Storm Road (Old School Book 3) Read online

  “I can’t be sure what each crystal is without seeing them up close and touching them, but the arrangement makes a kind of sense.” She’d paused. “If things go wrong, you need to be able to deactivate the trap.”

  “Deactivate it? Why would I do that?”

  “It’s a paranormal energy syphon. It might lock onto energy other than the ghoul’s. Lyall told you to use your blood to activate it. If you have a connection to Beulah, a misalignment in Lyall’s construction of the trap, something like a misjudged distance between the crystals, could result in the trap reaching for her magic instead of the ghoul’s energy.”

  “Damn.” He definitely had a connection to Beulah, so he’d followed Yasmin’s instructions and bought pounds of sea salt.

  “If something goes wrong, bury the trap in the sea salt and if that doesn’t work, draw a ring of salt around Beulah. It’ll act as a barrier to the trap’s pull.”

  Along with the salt, he’d bought bottled spring water to reset the necklace. Dean wasn’t clear on how that worked, but if the salt failed to contain the suction of the trap, apparently he ought to try emptying the water bottle over the necklace to rid it of the initiating element: his blood.

  Finally, forgoing esoteric weapons, he’d bought a hunting knife. He’d use it to slice his finger for blood to initiate the trap, but he also wanted it in case the ghoul had possessed some unlucky person. Dean might have to defend himself or Beulah.

  But first he had to get back to her.

  He left the necklace in the rental car and walked forward. He walked past the fallen pine tree, feeling no resistance as he passed the boundary at which the car had repeatedly stalled.

  So the ghoul wasn’t trying to keep him out. That made things easier. Maybe.

  The drumbeat of knowing that Beulah waited, alone, for him pounded at him. He was afraid that she would do something reckless.

  He returned to the car and scooped up the potential ghoul trap. The facets of the crystals felt awkward and wrong against his skin. A couple of the unfaceted, merely polished, crystals had an oily sheen. He strode forward, and plowed into what felt like wet cushion stuffing. He couldn’t move and his lungs heaved as they filled with unwholesome air.

  He retreated fast. The idea wasn’t to kill himself in returning to the ghoul’s territory. He had to get himself and the trap inside.

  He tried throwing it, and it dropped at the line where the car had stalled.

  Trap and car, he needed both to reach Beulah tonight.

  He returned to the car and unloaded the bags of salt he’d bought and the copper pot he’d tracked down. Actually, it was a copper saucepan, but it would work. He hoped.

  Copper wire strung the trap together. Copper conducted electricity. According to the introduction to magic book that Beulah had had him read, copper also channeled magic. That was what he needed it to do now. He’d use a copper pot to contain the magic it held.

  He filled the pot with salt and buried the trap in it. Then he put the pot on the side of the road, got into the car, and drove easily past the pine tree and into the ghoul’s territory. He got out, ran back for the pot, then dropped his shoulder and charged back to the car.

  There was no resistance.

  He nearly stumbled with relief. The salt inside the copper pot had hidden the trap from the ghoul—or perhaps from the ghoul’s magical sensors. The ghoul wasn’t all-powerful. As with any entity, it had to prioritize where it expended its energy. Lacking magic, he wasn’t a major threat. The ghoul was concentrating elsewhere.

  The rental car’s headlights lit up the road as night pressed in. Was the ghoul already hunting? In calling the low-grade wizard to the cemetery that morning it had made it clear that it wanted to possess another victim.

  Dean left the trap hidden in the salt, and the copper pot as secure as he could make it, tucked among other bags of salt, on the passenger seat, and drove fast for Beulah’s cabin. He had to make up time.

  Talking with Yasmin and following her directions for additional supplies wasn’t the only reason he’d been delayed. He’d parked the car for a difficult phone call to his dad. In case everything went wrong with the ghoul, there were things his dad needed to know.

  His dad, not unnaturally, asked why he hadn’t phoned earlier.

  Dean had kept his answer simple. “Aunt Millie’s gone off somewhere. I tracked down a friend of hers, a neighbor, who apparently knows how to contact her. She wouldn’t give me the contact number, but she did promise to pass on a message from me. I requested that Aunt Millie phone me.”

