Plague Cult

  Plague Cult

  Jenny Schwartz

  In a small Texas town a desire for love becomes a curse that unleashes a deadly plague.

  Ruth Warner is estranged from her family. She loves them, but her magic makes her an outsider in Bideer, Texas. Ruth has built a new life in New York as a healer at the Collegium.

  Sometimes, though, you have to go home.

  After the local coroner reports a suspicious death, the Collegium’s Chief Healer orders Ruth to Bideer. There’s a new cult in town, a lonely hearts club, and it’s playing reckless games with a death curse.

  But Ruth isn’t going home alone.

  Danger is in Shawn Jackson’s blood. He is a Collegium guardian, a mage trained to fight evil. He’s also a man accustomed to keeping secrets. He’s a hollerider, a huntsman; one of those who birthed the legend of the Wild Hunt. When he unleashes his magic, terror rides with him.

  He’s also Ruth’s back-up.

  As evil stalks an innocent town, the dedicated healer and battle-hardened marine must trust their own hurting hearts to prevent a devastating plague.

  Warning: “Plague Cult” includes a haunted house, an unconventional ghost, and a home renovation romance.

  If you love your paranormal romance fast-paced, intense and chilling, “Plague Cult” is irresistible.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Note From The Author

  Chapter 1

  “It’s time you went home.”

  Five simple words from her boss, and Ruth Warner’s stomach tied itself in knots. As a healer, she knew stomachs couldn’t literally strangle themselves, but hers didn’t seem to have gotten the memo.

  Home.

  William Mimea, head of the Healers’ Department at the Collegium, left her to catch her breath and turned to the third occupant of his office. “Ruth comes from a small town in the Texas Hill Country. Bideer.”

  “Population one thousand and twenty three,” Ruth said automatically. “In 1953.” It was an old town joke. The rusting sign on its outskirts hadn’t been updated in decades.

  “I like small towns.” Shawn Jackson’s southern drawl wasn’t quite Texan. “I grew up in one in Tennessee. Still got family there.”

  “That was taken into consideration,” William said.

  A fractional lift to Shawn’s left eyebrow indicated interest.

  And I’m watching him too closely if I’m reading his tells. Ruth glanced away. Close observation was trained into healers. It wasn’t just poker players and con artists who watched for the tiny, unconscious giveaways in people’s reactions and behaviors. Healers took them into consideration when diagnosing a patient. Often people didn’t mean to lie, they honestly believed what they said, but their body language shouted a deeper truth. That deeper truth was the one you had to trust.

  It shouldn’t have been hard to look away from Shawn. William’s office held enough distractions. The large room resembled an old-fashioned apothecary’s shop. Square drawers, long drawers, shelves and locked cupboards lined the walls. Books were everywhere, and propped among them were odds and ends, each with meaning to William.

  Ruth frowned at a plastic skull, painted in swirling iridescent colors. William always had multiple reasons for everything he did. If he was ordering her home, the unspoken part of the order was “physician, heal thyself”.

  I can’t! Guilt wasn’t so easily shed.

  The plastic skull grinned at her. William had explained its gaudy presence in his office to her once, its message for him and for all the healers who entered the room: death is part of life and has to be accepted. A healer fought, and then, a healer had to let go. They were not God. William had made that point to her a few times.

  Her hands curled into fists. She pushed down her guilt to focus on what she could do something about. “Why do I need to go home? And what is so serious that I need a guardian, Shawn, with me?”

  William lined up his pencil to be perfectly parallel with the edge of his desk. The desk held only his computer, an open notebook (its page blank) and the pencil. William was just as pared down. His dark skin stretched over high cheekbones, showing the hollows beneath, and his head was shaved bald. “Austin medical examiner Dr. Brittany Li possesses very little magic, but enough to recognize a curse victim when he lands on the morgue table in front of her. She reported his presence to the Collegium.”

  “Did she toss salt over her left shoulder three times?”

