When Trouble Comes: Twisted Book 5

by Ho, Jo

  Marley repeated his comment before making one of her own. “So, by that line of thought, you think our ancestors were witches?”

  Christian’s brow raised in surprise as the golden flecks in his eyes seemed to grow brighter. “I didn’t realize you didn’t think that already.”

  Marley’s shoulders lifted in a shrug. “We hadn’t committed to it either way, seeing as we don’t ever seem to have any real answers.”

  Eve closed her laptop, tucking a stray curl behind her ear as she got their attention.

  “Well, this is actually why I asked you all to come here. I figured this is a safe place where we can contain any issues in case this goes wrong.”

  Christian’s eyes grew a little wider. “In case what goes wrong?”

  Eve turned to Marley. “Remember in that cemetery, when you were able to find Christian in the Spirit World by focusing on him in your mind? I was thinking that maybe you could do the same with our ancestors now that we know their first names. Do you think you can do it?”

  Questions flooded Marley’s body as she swallowed drily. “I don’t know. It was different with Christian: I already knew him. I knew his voice, so I knew what to look out for.”

  “Wouldn’t this be the same raising those ghosts from the graves? All you had there were their names too,” came Christian’s balanced reply.

  “I can’t believe we didn’t think of this earlier,” Cassie said, looking more excited by the prospect of some spirit raising than she had any right to.

  The girl was just a little off.

  Marley shook the thought away, focusing back on the subject at hand. “I guess. I don’t know…” she trailed off, unable to voice the apprehension she felt.

  Christian watched the emotions dance across her face. While he knew that this move could be dangerous — their ancestors had been dead for over three hundred years, which could make them quite feral if their experience at the cemetery was any indication — Christian was loath to talk them out of this. It had been over a week now since Michael had broken the First Seal and they were still no closer to finding the next one before he did. If Marley were able to raise one of their ancestors, she could answer one of their most pressing questions. If nothing else, they would learn more about what they were dealing with. Nothing else mattered more than stopping Michael, not even the possibility of the girls getting hurt.

  Even as a wave of guilt hit him at the thought, he knew he was right. Though the girls were relying on him as their advisor, and as much as he wanted to keep them safe, that really wasn’t what his job was. So, despite feeling like a jerk, Christian kept his concerns to himself. With great power, comes great responsibility, he thought to himself. Spider-man had it right. He knew what the deal was.

  He hoped one day they would understand.

  “Just try, Marley. Even if it doesn’t work, it’s worth a shot,” he said, hoping he wouldn’t be struck down by lightning.

  Nodding, she agreed to try, though fear was quickly beginning to build like a tornado inside her. Her palms were sweaty and everything around her felt heightened as her senses became charged. Closing her eyes, she focused on the one thing she knew about her ancestor… her name.

  Mary… she called out in her mind. Can you hear me? Without a face to place, all Marley could do was focus on the name as flashes of other things came to her. Marley saw herself at Juju’s, the magic store, as Helena stabbed the needle into her finger. She watched again as her blood blossomed onto the square piece of fabric. Her blood that was also of Mary’s blood. Now she found herself in a black void with stars that blinked around her. She glided forwards in this new space, searching for the spirit she wanted.

  The air began to hum as Marley felt herself connecting to Mary. It was working, she was on the right track!

  Focusing with every fiber of her being, Marley called out to her ancestor as she swam through more of that black space.

  Mary… are you there?

  There was a thin cloud of fog covering everything so that it seemed that Marley was looking at this world through a sheet of muslin.

  Mary… come to me…

  Now the fog started to fade away as a hazy black shape appeared in front of her.

  MARY, I SUMMON THEE!

  A jolt shot through Marley’s body, not sure where the archaic language had come from, nor the sudden command that had blasted out from her mind. Abruptly the fog, the black void, and the hazy figure all vanished. Marley frowned, whirling around in the white space that followed.

