Storm Road (Old School Book 3) Page 16

  But not Dean!

  Beulah spun wind, hurtling it in a tornado that centered on Claudia to hold her in place. The ghoul would break through, but Beulah had won them a few seconds. “It has your blood.”

  “I know,” he said harshly. “I didn’t think. But I have salt.”

  The light from the necklace was fading. Whatever the ghoul claimed, the light glowing from it suggested that the necklace had connected to the ghoul. However, evidently, enclosed in flesh, the ghoul could strangle the connection, and was doing so.

  What light remained showed salt spilling from the pot Dean had dropped. He scooped up handfuls and began creating a wobbly circle.

  “Not around me,” she said quickly, sharply, and stepped back.

  He frowned up at her.

  “Hurry,” she urged. “It has your blood. Salt is an emergency barrier. It won’t hold for long against the ghoul. I can’t be inside it. I have to fight. And you have to stay behind the salt. Reinforce it with a second circle. I can’t fight you if the ghoul possesses you.”

  The grim line of his mouth showed he understood. If he tried to fight beside her, he’d become a liability. Worse, he could be possessed and compelled to be the weapon that destroyed her.

  He threw the necklace to her and completed the first circle of salt.

  Chapter 10

  Beulah released the whirlwind she’d shaped to hold the ghoul at bay inside Claudia’s body.

  On her right was Dean, safe for the moment in his circle of salt, but fated to be possessed by the ghoul unless she defeated it. The damned entity had his blood.

  On her left was the stolen child, Kaylea. The girl slept, but if Beulah failed, Kaylea would wake to terror and death.

  Fear shrieked through Beulah’s body and she fought it back. She needed control. More than ever in her life she had to use her magic precisely. That afternoon her weather magic had failed to fuel the summons to call the ghoul. Weather magic didn’t play nicely with other forms of magic, yet somehow she had to make it power the necklace Dean had brought.

  A toy, the ghoul had named the necklace. But the ghoul couldn’t be trusted. It would lie.

  Dean had spoken of it as a trap, one that siphoned energy. He had activated it with his blood. Judging by his earlier question of how she felt, he worried that the trap would reach as readily for her magic as the ghoul’s energy. She couldn’t detect anything pulling at her magic. The trap must have locked onto the ghoul’s energy signature.

  She felt cold and near to despair, aware that even before she entered the cemetery, her self-control had been shredding. To lose a child to the ghoul was inexpressibly awful and it ate at her discipline. She wanted to howl with fury and anguish that every child’s right to protection and safety, to be loved and nurtured, had been violated. The dull silvery fog swirled in complicated eddies as her magic reacted to her powerful emotions.

  Seeing Dean had torn from her the muffling shroud of horror that the ghoul’s presence evoked. For an instant she’d felt joy and triumph; relief that she’d been right to trust him and his courage. He had returned to her. He’d found her. That flare of happiness had countered some of the ghoul’s power. But now its awful despair pressed on her again.

  She would fail. Claudia would die. Kaylea would be terrorized and die. Dean would…I can’t let the ghoul have him!

  The pressure of the ghoul intensified. It possessed Claudia’s body, but it also existed wider than that, its blue fog body reaching down with root-like filaments into the dirt, and tentacles extending to the salt circle that momentarily kept Dean safe.

  Beulah struggled to discipline her thoughts and emotions. Panic wouldn’t help.

  She had the trap, and if Dean worried that it might reach for her magic, then didn’t that mean that she could connect to it? If she could only work out how, then she could fight the ghoul’s strangling of the channel that siphoned its energy into the trap. Dean had used blood to activate the trap, but for all she knew, adding her blood to it would only seal the trap, without enclosing the ghoul.

  What she needed was time to think—and the ghoul inhabiting Claudia’s body wouldn’t grant her that.

  So Beulah called another whirlwind.

  But Claudia raised her left leg and when she stamped down, the wind died. “Not again,” the ghoul said.

