“That’s—that’s something, all right. Did he really wear an American flag tie when he ate here?”
“Artistic license,” I shrugged. I was more concerned with shoveling down calories. My display of power had probably been a bit more than I should have attempted, so soon after almost draining myself dry. But at least recharging was fun.
Cassie took a sip of iced tea and shook her head slightly. “What’s our next play?”
I’d already come to a general idea, but I figured one aspect of having a not-sidekick was running things by my partner before committing to a course of action. “Stay on the move, wait Kent out. Soon as we can, hit the last scene.” I took a drink of tea to give myself a moment to consider my next words. “But no matter what happens there, I think we need to talk about getting some backup. No offense.”
She blinked, then frowned. “Not sure why that’s supposed to offend me. What kind of backup are we talking about?”
I grinned, but the waiter brought our food before I could reply. He dropped off Cassie’s taco salad and my arroz con carne, double steak, and departed with a promise of drink and chip refills. I found an intact chip and piled steak, rice, and molten cheese on it. “I ever talk to you about the De La Rosa brothers?”
“That’s the guy Kent worked with, on your dad’s case, right?”
“Esteban, right. He retired to San Diego. I lived with him and his family for a few years, out there. They have a detective agency.” I paused, feeling suddenly embarrassed. “That’s, uh, kind of where I got the idea to do the whole paranormal detective thing, actually. I’m listed on their books as one of their independent contractors.”
“Ah, so that’s the source of your bank account.” Her eyes twinkled and she leaned in closer. “And here I worried you were hustling pool in random honky-tonks.”
“I suck at pool,” I said, gravely, then smiled. “Anyway, you’ve got Esteban and his brother, Javier. They’re the heads of the agency. Karen’s the accountant—she’s Javi’s daughter. Her husband, Carlos, he’s an ex-cop, and he works with them, too. He tried to teach me golf. Then you’ve got Scope, Karen’s brother.”
“I didn’t take Spanish in high school, but—Scope?”
“Well, he’s an Esteban, too, but that’d get confusing, right? He’s the photography expert. They do skip-traces, disability fraud checks, divorces. It’s a ton of camera work, so—Scope.”
“Sounds thrilling. Kidding—but how are they suited to back us up?”
This was the touchy part. I glanced around. We’d come in after most of the lunch crowd, but you never knew when a waiter or waitress would pop up and overhear. “Here’s the thing. Javi and Scope are both ex-military. And yeah, most of what they do is pretty straightforward in a legal sense, but they also get into some more gray areas. San Diego is a pretty safe place, but it’s also close to the border. The cartels, for the most part, keep their business to people that exist in that world, but things spill over. And a good way for an up-and-comer to turn a quick buck is kidnapping.”
Cassie raised an eyebrow. “So, the De La Rosas do what, exactly?”
“They’re the guys you call when you don’t have time to wait for the FBI. They’re effective and brutal enough that the cartels have learned to steer clear of them. San Diego’s a big Navy town, and the firm has always got freelance work for guys with the right skills. They’ve got a few former SEALs on the payroll as consultants, and not the arf-arf, bouncing ball kind.” I shrugged. “So, yeah. If I call for help, we’ll get it. I want to make sure that you don’t take it as a slight against you.” I shook my head. “Hell, if anything, it’s a judgment on me. No way I’m equipped to handle what we just dealt with. I don’t know what I would have done if they hadn’t backed down.”
Cassie reached across the table and grabbed my hand. “Hey. I get it, okay? That was some next-level, Invasion of the Body Snatchers-type stuff, right?” She squeezed, and I squeezed back. The human contact felt good and right. It had been a long time. “I’ve got to stop listening to you, though.”
“Why’s that?”
“You said this was only a ghost job, that it’d be fast and easy.” She made a buzzing noise. “Wrong answer.”
“Blew that one, didn’t I?”
CHAPTER 17
Helen
Salome, Arizona—Friday night
In a secluded space toward the rear of the KOA Campground off US 60, class was in session.
Helen had given the order to head there shortly after she’d cast the second location spell. Remaining in the rest area was out of the question. The Highway Patrol was bound to come through and run plates at some point—especially if their stolen RV numbered among the vehicles remaining overnight. The motor home was comfortable, but Helen still had a very real sense of the impending doom hanging over their head. If and when anyone discovered the bodies of the former owners, or a concerned friend or relative reported them missing, the license plates on the big motor home would become a flashing beacon to any and all law enforcement that happened to run across them. Stealing a different set of plates was a possibility, but she also knew that if she didn’t keep her crew occupied she was bound to have a revolt on her hands.
Thankfully, returning to her former role of teacher made it much easier to ignore her frustration with the situation. She’d hoped to have the grimoire in her hands by now, but the girls, thankfully, had broken her out far in advance of what she needed. The delay wouldn’t interrupt the schedule of her plan. Some aspects were time-critical, but those also required certain preliminary magics. Without exception, she needed the grimoire to implement them.
The girls sat around the motor home’s small dinette table, faces set with grim intent. The familiars might well have been furniture, for all the attention they paid to the goings on in their midst. They’d been set to watch, and so they did.
