Red House (12 page)

“I never even thought of doing anything like that before.” I tried to ignore the sounds of his occasional slurping.

“Well, it was pretty damn awesome.”

Wishing I could agree, I shook my head. “It was a desperate move. I was completely unprepared.” Now I felt scraped out, hollow and bruised. Using that much power was no easy feat, and I’d done it with no preparation. I’d be paying for that burst of magic for weeks. I didn’t want to tell Daniel, though, because I didn’t want to risk making him feel bad. I’d gladly pay the price for his sake.

He put his arm around me, drawing me close. I felt the pressure of his lips against the top of my head. A shuddery breath escaped as I worked not to cry. The thought of losing my best friend and the only family I really had anymore was almost too much to bear. After the flood I’d gotten one phone call from my parents, the relief palpable in my mother’s voice when I told her I had a place to stay. Relief for herself, as having a place to stay meant I didn’t have to bring myself and my strangeness back into her house. I did not expect to hear from them again until the socially required Christmas card.

Putting those unpleasant thoughts out of my head, I leaned against Daniel. “You better not be getting blood in my hair.” It was the only way I could say
I love you, Bubba
right then without dissolving into messy tears
.

“Mm. I do get a little sloppy when I drink straight from the bag.”
Love you too
was loud and clear in his voice
.

I moved away, spotting my backpack on the floor by the table and reaching for it.

“You recognized that last ghost. I’m starting to think you know every ghost in the midstate area.”

I snickered. “Just the ones that are good for tourism and the ones no one can get rid of.”

“I take it he’s in the latter category?” I nodded. He said, “Well, what are you waiting for? Let’s hear it.”

I let the backpack slide to the floor, a twinge of nausea rippling through my stomach. This time it wasn’t the byproduct of too much magic. Rather, contemplating the ghost story I didn’t even like to think about, much less talk about, was making me sick. If Daniel was going to be in that house with me he had a right to know, so I had to swallow the sour taste of old fear and tell him.

“Back before I moved to Nashville I used to go ghost hunting with this bunch. They had a couple of EMF detectors and did the EVP recordings.” Electromagnetic field meters detected fluctuations that might be evidence of ghost activity. While a neat gadget, it was never something I needed. Electronic voice phenomena were fascinating though. I’d heard some amazing recordings of the dead speaking. Usually it wasn’t true communication from spirits but rather residual energy that sometimes spiked enough to make itself known, the spiritual equivalent of an echo from the past.

“We went to a few houses but mostly it was graveyards, places out in the boonies we heard stories about.”

Daniel grinned. “And if you didn’t find a ghost you could always sit around and drink, huh?”

“Yeah, well. Mostly we just hung out. Never came across much worth making a fuss about, except for one time.”

“Did you ever see stuff the meters didn’t pick up on?”

“All the time. Even out in the sticks there’s a lot of power lines and stuff to throw those things off.”

He tossed his empty blood bag to the coffee table. “What happened that one time?”

“It was the last time we went out. We’d heard about a spirit haunting a graveyard out in the sticks so we found the cemetery, found the grave that belonged to the ghost. We got there just before sundown so we could see the gravestone change.”

“The gravestone changed?”

“I thought at the time it was more a trick of the light than anything else. Most of the time it looked normal, just gray stone. But at sundown when the light hit it just right, it seemed to turn red. I saw it with my glasses on first but I was messing with a camera. By the time I could take my glasses off and go take a closer look, the sun was lower in the sky and it looked gray again. The place only had the usual low level energy traces so I didn’t think we’d see anything.”

“These people you were with, they know about the auric vision thing?”

I shook my head. “One of them thought I had some kind of psychic ability but we never really talked about it. The others, I don’t know. They were my friends but not the kind of friends I’d tell something like that, you know?”

He did. How many people had he known over the years who never had any idea he was a vampire? Hiding something out of personal safety could make someone really good at compartmentalizing and keeping parts of oneself locked away. There was only one person besides Rozella from back then I’d trusted my secrets with.