  The crystals on the trap Beulah held were losing light. First one, then three, went out.

  She reached for sunlight. It was nighttime in the Appalachian Mountains, but her magic could reach far enough to find the light hundreds of miles away. Even through the ghoul’s territorial boundary, she could connect to the sunlight, and she pulled it to her and into the crystals.

  They flared brightly. She had a moment of equally flaring hope. Then all of the crystals failed.

  Utter darkness pressed in on her.

  Claudia, controlled by the ghoul, smiled and licked Dean’s blood from her fingers.

  Light had failed, but the ghoul’s own blue fog body was an aura around Claudia. It was that aura that enabled Beulah to see the woman in the darkness.

  “What is it you seek?” she demanded of the ghoul. “Do you wish to live?”

  “To live?” The thing laughed, shaking Claudia’s body. “To live is to be halfway to death. I exist.”

  The trap had failed. Beulah let it drop to the ground. Learning how to use it wasted her time. Earlier today, when she’d prepared to summon the ghoul, she’d also prepared what she hoped might vanquish it. She’d taken to Millie’s house substances to call on the four elements of earth, water, fire and air. Each gave life, and each took life.

  Belatedly, she realized that she’d made a fundamental mistake. Even knowing that the entity wasn’t alive, she’d still thought to vanquish it with patterns used against a living being. Her own reality as one who lived had blinded her. The ghoul couldn’t be diminished by pulling the four elements out of it, as had been her raw, desperate plan. The ghoul existed as something else.

  It refused to live. And if it wasn’t alive, then it couldn’t change. The fact that its blue fog body stretched and condensed, and that it could possess people, had confused her into misidentifying the patterns as change when they were superficial shifts. The core reality of the ghoul was unchanging. It was one note. Where people were born, grew, suffered, loved, died and were mourned, the ghoul existed.

  It was as if the ghoul froze the cycle of life at one point on the wheel. Which point? Suffering? But it didn’t suffer. It enjoyed others’ suffering.

  Mourning.

  The ghouls of the Dark and Middle Ages in Europe had been born of the mass deaths of the Black Plague. They were entities that emerged from frozen mourning; from grief unacknowledged, unexpressed and devastating.

  Beulah had sought to vanquish the ghoul by killing it, stealing the four elements of earth, water, fire and air from it. She’d been wrong. To vanquish the ghoul, it had to be given what it refused. It had to be forced to experience the chaos of being alive.

  And for the ghoul to know that bitter joy, that fearful triumph, then she had to open herself to the same painful celebration. After her husband’s betrayal and the death of her unborn baby, she’d closed her heart against love. But love was at the heart of being alive.

  She would have to guide the ghoul through a cycle of life. She couldn’t give it birth, and without that, she couldn’t give it death, either. But she was a weather mage. There was another cycle she knew, one just as ancient.

  Here, beneath the old oak tree, she pushed the fog away and commanded dryness.

  She had to resist the ghoul’s attack for long enough to force it through the four states of being: dryness, coldness, moistness and heat. She watched for movement from Claudia.

  Instead, the ghoul’s blue fog tentacles reached out and stroked Beulah’s throat.

  Her breath shuddered, the air freezing in her straining lungs.

  “You, I will enjoy.” The ghoul spoke with Claudia’s voice, but its blue fog touch spo
ke even louder. It promised pain; agonizing, soul-annihilating pain.

  Why? How? Only this morning she’d watched that pathetic excuse for a wizard, the man with the stained t-shirt and inept bungling magic, escape the ghoul. So why couldn’t she? She stood there, feeling her magic draw the moisture out of the air, but knowing that it took too long. The cycle of the four states of being, the cycle that didn’t require life but which carried the life cycle within it, would take longer than she could resist the ghoul.

  It was toying with her.

  But it hadn’t been able to toy with the inept wizard.