  Ruth blinked. It was an unexpected question from a Collegium guardian, a mage trained in combat and educated in scientific magic.

  Shawn stretched out his long legs, crossing them at the ankles, his large boots scuffed at the heels. “My mamaw is a granny witch. So’s my sister. You don’t want bad luck chasing you. Salt works, in a pinch.” The skin at the corners of his eyes crinkled at the sly pun as he looked sideways at Ruth. Evidently, he was taking her measure as much as she was assessing him. Each was curious about their temporary partner.

  Ruth took a steadying breath, staring down at her hands. The freckles on the back of her right hand formed a constellation, the Southern Cross; hope in strange lands.

  If only she were going somewhere strange. Instead, she was going home.

  She loved Bideer and the people in it, but when she went home, Shawn would learn how she’d failed them. Failed Mason. She couldn’t fail them again—and a curse could be the worst kind of disaster. It all depended. Sometimes a curse did no more than add a wart to someone’s skin. Other times…

  “Dr. Li took the appropriate measures to stop the man’s corpse from exhaling the curse,” William said.

  Oh no. Dread clutched at Ruth.

  “Exhaling it?” Shawn sat straight, intent. “Now, that I hadn’t heard of. A corpse can spread a curse?”

  William looked at Ruth in a silent command to take over explanations. He’d undoubtedly use the opportunity to double-check her knowledge.

  “It’s rare,” she began.

  Shawn turned in his chair to face her. He was a big guy. Over six feet with wide shoulders and the lean, muscular build of a fighter-in-training, which in a sense, he was. As a Collegium guardian he was trained and experienced in combating magical evils that threatened mundanes and magic users alike.

  Most of the population of Bideer were mundanes. Her and her powerful magic had been an exception. Her dad’s family, the Warners, had a trickle of magic, enough to sow seeds at the right time or magic a cake into rising. They had the small magics of home and country. But her magic was a torrent, and it was a healer’s tide.

  Fortunately, her grandfather had known just enough of the hidden world of magic to introduce Ruth to the Collegium on her sixteenth birthday. It had helped to know she wasn’t alone, and once she’d finished high school, she moved to New York, into Collegium housing and studied hard. She attended mundane college and trained as a paramedic, while simultaneously undertaking healing arts at the Collegium. She’d been a practicing healer for five years.

  Her specialty was to act as a first responder. She’d never encountered a plague, but she knew the theory. The dramatic history of plagues made them unforgettable.

  “Mostly curses die with the person cursed,” she said. “It is exceedingly rare for a corpse to exhale its curse, but when they do, that’s when a plague starts.”

  “As in the Black Death?” Shawn queried.

  She nodd
ed. “Bubonic plague is the obvious one. The daughter of a ruler of one of the small kingdoms Genghis Khan conquered is said to have cursed herself. As she died, pestilence released from her body and infected the invaders of her father’s court. They then carried the plague along the Silk Roads from China, across the Middle East, and into Europe.”

  “But there’s a bacterium that causes the plague. It’s endemic in prairie dogs.”

  “Yersinia pestis. Yes. However, the bacteria came from the curse.”

  Shawn studied her, then William. “So the Spanish flu after the First World War?”

  “Most definitely a curse, and not from Spain. France, we think.” Ruth tapped her fingers against her thigh. She hadn’t expected to be called into William’s office or assigned a mission, today, so she wore casual clothes. Yoga pants and a tunic were comfortable, but they weren’t professional. She tugged at the tunic, pulling it to cover more of her thighs. “There are other rare examples. Syphilis came from Mexico, from the curse of an Aztec priest. However, mostly curses don’t spawn plagues. It takes a certain sort of intense hatred.”

  “Vengeance,” William said, and the word had the impact of a church bell tolling.

  Ruth forgot her unprofessional attire. “Not in Bideer. It’s not possible. They’re good people, and besides, no one there has that kind of magic.”

