Donn's Legacy, page 27
“Oh, God,” I groaned. “This is my fault.”
“Focus, Mac. Just breathe. In through your nose, out through your mouth.” He modeled the slow breaths and watched me as I followed suit. “Good. Again… One more… Now what did you see?”
I closed my eyes. The images came back to me. “I saw my mother at Yurt in Luck. She took me to the Shamrock room… She said Stephen was in trouble.” The more I spoke, the clearer the memory and my voice became. “Then I saw the jewelry box. When I picked it up, it took me—” My eyes flew open. “The field. Horace left the box at the end of the big field outside town by all the new construction. He put it in the little patch of woods behind the new apartments.”
Graham drove faster than I thought Baxter was capable of going and definitely faster than was probably safe on icy roads. We tore down residential streets, past dark buildings and an empty schoolyard. The glow from the porch lights and streetlamps was more subdued than usual, as though the glacial temperatures were holding back the light.
My stomach twisted. Stephen was outside in this weather, walking the breadth of the town. He had to be freezing. How long had he been out here? How much longer could he take?
“You’re sure it’s the field on this side?” Graham said.
“Positive. I remember the trees. Plus…” I fidgeted in my seat. “I want to go there. I feel like I need to be heading this direction.”
He peered at me from the corner of his eye. “You can feel the runes?”
When I nodded, he took a sudden turn toward Main Street. My gut wrenched, and I felt like I was on a carnival ride that had turned me upside down.
“We’re going the wrong way.” I resisted an impulse to grab the steering wheel and yank us back on track. “He’s the other direction.”
“This will be faster. There’s no road between the older neighborhood and the woods on that side. It’s all farmland back there. Stephen’s on foot, so he can climb the fences. We can’t.”
Baxter’s engine roared as Graham leaned on the gas pedal. Within minutes, we were racing down Main Street toward the roundabout that marked the last block of Donn’s Hill’s ever-expanding commercial district. There, the Main Street Diner sat kitty-corner from the town’s only gas station, and a large apartment complex jutted inward onto what little farmland remained inside city limits.
A half mile before the intersection, Graham made another abrupt turn. Ignoring a sign warning Private Property, he took us down a dirt road that ran between a giant parking lot and a field, perpendicular to the tree line. My brain sang with relief; we were now headed back in the direction my instincts had been screaming at me to go.
In the distance, a lanky figure shambled slowly across the field toward the trees. It was impossible to tell from this far away, but it had to be Stephen.
Then I felt something else.
Something familiar.
“Stop the car!” I shouted.
Graham swore and slammed on the brakes. Baxter fishtailed on the unpaved road before skidding to a halt in a cloud of dust.
“What is it?” Graham looked around, eyes wide. “Did we hit something?”
I gripped the dashboard and shook my head. Two urges warred inside me. Something called to me from the edge of the field, and I wanted to run toward it. It would be warm there; I could feel it. Warm and safe and the perfect place to lie down and get a rest from shivering in this cold.
But to my left, something else tugged at me. Something strong.
The feeling was a hundred times more intense than what I had felt at Cambion’s Camp the day Horace sent me looking for the first jewelry box. I had felt it more recently than that, though. The tidal wave of nausea that crashed into me was identical to the one that nearly flattened me when we were leaving Donn’s Hill for New Mexico.
I threw open the car door and dry-heaved over the road. When nothing came up, I shuddered back against the passenger seat and squinted out Graham’s window toward the source of my discomfort.
On the other side of the enormous parking lot, a long row of dark buildings stood between us and the highway. Hundreds of Donn’s Hill residents called the apartment complex home. And somewhere in there, I was suddenly sure that there was a spiritual force even stronger than the entity trapped in that first box.
No. What I was sensing was too extreme to be caused by a single spirit. There had to be more over there, maybe dozens. All the people Horace had lured to their deaths—the psychics he had murdered—were clumped together, their voices amplified by their proximity to one another.
And those voices were calling to me.
I stared back and forth between the apartments and the form stumbling across the fields. My mother had shown me where Horace was. His astral form was waiting somewhere near the trap he had laid for Stephen. If I took off my necklace, I was sure I would be able to feel his twisted energy lurking just behind the trees.
My hand darted to my chest and gripped the black tourmaline as Horace’s words came back to me. First, you find a way to disappear from my sight… When I wore this necklace, it did more than just block out any negative energy. On the astral plane, Horace was nothing but negative energy. When he was outside his body, he couldn’t sense me at all.
And while his spirit waited for Stephen in the trees, his physical body slept somewhere in that apartment complex.
I unbuckled my seat belt.
Graham grabbed my wrist. “Whoa, what are you doing?”
“I need you to do something for me. Call the sheriff again. Get an ambulance out here and go save Stephen.”
“Where will you be?”
“There.” I pointed toward the apartments. “Horace’s body is over there. I can feel it. But his spirit is watching Stephen. When you get there, don’t mention me. Just find the box and destroy the runes like you did in that basement, okay? And once Stephen is safe, come find me.”
“No way.” A muscle twitched in his face. “You’re not going alone.”
