Dead End (Peri Jean Mace Ghost Thrillers Book 8)

by Catie Rhodes

  Movement in the room’s mirror caught my eye. Priscilla Herrera’s spirit appeared right behind me. Her whisper came from inside my head. It’ll be okay. You’re stronger now.

  My nerves continued to churn. I stepped away from Mysti, ready to tell her to stop and knowing I couldn’t. “All right. What else do we need?”

  Mysti didn’t answer at first. She pointed at things, whispering to herself. She pressed her lips together and muttered, “It’ll just have to do.”

  “What’ll just have to do?” Dillon's voice, hard as she was, came out in a squeak. She stood with her hands on her hips. She might not understand what was going on, but she’d fight over it because it scared her. Great. Just great. My shoulders tightened.

  “It would really help if we had something of Amanda’s. I can use thread or wool, but a personal item helps more.” Mysti shook her head. “We don’t, though, and that’s that.”

  “Uhhh…” I crept over to my witch pack and dug around, trying to remember where I put it. My fingers closed on cold stone, and I drew out the skull. Carved of some marbled black stone and small enough to fit in the palm of my hand, it gleamed in the motel room’s tobacco tinged lighting. I held it out so Mysti could see. She approached warily, walking on the balls of her feet as though she might need to run.

  She took the skull and held it close to her face. “Arfvedsonite. It has to do with moving forward. Some use it for psychic visions of the future. Some think it facilitates acceptance of change.” She held it out to me in the flat of her palm. “May I ask how you ended up with it?”

  “I filched it when we cleaned Amanda's stuff out of the clearing where Priscilla Herrera’s cabin is.” I thought back on the day, remembering the deep, irresistible urge to just slip it in my pocket.

  “Rather than the bottle, we’ll use this for her point of contact with you.” She put the bottle and grave dust back in her backpack. “Consecrate the skull for spirit work. Then hold it over the wormwood smoke to create the connection. Amanda’s a fairly new spirit. She shouldn’t have trouble finding her way to an item she used in spell work.” Mysti flicked her fingers at me, a silent order to get moving.

  I got out my supplies and took them in the bathroom. The scent of the lemon cleanser and my oil relaxed me. I whispered to the skull as I worked, explaining its new purpose. By the time I took it out of the black cloth, the change in the stone rang through my arms.

  I walked back into the bedroom to find Mysti and Hannah huddled together whispering. Mysti touched Hannah’s arm, her face set in sympathy, and nodded. They both turned to watch me enter the room, the skull upright on the palm of my hand. Hannah moved away, eyes carefully averted from me. Mysti approached and nodded at the skull.

  “We're ready. Either you get your familiar to open the gate to the underworld, since he’s a psychopomp, or I have a guardian I’ve worked with before.” Though Mysti’s tone was pure business, I heard a little tremor at the edge of it. The fear in my chest wound tighter.

  “I’ll call Orev.” My familiar wouldn’t ask for much other than the cat kibble he sometimes ate. Deep inside, my mind burned with my connection to Orev. With Dillon's power here to draw on, all I had to do was step into the psychic connection. I nodded to let her know what I intended. She uncovered her raven tattoo, and I did the same. The connection came to life. Orev’s cries filled the room as did the sound of flapping wings. The shadow of a huge bird, wings raised, appeared on the wall. He wasn’t really in the room, but his spirit was. Good enough.

  I held my arms up in imitation of his wings and spoke. “Orev, my familiar and guide, open the gates to the spirit world now.”

  A clang like an iron gate being opened shook the room. The smell of dead flowers and dust tickled my nose.

  Mysti handed my athame to me. “Your blood on the skull.”

  I did as she said, grunting as I stabbed the tip of my index finger. My blood absorbed into the skull, and the white marbling in the black stone took on streaks of red.

  Mysti gave me a small nod of approval and pushed me in front of the altar. “Call her by her full name.”

  My heart jumped. How could I voluntarily contact someone who had tried to kill me, had killed Eddie Kennedy, and had imprisoned my father’s spirit for twenty-plus years? Crazy. That’s how. I took a deep breath and centered myself. “Amanda Irene King, please grant us the honor of your presence.” I raised an eyebrow at Mysti. She nodded and motioned me to say it again. “Amanda Irene King, please honor us with your presence.”

