A current passed around the circle like static electricity. The lit candles placed around the circle sputtered and then the flames shot up a foot or more.
Juliet offered the athame to Miranda, who pointed it to the East, drew the pentacle, and said, “My element is water. I call upon the God and Goddess to boost my strength to fill and flow, to temper my quest with intuition and know, that good shall prevail, strong and right. This evil will end, starting tonight. By the power of all and me, so mote it be.”
The waterfall sound of rushing water filled the room, and a mist billowed in the air, then dissipated.
Caleb accepted the ritual knife from Miranda and raised it to make the symbol and point to the North. He held the paper Aubrey had given him in his cupped palm and read the words. “My element is earth. I call upon the God and Goddess to boost my strength to cradle. In heart and hand I will hold those I love stable. Until ’tis time to bring my power to bear, against the evil who will dare, bring harm to those for whom I care. By the power of all and me, so mote it be.”
A surprising feeling of warmth worked its way up through the bottoms of his feet to the top of his head. The hairs on his arms stood up. He glanced at Chase. The man was rubbing his arms, and his brows rose. Caleb waited for the feeling to ease back down before he passed the athame back to Aubrey.
She bent her head. “We offer our gratitude and our love for thy blessings and gifts, Lord and Lady.” She raised the blade once more and again pointed to the East, “By thy breath.” Turning, she pointed to the South, “By the power of thy loving spirit,” West, “By the cradling waters of thy womb,” North, “By the strength of thy body, we open this circle. So mote it be.” She lowered the athame.
The sudden release of the barrier around them was like dropping a curtain, and Caleb was surprised not to feel another billowing of air as it hit the ground.
A bone-chilling chorus of screams rose and built from outside until it hammered against the windows, the walls. For a moment he expected the door to fly open or the windows to break, but all stood firm.
Miranda had shifted her stance and now relaxed and murmured, “Blessed be.” The other two echoed the sentiment.
They’d have to take on the power sooner or later. But for now the barriers were holding.
Chapter 21
The release from their hours of concentration left Juliet physically exhausted, yet her mind raced. Caleb and Miranda’s conversation with Aubrey fell to a quiet murmur as the three went into the kitchen. Juliet glared in frustration at the shadow creatures. They paced back and forth in the pools of light, their movements strangely graceful and nearly identical. Were there really that many of them, or had the witch responsible mirrored the actions of just two or three to make it appear there were more?
If one witch was responsible for all this, and she’d sustained it all this time, she was bound to be getting tired. The three of them, working together, might be able to take them out right now.
Chase wandered over to stand next to her. He braced an arm on the wooden facing. “I don’t like you being this close to the window.” Beneath his light brown eyebrows, his pale eyes looked almost gray. “One of those things might reach through.”
“Aubrey has set protective wards on all the doors and windows. We’re safe—for the night at least.”
“You have that much confidence in her ability?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Just for my peace of mind, come have a seat with me on the couch.”
Juliet allowed him to guide her to the overstuffed sofa. When he sat close enough that his knee brushed her thigh, she looked up to study his face.
“I’ve been thinking.”
“Uh-oh.”
He shot her a wry look, then grinned.
Her stomach tumbled and she felt a twinge in her chest. She hadn’t seen him smile before. It lent his masculine features a charm she wasn’t expecting. His blond hair, cropped short, lay close to his head, as controlled as the rest of him. She wondered what it would be like for him to lose himself in passion. “What is it you’ve been thinking about?”
“It’s more curiosity than a question. I was hoping you could satisfy me—ah, my curiosity.” The tops of his ears reddened.
Was that a Freudian slip? Juliet bit her lip and looked away, the urge to giggle strong. “About what?”
He rubbed his palm along his jaw. He’d never shown any uncertainty before, so why now?
“If witches really exis—”
Juliet raised a brow. How much more proof did he need?
“What else is out there I don’t know about?”
Would he believe her? And if he did, how much time would he spend wondering about his friends and coworkers? It might make him doubt them. It might also make him doubly wary of the people he arrested, which could save his life. But it could also affect the way he did his job.
Members of the preternatural community went out of their way to live under the radar. And they policed their own when someone decided to go rogue. It was better if they took care of business quietly instead of turning it over to the cops.
“This situation will probably be the only one of its kind you’ll ever have to worry about.”
She could see his relief, and guilt struck her. Was she putting him in danger by not telling him the truth? Maybe she should. In her experience, men could only deal with one thing at a time. After they got through this, she’d break the news to him.
Guilt drove her to her feet, and she went to look out the window again. The shadows were gone. The pools cast by the streetlights held nothing. Chase stood close behind her, his body heat reaching out to warm her. He was a detective. He carried a gun. He could protect himself against the Willy Porters and Gerald Abbotts of the world. The temptation to lean back against him was strong. “They’re gone, Chase.”
“I see that. What else is out there, Juliet?”
She turned to look over her shoulder at him, her arm brushing his chest. Instead of moving back, he splayed a hand against her back. She felt protected, and the look of demand in his eyes escalated her attraction into an ache of desire. Her gaze settled on the firm well-shaped curve of his bottom lip. She was tempted, very tempted, to align her body with his and reach for more. It would distract him from the question she was trying to avoid.