  His dad growled his answer from his hospital bed, sounding impatient with his sister, but relieved, too. “She’ll be off after one of her crazy stories. Too scared of being scooped to be sensible. She’s done this before, but those times she made an editor or one of her colleagues the contact person.”

  Dean feared Aunt Millie’s withdrawal was for more personal reasons than the pursuit of a story. But his dad’s assumption that this was more of the same of an old pattern let Dean escape further questions. He turned the conversation to an update on his dad’s health, and at that point, Sergeant Jack Fortescue terminated the conversation.

  His dad had always been larger than life. Other kids had superheroes. He’d had his dad, Indestructible Man.

  The recent car crash had changed that. Dean shook his head, wryly amused at his own immaturity. Here he was, thirty three years old, and shocked that his dad wasn’t invincible. If Dean was honest, his agreement to use part of his vacation time to find Aunt Millie hadn’t just been to keep his dad in the hospital bed and not following through on his threat to start the search himself. Staring at his dad asleep in the hospital after the crash as he lay there beat up and vulnerable, Dean had found himself floating free. He’d been untethered by the sudden realization that he could have lost his dad in the car crash.

  It had been his dad and him for so long. They hadn’t been best buddies or constant email types. But they’d been there for each other. No one had your back quite like a marine sergeant.

  Dean’s faint smile died as a deer plunged out of the woods and across the road. He swerved to miss it. The car skidded and he steered into the slide. Luck was with him and the slide straightened out before he hit a looming pine tree.

  Luck might have been with him, but he had a suspicion that the deer wasn’t a random event. The ghoul needed his blood on the ground to possess him, and a car crash was one way of achieving it.

  This was his warning. No more thinking of other things. He had to remember that he moved through enemy territory. His dad would kick his butt for thinking of anything but the current mission: get to Beulah, explain the trap, and work it with her.

  Yasmin had been clear. “You have to be able to see Beulah when you activate the trap in case it locks onto her magic rather than the ghoul’s energy. Have the salt and water ready. You also need back up, so don’t try the trap without her. It could go wrong in a dozen different ways.”

  He thought of fallback tactics. He’d activate the trap just outside Beulah’s ward. Then she could watch him from safely inside, and if it didn’t work, he had a safe place to retreat to. At least this time he’d be the one taking the risk, rather than her.

  But when he drove up to the cabin, no one stood at its lit windows. The door didn’t open. Beulah didn’t rush out.

  The relief he’d felt at reaching the safety of her land chilled into dread.

  I told her to stay in the cabin. She promised.

  He burrowed his fingers through the salt in the copper pot and pulled out the trap. This was what he’d gained from leaving Beulah alone. He wasn’t going to lose it. He wound it around his left hand. The crystals were cold and hard against his knuckles.

  The front door of the cabin opened when he turned the handle. It wasn’t locked.

  “Beulah?”

  The cabin felt empty. The kitchen was clean, the living room fire unlit. It was silent and still.

  “You promised you’d
be here.”

  If she’d been dragged out of here, if the ward no longer protected her home, wouldn’t there be some evidence of a struggle?

  He found her note on the kitchen counter near the wall phone.

  “Dean, Mrs. Johnson called. Her great-granddaughter’s gone missing. Her mom sent her to bed early for being naughty, and when she went to check on her, the little girl’s bed was empty and the window open. Mrs. Johnson is organizing a search party, but—I can’t let the ghoul have her.” He turned the note over. There was more writing on the back. “I hope you have reinforcements, but if not, it’s nighttime. The ghoul is strongest. I know I’ve broken my promise to you, but my magic has recharged. I have to try and help. Unless you have a new protection charm, please don’t follow me. Stay safe and I’ll see you in the morning. Beulah.”

  “Stay safe?” He crumpled the note. The crystals and copper wire of the trap were cutting into his palm. He relaxed his angry fist. He wasn’t angry with Beulah. He understood why she’d had to try and help, and he even understood her attempt to make him stay safe. He’d attempted the same with her. But they were both warriors. The only safety they knew was defeating evil. Neither would be able to live with themselves if they turned away.