  Was the difference between them that the wizard had panicked and run? But she couldn’t run. She was all that stood between the ghoul and the loss of three people—then even more as the ghoul absorbed their life energy and grew in power. Dean had labelled the inept wizard a sociopath; uncaring of anyone, unable to feel empathy. Had that been part of the defense the wizard had unwittingly wielded against the ghoul? Did it need the person to care?

  But the ghoul’s first victim, Nate Smith, hadn’t had a reputation as a humanitarian.

  Panic! The wizard had panicked. Beulah was trying to control her emotions, but the wizard had been uncontrolled. As a sociopath, he didn’t experience shame, and so his emotions and behavior just exploded, uncontrolled.

  Her magic dried the clearing under the oak tree to an arid desert. The air sucked the moisture from her lips and left her eyes dry.

  She was trying so much for control, had done since she was a teenager and nearly killed people with her reckless use of magic, but what had control done for her? She’d locked herself away from life and love. She went through the motions of living and her heart struggled with her own self-imposed imprisonment to reach out to care for people. But until Dean, she hadn’t let herself feel passion.

  Her ex-husband, Samuel, had frozen that part of her.

  And it was that frozen, fearful part of her that fed the ghoul!

  She lashed out with her magic to bring the second stage of the cycle: coldness. The air in the clearing was too dry to form snow, but the grass and weeds at the edge of it shone suddenly with the dim, refracted, silvery light of ice crystals as the fog that had condensed on the leaves crystalized.

  The ghoul pulled all of its tendrils of blue fog from the circle of salt that protected Dean and launched them at Beulah. It flung itself in Claudia’s body at her, too.

  Beulah hated to do it, but she needed time to complete the cycle. She stepped into Claudia’s rushed charge, grabbed her arm, bent, twisted and flipped her onto her back. The ghoul might possess Claudia’s body, but the laws of physics still applied to it, and Beulah had been taught self-defense at school.

  The Old School had taught her something else, too: the power of relationships.

  She stooped and picked up the trap. She fumbled with it, searching for the stone she’d seen Dean smear with his blood. She found it and pressed her thumb into the blood spot. As she did so, she dropped all the protections around her heart. She let go of all the fear and grief that had frozen her; all the self-control that she’d prided herself on. She thought that it kept her safe, that she was strong alone.

  But Dean was even stronger.

  She’d recognized and responded to his independent strength. As she’d done with Samuel all those years ago. But with Samuel she’d been young and scared of her own power. She’d wanted him to protect her from it, and she’d tried to model her self-discipline on his. Even after his betrayal and death, the lessons he’d taught had shaped her life.

  Now, she let them all go. Dean was strong, but she didn’t need his strength to hide behind. She needed to join with him.

  If he could let go of his own defenses and let her in.

  Her request ran through his blood. This wasn’t weather magic. It wasn’t really magic at all. It was love. Not yet a fairytale love of happy ever after, but a love that saw possibilities in another person and wanted to explore them, to grow with them, and to risk her heart for him.

  Dean, the self-sacrificing insanely brave man that he was, looked from her touching the blood on the crystal, to her eyes, and then, he stepped out of the salt circle. He stepped out of safety, into the raw reality that the ghoul could and would possess him, and clasped her hand.

  She dropped the trap. It wasn’t needed any more.

  The ice around the edge of the clearing melted and the clearing itself was heavy with moisture. Her magic had called the third of the four states without her consciously trying for it. Moistness.

  Only heat remained to be called to close the cycle.

  She tightened her hold on Dean’s hand and sent their heat out through the clearing. She sent it through the ghoul and on, dissipating the fog that she’d summoned to hide herself in the cemetery.

  The ghoul wasn’t strong at all; not against raw emotion.

  It was generated by the power of passion denied. Grief was passionate unless you turned it inward, refusing to heal; holding on, in anger and fear, to one place in the cycle of life.

  Let go. Trust. Be.

  The cycle of the four states of being was complete.

