Beacon's Fury (Potomac Shadows Book 3)

by Jim Johnson

  Malcolm shrugged, but I guess he didn’t have anything to add. Last I heard he was living with his folks and sister while his sister finished up her rounds of therapy after we had literally pulled her out of the grasp of a local drug dealer.

  A subtle shift in the ley around us jolted me into new alertness. “Wait! I sensed something—downstairs, I think. Down the hall and turn left. The door is just outside the kitchen.”

  Malcolm followed my guidance and moved to stand next to the door leading downstairs. Tonia didn’t use the door all that much, since the basement suite had a private entrance to the back of the house which enabled her to come and go as she desired and without the rest of us noticing most of the time.

  I said, “I don’t see her much, and I don’t know her schedule, but I’m picking up something through the ley down there, and I can’t push through the interference.”

  Malcolm glanced at me. “Do we go down there or call for help?”

  My heart in my throat, I forced it down with a few deep breaths and sheer force of will. “Who would we call? Miss Chin? Bello? Neither would get here soon enough if we run into the Spinner or one of his ‘geists.” I shook my head, “We have to deal with this, Malcolm. We can’t keep running around living our day to day in fear of the Spinner and his efforts to wipe us out. We’ve got to face him.”

  He stared at me as I talked, then as I wrapped up, he nodded. “Damn, I knew there was a reason I liked you, Rachel. Come on.”

  He reached out and opened the door to the basement. It swung open. A dark set of stairs leading down faced us, and from the depths of the dark and silent basement, a waft of a putrid odor washed over us.

  A spear of fear streaked down my spine, bolting my feet to the floor. I pulled my etheric shield in closer to us, and shot a glance at Malcolm.

  “Christ, I don’t know if I can do this.” But even as I said it I knew I would. I had no idea where Abbie or Charity were, and it dawned on me that I had pushed my fear for them into a corner of my mind so that I could deal with this.

  How the hell had I done that? I didn’t remember being quite so brave. Maybe there was hope for me after all?

  Or maybe I was just as dumb as bricks.

  I slipped past Malcolm and started my way down the stairs, channeling a little of my power into the crystal that always hung from my neck. It was glowing with a soft blue pulse tinged in silver, the usual ley color mixed in with my own aura sheen.

  The bright light streaming out of the crystal illuminated the stairway and the hallway at the bottom of the stairs. Nothing looked out of place, but I could feel the etheric darkness pushing in all around us, like an ever-present bank of fog threatening to wash over us.

  From behind me, Malcolm said, “Do you think Tonia is home?”

  I continued down the stairs, reaching out with my senses. “I have no idea. She’s not close to the rest of us and keeps to her own schedule, mostly. I think I’ve interacted with her maybe a half-dozen times in the last year.”

  I reached the bottom of the stairs and glanced to the left, where the hallway ended in an open door leading to a small utility room where the house’s hot water heater, central air system, and Tonia’s washer and dryer were located. The room was dark and quiet. A little green light glowed on the control panel of the dryer, suggesting that whatever load of laundry Tonia had been working on was dry and done.

  I focused down the other direction of the hallway. It ended in a pair of closed doors. One led to a half-bathroom with a shower stall, and the other led to Tonia’s bedroom.

  I stared hard at the door leading to her bedroom, somehow knowing, either through good old woman’s intuition or through a flutter through the ley, that I was not going to like what I saw on the other side of that door.

  Just as I was about to relay that to Malcolm, the door blasted outward toward us in a million slivers of wood and metal, and it was all I could to do shift the shield around us in time.

  Shards and debris screamed past us, embedding in ceiling, floor, walls, and the washer and dryer behind us. Through the door lurched Tonia, though my view of her through the Veil was shimmering—she wasn’t Tonia any more, but a ghost, a lost soul. The Spinner had taken her and twisted her.

  “Malcolm!” I cried out as I reinforced the shield as Tonia, now a twisted ‘geist under the Spinner’s programming, lurched toward us with long arms ending in sharp pincers and a broken mouth full of bright teeth.