  He spun on his heel and strode out of the cabin. He’d planned to use the trap at the edge of Beulah’s land, but remembering Yasmin’s warning, he knew he couldn’t risk it. He needed Beulah with him. He needed to know if the trap caught her energy or the ghoul’s. If it caught hers, and she was fighting the ghoul when it happened, then he would be responsible for her death.

  Because the ghoul would possess her, and then, it would kill her.

  He thrust the trap into the copper pot, hiding it in the salt, before the tires of the rental car crossed from Beulah’s driveway and the safety of the ward to the road.

  She hadn’t written that she’d be going to the cemetery, but she was too smart to waste her time hunting for the ghoul elsewhere, and too driven, with a child at risk, to fear approaching the ghoul’s base at night.

  The town was busier than usual for a small town at night. The search for the missing child had everyone stirred up. But they weren’t milling around a particular house, which meant that the ghoul hadn’t stolen the child from a house in town, but from a cabin or farmhouse somewhere within its territory.

  Fog wove around a streetlight and blurred the yellow of it for a moment. Dean’s attention snapped to it, but it wasn’t blue fog. Not the ghoul.

  But a fog in summer wasn’t natural, was it?

  As he neared the cemetery, the wisps of fog thickened, confirming his guess that it was Beulah’s creation. She was using her weather magic to hide whatever it was she faced in the cemetery. The ghoul wouldn’t care who saw it or what horrors it unleashed, but Beulah had to live with her neighbors. She wouldn’t want them to fear her.

  It helped that they were focused on a search outside of town, while she hid in the fog.

  He parked the rental car and picked up the copper pot. If the salt concealed the trap from the ghoul, he wasn’t about to lose that element of surprise. The hunting knife he’d use to cut his finger for the blood to activate the trap was strapped to his waist where he could reach it quickly. He might need to use it for other purposes, like self-defense.

  The fog wrapped around gravestones and wove through the branches of trees. Add in the dark night, and Dean could barely see. He walked carefully, finding his own near-silent footsteps too loud.

  He realized he was walking in the direction of the grandiose tombstone where the wizard had attempted his inept and interrupted ritual that morning. But was that where he needed to go? Why would he trust the choice of a low-grade wizard?

  He maintained a steady pace, but veered away from his original, unthinking destination, and headed for where the fog seemed thickest. Surely Beulah would be at the heart of it? If she wasn’t, he might have to risk shouting for her. It wasn’t like the ghoul wouldn’t have already sensed him.

  But it hadn’t shown itself.

  The land sloped down slightly. He walked between rows of graves. The fog now seemed to muffle sound as well as sight. It was eerie. Night wasn’t usually utter darkness. There were stars and moonlight, or the cities sent their own light to reflect off the pollution that hung in their air. But here, now, he was nearly blind, his senses straining and failing to detect and anticipate attack.

  The fog was as thick as fog could be. The street was no longer visible and the revving engine of a single car sounded incredibly distant. He stopped. He’d thought that Beulah would hide her actions in the thickest fog, but if he couldn’t see her, should he call her now or retreat to where he might be able to see the ghoul?

  The copper pot, filled with salt, was surprisingly heavy. He gripped the handle near where it joined the pot and it was heating with his blood temperature. He hesitated, unwilling to retreat and unsure if, even with his training and skills, he could find his path back in the complete darkness. To trip over a grave, fall and cut himself would spill his blood on the ground, leaving him open to the ghoul’s possession. Maybe he should keep going forward?

  The answer came as a murmur through the fog.

  “…don’t do this,” Beulah said, her voice pitched low as if to hide the urgency in it.

  The cemetery wasn’t so big that she could be far away. He overlaid his daylight memory of the graveyard with where he thought he’d walked, and turned to the west. He went cautiously since confirmation of Beulah’s presence suggested that the ghoul was also actively present. Dean prepared himself to grab for the trap concealed in the salt and for the knife at his belt.