But he couldn’t protect himself against what waited out there. And she couldn’t be responsible for another man’s death. She couldn’t.
Pulling her thoughts back to his question she sighed. “Knowing won’t make your job easier, Chase. And I can tell you love your job. Men identify with what they do so closely. They judge their worth by what they do. You don’t want to allow all this crap to take root inside your head to ruin it for you.”
“You wouldn’t be trying so hard to avoid the question if it weren’t something really bad. All the mythical creatures you see on TV?”
“Some.”
“Shit!” He first looked surprised at her answer, then pissed. She could almost see the ideas working through his head.
“Most of the time things are taken care of on the down low. You won’t be called in to deal with it. If Miranda wasn’t such a Goody Two-Shoes, you’d never have known about the spells. I certainly wouldn’t have given them to you.”
“Who would you have given them to?”
“We’re not associated with any coven. We’d have had to deal with it on our own. And you wouldn’t be in danger right now simply because you got involved.”
“I was already involved. The autopsy reports are on my desk to prove it. I’d never have stopped looking for the reason behind those men’s injuries.”
That pit bull attitude was what made him a good detective, but might also get him killed. But not if she could prevent it.
Her attention swung to the street again. Small glints of light sparkled on the lawn. She frowned. What the hell was that? Realization hit her, and she began to shake. Her stomach quivered. “Oh shit!”
�
�Spiders,” Chase finished for her.
They turned as one and ran for the kitchen. “We have a problem,” Chase announced. Miranda, Caleb, and Aubrey jumped to their feet.
“The spiders that attacked the car are outside,” Juliet finished for him.
“They can’t get through my wards,” Aubrey said, her tone soothing.
Chase turned an expression stony with concern on her. “We’re talking about things that are able to eat through a windshield, Aubrey.”
“My wards will hold.”
“Do they cover the whole house, the roof, the attic vents? These suckers can leap like a fucking kangaroo and hit with the force of a baseball at ninety miles an hour. The big one cracked my windshield like an eggshell.”
His language alone increased Juliet’s concern.
Aubrey frowned, biting her lip. “If they come through a window, they’ll burn to a crisp. If they touch the house, the same will happen. But I didn’t think about the roof. Nobody told me they could jump.”
“Fuck!” Caleb exploded.
Juliet tried to release her fear and ground herself. “I have an idea, but it will require that we all of us working together.”
“What is it?” Miranda demanded.
“We were going to try to suck one of the shadow creatures into a crystal. We just need to work on a bigger scale. I can take care of the ones on the lawn, and you two need to gather up the ones on the roof.”
“How do you know they’re already on the roof?” Aubrey asked.
“Listen.”
A muffled rustling sound much like a paper bag being crushed came from above.
“Those assholes are eating my roof,” Aubrey’s green eyes sparked, her red hair floating about her shoulders as anger fired her powers.
They all followed her into the living room. Aubrey reached for some of the crystals they had prepared, and she put some in her pockets. Miranda and Juliet did the same.
Caleb’s features had hardened with concern. “How can we keep the shadows off of you while you three take out the spiders?”
“I’m going to kill the streetlights. You watch my back and warn me if they start to fire up again. I’ll be using fire to dissolve the spiders. The shadows may try to manipulate the light from that to attack.”
It had been so long since she’d felt empowered, and now the feeling of being in control of herself and her gifts rushed up to meet her like an old friend. She gripped the front door knob and jerked it open.
She threw out a hand. “Terminus vicus lux luscis.” Like dominoes falling, every streetlight blinked off, plunging the neighborhood streets into darkness.
“Showoff,” Miranda muttered before shooting her a grin. As scared as they were, they were finally living as they should always have been.
Juliet motioned for Miranda to stay back and walked across the porch. She kicked a tarantula-sized arachnid off the stairs like a soccer ball, and heard it hit the street with a crunch. The weight of the thing surprised her.
She rushed to an open space on the lawn and pulled the power up and through her body in a rush. The scuttling horde surged toward her as soon as she stopped in the center of the yard. She waved her hands back and forth as she would if she were brushing the grass.
A thousand small, skittering shapes hastened toward her, their bodies glittering like crystals. Her skin crawled, and the thought of them touching her provoked an itchy feeling in the back of her throat.
Her anger built to overpower her fear. “Within the grass, within their mass, with fire I will ignite, these things divined to inspire my fright.” Each shiny body began to glow fiery red, like a hot coal, and they writhed and withered onto their legs, which curled like burned paper under them. Thousands of them glowed against the inky blackness of the grass, turning the yard scarlet with their heat and sending out the scent of burned sod.
In the dull red glow, tall gray shadows, hazy and indistinct, began to form.
Miranda ran to the edge of the porch and extended a hand, calling out, “Impluo!”
Large, wet drops of rain plopped onto the lawn, hitting the burning spiders. They hissed, and steam billowed upwards. Heat pulsed and built until the first one crackled, then popped with the ferocity of a gunshot, sending out shards of hard, molten glass. Like a chain reaction, the others followed in quick succession, sounding off like a string of firecrackers on the fourth of July.