  Malcolm got one look at the thing that had been Tonia and just let loose with both fists. Bright arcs of bronze flame arced out of his hands and trailed down the hallway and enveloped the approaching ‘geist, with some spillover that set the carpet and the walls on fire. The ley energies were so strong that the carpet almost immediately ashed and set the hardwood underneath it on fire as well.

  Desperate for a solution that’d protect Tonia’s immortal soul as well as most of the house, I shifted the shield and used the ley threads to fold it in on itself, so that it covered the ‘geist rather than us.

  Malcolm caught onto what I was doing and stopped his jets of fire. “What are you doing?”

  I held out both my hands in front of me, willing the ley threads to shape the shield into a sphere that would completely enclose the ‘geist. Once that was complete and the sphere was fully joined together, I shifted the density of it and altered more of the ley around us, and siphoned all the air out of the sphere.

  The fires within the sphere went out almost immediately. Tonia’s body, now a broken, burned ‘geist, struggled against its etheric prison, scraping ineffectually at the inside surface of the sphere. I maintained the lack of oxygen in the sphere to keep any possible spark from reigniting, and then I reached out with more ley threads and started pushing them into the ‘geist’s etheric form in the shape of scalpels, seeking to sever its connections to the Spinner.

  The thing started to scream and I tried to work faster. The ‘geist must have sensed what I was attempting because its scrapings against the inside of the sphere increased in desperate motions, and its screams got louder.

  Malcolm stomped out a small fire on a floorboard. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Check the bathroom for a fire extinguisher! Under the cabinet!” I worked my ley scalpels faster, cutting every connection I could find. The Spinner had made cruel work of Tonia. He had killed her and bound her soul to her body, and then placed compulsions on her. There was a vestige of her, still alive and herself, within the smoldering carcass of her body. It was horrible and evil, and all together fitting of what the Spinner was capable of. I hated him more now than ever before. That he could do such an evil thing to a person was mind-numbing.

  Peripherally, I caught Malcolm coming out of the bathroom with an extinguisher in hand, but by that point I had dropped the shield sphere and was on the charred floor, holding Tonia’s broken body in my arms.

  I rested both hands on her ruined head and closed my eyes, and dove my consciousness deep into hers. I had to fight through several layers of pain and anguish, and finally touched a strange, brilliant center of white light that encompassed her immortal soul.

  I touched on that gently with a tentative ley thread, and spoke to what remained of her. “Oh, gods. I am so sorry for what has happened to you. Don’t try to speak. I know you’re in incredible pain.”

  I scanned her remains, and saw through my connection to her the last bits that held her fast to her mortal shell. “I can set you free, but I need to know that it’s what you want. I…I’ve never helped someone die before, but I have helped dozens of souls to move on to the next phase, and I can help you with that right now.”

  The feelings and thoughts I got back were inchoate, full of fear and woe, but through it all, Tonia somehow managed to push it all aside and offer up just one phrase that I could make out clearly. “Help me die,” was all she said.

  I dropped my chin to my chest. Even with my eyes closed I could see the brilliant silver light pouring out of my little crystal penda
nt.

  I whispered a silent prayer even though I hadn’t been to church in ages, and then, as gently as I could, I slipped my ley scalpel through the last couple of threads holding her body to her soul. As the last one parted under my touch, I shifted my energies to open up a rift in the Veil next to me. As soon as her soul was fully free, a brilliant white afterimage of who I remembered her to be glimmered, before the cruel damage done to her body. I shifted my position so that I could reach a hand out to her etheric form.

  She had a confused, yet serene look on her face that appeared to be full of gratitude. There was no trace of the incredible pain she must have just recently been feeling.

  She reached out and took my etheric hand, and then I stood and guided her to the rift in the Veil. “You’re free now, Tonia, free to go through the Veil and on to what awaits you. Go, in peace. In time, I or someone like me will visit you and help you on your way.”