  “Marley,” came Christian’s voice, pulling her back. “Open your eyes.”

  She opened her eyes, letting the blurriness fade away until she saw the figure standing before her. A gasp escaped her lips as she recognized that terrifying face that had haunted her dreams.

  It was the hanging woman who had been haunting her.

  She was Marley’s ancestor.

  She was Mary.

  Chapter 7

  The ghost stood in front of her, dark hair floating in the air.

  Her black eyes were as frightening as they always were, her lips still sewn gruesomely together. Marley had to resist the urge to run away. She had summoned her, this ghost, her ancestor. Clearly, Mary had something she had wanted to tell Marley all this time, but it wasn’t only her sewn lips that stopped her. Mary had a feral energy that was impossible to miss. It was as if she was more animal than human. Marley wasn’t sure that Mary would be able to speak even if her lips were free from their bonds.

  Moving slowly around so that he could get a better look at her, Christian watched Mary carefully as the others looked on in bewilderment. Lost in the moment, Marley had forgotten that only she and Christian could see the ghost. She had no time to explain what was happening, however, not wanting to break the spell. Swallowing the lump of fear that had wedged its way into her throat, Marley spoke.

  “What is it you’ve been trying to tell me?” she asked the ghost.

  Mary’s hair seemed to move faster in response. She didn’t speak, didn’t make a sound this time as she turned to look around the room. Suddenly she blinked away, only to reappear by the corner of Eve’s table. Then, very deliberately, she knocked a pot of loose black eyeshadow onto the cream carpet.

  Tyler and Cassie both jumped while Eve’s face turned annoyed. “What the hell?” she asked, not realizing that it was Mary who had knocked it onto the floor. Grabbing a box of tissues that sat on the bedside table, she started for the pot when Marley stopped her.

  “Wait… It’s Mary. She’s trying to tell me something.”

  Mary bent down until she was close to the floor. Using her finger, she dragged it through the black eyeshadow as she drew a shape onto the carpet, followed by another, then another. Finally, she enclosed the shapes into an uneven circle, but she must have run out of whatever energy it took for her to do that, as she suddenly shot Marley a look before she disappeared.

  They crowded closer to the sign on the carpet. It was three conjoined triangles, but they overlapped in such a way as to form seven triangles. Marley couldn’t stop the gasp that escaped her lips when she saw it.

  “That’s the symbol I saw on those demons’ heads, the ones who attacked us in the cemetery.”

  Tyler frowned, looking down at the carpet then back at Marley. “But we didn’t get anywhere looking for it before?”

  Marley’s face became animated. “That’s because I remembered it wrong! My diagram only had the three triangles in it, this one has seven!”

  Excitement bubbled up as she realized that she had successfully raised a specific spirit and communicated with her. Her ancestor had been trying to help this whole time, which meant that Christian had been right before when he had insisted she find a way to communicate with the ghost which they now knew was Mary. Knowing this, the guilt hit next. She needed to apologize to him, but when she saw the frustration in his face, worry nagged at her. “What is it?” she asked him.

  “She made it look so easy, connecting with p
hysical items, but I still don’t know how to do that.”

  “Maybe we can find out from her another time,” Marley answered hoping that was true.

  He ran a hand through his mussed blond hair. “I’ve seen her do that twice now. If I can learn how to do that, I won’t be as ineffectual as I am now.”

  His jaw tensed. Marley hadn’t known until now how much this had bothered him. She promised herself that they would figure this out together.

  “So now that we have the actual symbol, we should check it against the database at Guardian HQ, shouldn’t we?” Eve said.

  Christian nodded, trying to ignore his own frustration. “We should go now.”

  The girls got ready to leave when Tyler wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. There were goose pimples up and down her arm though it wasn’t the least bit cold. Rubbing her arms, she approached Eve.