I continued. “We didn’t find anything inside the boundaries of the cemetery itself. Sometime after dark one of the guys walked into the woods to use the bathroom. We heard him screaming for help. We thought he was playing around, trying to scare everybody. Him and a couple of the other guys liked to do that sometime. I still had my glasses off when the woods lit up with red. I’d never seen so much angry energy before. The EMF meters started lighting up. Whatever was out there was so strong, everybody could feel it. Jody started screaming again. Me and one of the other guys went into the woods to find him. Todd got to him first. Jody was halfway up a tree, just kind of pinned there, flailing around. He couldn’t stop screaming.”

The horror movies make that kind of terror look like an adrenaline rush but what I saw on Jody’s face that night didn’t give me any kind of rush. It just made me sick with fear. “He was seeing something even I couldn’t see. Whatever it was terrified him. We tried pulling him down but whatever had him dragged him up the tree higher. We tried climbing the tree and kept getting knocked down. There was nothing we could do. It just held Jody up there until it got what it wanted.”

“What did it want?”

“Jody stopped screaming all of a sudden. The silence spooked me as much as the screaming. Then the laughter started. It sounded like it was all around us, just rolling around us like it was taking a victory lap. Jody fell to the ground and we ran for him. He was dead.”

Daniel went to the bar, bringing me back a bottle of water. I took a long drink and tried to shake the memory of Jody’s face, frozen in terror in death. “Did you actually see the ghost that time?”

“That was the only time I went out there. No way was I going back. But yeah, I saw him. Dark clothes, black eyes, freakish smile on his face like you’d expect to see on a serial killer’s social networking profile. Ghoulish bastard. Eventually I was able to do some digging and found somebody that knew about him. Stanley Haschall murdered his entire family around the turn of the century, the early nineteen hundreds. He was the oldest of eight kids and he killed all of them, both parents, one set of grandparents that lived with them. The house was full of blood and body parts. Nobody knew why he did it, what set him off, anything.”

“He go to trial or they take care of it?”

“A deputy shot him. He supposedly tried to escape. Who knows what really happened. But the weird thing is, they buried him in the same cemetery as his family. I never got that, burying him right there with the people he murdered. Anyway, the house burned to the ground and it didn’t take long for the haunting to start. The cemetery belonged to a church so there were other people buried there, a fair number of visitors, and of course the church itself and its members. He had himself a good number of people to terrorize.”

“Didn’t stop him, being on holy ground?”

“Not even a little bit. The person I talked to thought he had some kind of ability. That he could exert control over people, make them see, and in a very real way, experience their worst nightmares. Jody wasn’t the first person he literally scared to death. He decided to go after people at the church. Praying didn’t help so they brought in an outsider.” I turned to meet Daniel’s gaze. “Those nice church-going folk hired themselves a witch to take care of their ghost problem.”

“Well, don’t that just figure. She get him under control?”

I nodded. “She must have been pretty powerful because she was able to confine Haschall to an area in the woods beyond the church. And for years she’d come back out there and strengthen the wards, both to keep him in and keep others out. Spells to make people change their route, turn around and go back where they came from, stuff like that. But it’s been decades since anyone did that.”

“You didn’t go out there and do some warding of your own?”

I hesitated before answering. “I had a cop keeping tabs on me.”

“How long was this before you moved to Nashville?”

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Daniel, it was the art of the “bitch please” look. “What do you think?”

He laughed. “So now this psycho killer ghost is in Maple Hill. And Miss Lorraine thinks the flood is causing chaos on the spirit plane just like it has for the, what do you call this, the regular plane?”

“That about sums up our problem.”

He was silent for a long moment. “What do we try next?”

I had no idea. “I’m working on that.” I retrieved my backpack from the floor, wishing I could pull a solution from it like a rabbit out of a hat.

“Unless you need me, I’m gonna relax.” He stood, walking to the doorway.