  She nodded and then gave me a shy smile, and then floated through the rift and then spiraled out of sight in a flash of electric blue.

  Once she was gone, I shut down the rift with a weary wave of my hand. I gently laid her body down on the charred carpet. I realized then that my face was soaked with tears, and I took a moment to wipe my face off with the palms of my hands.

  A green towel entered my line of vision, and I looked up. Malcolm stood over me, the fire extinguisher in one hand and the towel in the other. He had on the saddest expression I had ever seen on him.

  “That…was incredible, Rachel. I saw it all, with my own eyes and also with my Sight. I’ll never forget it.”

  I didn’t know what to say, and knew if I said anything I’d start crying all over again, so I simply nodded and then stood up. I took the towel and wiped my face and my hands, and then laid it out across Tonia’s face.

  I stared at Malcolm. “We have to go upstairs. I can’t imagine what might have happened to the others.”

  I led the way toward the stairs, feeling dead inside, fearing that I’d find something even worse had happened to Penny and Jackie and Cooper.

  And I hoped to hell that Abbie hadn’t been home when the Spinner had struck.

  Chapter Twenty

  I DIDN’T DARE TRY TO CALL Abbie now; Malcolm and I had to get up the stairs and check the rest of the house. I had no idea who had been home aside from Tonia when the Spinner got here, and I was doing all I could to keep myself together. If Abbie had suffered the same fate as Tonia, I just didn’t know what I’d do.

  At least I didn’t know what I’d do after I made the Spinner pay dearly for what he had done.

  Malcolm and I searched the main level of the house, and Jackie’s room, but the whole level was empty. We reconnected at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the top floor.

  “Are you all right, Rachel? Want me to go up first and, you know, sorta check things out?”

  I stared up the staircase, the utter silence of the house and the ever-present pressure of that etheric fog pressing in all around us. I had rebuilt and reinforced my shield after we left the basement. I had to maintain a constant focus on it and power it with ley energy fed from my core. It was a bit of a distraction, and I wished that Charity was around to help me through it, but she had been silent since before we rushed here from Branchwood.

  I sighed and then shook my head. “No, Malcolm. We need to go up together. Whatever’s up there is something we have to face together.”

  His gaze met my eyes and then he reached out and squeezed my hands. I felt the warmth of his touch and the heat of his aura, simmering just over his skin. He had another double charge of bronze fire ready to unleash.

  I readied my energies to support the shield and then started up the stairs. The Spinner’s etheric fog was denser here, and it was like walking through soup to get up to the top landing.

  All the doors on the top level were open, though the one to Penny’s room had been knocked apart, and a few steps closer to it showed me how.

  Cooper was spread out, face down on the floor, blood everywhere. Judging from the damage to the door and the wood fragments everywhere, it looked like he had been bodily picked up and thrown through the door.

  I hurried to his side and knelt down, but a touch of my hand and a tentative scan with the etherics told me what my eyes suspected. He was dead as well. Unlike Tonia, however, his soul had departed his body much as any other soul departs a dead body. I reached out with my senses and scanned the area to see if perhaps his soul had lingered in the area.

  Miss Chin, and later, Charity, had explained to me that when a person dies, sometimes their soul lingers around the place of death, sometimes for a few days, sometimes for years or even centuries. That I couldn’t detect his soul meant any number of things.

  He could have found his way to the Holding and beyond on his own, he could have wandered off and gotten lost, as so many souls have done in the past. Another option was that his soul had been taken captive by the Spinner, or even twisted into a new ‘geist.

  “Malcolm, Cooper is dead. I don’t sense his soul anywhere, though. We should…I guess we should watch out for another ‘geist.” God, how could this be happening?

  He nodded, then moved away from me and Cooper’s body and checked the other rooms. I stood up and checked the rest of the room Cooper shared with Penny, but I didn’t find Penny or any trace of her. The room was a wreck, with furniture and clothes strewn all over the place. If Penny had been here, she had either been taken captive as well, or had otherwise been removed. I couldn’t remember what her work schedule was like or if she had been away from the house.

