Until the blood from the many cuts on his hand reached the metal. He froze in an instant rigor as the blade flared into life. It was an athame, not a simple knife, a ritual blade, and spelled for a purpose. This guy had no idea of what that was. He couldn’t have. He wouldn’t have used it if he had. It fed on the blood on his hands, but it wanted more and it knew where to get it.
I moved to strike with the Night Sword but I was too far away. The man jumped back, still under the knife’s control. Turning the knife in his hand and shouting hysterically, he shoved the blade hard with both hands between his ribs into his heart. He exploded. White-hot fire erupted from him, melting the knife in his chest, blowing out the windows and pummeling my shield, throwing me back into the wall of the hall. Neither the Stone nor the blade had seen that coming. None of the three of us would make that mistake again.
Little Brother! Peter called.
I’m okay, Pete, I answered.
The Night started eating away at the blood magic trying so desperately to destroy me but kept at bay by the Stone’s shield. The damage was done here, though. The man was gone and the fire was into the walls already. The computers and camera equipment were useless even as doorstops. I went back out the front door. I pulled the fire alarm in the hall as I invoked the chameleon spell then took the stairs out, three at a time. Smoke billowed out of the blown-out windows and flames were already reaching above the trees.
“Seth!” Richard yelled from the sidewalk. He couldn’t see me under the spell. “Where are you? Seth!”
Peter was running up the hill. “He should be coming out now!” He was looking into the apartment building for my aura.
“I’m here!” I hollered to him, keeping the chameleon active. A loud crash in the building announced the fire spread farther and the noise increased dramatically as the fire destroyed with ferocious intensity. The hateful magic helped it.
We all heard the squeal of tires on asphalt as I topped the concrete steps. And we all turned, ready to send seriously heavy offensive spells at whatever was coming. Thankfully, we recognized the black streak as it wove in reverse through the parking lot at us, screeching to a halt directly opposite us. Jimmy threw the door open and jumped out, yelling, “Seth! Peter! Richard! Seth!” He was panicked, tears streaming down his face. He couldn’t see us standing five feet in front of him.
I sent the Night home and braced myself for the collision, then dropped the chameleon, too. “We’re all right, Jimmy,” I said loudly, knowing it was too late. He crashed into me hard.
Surprisingly, we didn’t go down and he turned it into an embrace, hugging me tight and muttering, “You’re all right! Oh, God, thank you!” several times before letting me go. We began hearing sirens in the distance. When I looked for Peter and Richard, I found them rifling through the only other car in the lot.
“Come on, Jimmy, get in. We have to go,” I said urgently. “Pete, gotta go. Now!” Jimmy climbed in the back seat. I wouldn’t have argued if he’d drive, though. By the time, I got in and shut the door, Peter was climbing in the back and Richard was standing behind him.
“Stop at the rental car!” Peter shouted as Richard rolled the window down. I didn’t ask, I just did, slamming on the brakes from the heavy acceleration we were in. Peter sent a massive wave of disassociating magic over the car and the apartment containing the sense of anything human. If there had been a person in that building, that person would have been ill for weeks, hospitalized, without a clue to the cause. Thankfully, Peter wasn’t that careless. The wave sank into the earth just past the building’s confines. We pealed out of the parking lot, passing the first police car within a half of a block. The fire engines were behind them by two blocks, their heavier loads taking longer to get up the hills.
Jimmy was the first to ask, “What the hell happened back there?”
“The place was booby-trapped,” I said. “Dead Man’s Switch, with a real-live, create-your-own dead man.” I was still on the adrenaline rush, blood pumping hard. Controlling my breathing wasn’t hard, but my heart was another matter. I pulled the car to the side of the road as police and fire vehicles flooded past us, then pulled out again, staying right at the speed limit.
“Let’s get away from the scene first, Jimmy,” Peter said, calmly. Not that he was calm, but he could appear that way. Another few turns through the neighborhood put us on a main road, Sparkman Drive. I lost us in traffic, driving away from Richard’s TDY and his now-noisy neighbors. Once we were at least five miles away, I pulled into a convenience store and we all piled out of the car, nervous and jittery.
