The Ledberg Runestone

by Patrick Donovan

  I saw my truck, outlined against the darkening sky, barely visible through the trees. A surge of relief and fresh adrenaline washed over me, sending me crashing through the underbrush. I pushed harder, covering as much ground as I could with each hobbled, half-there step.

  I was maybe ten yards away from my truck when I felt a familiar wave of power wash over me, strong enough to stop me mid-stride. A second later, the girl from the parking lot of the Poor Confederate stepped out from behind a small copse of trees, putting herself between myself and salvation.

  “You have the stone,” she said, more a statement than question. Even though her voice was barely a whisper, I could hear it with crystal clarity over the din of the rain.

  “You know what you have to do now, right?”

  “Yeah, it’s pretty apparent. Keep running,” I said, taking a step to the side. She sidestepped, still a good ten feet away from me and put herself once more between my truck and myself. The message was clear. I was going to hear what she had to say, my opinion on the matter be damned.

  “You have to make sure this plays out to its end. Its proper end,” she said.

  “Look, this is enlightening and all, but I really need to continue running for my life. So if you don’t mind?”

  She pointed to the woods behind me.

  I really don’t know why I did it. I don’t know why I didn’t just get my ass back in gear, but I looked over my shoulder in the direction she was pointing.

  One of Mama Duvalier’s daughters, Maryse I think her name was, had spotted me, and was currently making a beeline through the trees in my direction. Her clothes were soaked, plastered to her skin. She was all but painted in what I could only assume was blood. The rain had streaked through the gore on her cheeks and forehead, giving her a nearly animalistic countenance.

  “It’s going to get worse. They’re going to think you did this.”

  “Did what?”

  The girl, whoever she was, held up a hand, palm out. The feeling of power that radiated off of her, in that instance, was freakishly intense. It was like standing next to a lightning strike. There was a brief instant of tension filling the air. Then it was gone. At the same instant that the girl unleashed the power she’d gathered around her hand, Maryse’s head whipped to the side with an audible crack. It sounded like someone stepping on a dry branch. For a moment, Maryse stood where she was, wavering on her feet. Her eyes were wide, her mouth slightly open, like she was surprised, or shocked, and the emotion hadn’t quite gathered up enough steam to pass her lips and turn into a vocalization. She fell into a crumpled heap, her head at a wholly unnatural angle.

  I tried to say something. Instead, I stammered over a few random syllables, that maybe on a good day, could be pieced into some approximation of “what the hell.”

  I turned back to look at the girl from the Poor Confederate, but she was gone.

  I bolted towards my truck. I climbed inside the cab, got the engine running, put a good mile and a half between me and Mama Duvalier’s little compound, and made no effort to rationalize what had just happened.

  I fishtailed into the first reasonably full parking lot I could find, which just so happened to belong to a Walmart. Under normal circumstances, I considered Walmart’s to be the physical equivalent of the third level of Dante’s hell.

  This time, though, I just found it strangely comforting. It didn’t make the fear go away, it changed it. There was something about being around people, about being somewhere mundane, away from voodoo priestesses and imminent death that at least turned the icy fear into a familiar, bone-deep, chill.

  It didn’t help that the mystery girl, the one who’d snapped Maryse’s neck, had said that the Duvalier family would blame me for her death. Despite the fact that it was highly plausible that Maryse had died in the chaos of the attack on Mama Duvalier’s, it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that the Voodoo Priestess of Appalachia would believe I had murdered one of her daughters.

  I sat there for a long time, watching the rain trace odd, asymmetrical patterns on the windshield and strange liquid shadows across the dashboard and seat.

  I reached over and grabbed my backpack out of the floorboard, setting it on the seat beside me. I opened it, dumping the contents on the passenger seat. Most of my gear was still there, the fetishes, the herbs, and so on and so forth. The books and the bottle I’d taken were there, as was the hide-wrapped bundle.

  I grabbed the bottle, opened it, and took a long pull. The rum was unlike anything I’d ever tasted. It was spicy, sort of sweet, and potent. Almost instantly my nerves started to settle, some of the shake slid out of my hands, and my head started to clear.

  I picked up the first book, a thick, cloth-bound textbook, and started flipping through the pages. It was in French, I think. Either way, I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Latin, some of the other dead languages, weren’t really a problem for me, given that most magic treatises and texts were written in dead languages. I was all but fluent in Avalonian, the language of the Fae. I could even wing a little Infernal in a pinch. Languages still used by large swaths of the world were the ones I just couldn’t wrap my head around. Go figure. Languages spoken by face-eating monsters, not a problem. Languages spoken by actual living people, and I was clueless. At the very least, I could probably make a few bucks off of it.

  The other book was smaller, maybe four inches wide by ten inches tall. This one I recognized as soon as I saw the first page. That’s not to say I knew what it was per se, but I knew what it was all about. The circles, the occult symbols, the mixture of runic languages, I knew enough to know that I was holding some major mojo. This was a summoning book. Judging from the bits and pieces I could make out, it had the metaphorical names, addresses, and phone numbers of some pretty big, pretty nasty stuff. I flipped a few more pages and shoved it back in my bag. That one it was best to leave alone.