  “Maybe not. Probably not,” William said. “Not among the townspeople. However, Dr. Li mentions that a cult has started up on the edge of town.”

  “A cult?” Ruth struggled with the notion. “In Bideer?”

  “Dr. Li’s from Austin. She didn’t want to stir things up by visiting and asking questions. Bideer’s sheriff mentioned in passing that the victim had been asking after a new club in town, one the sheriff isn’t entirely comfortable with. Apparently, he didn’t use the word cult, but Dr. Li has her suspicions.” William’s memory was prodigious. He didn’t have to consult any notes. “It calls itself the Moonlit Hearts Club and promises to heal lonely hearts.”

  “Exploit them, more like,” Shawn muttered.

  A hint of agreement in William’s expression suggested sympathy with Shawn’s attitude. Everyone was wary of potential cults. Too often, even when a group began with the best of intentions, disturbed individuals took advantage of the set-up for their own purposes. Sometimes it was simple greed, but other times it was too indulge a masochistic personality. “The victim was sent on to Dr. Li for examination since his heart ruptured. It filled with blood, broke and flooded his chest as he died.”

  Shawn grimaced.

  “Any other symptoms,” Ruth asked.

  “I’ll email you the report.” William closed the blank-paged notebook. “The curse is probably a false alarm, but the combination of a possible cult at a nexus site is unsettling in itself.”

  “The nexus is only a small one,” she objected. “Most people don’t even notice the power boost of the converging ley lines.”

  “For some people, any increase in power is worth pursuing.” Shawn raked a hand through his dark brown hair and shook his shoulders. “Ugh. I hate cults.”

  “But the fact that you can mask your magic makes you ideally suited to a discreet investigation,” William said.

  A slight grin curved Shawn’s mouth, denting a hint of dimple in one lean cheek. “I’m not complaining. I’ll be damn glad to get out in the field again.”

  Ruth re-assessed the easy strength she’d sensed in him. “You were hurt?” She had to control the urge to scan his aura, looking for the shadow of old injuries.

  “Ruth’s been working in Australia the last two months,” William said, apparently feeling she’d missed something obvious.

  Shawn simply answered her question. “I wasn’t hurt. I was one of three guardians assigned to act as bodyguard and personal assistant to President Bennett before he discovered his new form of magic.”

  “Ah.” Despite her dread at returning home to Bideer and the wisp of possibility that a plague could await her, she had to smile. “Were you an efficient secretary?” Her mind boggled at the idea. Shawn seemed very much an outdoors, open-spaces, action man. Trapping him behind a desk to juggle schedules and sort out office politics and paperwork seemed a recipe for frustration.

  “Cute,” he said. “And no, I wasn’t a hit as a secretary. Lewis couldn’t wait to get rid of us.”

  William cleared his throat.

  Shawn grinned. “The feeling was mutual. Now, Lewis has a secretary who can silence a room full of pushy mages with the lift of an eyebrow.”

  “Who?” Ruth was intrigued. She’d missed all the recent dramatic upheavals at the Collegium by virtue of her mission in Australia studying the transmission of the Hendra Virus in tropical Queensland. Fruit bats weren’t the only animals that spread the virus, and she’d been investigating the role of bunyips with the help of an Australian cryptozoologist. The passage of disease transmission across species, and from magical to mundane, was a special interest of hers.

  “Gina, Lewis’s girlfriend, suggested her cousin Lance. He used to manage one of her family’s hotels, of the Sidhe Hotel chain, but was looking for a challenge. He only has the most minor of house witch magics, but his grasp of personal dynamics and Collegium politics is scary.”

  “You like him,” Ruth said.

  “By taking the job, Lance let Chad, Haskell and I off the hook. I owe him.”

  “Indeed. And now you are free to accompany Ruth to Bideer.” William brought them back to the issue at hand: going home. “Ruth, in your file, you mention you’ve bought a house on the outskirts of town.”