As the light died, the shadows dissipated as quickly as they had appeared. Before the noise and rain ceased, Caleb and Chase ran off the porch, leaping over the smoldering patches to stand on the sidewalk and act as lookouts for any shadows.
Miranda and Aubrey followed to join Juliet on the rain-slick grass. They faced the house and looked up on the roof. Beneath the half-moon’s light, the charcoal gray shingles glittered with tiny, skittering forms.
Aubrey bent her elbow, cupped her hand and spun it in a circle. “Per suction quod verntus levo illa molestus.” The wind spiraled and swirled, circling in wild eddies along the ground, sucking the dead, broken carcasses up out of the grass. With the twisting speed of a dust devil, it took flight and climbed into the sky, bounced, then whirled along the roof, causing the damaged shingles to clatter as it scooped up the writhing mass of crystalline arachnids like a vacuum.
Miranda drew a deep breath and exhaled hard enough to blow up a balloon. A large, transparent bubble appeared and expanded until it stood six feet in diameter, suspended above the ground. “Wiggly arms and legs come hither, within my bubble you will slither,” Miranda called out. The wind stilled, and Juliet was certain the sudden appearance of thousands of swarming spiders clumped together in a heaving mass with their burned and broken nest mates would haunt her with more than one horrible nightmare.
“Do you think you can break the bubble at the same time I send these things back to their creator?” she asked Miranda.
“Yes, I can do that.”
“Maybe it will be enough to scare her into dropping this vendetta.” Goddess, she hoped so. Juliet drew upon the earthy power beneath her. She stretched out a hand and touched her fingertips to the bubble. Immediately at least fifty spiders heaved against the sphere and tried to gnaw their way through to bite her. She couldn’t entirely control the instinctive flinch, but held her hand steady. “From shadow to light, carry back this power, and end this final witching hour.”
The sphere suddenly stretched out, elongated, as if it were being sucked through a keyhole by a ferocious vacuum. Then it began to shrink, getting smaller and smaller, as more and more of the spiders and their transparent prison were drawn away to another time and place.
“Ut liberum,” Miranda commanded, just as the last remnant of the bubble disappeared into the either.
A waiting stillness hung in the air. And for several moments they remained frozen, silent.
“Remind me not to piss you ladies off,” Caleb quipped. “Having thousands of those things dropped on my doorstep would be about as bad as experiencing the ninth circle of hell.”
Aubrey laughed, breaking the white-knuckled tension of the group. “Juliet didn’t drop them on her doorstep, Caleb. She sent them all back to her directly.”
“Jesus,” Chase murmured.
Juliet rolled her head to relieve the tension cramping her neck. It was both satisfying and depressing that she’d probably banished the one thing that could have led them to the person responsible. And that she’d been forced to break their cardinal rule of “an it harm none, do what ye will.”
Her voice was tinged with a pinch of bitterness when she said, “Karma’s a bitch.”
Chapter 22
Miranda stood next to the bed, Caleb’s neatly folded clothes in her hands. Washing his clothes was such a small thing, yet intimate. His gray boxer briefs and white tube socks were tucked between layers of shirt and pants.
She had never allowed herself to dream of a husband and family. Had never thought she could want a man until Caleb. Not until Juliet had assured her Clay Maddox was
gone for good. For a brief glorious few hours she’d believed it was possible. Until she showed Caleb what she was.
She’d ignored it, suppressed it, and the void inside her had grown to swallow her personality, her life. She had punished herself for the past by pretending to be someone other people could ignore. She’d hidden in plain sight. But she couldn’t do it anymore.
“What are you thinking so hard about, Mandy?”
Caleb’s voice, gravely from sleep, jerked her back to the present. He stretched and the fabric of his T-shirt pulled taut across his chest and shoulders, outlining the strong, masculine lines of his upper body. Her mouth dried with longing and her skin tingled. When Caleb folded one hand behind his head and patted the bed next to him, her heartbeat burst into an erratic rumba.
His small gesture inspired a tiny kernel of hope, although she cautioned herself not to read too much into it. She placed his clothes on the dresser and closed the distance between them. Instead of sitting, she climbed on the bed next to him and curled on her side, facing him.
For a long moment he looked into her eyes. The dark beard stubble along his lower jaw tempted her to touch, but she curbed the impulse. He had made the first gesture, but she needed to take things slow.
“How’s your arm?” he asked.
“Better.” Juliet had done a gentle healing, and though the bruise had flourished with color, the bone-deep pain had eased a little.
He tucked a long strand of hair behind her ear with a fingertip, and the small caress resonated all the way down her neck. “What were you thinking about?”
“I was regretting how much time I’ve spent hiding in the shadows, afraid to be what I am.”
“I understand the need to hide what you can do, but why did you think you had hide the rest?”
The question aimed right for the heart of the whole situation and hit its mark. Fear and guilt welled up, threatening to paralyze her. Her voice came out a whisper. “I didn’t think I had a choice.”
Deep Within The Shadows (The Superstition Series Book 1) Page 16