“You’ve been working on tapping external chi,” Helen said, to nods all around. She avoided the more detailed description the grimoire had used when she herself had found the means to tap. Her coven had crossed the line of typical morality, showing themselves willing to kill for power. Despite that, she thought they’d react poorly to the revelation that the least frightening term the grimoire used for external chi was ‘shadow source.’
She reconsidered the half-dozen mystical watch dogs scattered around the interior. Then again, perhaps not.
“One of the most useful capabilities is the ability to tie certain spell effects to a physical object. This, probably, is the origin of the thought of mystical runes. The truth, though, is much simpler.” She held up a simple wooden bracelet, one of a dozen similar souvenirs they’d bought at a roadside tourist trap before arriving at the campground. “You focus not on the particular object, but on the sort of change that you bring to it. A scratch, a mark of some sort.” With a knife in hand, she focused on the shadow source as she scratched the curved interior of the bracelet with a random curlicue. “You can’t see the effect of the binding on the physical object, but when you do it properly, you’ll feel it.” She bounced the bracelet in her hand. It didn’t seem to weigh more, but it felt more substantial, more real, to her, all the same. If she held it still in her palm, there was a faint vibration to it that hadn’t been there before. “Then, once you bind it to the tap, you can make real use of it.” She nodded toward the opened binder of spells. “The shield spell is a difficult one because the energy required for defense is equal to the energy exerted against it. Did any of you study it?”
Kelsey and Roxanne nodded. The smaller girl murmured, “There were so many warnings I was afraid to try to cast it.”
“It’s one of the more advanced spells you managed to save,” Helen agreed. “That said, it’s most useful when you bind it to a tap.” She took up the knife again. “Clipeus.” A faint curl of smoke trailed up from the tip of the blade as she scratched the second sigil into the inner curve. The bound spell snapped into place, vibrating in her hand. The familiars shifted, looking
around the interior, as though seeking out the source of some noise only they could hear. Helen smiled. She handed the bracelet to Kelsey. “Try it on.”
The younger girl slipped it onto her wrist and made a noise of interest in the back of her throat. “You’re right, I can feel it.” She shook her wrist, and the light around her arm seemed to shimmer and bend ever-so-slightly, in an area around four feet in diameter centered on the bracelet.
“Wood’s not the most durable material, but it’ll do. I used to own a very special ceramic relic that was thousands of years old, and it was none the worse for wear. Melanie’s father had it. That little planter brought us all together, in a way.”
Giselle reached out and stroked Kelsey’s bracelet. “What about metal? What if we wanted a magic sword or something?”
Roxanne laughed. “Hell, yeah!” All three girls exchanged high-fives.
Helen resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “Metals are more difficult. They’re far more durable than other materials, so the potential for power is far greater. But yes, if you have something metal and the tools to inscribe it, you can imbue effects.” There were more than a few historical examples, particularly in wartime, but that was a line of conversation she wanted to steer them away from, for now. They had to learn how to walk before they could run. “The main issue is that metals tend to be harder to work with, so you either need experience with chiseling or filing. Even then, sometimes you need some sort of already-magical blade to inscribe it.”
“Did you have anything like that, before?”
“I used to.” Helen smiled, though it didn’t touch her eyes. “But we’ll get it all back, sooner or later, ladies.”
Paxton
Phoenix, Arizona—Friday night
Getting Kent up to speed took a bit longer than I’d planned. Having to explain that we’d been responsible for the street full of bones that had Phoenix PD hopping most of the afternoon had been an interesting experience. On the bright side, he considered our explanation of events, then shrugged. “Don’t see what else you could have done, short of running away before they blocked the exits.” His blithe forgiveness for so much death might have been off-putting if Kent hadn’t been all-too-familiar with my Mother’s dossier of crimes. It didn’t completely assuage my guilt, but it helped, a little.
Rather than take two vehicles we took a roundabout path, dropping Kent’s SUV off at his house and piling into the rental. Cassie gave up the shotgun for Kent. He directed me with the familiar ease of a local and saved me the hassle of listening to the GPS.
“You haven’t asked me, you know.”
I took a quick glance over. “Asked you about what?”
“The boys. Evan and Ethan.”
Working my jaw back and forth, I kept my eyes on the road and tried to tell myself that was entirely about safe night driving. Sure, it is. “I didn’t forget about them.”
“That’s not what I’m saying.” Kent’s voice went softer, but the blows still struck. “You empathize with them?”
“Of course, I do. How could I not?” What had happened to me at sixteen had been bad enough. Just thinking about what the twin boys had to be going through left me shaking. Maybe not thinking about it was taking the easy way out. Had my dogged insistence on preceding from oldest to newest been borne out of a desire to cover all the bases, or to put off the most horrifying scene of them all? “Where are you going with this?” I forced a laugh, but it sounded shrill in my ears. “You think I need a shrink?”
He shifted in the passenger seat, then sighed. “I don’t want this to crush you if it doesn’t come out right, son.”
I swallowed. “If they don’t make it, you mean.”
“Right.”
“That’s the last thing you should worry about, Pops.”
He sounded surprised. “Oh?”