“Go ahead. We’re done for the night.” I rummaged through the bag for my phone.

“Okay. I’ll be in my room. I’m gonna clean the shotgun, watch some Paula Deen.”

A snicker slipped out. “Oh, Bubba, you redneck vampire, you. Don’t forget some beer with your blood.”

He left the room laughing.

Lorraine’s admonishment about tying one arm behind my back by not working with spirits came to mind. I had never worked a job where I would need to do that, on purpose. If I couldn’t clear Maple Hill on my own I’d have to bring in people like Lorraine, who did work directly with the spirit world. Creating those kinds of relationships took time. Even if I wanted to do it, there was no time for me to try now. Julia could not be put out of her home for months or even years.

I found my phone. There was a voicemail. I figured it might be from Julia Epps so I called to listen. It was Blake. Unable to focus on the words, I let his voice, low and sultry, wrap around me in a warm embrace. He was just what I needed right now.

I cleaned up before I left, leaving a note and sneaking out. I really should have stayed home, got some rest and something to eat. Calling Blake was an option but I wanted to see him. Feel his body next to mine, even if all we did was hold each other. Simple lust would have been so much easier to ignore, but I couldn’t discount this growing need for him.

The exact moment low-level attraction turned into need, I couldn’t say. It was not the first time I saw him, in a crowded dingy nightclub. Or later that night when he broke into my office, although letting myself get talked into going for a midnight breakfast should have been a clue I was about to get in over my head. It wasn’t even the first time he kissed me, though it was quite a momentous first kiss.

He’d been patronizing to me at the start, and I’d tried to push back against that as hard as I could. Bossy and overbearing too, never good qualities in a boyfriend. Arrogant. Not exactly ethical. I could keep mentally listing his faults as I drove, but I didn’t have that far to go.

So what did I see in him? He’d asked me that himself the first night we made love. The answer I’d given him was vague, my own feelings still half-formed at the time. Now I knew the truth and it was hard to admit even to myself. Driven by loneliness and feeling disconnected from everyone around him, Blake had made a deal with a demon that he thought would help fill those empty spaces in his heart. It blew up in his face, as deals with demons are wont to do, and I had to do my best to clean up the mess. I knew those feelings of loneliness and disconnection intimately. Alienation had been a close companion my entire life, even before I began to see auras. But especially after the magic inside me began to manifest. If I didn’t have my daffy redneck vampire ancestor in my life, where would I be now? The years between losing Rozella and finding Daniel were a blur of emptiness to which I never wanted to return.

Blake lived in that kind of emptiness. I recognized it almost right away and for whatever reason, I wanted to be the one to fill that void. I wanted to make him feel like he had a place where he could be himself and be accepted, maybe even loved.

The elevator ride to his room seemed to take forever. I finger-combed my hair, wishing I’d taken more time with my appearance. Cleaned my glasses on my shirttail out of nervous habit. We’d have to talk about that bad astral projection habit of his. No more visiting me in dreams. We’d have to talk about a lot of things. Right then all I wanted was to be in his arms.

I stepped out of the elevator, fighting the urge to race to his room. His door opened and I wondered briefly if he somehow knew I was there. Then a woman stepped out and my heart stopped. She was young, taller than me, turned out impeccably in the goth look I knew he liked. Their voices were a low murmur I couldn’t decipher but the easy laughter between them wasn’t hard to figure. I caught a glimpse of Blake leaning out of the doorframe to kiss her cheek before I ducked through the emergency exit.

Stumbling into the wall, I sank to the floor. My heart alternated between too fast and too slow. Breathing was like sucking air through mud. First cold, then hot rolled through me. The tips of my fingers itched with a sudden fever. I held up my hands to examine them. Lines of energy arced between my fingers. Curling my hands into fists only hurt. I needed to ground. I slammed my open hands palm-down on the floor, eyes widening at the cracks that erupted in the tiles. It took another ten seconds or so to get my breathing under control and feel steady enough to stand.