  I took a few more minutes to collect my nerves. When I finally felt like I was capable of keeping my head on straight, I pulled out of the parking spot and started trucking my way back towards Asheville.

  Chapter 16

  By the time I got to my father’s neighborhood, the storm had let up and the setting sun was playing off of the rest of the rain clouds in a staggeringly beautiful mix of purples and reds.

  As I drove through the last few side streets that led to my old man’s house, I could see more lights coming on, families settling into dinners and relaxing after a hard day at work. There was a whole sense of suburban peace about it that got to me. Maybe it was the way my family had gone, after my sister’s suicide, that really made it sting. Once she’d died and my mother had left, it was just me and my pop. That’s not taking anything away from the old guy, but his time was spent working nonstop to make ends meet, and any free time he had was spent sitting in front of doctors, specialists, or the occasional quack. I started longing for something sort of normal. At least, I did in retrospect.

  I pulled over to the curb across the street from my old man’s house and climbed out of the truck, leaving my backpack on the floorboard. I was still soaking wet. My little exodus through the woods had left a deep, steady ache in my leg, which left me leaning on my cane a lot heavier than I would’ve liked. The lights in my father’s house were out, and his truck was gone, which wasn’t surprising. He had a tendency to work late, more often than not. Given everything Melly had been through, it wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if she were still asleep.

  I made my way up the little walk and to the front door and stopped.

  Something wasn’t right. I stood on the porch, wrestling with a bout of indecision. After a few minutes of uneventful silence, I just chalked it up to a case of lingering nerves.

  The living room was empty, with just enough of the fading daylight filtering in to cast the room in heavy shadows.

  “Melly?”

  I waited for a second, and when there was no response, I stepped further into the house.

  “Melly, you
here?”

  This time, I heard her. It was little more than a muffled sound from the kitchen, but it was enough to kick start a jolt of adrenaline through my system. I forgot my nerves and went in.

  Cash hit me as soon as I crossed the threshold. I was already shaky on my feet, thanks to the past few hours, and the blow was enough to send me staggering hard into the refrigerator. I turned around to face him, to try and muster some defense on the rebound, and Cash kicked my bad leg out from underneath me. I tried to swing my cane at him, but he caught it with a mild look of amused disdain, jerked it out of my hand and began raining down blows to my head and arms. So I did what any self-respecting spell slinger would do, and curled up in a ball waiting for it to be over, which, of course, took a veritable eternity.

  I finally pulled myself up to a sitting position, my back against the fridge, every inch of my body alive with pain. Melly was seated at the kitchen table, her wrists and ankles bound to one of the chairs with duct tape. She had another piece over her mouth. Even in the fading light, I could see the streaks of tears over her cheeks, an angry bruise forming under her right eye. She looked frightened, but those weren’t the tears of someone who was afraid. Those were the tears of someone who was pissed off.

  Cash, on the other hand, looked bored. No. Not bored, exactly. There was no emotion there.

  “Jonah,” he said, his voice empty. “You want to know why I don’t like you?”

  He pressed the point of the cane into my chest, effectively pinning me where I was sitting.

  “Because you’re a psychopath?” I asked.

  He responded by slapping me lightly in the face with my own cane.

  “Because you’re a coward.”

  “I’ve been called worse,” I said.

  Cash didn’t answer. Instead, he took a few steps back, positioning himself behind Melly. He set my cane on the table and reached out, gently, almost timidly, stroking Melly’s hair. She recoiled, a movement that was equal parts disgust and rage. At that moment, I was pretty sure if her mouth wasn’t taped shut she could’ve taken a finger off with her teeth.

  “Cash,” I growled. “Whatever you’re thinking of doing, don’t. Just don’t. If you have an issue with me, then we can settle it.”

  Cash turned his eyes towards me, stroking Melly’s hair.

  “You shouldn’t talk,” he said finally. “You should just watch.”

  In that moment, two things became abundantly clear. First, Cash intended to kill the both of us. Second, the pre-game show was going to be doubly horrific for Melly.

  I made a decision without it really even registering that it was done. If Cash wanted to hurt Melly, or kill us, I wasn’t going to make it easy.

  Cash slid his hand over Melly’s shoulder and to the back of her neck. Where one moment he’d been surprisingly gentle, the next he was all violence and rage. He grabbed her hair, jerking her head back, and kissed her tape-covered mouth.

  Once his eyes were off of me, I launched myself at him in a full on tackle. I caught Cash perfectly, my shoulder slamming into his hips, dropping us both to the floor in a tangled mass of thrashing limbs.

  Cash went absolutely ballistic. As someone who had spent several years as a thug, a few more in prison, and a lifetime of being a full-fledged asshole, he had me at a severe disadvantage. The only thing I really had going for me was the fact that in school, I’d played a whole lot of Dungeons and Dragons and could take a lot of abuse at the hands of bullies.

  Cash slammed his fists into my side, peppering my ribs with quick, hard rabbit punches. Even this close, they were enough to cause my breath to catch in my chest and send slivers of pain running up and down my ribs. I tried to give it as good as I got, but it was a losing effort. The most I succeeded in doing was getting my poorly timed, weaker blows in the way of Cash’s fists enough to maybe soften a shot here and there.