  As I stood near Cooper’s body, staring at nothing, numbly working out the pieces to the puzzle, Malcolm called out. “Rachel, you better get in here.” His tone told me all I needed to know.

  Oh, God. Not Abbie. Please, no.

  I wanted to run down the stairs and out the door and never come back. I wanted to tear a new hole in the Veil and shove as many ley threads down the Spinner’s neck as I could. I wanted to do just about anything besides walk into my bedroom and face whatever that bastard had done to my love.

  Somehow, I forced myself to put one foot in front of the other and drag myself the dozen or so feet from Cooper’s room to the threshold of my room. Malcolm stood just inside the room, watching me as I approached.

  I stared into his eyes, but his glance was hooded, focused inward, and he revealed nothing with a glance. I looked past him into the wreckage of my room, and felt my breath taken away.

  All the stuff Abbie and I had in the room had been scattered, as if a massive tornado had touched down in the center of the room and had torn it all apart. Our bed, our computer, all the furniture in the room was destroyed.

  Also scattered throughout the room, and pinned to the wall with various splinters and shards of wood, were old wood pulp pages, all blank, and it took me a few moments to realize that they were the same pages contained within Charity’s journal.

  The cracked leather journal was cast to one side of the room, its spine broken and both front and back covers partially torn from the spine. A few blank pages were still intact, though they amounted to less than a tenth of what I remembered the journal containing.

  Malcolm shook his head. “All this…this hate. For us?”

  I nodded, numb all over again. “For me, I think.” I glanced at him. “Perhaps for us both.”

  A sudden thought struck me and I shot out a hand and grabbed his elbow. “Malcolm! If the Spinner hit me here, at home, could he have gotten to your family as well?”

  His eyes grew wide and then his hand dived into his back pocket for his smartphone. While he attempted to call his house, I tried to carefully pull a few pages of Charity’s journal off the wall, but they had been so cruelly skewered there that I ended up tearing any that I tried to remove. I left the rest where they were, and gingerly picked up the remains of the leatherbound book itself.

  The book that had housed Charity’s consciousness, her living soul, was a tatter
ed ruin in my hands. I reached down into it to try and seek her out, some vestige of her soul that I could latch onto and use to try and find her.

  My initial scan failed, and I let out a sob of frustration. I glanced at Malcolm, who swore and then shoved his phone into a pocket. “No answer. It’s a little early yet, but I would have thought someone might be home.”

  “I need your help.”

  “Name it.”

  I indicated the journal in my hands. “This is what’s left of Charity’s journal. I need to delve deep into the ley grid to try and seek out her soul. I can’t tell if it’s still connected to the book or not, or if she’s been freed completely, or taken, or whatever.”

  I stared despondently around the remains of room. I felt so guilty to know I was relieved that I hadn’t found Abbie or Penny in the room. That Charity could be gone was a real blow, but what an awful person I had to be to feel relief that my girlfriend didn’t seem to be among the casualties.

  Malcolm reached out and rested his big brown hands on my shoulders. “Anything you need, Rachel. I’ll do all I can. Want me to keep guard while you dive deep?”

  I considered the options, then nodded. “That’s the best thing to do. You’ve got Warden shielding. I think I need to focus everything on finding Charity. If you can protect us while I do that, I’d be grateful.”

  He nodded, and shifted his ley energies from offensive to defensive. “Where do you want to work?”

  I looked around the broken room, and shrugged. “This room was full of happiness and joy once, and Charity spent a lot of time here. I’ve done a lot of mediation and work in this room, so I guess it’s as good as any other place, even with the damage.”

  He nodded. “And then as soon as you’re done, I guess…I guess we better call the police and then get the hell out of here. I don’t want to have to answer questions about two deaths in the house.”

  I shook my head. “I can’t even think about that now.” I moved toward the center of the room and carefully kicked aside debris to clear myself a space to work.