—especially when people started poking around with cameras. There had been leads, solid clues that led them toward answers. Dangerous or not, she didn’t like an entity that wanted to sit around and jerk her chain.
“What did you two make of the shadow figure,” Leon asked.
Cole had no idea how much he knew or if he’d reviewed the tapes, so Cole had opted to leave that bit of information out until Kaylyn could explain. She wondered why on earth he slowed in the middle of the yard to ask her that. “Kaylyn has a theory on it.”
“And?” Leon asked.
“Is this important right now?”
“I thought I saw something move through the window.”
Cole’s feet grew
heavier as she trudged through the tall grass. “It didn’t look like a dog, did it?”
Without answering, Leon reached for the handle, while she struggled to keep her camera steady. Concentrate. Too much coffee and adrenalin mixed with the lack of sleep were playing havoc on her system.
The garage door squeaked as it opened. Leon entered first, slowly scanning each direction with every step.
The structure had a dirt floor, and it smelled like a combination of rotting leaves and gasoline.
Luckily, still no sulfur, though.
“Watch for snakes,” Cole said.
“There aren’t—”
“I know. Kay, the amateur snake-ologist already told me there aren’t any poisonous ones,” she said, peeking through the contents of one shelf. There wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. Mostly old tools, jars full of nuts, screws, and bolts, among other objects she couldn’t identify, but had seen in at least a dozen garages before.
“You know they’re not called snake-ologists, right?” Leon asked.
Who cares what they were called? “I was a sociology major. Stayed far away from biology labs.”
Leon, on the other hand, spent his college career in biology labs. Cole couldn’t fathom the number of dissections or going home coated in the smell of formaldehyde.
“I have no idea what we’re supposed to be looking for? This house is doing a number on my logical thinking?”
“The house or your lack of sleep?” Leon turned and eyed her.
Cole knew that lecture was coming, but when she turned, her a metallic box in the back corner of the room caught her eye. “I think I found the breaker box.”
“Good,” Leon said, “As soon as we finish our sweep, we’ll see if it’s powering the water in the house. Somehow.”
“Any idea what you might have seen move? Size? Shape?”
Leon shook his head, crouching down to look under a table. “Come have a look here.”
She squatted down on the other side of the table. Something in the dirt glinted and she reached for it, assuming it was a screw or small piece of metal that had fallen off something in the garage, but as she brushed the dirt away, she discovered that it was a large plate of metal. “Think it’s relevant?”
Leon held down the recorder, capturing the details and brushing away more of the dirt. There appeared to be some kind of inscription. “Can you make it out?” he asked.
“No, looks like come kind of Cyrillic script.”
“Very good,” Leon said with a sly smirk. “Let’s see if we can pry it up.”
“Great, sounds like a fantastic plan.” Cole glanced around the room again; checking for stray dogs or snakes—even the slightest hint at a moving camera.
Leon grimaced and sat the camera down so it still pointed at the plate. “You sound like your sister.”
They each scraped until they found the edges of the metal panel, but Cole froze when she heard a low growl come from the back of the garage. She sat back on her feet, moving as slowly as possible. “Lee?”
Leon followed her lead, grabbing his camera pointing it toward the source—a black dog with deep red eyes.
“Where was grandpa attacked?” he whispered.
“Barn.” Cole reached for her own camera, trying to find it without taking her eyes off the creature. “That is so not a snake.”
The dog growled again, baring its white fangs. It was all black, and Cole noticed that a small portion of the light passed right through its body.
“Plan?” she asked, not daring to move. The dog was closer to the door than they were. “Ideas? Anything?” she added when Leon didn’t answer.
“I think it’s a Corn Wolf.”
Every sense kicked into overdrive—the smell of dirt, cold of the air, the movement of the dog’s slightly transparent hair around its mouth as it breathed. Her intuition screamed. “And how does one run from a Corn Wolf?”
“Very. Slowly.”
“Not what I wanted to hear.” Cole’s stomach wedged into her throat.
“They’re restarting the farm,” Leon explained, more to the canine than to Cole.
The dog simply bared its teeth and lowered its head until its body arched in preparation to pounce.
Following Leon’s lead, she also tried to reason with it. “We’ll explain everything to them. Make sure they know....”
Cole trailed off, she was going off the belief that her guess had been right, and this was some kind of entity associated with the harvest, but she had no fucking idea what it wanted.
“An offering,” Leon said. “A portion of every crop laid to waste in your name.”
The dog growled but sat back.
“But, you have to let us leave,” Leon added.
The dog reared back then leapt at them, letting out an ear-piercing bark.