  We scrambled on the floor for a good thirty seconds before he threw his hips up and rolled me over, planting his knee in my chest and pinning me to the floor. He punched me in the side of the head twice, each blow landing hard enough to send spots across my vision and birth a nausea-inducing pain at the base of my skull.

  Once he was sure he’d taken most of the fight taken out of me, he pulled out the box cutter.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” he said.

  “I’d planned on killing you regardless. Now, I’m just going to have to make a day out of it. You understand, right? Though, I suppose I’ll keep you alive long enough that you see what happens to her,” he added as an afterthought, and pressed the blade to the side of my face he hadn’t carved up. I felt the blade move, and the pain a second later. Cash traced another line over my face, under my right eye and over the bridge of my nose.

  He took the blade away, watching me thrash around, blood running into my eyes, with an almost clinical detachment. With him pinning me down, I could barely breathe, let alone muster up enough oxygen to scream. He waited until I finally stopped moving, and pressed the blade against the corner of my eye.

  “Don’t worry. Only one,” he said, grabbing my hair and holding my head still. “Probably shouldn’t move too much, though, you might make me miss my mark.”

  “Fella, I’m gonna have to ask you to be so kind as to stand up nice and slow. Otherwise, I’m gonna end up having to repaint my kitchen,” came a voice from behind Cash.

  Cash went perfectly still, the tip of the blade still pressed against my face, just a hair away from my eye.

  “Don’t make me ask you twice,” my father told him, punctuating the statement with the ratcheting clack of a pump-action shotgun.

  Chapter 17

  Cash stood up slowly, taking a single step away from me.

  “Now drop the box cutter and hit the floor.”

  I heard the clatter of the box cutter on the linoleum.

  “Attaboy,” my father said. “Now, Jonah, get up.”

  I fought back up to my feet, though it took the help of the kitchen table, and a fair bit of trying to wipe the blood out of my eyes. Once I got vertical, I wavered a bit, my head spinning from the pounding that Cash had given me.

  “Old man, you have any idea the level of shit that you’re—”

  “Funny, I don’t recall asking for your opinion,” my father said. “So how about you speak when spoken to? Comprende?”

  Judging from the look of surprise on Cash’s face, I was pretty sure no one had talked to him like that in quite some time, if ever.

  “Let me explain to you how this is going to work,” my father said, as if speaking to a small child, “You’re gonna turn around and leave my house and you’re not going to go near my boy again.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Cause if you choose to do otherwise, I’m gonna hurt you,” my father said. “Bad,” he added.

  “You got—”

  “I think I told you to shut up. Now, if you want to try and see how serious I am, I’ll save you the trouble. Go talk to your daddy. He knows.”

  I tried to wrap my head around what he’d just said. I knew my father had had a past, but to hear him talk down one of the Carvers like that shocked the hell out of me.

  “Just fucking shoot him,” I said.

  My father turned his gaze toward me.

  I’m not sure if it was the intensity of his stare, the disappointment in his eyes resonated with me. I couldn’t meet his gaze. I looked at the floor, ashamed.

  My father turned his attention back towards Cash, the shotgun unwavering.

  “Well? What’s it gonna be?” he asked.

  Cash looked, for a moment, like he wanted to say something. Instead, he took a few more steps backward, then turned and bolted out of the house. My father lowered the shotgun, watching the door after he’d gone.

  “Don’t just stand there bleeding on the floor, boy, untie the lady,” he said finally, propping the shotgun up in the corner. “I’ll go get the first aid kit and patch you up.”

  I blinked once, the new cu
t on my face burning. I didn’t think it was too deep, but it hurt like hell and I could feel the blood drying on my cheek. I scooped up the cutter, and after a minute or two of work, managed to cut Melly free.

  She shot to her feet and I had to grab her around the waist to keep her from bolting out the door and chasing Cash down.

  “Easy, killer,” I said.

  After a bout of cursing that would be considered impressive in even the rowdiest of company, she finally calmed down and turned towards me.

  “Jesus, Jonah. Your face.”

  “I am a pretty man, aren’t I?”

  “What the hell were you thinking?” she snapped, slamming a fist against my shoulder. “He could’ve killed you!”

  “Go easy on the boy,” my father said, walking back into the kitchen and setting the first aid kit on the table. “He wasn’t lucky enough to inherit my brains.”

  Melly glowered at me, then took a step back, her anger still barely in check. After a moment, she looked between me and my father.

  “Shouldn’t he go to the hospital?” she asked.

  “Nope,” my father said. “Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for him to owe a hospital a few thousand dollars when I can do it for free.”

  He walked over to the counter, washed his hands, and started a pot of coffee, then sat down at the kitchen table and opened the kit. He sorted through the contents, setting a few things out on the table.

  “Cash is gonna be pissed. Best to let him calm down before you go anywhere else, Jonah,” my father said. “Once I get you put back together, me and you need to have a conversation.”

  My father gave me that look again, the one that made me feel about a quarter of an inch tall.

  Melly paced back and forth, all but fuming.

  “We should call the police,” she said.