  She widened her eyes at him. “Rose House? We can’t stay there. It’s a fixer upper. I shouldn’t have even bought it.” It had been a mistake. She didn’t belong in Bideer. However, she’d scrupulously updated her Collegium file with her new purchase. She’d also told her brothers: Mitch in the army, and Kane at college. She hadn’t told them it was a secret, so they might have told her parents. If they had, her parents hadn’t phoned to bemoan her actions, although everyone knew it was better if she stayed away.

  I guess I won’t be doing that. Anticipation and dread danced butterflies in her stomach. She’d be going home.

  “Shawn will be your ex-marine friend taking on renovation of the house in exchange for free board and lodging,” William said

  “Solid,” Shawn approved the cover story.

  Ruth tried to shake herself up, to focus. “Have you ever been in the marines?”

  “Spent a year embedded.” Sudden shadows darkened his hazel eyes. “The Collegium occasionally introduces us into a military unit.” By “us” he evidently meant his fellow guardians. “Sometimes it’s the only way to confront a threat in an unstable region. Military goes everywhere, but some things mundanes shouldn’t face alone.” So he’d faced the magical danger for them, and it had left spiritual scars.

  She had to rein in her empathetic healer’s instincts. Their mission wasn’t about healing whatever had happened to Shawn overseas—although, William could be sneaky enough to make an apparent mission about preventing a plague curse serve double duty to heal a guardian as well as a healer. After all, she suspected he was using this chance to set her up to heal the long term psychic scars she carried. If she was braver, and if Shawn wasn’t present and listening, she’d tell William that he was hoping for the impossible.

  Going home wouldn’t absolve her of the past.

  She focused on practicalities. “What about renovations? Can you maintain the cover story?”

  Shawn grinned at her. “My dad and sister are electricians. Dad makes extra money on the side renovating houses. Mom hates moving all the time, but it’s his hobby. I’ve helped him plenty.”

  Ruth surrendered to the inevitable. “William, I should have known you’d have it all mapped out.”

  “Yes, you should. I don’t send my people on missions they’re not suited to.” The stern look in his eyes meant he wouldn’t let her wriggle out of this even if her conscience would
have let her try. Plagues were rare, but they could happen, and the presence of a cult at a nexus site did increase the infinitesimal odds. She’d be going home to make sure Bideer was safe.

  “When do we leave?” she asked.

  “Tonight.”

  Shawn was interested in Ruth’s reaction to going home. If someone had told him there was even the sniff of a chance of a plague starting in his mamaw’s small town, he’d have a hundred questions. On the other hand, Ruth was a healer. She probably knew the answers to those questions. She was definitely a self-contained woman, so if she worried, she’d hide it.

  Although she hadn’t been able to hide her resistance to going home. Her body had stiffened with it.

  “Good luck.” William’s words were a dismissal.

  Shawn stood and waited for Ruth to precede him from the room.

  The top of her head only came to his shoulder. She was a small, slim woman. The loose top she wore covered her to mid-thigh, hiding her figure, but she moved gracefully and swiftly. Her shoulder-length hair was tied back in a ponytail. He wouldn’t mind seeing it loose. It had the fine red-gold color usually seen in children and outgrown by adulthood. A Celtic woman, the naming suited her. A woman of ancient magics. A healer.

  “Do you have time for a coffee?” he asked.

  She glanced at his face, then swiftly at her watch. “Twenty minutes to eleven. Yes. We could talk on the plane, but—”

  “Portal,” he interrupted.

  “Pardon?”

  “I’d bet that the mission briefings being sent to us include travel via portal. San Antonio would be the closest portal to Bideer. I expect they’ll have a vehicle, maybe two, waiting for us and all the details of our cover stories. If it’s plague, I doubt we’ll waste time on air travel.”

  “Possibly plague,” she corrected. “And the chance is infinitesimally low.” She sighed. “But you’re undoubtedly right. We’ll travel by portal.”

  He slanted a look at her as they descended the stairs. “Are you one of the ones who gets portal sick?”