Peter handed Jimmy two twenties and asked him get us all two bottles of water and a couple of dark chocolate bars each. He thought Peter was trying to get rid of him but went anyway. All we did while he was gone was trade “You all right?” back and forth and walk in circles around the car a few times. We jumped on him like jackals on a wildebeest when he got back. The three of us guzzled the first three-quarters of a bottle of water before stopping to breathe.
“Now, tell us what happened, step by step,” Richard said slapping one of the chocolate bars into my hand.
“I screwed up is what happened,” I said, exhaling slowly. “I knocked on the door. When the peephole went dark and he was behind the door, I shoved my way in hard. It threw him and the door back down the hall. The layout was close to yours. The door flew back and lodged into the wall in the living room. The man fell into the hall. I should have held him down on the floor there, but instead I looked around for the second aura we saw. The walls were covered in protection sigils. While I was reading them, the man scurried to the back room, shoved his hand through a glass display case, and grabbed a knife. I followed him back and saw him but I wasn’t fast enough to stop him.
“The knife had some sort of spell on it,” I said, beginning to stammer some, having a hard time explaining what I had seen. “It wasn’t visible beforehand, but when the blood from his hands hit it, the magic flared like sodium on water. He seized; his whole body completely seized. I was already thrusting forward with the Night but he suddenly jumped back, out of my reach and flipping the knife around in his hand. Then he shoved it directly into his heart and, boom, flash fire.” I was shaking now, just remembering it. “It was just so wrong. The explosion from him sent me flying. The Night ate most of the energy and the Stone diverted most of the kinetics, but I wasn’t anchored to anything so I hit the wall.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong, Seth,” Richard said, slipping an arm over my shoulders. “None of us knew what would happen up there. And what you’re describing sounds like blood magic. That can hide in some particularly nasty ways from what I’ve been told. I’ve never seen it personally.”
“Blood magic? Like the man at the warehouse?” I asked, looking to Peter for that answer. Richard wasn’t at the warehouse to know what I meant.
“Kieran said it was blood magic,” Peter said, sucking on the chocolate slowly. “I’ve never seen it either, but it looked nasty enough.”
“Any way we look at it, the fact that you were being spied on is bad,” I told Richard. “You need to check on your wife and daughter as soon as possible.”
“The satellite passes into range tonight,” Richard said.
That was puzzling. As covered as this planet was for communication, he timed satellites?
“Why so long, Dad?” Peter asked, saving me the trouble.
“Their magic interferes with everyday satellite phones,” Richard explained. “From there it’s all geography and politics striving to make the world difficult for all. We had to set up links for land lines.”
“This guy just exploded?” Jimmy asked me.
“Burst into flames right in front of me, just like in the comics,” I said, eating more of the chocolate bar. I could get addicted to this stuff. “You saw the building going up, Jimmy. I didn’t do that.”
“Well, we’re away from it now,” Peter said.
“Yeah, let’s get going, then,” I sai
d, pushing off from the hood.
“Are you sure you don’t want to call it a day? That was pretty traumatic,” Richard said, acting very much like a caring father.
“No, we’re no worse off than we were, unless one of you hasn’t told me something,” I said suspiciously, searching them both over carefully. I didn’t see anything but raised stress and higher hormonal levels, but there were things I didn’t know, a lot of them.
“All we did was watch you get barbecued, so, no, we’re fine,” Peter said, taking my keys. “I’ll drive, though.”
I didn’t object until Richard made moves to climb into the back seat. “My father would kick my butt from here to your house in Canada,” I said, pulling on his shoulder then sliding in behind him. Jimmy collected the trash and disposed of it, then joined me in back. I settled back and closed my eyes, replaying the event in my head over and over, looking for some clue that I missed.
“Seth, quit dwelling,” Peter growled at me after ten minutes. “You did nothing wrong back there.”