  The overhead light buzzed and went out, leaving only the candles flickering. I glanced at the mirror to see Mysti beside me and Priscilla Herrera’s ghost flanking me. The hag perched on top of my shoulders like a gruesome parrot. The black opal pulsed power on my chest, its heat burning my skin.

  “Again,” Mysti whispered.

  I opened my mouth to speak, but Priscilla Herrera’s deep, commanding voice came out instead of my regular smoker’s screech. “Amanda Irene King. Visit us. Dine with us.”

  The room’s temperature plummeted. The hair on my arms raised, and the tip of my nose felt like an ice cube. Amanda appeared before me, head down, two fingers on the skull. We connected with a chiming sound. Shivers ripped through me. My teeth began to chatter.

  “Peri Jean Mace.” Amanda raised her head. To my relief, she looked much as she did the day I bested her and helped kill her. The phantom sound of her screams from that day echoed in my memory.

  “Will you dine with me?” Amanda’s dry rasp made me want to cut and run.

  Instead of answering, I took one of the bread cubes and ate it. Tasted awful and stale. Amanda smiled. The rest of the bread cubes rippled green, then black with mildew, and shrank to nothing but a stain in the bottom of the bowl.

  “Will you drink with me?” She smiled again, and for a split second, her face was the mask of horror she’d worn as my father’s ghost pulled her underground to her death.

  I took the bowl, sipped from it, and set it down. The remainder of the water slowly dissipated until a little dampness in the bowl’s bottom was the only proof it had been full.

  “I know why you called me here.” Amanda’s grating voice had grown strong enough to fill the room.

  Hannah moaned from one corner, but I couldn’t take my focus off my visitor. Doing so might give her another chance to kill me.

  “Do you wish to help me?” I gulped.

  She showed me her death face again. I held myself as still as I could. Her rasping voice came again. “Perhaps you think I owe you for my behavior the last time we encountered one another.”

  I shook my head no. “I wish things hadn’t happened the way they did.”

  Priscilla Herrera’s anger burned at me. Never apologize, she hissed inside my head. I tried to ignore her, but the hag chimed in, hoping I’d get angry and blow this situation all to hell.

  “I made a great many mistakes on your side of reality.” Amanda’s specter floated, blowing side to side, even though there was no wind in the room. “Maybe I can soften them by helping one whom I wronged.” She took her fingers off the skull and went to where the carved box lay on the floor. “Barbie chose this. She chose everything, used everybody.” Amanda’s harsh voice rose. “She ended my life. Put me where I am now.”

  I glanced at Mysti, fear pumping through me. I panted with the force of it. Amanda sounded like she was winding up to have a good, old-fashioned tantrum. Mysti pressed one hand to my back. Stay steady, her gesture said.

  Amanda hunched forward and wept, transparent hands on the filthy carpet. She morphed into what her corpse probably looked like now. Nothing but bones and hanging strips of cloth. Her words guttural, she began to chant. “This spell I unbind. It is no longer needed. Spirits, go now, return from whence you came. Thank you for doing my bidding.”

  The protection spell gave a crisp snap, turned into a wisp of smoke, and shot toward the door, where it exited underneath.

  Amanda floated back to the table, put he
r fingers back on the skull. “May I visit again?”

  I glanced at Mysti. She raised her eyebrows in victory. She’d been right, and she’d never let me hear the end of it. Amanda waited for her answer. I gulped. “Yes. Please visit again.”

  Amanda stared at my fingers for several long moments. My athame clattered across the table toward my hand.

  “More blood on the skull to seal the agreement,” Mysti whispered behind me.

  I took up the athame, dreading the minute prick at my finger. Annoyance radiated from Priscilla Herrera’s ghost. She didn’t like this one bit. I didn’t either. But what else could I do? If I insulted Amanda, I’d have another enemy. I pricked my finger and spattered a few drops of blood on the skull. It absorbed them. The red in the skull’s pattern deepened. Amanda left with a whisper of dead leaves and the smell of turned earth.

  Mysti lit a bowl of her special banishing incense. “Have Orev close the gates to the underworld.”