“I lost my temper this afternoon. Something happens to those kids, I’m liable to lose my mind. And I don’t know what I might do, then.”
Cassie leaned forward between the seats. “It’s not going to happen, Pax.” She squeezed my shoulder. “You’ll get this done.”
I grinned at Kent. “See? I’m getting a more positive outlook already.”
He shook his head and crooked a finger at a house. “That’s the one.”
Glancing at it out of the corner of my eye, I nodded but kept on driving. There was a convenience store at the end of the block. I parked the Explorer and twisted to face my companions. “I’ll go in on foot. Keeps the prying eyes away.”
Kent looked like he wanted to protest for a minute, but he finally nodded his assent.
“Back in a flash,” I promised, and started walking back to the empty home. The temperature had dropped to a surprising extent after the sun went down, and I shoved my hands in the pockets of my jeans and wished I’d thought to bring a jacket.
It was a well-lit street, most of the homes set well back from the road. It didn’t look like the sort of place where horrible things happened, but if I’d learned anything in the last ten years, it was that evil most often struck where you least expected it, and safety often proved to be an easily-shattered illusion.
Checking behind myself to make sure the street was clear, I went invisible. Safe from prying eyes, I cut through the front yard and stepped around the side of the house Kent had indicated. A padlock secured the gravity lock of the side gate. I checked that the no one stood in the windows of the house next door, dropped the invisibility spell, and phased through the gate.
Various sized of pebbled stone, as was typical for the area, covered the front yard. The backyard was lush with grass save for the area surrounding an in-ground pool and a patio with a barbecue grill. I crossed my fingers that there weren’t any motion detector lights in the backyard and moved through the grass to the patio and the sliding doors leading into the house.
Phasing through the glass felt different than other materials, which I suppose made sense in a strange sort of way. As I stepped into the house and took in the unfamiliar atmosphere of someone else’s home, deja vu hit me. This was the second time in a week I’d intruded into the emptiness of a family’s grief, only this time, I hadn’t even bothered to learn the last name of the owners of the home I was trespassing.
I know the names of the boys, I told myself. That was most important. That and doing everything I could to find them before Tlaloc and its minions subjected them to unimaginable terrors and tortures.
When I’d called the De La Rosas and asked them for any help they could provide, I’d also taken a few moments to speak to Karen. She had, so far as I knew, little or no talent for magic, but she styled herself a bruja blanca, a white witch. What she lacked in true power, she made up for in research-fu. Last week she’d been able to translate crucial clues that had helped me defeat Melanie and the Edimmu. I hoped her efforts would pay off for me this time as well.
Enough dithering. I took a deep breath to steady myself and reached out. “Is there—”
The feeling hit me before I could even finish the sentence. Waves of grief and anguish thundered through the house. Having opened myself to them, the sheer mass of emotions drove me to my knees. If the lack of activity at the prior crime scenes had given me concerns that my abilities were beginning to fail me, it was a dead issue, because this was the most intense reaction I’d ever felt.
The sound of weeping came to me from deeper in the house.
I pushed myself to unsteady feet and tried to follow the sound. “Hello?”
Go away.
“I’m here to help. I—”
LEAVE.
The rebuke struck me in the chest with a palpable impact, and I winced. I’ve taken flying knick-knacks to the head a time or two, but this was something different. I had a hunch that, if I wasn’t careful, the occupants of the house could do me real harm.
“I need to talk to you about Evan and Ethan, first. Then I’ll leave.”
A forlorn wail, then: They’re dead. Dead and gone.
“No. T
hey’re alive. Someone took your boys. I’m trying to save them.”
The house fell silent, still, and then the woman stepped out of the wall. If not for that, I could have convinced myself that she was right there in front of me. She was as solid an apparition as I’d ever seen. My boys?
Evan? Ethan?
I turned and saw a man behind me. It was no surprise that the horrors that happened here would result in two ghosts, and it also helped explain the level of sheer emotion that permeated the place.
“The men that came here, can you tell me anything about them? The police said they came in a van. Did you see any writing on the sides?”
Men in black. Dead eyes. So much blood.
Ethan? Where are you?
“Help me help them. What did you see?” Unwilling tears spilled down my cheeks, and I had to fight to speak past the rising lump in my throat. It’s obvious to say that ghosts didn’t tend to be all there, but these were further gone than most. Driven mad by the circumstances of their death, cursed to eternally walk the halls of their home, calling out for what they had lost but could not find.
The mother stepped closer to me and trailed ethereal fingers through the tears on my face. Something in the cast of her face changed, and she whispered.
The door.
“Show me,” I said. “Please.”
She turned and moved toward the front of the house. I followed close behind, chased by the trembling voice of the father. Evan?
The mother led me to the front door, then stopped. After a beat, I realized that she wanted me to open it. I didn’t hesitate—if anyone saw the open door, I could always cloak myself and get out of Dodge. It would suck, leaving the spirits to their agony, but I could always come back later.
I pulled the door open. The interior of the house remained dark, but the glow of the streetlights illuminated enough of the front porch for me to make out a faded stain on the concrete.
Night's Black Agents (Paxton Locke Book 2) Page 15