“If I’d held him down, he’d be alive right now,” I mumbled.
“He didn’t have to take the knife, y’know,” Jimmy said. “He didn’t have to be sitting in that room spying on Mr. Borland. That man made choices, Seth, just like you and me. He chose to pick up that knife. You didn’t force him to do it.”
I looked over at him, seeing the earnestness in his eyes. “Quit being reasonable, Jimmy. It’s unbecoming.” Richard chuckled.
Jimmy gave directions to Peter that sped up our trip to his house. Side roads that looked longer on the maps but had other roads to cut across. A few months ago, I would have taken a similar route myself but I thought a little differently now. I’d have to get back into the locale if I was going to stay around. Fifteen minutes later, Peter was pulling the car onto the dirt road that led to Jimmy’s old house.
Out by the mailbox was a “For Sale” sign, noting the foreclosure on the sign, from Farmers and Families Realty Company. We would definitely have to investigate that group more heavily. Peter drove very slowly, barely above idling speed, as we all looked out windows searching for something, signs of life, I suppose. The first three hundred feet was nothing but fenced in pastures on the left and woodlands on the right. Ahead of us, an old barn, weather beaten but maintained, stood with one door wide open, the other shut. An old but serviceable tractor stood in front, acting as sentry.
The road curved sharply to the right and opened up suddenly to show the house backed up against the woods, a ranch-style house, as big as my house, but only because of additions over years. Over farther left of the house near the treeline were several old vehicles rusting in the sun and rain. A large propane tank sat on the end of the house. The front yard was fenced in with a large swing set, rusty and unused, the slide hanging by one screw and one swing hanging on one plastic-coated chain. It was no wonder all I saw was Jimmy’s two-year-old truck—it was his finest possession.
But today he wasn’t ashamed of it. Today he was worried about it. Damn, that made me feel like crap.
“Everything look like you left it, Jimmy?” I asked quietly after Peter stopped the car. Nothing moved that wasn’t caused by the breeze.
“I don’t see nothing out of place,” he murmured.
“You said there was livestock,” Peter prompted him. He turned toward the barn.
“The cows could be in the back pasture,” he said thoughtfully. “Momma prolly took the dogs to the pound or got Mr. Mullins to take ‘em. He’s got the farm over the hill.”
We got out of the car and moved toward the house slowly. The three of us searched through the house carefully as we approached, Richard working the astral with Peter and I working the energy plane as well. Jimmy watched us, curious as to what we were looking for but not willing to interrupt us.
“I’m not seeing anything from here,” Peter said finally.
“No, me neither,” Richard said.
“Let’s go in, then,” I said, gathering my courage and starting for the door.
The house faced the southeast and was high enough on the hill to give it a nice view down the pastures. At this time of day, though, it meant the sun was high enough overhead and westward that it gave little light inside the house, even without the curtains. I pushed open the front door and entered the dimly lit room. We were greeted immediately by something rank and rancid. Something had time to rot in the time Mrs. Morgan was gone. The evidence that they’d left in a hurry was on the floors, wads of newspaper and take-out boxes everywhere. I couldn’t blame them for being angry with the mortgage company. The carpeting was marred with divots and stains where furniture sat for years.
The further we went into the house the stranger it felt to me, like I was invading a stranger’s house after it was robbed. It was eerie that way. The layout of the house was simple, rather barbell-shaped. The first room was the living room with the dining room and kitchen behind it. The Master bedroom was to my right. One long hall connected the other two bedrooms to a utility room and the garage, converted into a fourth bedroom.
“Which room is which?” I asked, looking down the hallway.
“My room is the end of the hall,” Jimmy said, coming up beside me and pointing into the darkness. “The bedroom on the left was Cecilia’s. Across the hall was Momma’s sewing room. That’s Momma and Daddy’s room back ‘ere. His office is off of that.”
“I really need to put some flashlights in the car,” I mumbled to myself.