  “Hey, have you got something I can borrow? I didn’t bring anything with me today since it’s been pretty warm out, but I’m feeling kind of cold now, and if we’re heading off to the HQ for the rest of the day…” she trailed off, not needing to finish her sentence as Eve was already nodding, making her way to her closet.

  Opening it, Eve’s hand reached in for a cardigan when it froze as something caught her attention. It was her yellow dress, the one with the rips and bloodstains, the one she had destroyed in the fire this morning. It was now hanging up inside her closet like nothing had happened.

  Ice daggers raced down her spine as she slammed the door closed so fast that it made Tyler jump. Backing away from the closet, she grabbed a hoodie that was slung over a chair. “Here, take this,” she offered Tyler, steering her out of the room as she tossed a terrified look over her shoulder at her innocuous closet.

  She knew she had burnt it this morning, so how was it back?

  Chapter 8

  Within the hour, they were settled at what was quickly becoming their second home — the Guardian base.

  As Eve was the most proficient with computers, she had become their de facto research guru, with the others deferring to her skills. Not that they had had much of a chance to try. As soon as they had left Eve’s house, she had been super quiet while the others talked about Mary and what might be going on. Eve hadn’t engaged with any of the conversation, choosing to focus on the drive instead. If Marley didn’t know any better, she’d have thought something was seriously eating away at her. She wasn’t close enough with Eve to ask though. The girl could still be quite intimidating at times so Marley left her observations alone, figuring that Eve would explain herself when she was ready.

  She sat in front of the banks of computers now, within the hidden room containing the Guardian’s secret database, scanning in a diagram of the new symbol. Processors spun as the computer struggled to cope with the amount of information it was pulling up.

  Eve drummed black painted nails on the tabletop, waiting impatiently for the results to appear. When they did, they flooded the screen.

  “Holy…” she exclaimed. “This symbol goes waaaaay back.” The others crowded around her, craning their necks for a better look at the screen.

  “There are so many hits,” Cassie said, shocked by what she found. And there was. Seemingly, hundreds and hundreds of pages of it.

  “Well, here comes the bad news. The system isn’t sophisticated enough to pick out what any relevant information might be so we’re going to have to manually read through all of them.”

  “But that will take all day,” Cassie gasped, intimidated by the sheer scale of it all.

  “Do you have someplace else to be?” came Christian’s cutting response, though Marley decided not to repeat it, to his annoyance. “Your job is to repeat everything I say, not pick and choose,” he said.

  Marley didn’t reply, however, something else on her mind. She turned to him, her eyes troubled. See her expression, his own softened. “What is it?”

  Marley stared at him, torn by whatever it was she wanted to say. She swallowed, taking a breath before speaking. “I’ve been thinking… I’m basically the most useless member of this gang.”

  Having overheard her, Tyler whirled around, shocked. “That’s not true! What are you talking about?”

  Marley gave her a smile of thanks though her eyes remained firm. “It is true. I can basically summon ghosts, possibly talk to them, but that’s all. In a physical sense, I’m practically useless. I can’t do anything. Think about the times we’ve been attacked, I’ve only been able to do something once…” She paused momentarily as Christian’s shocked green-gold eyes flashed into her mind as her hands squeezed his heart until it stopped. She had to wait until the image disappeared before she could speak again. “And I’ve no idea how to do that again, even if I wanted to. I can’t be a liability, I need to be able to help defend us.”

  Christian wasn’t sure what she was getting at. “Continue.”

  She looked at him directly. “I want you to teach me self-defense. I want to learn how to fight so that if we are attacked again, I won’t be so useless.”

  “That’s not a bad idea,” Tyler said, nodding in agreement.

  “Um… how is that going to work though?” Cassie raised, a tentative lilt to her voice. “When Christian can’t actually touch anything?”

  “No, but my voice works fine,” he said before realizing his error. “Well, for one of you, anyway.”

  “You guys can start training now if you want, while the rest of us go through this stuff,” Eve offered. “We’re probably not going to make much of a dent in it anyway, so you might as well.”