  I raised my arms as wings again. “Orev, close the gates to the underworld.” The metal clang rattled the mirror in its frame.

  Mysti smiled at me in congratulations. Hannah rushed over to the box and popped it open. Inside was an outdated micro tape recorder. A plastic baggie of batteries lay beside it. I came to stand beside her, wanting to help, but didn’t quite dare. Hannah shoved the batteries into the tape recorder and turned it on.

  The sound of a noisy, public place dominated the scratchy recording. My high hopes fell a few inches. It was easy to forget how nice digital recordings sounded compared to the older tape kind.

  “There’s his car,” Barbie muttered. “Get lost but stay where you can see me. Don’t let them drag me out of here.”

  A scared female voice that barely sounded like Amanda said, “O-o-okay. But I can’t believe you’re—”

  Barbie’s hiss cut her off. “Here he comes. Go on.” Several seconds passed. Then Barbie said, “Well, well, well. Is this a new sheriff I see?”

  The recording scratched and muffled. I imagined Joey and my mother hugged. Gross to the power of gross.

  “That election wadn’t nothing but a formality.” Joey’s phlegmy, nasty voice sounded exactly the same as when I knew him.

  Footsteps approached, and a chair scraped. “This is the last time I’ll meet the two of you in public.” King sounded younger but no less mean.

  “Whatever you say, Tolliver.” I thought I heard a smile in Joey’s voice. “Let’s negotiate.”

  “Ain’t nothing to negotiate.” King’s voice lowered to a growl. “I got Barbie’s clothes from the day she killed Paul Mace and the murder weapon. Joey, you got the file saying the knife found at the crime scene wasn’t the murder weapon. You kept that fact out of the mix because Jesse Mace confessed. Ain’t that so?”

  Joey mumbled something I couldn’t quite hear because a group of people walked by talking at the top of their lungs. I bit back the urge to shush them.

  “You’re right,” King said. “Don’t matter now. He’s in prison. But ain’t neither of you turning on me. Way I see it, we in a standoff. I don’t want no more bullshit from either of you.” He hit something, the table from the sound of it. “No more coming to my house and scaring my boys. And you, hell bitch, just stay the fuck away. Or all of us is going to the death chamber together. Hear me?”

  A chair scraped back. “Fuck this,” Barbie said. Her heels tapped across a floor, and a door squeaked open. The tape ran as she got into a car and started it. The engine revved, and someone began to pound on the window. The brakes squalled, and a car door opened and closed.

  “You can’t just leave me here.” Amanda sounded out of breath.

  “Did you just run across that restaurant like a fucking moron?” I knew the tone of Barbie’s voice. It was the one that meant she was about to really pitch a fit. The tape cut off.

  So this was what King had wanted enough to hold Hannah hostage. I’d ram it so far down his throat it would be next Christmas before he shit it out.

  15

  I helped Mysti gather her things. She’d hang around a nasty place like this an hour past what she had to in order to do it her way. Not me. I just threw things together and fixed it once I got home. Or didn’t. Dillon got in on the act, asking Mysti what every single thing was for.

  I got tired of listening to Mysti’s patient explanations and went to tend to my own belongings. The tape recorder sat on the bed. I reached for it. Hannah nabbed it before I could touch it.

  “Who gets it? King or Rainey?” Hannah feinted away from me, recorder held to her chest. “Rainey needs it to get Jesse out of prison.”

  “She’s going to get it,” I promised. Hannah’s face relaxed, and I did too. “It wouldn’t hurt if we added the clothes Barbie was wearing the day she murdered my daddy.”

  Hannah edged a little closer. “How do you think you can get that? King’s not going to let you go digging around in his stuff.”

  I zipped up my pack and closed the distance between us. I lowered my voice to a whisper. “When we go to meet King to hand over the tape and get Wade, he’s going to try to kill us. We’ll either win or die. If we win, we’ll get Barbie’s murder suit. If we die, it won’t matter.”

  She gave me a grim nod. Our eyes met, and we understood each other for the first time since I’d rescued her from King. Neither of us thought death such a fearsome thing anymore.