“Oh, I might be able to fix that,” Jimmy said and hurried down the dark hall.
“Jimmy, wait—” I said, but he was already gone, a door slamming in the dark. Peter came out of the kitchen, gagging, as Richard went into the sewing room, chuckling at him and tossing a small sphere of pale blue light into the air. I grinned at Peter and tossed my own blue light up, directing it into the Master bedroom ahead of me.
There was a strange feeling at the door that made me pause. It hit me fairly quickly, the first oddity. The room was still completely furnished. I stood in the doorway and looked around. The furniture was all dark woods, while the walls were lighter. Mrs. Morgan obviously went for lighter contrasts with textures, using fabrics in tablecloths and window treatments. It was hard to see the designs in the dark as the room seemed to drink in the light of the sphere. Not seeing anything dangerous I walked in slowly, still suspicious of the simple amenities of life. Dragging my fingers lightly across the top of the dresser as I rounded the king-sized bed, I noticed the thick coating of dust, grinding it between my thumb and forefinger. It was really thick.
Peter appeared in the door and watched me stare at my fingertips. “This is blood,” I said, looking up at him. That’s when I saw the elephant in the room, the bodies on the bed and, even more oddly, on the wall. The lamp on the bedside table blocked them from the doorway.
I must have showed the shock; Peter walked straight to the bed and said, “Fuck.”
Richard was at the door, too, mere seconds behind Peter, alarmed by his language alone. Peter didn’t use such expletives lightly. “Damn,” Richard added, gripping the bedpost tightly. “Any ideas who?”
“The man nailed to the wall is John Morgan, Jimmy’s father,” I told them quietly, watching for Jimmy. “At least, I think it’s him. I only met him once and seeing as his face is messed up, I could be mistaken. It stands to reason that the woman on the bed is Mrs. Morgan and the girl is Cecilia.”
“Why is it so clean? They’re eviscerated. It should be messier, grosser,” Peter said, disturbed at the sight.
“I think they were drained for some reason,” I said. “Look at the dust. It’s dried blood and it’s all over the place, like somebody misted the room before they left. Dust even fell on top of it. You can see that on top of the chest over there.” Richard turned to stare at me in wonder, apparently surprised at something I’d said. “What?”
“You got all of that in fifteen seconds?” Richard asked.
“Well, a bit more, but, yeah,”
I said.
“More?” Richard asked.
“Not a particularly nice ‘more’ either, I afraid,” I said, looking at the blood-free comforter the bodies were so carefully laid out on. I let my senses invade the room again, feeling for the dust that coated the surfaces of everything, like the first time I discovered the blood. Sorting through the different samples and ignoring duplicates, I couldn’t differentiate a cow from a dog from a man by the blood sample. I didn’t know enough, but by counting using Jimmy’s numbers… “The amount and type of blood here appears to account for Jimmy’s family and all the livestock, but maybe one cow,” I said quietly. There had to be something here, something in the blood that set off the magic that caused a spell to ignite. I could see the power working once it started, but I just couldn’t see what was triggering it.
The lights snapped on suddenly, blinding us for a few seconds as every light in the room blazed to over-sized life. The hum of older fluorescent lights started a second before the flicker.
Threes do seem to be important numbers in the universe. I had one mistake under my belt and now for number two: I was in too deep. There had to be something that connected the blood to magic. The answer was sympathy. A very peculiar kind of sympathetic magic links the blood to the astral plane just enough to ignite the spells. It limited the types of magic it could work, too.
Jimmy ran through the door. “I jumped the breaker box. What are y’all staring at?”
The sympathy magic ignited. I got to see it up close and personal. Didn’t like it, not one bit. I was just the passenger of the psychic onslaught that attacked Jimmy as he first saw his father nailed to the wall. In one searing instant, the pain and horror visited on each and every member of Jimmy’s family until their deaths was pounded into his head and mine as I fought to understand how to break its hold on Jimmy. Breaking the sympathy was the only answer I had.
Sons (Book 2) Page 16