  Each of the girls nodded, letting Marley know that they were in agreement.

  “You’re sure you don’t mind?” she asked, just to make sure.

  “Knock yourself out,” Tyler said.

  Surprised by how fast this was happening, Marley felt a shiver of excitement. She wasn’t going to be defenseless anymore! She was going to learn how to protect herself and the others. Smiling at Christian, she gestured.

  “After you, Sensei.”

  * * *

  Marley padded barefoot onto the mat-covered floor.

  She stood in the enormous workout space on the other side of the warehouse, taking in the display of weapons that lined one wall. There were guns, old-timer rifles, crossbows, and bladed weapons of every kind. She even saw a pair of nunchucks, which she immediately knew she would never use. Gathering up her hair, she tied it up into a ponytail so it wouldn’t get in her face. Christian stood in front of her, pacing back and forth.

  “The first thing you need to learn—" he began only for Marley to interrupt.

  “About fight club?” she asked, earning a look from him in response. “Sorry, couldn’t help myself.”

  “Try,” he replied. “Anyway, as I was saying,” he continued, drawing out the word ‘saying’. “The first thing you should learn about self-defense is that, if you are in danger and you have an opportunity to, you should RUN.”

  Marley shot him a perturbed look. “Surely that’s the last thing?”

  “Absolutely not. Your goal is to stay alive so if something happens and you can get away, do it.”

  “Run… got it,” she replied.

  “Next lesson: staying alive isn’t like what’s it’s like in the movies. It’s not all martial arts and pretty kicks. It’s ugly. It’s messy. You need to learn that everything is a potential weapon — it’s all about how you use it.”

  He gestured to her handbag. “Bring that over here.”

  Wondering what he was getting at, Marley did as he commanded. “Tip the contents onto the floor.”

  She hesitated, shooting him a look. “Are you sure?”

  He nodded, barely able to hide his impatience. “This would go so much faster if you just did as I said without questioning me every step of the way.”

  Shrugging, thinking ‘so be it’, Marley tipped out the contents of her bag. Out spilled a few cosmetic items — the leather purse she had used since high school, a pack
of limited-time Tic-Tacs, her vial of meds, a pen and notebook that she always carried with her… and a couple of tampons. Seeing them, she arched a look at Christian. Either he didn’t know what they were, which seemed unlikely, or he was just ignoring them.

  “How many weapons do you see in those contents?”

  Marley looked down at her items, her features twisting with confusion. “Er, none, unless you count the Tic-Tacs, which are probably only useful for fighting bad breath.”

  Christian pointed. “Your pen. You can use that to stab someone in their eye…” he began as Marley recoiled with horror.

  “That’s horrible,” she said.

  “Trying to stay alive isn’t pretty, Marley. Get used to that. Now, what else can you use?”

  Her eyes ran over the items on the floor, but she couldn’t think of a way to use any of them. “I don’t know.”

  “Your credit card,” Christian commented. “If push came to shove, you could snap that card in half. The edge of the card would be sharp enough for you to slice someone’s neck with it.”

  An image of herself doing just that popped into her mind as did the answering spray of blood such a cut would cause. She felt the blood draining from her face but Christian didn’t seem to notice, warming up to his subject.

  “OK, you’ve got the gist. Lets move on to common holds and how to break them, or we can jump straight to how to behead a demon using only household furniture.”

  “Could we maybe save that for the next lesson?” Marley asked a little desperately, hoping that he was joking.

  So far, this wasn’t going as anticipated.

  She hoped it would get better from here on out.

  Chapter 9

  The words blurred together on the screen.

  Eve rubbed her eyes, trying to blink away the haziness. They’d been at this for hours now and any initial excitement had long worn away. Tyler’s nose almost touched her printouts as her chin rested again her chest. Her eyes were closed. It wasn’t clear whether she was just resting them or had fallen fast asleep.