  I pointed at the tape recorder. “Use your phone to make a copy and send it to Rainey. Also tell her King has Barbie’s clothes. Tell her there’s a safe both at his compound and at Long Time Gone. Could be in either one.”

  Someone knocked on the door, hard, three times. We all froze and stared. The knock came again. Three more times. Something croaked, “Housekeeping.”

  Bullshit. A place like this was more likely to have free penicillin shots than housekeeping. I put the chain on the door and cracked it open. At first it seemed nobody was there. Then a withered face, so deeply wrinkled it appeared featureless, appeared in the crack. I sucked in my breath and took a step back. One silver eye stared past me. The other eye socket was empty, nothing more than a slitted hollow.

  “Oh god. What is that?” Dillon cried out.

  The thing acted as though it hadn’t heard. “Don’t try to leave. Management’s on the way.” Its voice, expressionless and dry, came from inside the room with us. I slammed the door and leaned against it, lightheaded, trying to process what I’d just seen.

  “That was a corpse pushing around a housekeeping cart and talking. What the fuck?” I spoke to Mysti, the most reasonable person in the room.

  Mysti nodded and pushed past me to stare out the peephole. The dead thing outside started knocking again, pausing every three knocks to repeat its message. Mysti backed away from the door.

  “What is that?” I repeated.

  “Heard of zombies, haven’t you? There’s no telling what kinds of monsters that monster in the front office has lurking around this place.” Her chest rose and fell with her panicked breaths.

  Mohawk’s threat of collecting my soul resurfaced in my mind. Would he turn me into something like the monster outside our door once he was done with me? I began to tremble. The zombie, or whatever it was, continued to knock on the door and deliver its message over and over.

  Dillon went into the bathroom and turned on the light. She came back in a few seconds. “Ain’t no window in there, but we gotta go. I can’t handle this no more.”

  The hits on the door got harder and then stopped. I let out a sigh of relief. “Okay. Let’s try to make it to the car before—” The door slammed open so hard the knob embedded in the wall.

  Mohawk rushed into the room and grabbed me by the arm. “How dare you vandalize my property and render it useless?”

  Dillon and I exchanged a quick glance. She launched herself onto Mohawk’s back and hooked one arm around his throat. I gathered my magic until it bubbled and shot it at Mohawk's silver earrings. They turned bright red, then orange.

  Ins
ide me, the hag jumped up and down like a spectator at a dog fight. Inhuman lust for violence and the pain of others. The being’s reaction bled into my emotions, increasing my enjoyment of the moment. Then I realized what I was doing, what I was becoming. All the coffee that day bubbled in my stomach, acid burning the back of my throat. I had to get rid of this thing, and I still had no idea what to do. Mohawk snatched at me with a hand that had grown ugly claws. I jumped out of the way and refocused.

  Mohawk let out a high-pitched scream. I kept pouring magic into the earrings. They went blue, and his ear started to smoke. He let go of me to clap one hand to his ear, staggered backward, and slammed Dillon into a wall. She slid to the floor but crawled to her feet, fists out, ready for the next round.

  I tossed Mysti’s pack at her and grabbed mine. “Run!” I threw open the door. There stood the thing Mysti had called a zombie. This time I got a good look at her withered arms. The smell of her dead flesh gagged me. She opened her mouth and let out a howl louder than a dog shitting a brick. We were trapped. I slammed the door in the crone’s face, locked it, and went to stand in front of my friends.

  Mohawk’s ear, burned black from my magic, fell off his head and bounced twice on the carpet. A new ear grew back in its place within seconds. He lowered his chin, head flattening and elongating. The faint pattern I’d noticed on his skin surged forward and turned to snake scales. “I used this room to collect human souls. You broke it with your stupid fucking magic. Taking one of you as a slave is fair exchange. I pick the Gregorius witch.”

  In other words, he picked me. I blurted out, “I pick your mama.” The mantle built like a coming storm. I held it inside, knowing I’d need to unleash it all at once just to stun the creature in front of me.

  Mohawk’s throat widened like a cobra’s. He hissed and lunged at me. Unable to shoot magic at him fast enough, I let out a weak yelp and jumped back into Hannah.

  She steadied me and kept a grip on my arm. “He can take me. I’ll never be normal again,” she whispered.