In that split second, Cole prepared for the attack, curling up, shielding her face and closing her eyes. Her thoughts came impossibly fast, wondering how Kaylyn was going to find them.
If they’d still be alive.
“You can get up now,” Leon said.
She slowly lowered her arms and looked around. “How’d you know that’d work?”
“This is farm country,” Leon exaggerated his accent as he spoke. “Do you know how many types of these entities there are?”
She didn’t. Although she’d grown up near farm country, and had investigated a number of cases involving farms, she’d never actually found a crop spirit. “And it’ll wait until harvest.”
Leon hurried her toward the door—the first clue in his answer. “Not likely,” he whispered when they were out of the garage. “But right now, the messengers are valuable.”
“Fucking hell,” Cole sprinted for the back door of the house and locked it as soon as they were both safely inside. “It won’t come in here, right?”
Leon tapped her shoulder and she spun around.
“WRNED YOU,” was spelled out in magnetic letters on the fridge.
“I don’t believe that was there before.” Cole pulled out a dining room chair and collapsed into it. “Two entities, then?”
“Seems so.” Leon leaned over the back of her chair and stared down at her. “How about you tell me what else you and Kaylyn have figured out. Start with her theory on the shadow person.”
Chapter 16
Jonah was stretched out on the couch, half asleep when his phone started buzzing. Ignoring it seemed like the better of his options, so he closed his eyes. At the moment, the ache in the back of his chest was merely a dull roar, muted by the calming fuzzy sensation that pumped through his blood and soothed his nerves.
The phone went silent and immediately buzzed again, dancing across the coffee table and demanding his attention. He needed one of those systems that told him who was calling so he didn’t have to move to pick it up, but he concluded that no one would bother calling back right now unless it was urgent.
Gritting his teeth, he rolled and grabbed the phone. Kaylyn Anderson flashed across the screen and he bit back a sigh as he accepted the call.
“You can’t be in trouble again already?” he said, immediately assuming that something had gone wrong with the investigation. But why wouldn’t she be calling Leon?
“We need to talk,” she said simply. He heard the engine of her car in the background of the call.
“Where are you?”
“About ten minutes from your house. I wanted to make sure you were, awake—and dressed.”
“Barely,” he said. Leaving it to her to decide which aspect he was addressing.
“Look, I don’t want to disturb you, but—”
“Well, I’m here, and will be when you arrive, but my question is why aren’t you investigating the farmhouse?”
“I’ll explain. Be there in a few.”
The line disconnected and Jonah tucked his phone into the side of the couch. At least that way he didn’t have to move to get it again. And maybe it’d drown out the next person who decided to disturb him. Betwe
en the paperwork he’d insisted on going to the office to finish before the meeting, merely because he wanted out of his house and wanted to rid his mind of the image of Kaylyn running out that morning—he’d later concluded that was a terrible decision—and the committee meeting in the afternoon, he was bushed.
On the bright side, he considered that he might be about to find out whatever Kaylyn else had been hiding.
He forced himself upright, the movement not so bad since his meds had taken effect, but he hoped that whatever Kaylyn wanted didn’t involve a whole lot of thinking. Or talking. The only thing his brain was interested in was sleep.
Rubbing his hands through his hair and over his neck, he headed to the foyer to deactivate the alarm and unlock the door. Either Kaylyn was driving faster than she promised or his brain was moving much slower than he thought, because as soon as he dropped his hand, he noticed headlights coming up the driveway.
After parking her car, Kaylyn sprinted across the dark driveway up to the door.
Frigid air snuck past her as she dusted off her boots and entered. “Hey, boss,” she said, smiling shyly.
“This is becoming quite the habit,” he said, gesturing to the living room since he was eager to sit down again. “What was so urgent?”
“Sorry, I don’t want to get you in more trouble.”
Jonah snorted and shook his head. “Don’t flatter yourself. I find plenty of trouble without your help.” Although her introduction did worry him a bit.
“But the fraternization—?” she asked, her eyebrows pinched over her nose.
“Scare tactic. They wanted you to play your hand.” He hoped.
He took a seat at the end of the couch, while Kaylyn took the opposite end, twisting her knee up so she sat sideways to face him. “If fraternization is all they have on us, let them do their worst. Now, I doubt you came here because of that.”
“No. The house has been crazy. We called Leon and he’s there with Cole now, but—”
Despite its foggy state, Jonah’s mind ran with the possibilities that would lead Kaylyn to leave an investigation to come see him.
“Something was caught on our tapes last night, and well, I needed to tell you before I tried explaining it to anyone else.... I keep seeing your mom.”
Beyond the Divide (Fractured Legacy Book 2) Page 14