“We don’t have time to argue.” I yanked my hand away from him, slung my purse over my chest, and got out of the car. “Horace is like a living ghost. If I don’t find out who he is now, we’ll never know, and he’ll just keep hurting people. And Stephen needs your help. He’ll die, Graham. There’s no third option.”
Before he could say anything else, I slammed the door and bolted through the Geo’s headlights toward the parking lot. I was halfway to the buildings before I heard Baxter’s engine roar to life and tires crunching over the unpaved road. Graham had listened; Stephen was going to be okay.
He had to be.
I had nowhere near as much confidence about my own future. If the timing wasn’t just right, if I couldn’t find Horace before he returned to the waking world…
There was no point thinking about it. I had made my choice. Now I just had to find him as quickly as possible. I needed to focus on sensing the spirits calling to me and destroy their prisons.
But as I darted through the parked cars, I couldn’t help wishing I had taken an extra second to tell Graham I loved him before slamming that door, just in case.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Following the ghostly compass in my brain was a strange sensation. It felt like searching for the source of an elusive scent or trying to find the thing in your house that’s making the noise nobody else seems to hear. If I didn’t focus on it completely, the feeling faded enough to be overtaken by the urge to find the lathu rune that had lured Stephen out into the cold. But when I did concentrate on the spiritual energy calling to me, the overwhelming nausea nearly brought me to my knees.
The closer I got to the source, the more difficult it became to push forward. The tourmaline around my neck did nothing to block any of it out, or if it did, what leaked through pressed against me like a giant pair of hands squeezing my skull.
How could Horace stand to be so close to this much energy? How could he relax enough to fall asleep to astral project? If I blacked out from the pain, would I find myself on the astral plane?
I gritted my teeth and concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other until I bumped up against the sidewalk at the end of the parking lot. It took some effort to lift my shoes the few inches required to go from asphalt to concrete, but I soon found myself in a wide, open-air hallway with a pair of numbered doors on both sides. A metal staircase led to more apartments on the floors above me, but I couldn’t imagine climbing it without falling backward and breaking my neck.
It felt safer to start my search at ground level. I squinted at the doors around me, most of which sported Thanksgiving decorations—cornucopia wreaths, hand turkeys, and pilgrim hats. But there was one door that looked like it wasn’t yet aware that Halloween was two weeks past. A pair of vampire fangs had been taped to the door, perfectly framing the number three.
The pull was strongest here. I stumbled as I approached the door but caught myself on the rough plaster beside it. The voices calling to me were just feet away, right on the other side of this wall.
“Mrrrrooooowwwww.” A black cat growled at me from the far end of the hallway as I steadied myself. It arched its back, and its green eyes flashed, as though it was trying to warn me away from its territory.
My head throbbed like a bass drum, but through the searing pain, I recognized that cat. Fang had shown me a photo of it. I looked from the cat to the vampire fangs and back again.
Fang. This was Fang’s apartment. What the hell was Fang, that little fake, doing with this much spiritual energy pouring out of his home?
There was only one way to find out. I had to get through that door.
Shadow hissed at me. Apparently deciding discretion was the better part of valor, he turned tail and darted around the corner. An idea wormed its way past the pulsing in my brain. I forced myself off the wall to follow him, turning the corner just in time to see Shadow leap up through a window on the other side of the apartment building.
Fang had made a makeshift cat door with a piece of cardboard, some duct tape, and a cat-flap insert that looked like it was intended to sit in something much thicker. With no regard for the amount of noise I was making or the way this might look to an outside observer, I yanked the cardboard away from the window. The next step took more energy than I thought I had left in me, but I managed to hoist myself up and through the opening, landing on a metal pet dish that thumped softly against the carpet beneath my feet.
Dimly, at the back of my mind, I registered a change. The lathu rune no longer called to me. Graham must have destroyed it, which meant he had either reached Stephen or beaten the rune caster to the box. In either case, I prayed he had gotten there in time.
If Horace was out there, he had just witnessed his plan failing. I was sure he would recognize Graham and realize I was behind this turn of events. Would he stick around in astral form to see how I’d managed to stop him, or would he wake up to run before I got any closer?
I didn’t love my odds.
The space the absence of the lathu rune left in my mind was quickly filled by the increased pressure from the nearby ghosts. They were here, in this apartment. I leaned into the pain, begging it to guide me to its source. But it was all around me now, pressing against my mind from every direction. Forget wading too deeply in Grey’s river of spiritual energy; I was a submarine that had sunk to the very bottom of the ocean, and the hull was caving in.
My legs gave out, and I collapsed onto the snow-white carpet. I forced myself forward on my hands and knees, eventually reaching a closed door. I didn’t register any of Fang’s furniture as my fingers curled around the knob; he could have hung flashing neon signs all over his bedroom, and I wouldn’t have noticed. My vision was limited to the six inches in front of my nose as I crawled out of the room.
Carpet.
Carpet.
My shoulder scraped against something. An open doorway, I decided.
More carpet.
Then—cedar.