  A greater darkness loomed above him, then between one step and the next, the fog cleared.

  He stood beneath the canopy of a large oak tree. Beulah stood a short distance in front of him, mostly turned away to face a shorter woman. Expressions were impossible to read in the darkness, although after the obscuring fog the fact that he could see at all relieved him.

  “I’m here,” he said quietly, for Beulah’s benefit. As much as he wanted to grab the trap and activate it, he’d been trained to understand the risks of acting without information. He couldn’t see the ghoul, but he could recognize the tension of battle in Beulah’s stance.

  “Did you bring help?” she asked without looking away from the woman in front of her.

  “No,” the woman answered for Dean. “He came to die.”

  He pushed aside the drama of the words for the faint sense that he’d heard the voice before. The voice was young with a faint huskiness to it.

  “Claudia is possessed,” Beulah said briefly. “Mrs. Johnson’s granddaughter.”

  Recognition struck him. The figure standing with ominous stillness before Beulah was the blonde bombshell who’d flirted and served him breakfast, who’d been friendly and genuine. His hand twitched as he fought the instinct to grab the trap and pull it from the salt.

  “The ghoul used her body to steal a child, Claudia’s niece. Kaylea would have gone trustingly with Aunt Claudia. But Claudia, you must fight, now. You’re still in there. Fight to save yourself and the baby girl.”

  Where was the child? Dean scanned the small area beneath the oak tree, the only space clear of fog. Against the trunk of the tree, huddled in among the inadequate protection of its gnarled roots, he glimpsed a hint of what could be a child. Or the shadowed shape might be his imagination

  “She sleeps,” the ghoul said in Claudia’s voice. “Now that I have her, I don’t want her running. I want time to enjoy the sweet gift of her fresh terror. No one will save her.”

  Dean plunged his hand into the salt, closed his hand around the trap and dropped the copper pot. He switched hands to hold the trap in his left, while with his right he grabbed his knife and pricked his left index finger. He juggled the trap to press his finger against the black crystal that Lyall had said would activate the trap.

  Light flared from it.

  Beulah blinked, dazzled by the
sudden light from whatever Dean held. He’d moved so fast that she’d barely heard the thud of whatever he’d held drop before the light flared. Not a natural light, either. It was magic, glowing with the purple edge of enchantment. She saw what looked like a necklace in his hands, as well as a knife. Then the ghoul moved, and she turned back to face it in Claudia’s body.

  She readied herself to shape wind to hold Claudia in place.

  “Beulah, are you okay?” In three long strides Dean stood beside her.

  “Yes.”

  “You don’t feel any different?”

  Claudia’s body stepped forward.

  Beulah flung up wind in a howling barrier. “I feel normal. Scared, but normal.”

  “Then the trap must be siphoning energy from the ghoul.”

  Claudia’s body forced itself through Beulah’s howling windstorm. Of course, that was the problem. The ghoul didn’t care how it hurt Claudia. It intended to kill her. But Beulah cared about her friend.

  She reinforced the wind barrier with fog to blind and confuse the ghoul while she tried to work out what Dean meant. The source of the purple-tinged light had to be some sort of anti-ghoul weapon. “It doesn’t feel as if the ghoul is weakened.”

  “By that toy?” The ghoul laughed, mockery ringing oddly through Claudia’s usual throaty laugh. “Perhaps if I was disembodied, but wrapped in flesh and blood, feeding on it, the toy is nothing.” It ran forward in Claudia’s body. It ran at Dean.

  Beulah had been braced to be attacked, and the ghoul’s sudden dart at Dean took her a precious second to process.

  The ghoul struck at the necklace, and when Dean spun away, giving it his back, it scratched and tore at him; raking at him with Claudia’s long fingernails. It scored the skin at the back of his neck till blood came.

  Blood!

  “Dean, no!” Too late Beulah recognized in him the same unwillingness to hurt Claudia, but by reacting defensively, he’d enabled the ghoul to acquire his blood. And blood was what it needed to possess a person.