The woodsy scent of the red boards invaded my nose and cleared my senses. I blinked the tears out of my eyes and focused on the thing in front of me: a large cedar chest. It was open, and I gripped its lip to pull myself to a sitting position. I inhaled deeply, focusing on the smell. It was masculine, like my father’s aftershave. Natural, like a peaceful forest.
The scent cleared my head enough for me to fully process what I was seeing. Strange symbols covered the inside of the chest’s lid, painted in a thin reddish-brown color that I hoped had come out of a can. Beneath the rim rested rows upon rows of small square jewelry boxes with hinged lids. Ten across, five down, and who knew how deeply stacked. There had to be hundreds of them.
Hundreds.
Horace had hundreds of spirits trapped in here.
This time, my stomach found something to vomit up. Yellow bile erupted out of my mouth and spattered across the boxes.
A secret fantasy, one I had buried as far down in my psyche as I could delve, disappeared in a puff of my breath. After channeling Camila, I was sure I could do the same with my mother. No more half visitations where she couldn’t even properly communicate with me. We could have a real conversation—one where I could ask her any question I wanted and she could take her time answering.
But to do that, I would have to find the jewelry box that contained her spirit.
I cringed against the returning pressure and lifted a few at random. Each had a different symbol on the bottom, most of which I didn’t recognize—glyphs, runes, single alphabet letters, an abstract sketch of a cat. Was it some kind of system? Could Horace pick up a box with a diamond carved into the bottom and know exactly who it belonged to?
My theory was confirmed when I found a box marked with a pickax. I’d been right; Horace had collected the miner’s spirit from the Ace of Cups.
There was no time to crack the rest of his code. The moment of clarity the cedar scent bought me had long since started to fade, and the pain came roaring back into my head like a freight train. I gripped the chest with one hand and reminded myself what I had come here to do. It took every ounce of my focus to dip my other hand into my purse, close my fingers around something small and cold, and haul out Darlene’s lighter.
The little green head with its oversize black eyes made me think of Camila and her alien obsession. I had set her free, and I would free the others.
“Sorry, Mom,” I whispered.
Blue flame erupted out of the alien’s head. I lowered it into the chest, where it licked at the unvarnished edge of the centermost box.
Then the cedar chest’s lid slammed shut. Pain shot through me. I yanked my aching limbs to my torso with a yelp, dropping the lighter. It bounced off my knee and landed on the carpet.
“I should have known you’d show up sooner or later,” a familiar voice said above me.
I jerked my head up, and my eyes went wide.
Noah leaned over the cedar chest, rage tattooed across his snarling face as he reached for me.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
When the lid slammed closed, two things happened at once. The fingers on my left hand felt like someone had snapped them in half, and the pressure squeezing my head vanished. Whatever Noah had painted on the inside of the chest’s lid must have been containing the energy of the spirits trapped within.
The fog in my brain instantly cleared, and I scrambled backward out of his reach, finding my feet faster than I would have thought possible. I backed across the hall and into Fang’s bedroom, never taking my eyes off the suddenly murderous cameraman. He wore a pair of sweatpants and a plain white T-shirt, and though there was no trace of his hat or cloak and his face wasn’t the same as it looked on the astral plane, there was one thing about him that was instantly recognizable: the cold, sadistic gleam in his eyes.
I had thought Kit was just trying to make space for herself on the Soul Searchers team, but she had been right. Noah didn’t know how to work the cameras properly. He didn’t really have any experience. That had all been a lie, a way for him to get onto the crew. But why? Just to screw with me?
Or to find other psychics to murder?
There was no point in asking. In my heart, I knew it was probably a little of both.
“Well,” I said, “I don’t know if I should call you Noah or Horace or whatever your real name is.”
Noah flashed a humorless smile as he walked toward me. “It’s Noah, but I’ve always hated that name. His story never made any sense to me. He took all that time to build the boat, herded everything that mattered onto it, and then just… let it go? A smart man would have kept it for himself.”
“Horace, then.”
He hissed through his teeth. “I can hear that, you know. The way you say it, like you’re cramming two foul words together as quickly as you can. It’s Horus, Mackenzie. Say it with the respect it deserves.”
I backed into a dresser and groped for something—anything—I could use as a weapon. Noah might not be able to travel the length of the room in a single blink outside the astral plane, but he was still considerably stronger and larger than I was. If he leapt at me, I needed to be able to level the playing field.
My hands found nothing.
“Sorry, Horus,” I said, careful to enunciate the u.
He stopped at the threshold between the hallway and Fang’s bedroom and inhaled deeply. “I told Fang not to leave his window open for that worthless cat. I should have checked when he left this morning. But don’t you think the winter air is… I don’t know… bracing? The cold can be so freeing.”
I shuddered. “Does he know what you’re doing in here?”
“Lord, no. I don’t know if it’s his youth or his disposition, but the child is pitifully easy to manipulate.” His eyes flicked to the window. He darted across the room toward it, blocking my exit and chasing me up onto Fang’s bed. “Now, now. Where do you think we’re going? I’ve got a box ready for you, Mackenzie. It took me a few years, but I figured it out. The stronger the psychic, the longer she lasts. And you’re ripe for the plucking.”