  Claudia lay unconscious on the ground. The ghoul had abandoned her body. It tried to possess Dean in an avalanche of blue fog, but couldn’t.

  Of course it couldn’t. Beulah felt the power of Dean’s emotions. He was scared, like her. He was also angry and determined, worried for her. But beneath it all, he held onto hope. Hope was what enabled a person to act.

  For all its power, the ghoul couldn’t comprehend hope.

  Its fog body condensed, the blue deepening to a midnight darkness and the form compacting to man height. “You can’t defeat me,” it said.

  Beulah ignored the comment and the push of fear that the ghoul directed at her. She felt the fear, but that was okay. Fear was part of life. “The person who bound you still gave you power in the binding. Whoever they were, they couldn’t surrender to life’s uncertainty. They bound you by binding part of themselves. Whatever they left burned in the fire and you were free.” She was certain of it.

  Her emotions and magic were free and they shone with the truth.

  “I don’t seek to bind you,” she said steadily even as the ghoul rushed forward and engulfed them. She was breathing its horror and her heart beat so fast if might explode out of her chest.

  Dean pulled her into his arms and against the rapid thud of his own heart.

  Despite everything she smiled as she put her arms around him and hugged him. She spoke to the ghoul. “You made the cemetery your base because here we all freeze, fearing death and regretting choices we’ve made, aware that there are no second chances.”

  Dean was warm and real, solid and there. He didn’t need magic. Just his courage. Just himself. He was everything she needed to finish her healing and release the ghoul.

  Life wasn’t about second chances and negotiating—controlling—for safety. It was about living every moment as a gift.

  “Unnamed, unmourned, unborn.” As she spoke the words she’d used in the failed summoning, Dean’s voice wove with hers. They named the ghoul for all that it lacked. And then, she let it go.

  Her magic pushed out in a wave of violent air turbulence. Just as she’d done two days ago when she’d come home and, feeling the resistance that kept her old Triumph motorcycle from climbing the mountains, had woven her magic to break it. Then she’d thought the tiny use of magic uncalled for.

  Now, she understood that being true to herself and using all of her talent wasn’t reckless. It was about saying a giant YES to life.

  In the jumble of leaves, summer grass and the last of the fog, the ghoul vanished with a wail.

  “It’s gone,” Dean said.

  “As if it never existed.” She stood on tiptoes and kissed him.

  His arms tightened hard around her and he answered her with blistering passion.

  Lightning cracked in the sky, thunder booming in a rattling blast.

  She pulled back
fractionally from the kiss to laugh.

  Dean smiled at her, a slow-dawning, all-consuming knowing shining in his eyes. “Those fireworks, they’re you?”

  “They’re us.”

  They stole one more quick kiss before they had to be sensible. The ghoul was gone, but it could leave evil behind. They had to minimize the damage.

  “Explanations soon,” she promised Dean. “But we need to sort things out here before Claudia and Kaylea wake up. It’ll be easier for everyone if the ghoul never existed. Claudia is Kaylea’s aunt. I don’t want her family suspecting her of anything bad concerning the girl’s vanishing. Lingering suspicions can destroy a family. Can you carry her to the car?”

  In answer, he stuffed the trap in his pocket and picked up Claudia. “Won’t she remember the ghoul’s possession?”

  “Hopefully not. It’s gone as if it never was. Can you feel the clarity in your emotions, as if everything sparkles?”

  “I thought that was you.”

  “Romantic.” She smiled at him.

  “Honest.”

  Beulah carried little Kaylea. The warm weight of the girl’s sleep-heavy body sent a pang through her. One of longing and relief. She had saved this child. She and Dean. She walked to where he waited for her, holding Claudia. Then, together, they crossed the cemetery with her shaping enough fog to hide them.

  “What’s the plan?” he asked.

  “We’ll drive up to Soul’s Hollow. It’s just beyond distance searchers would expect a child to wander, but near enough to be feasible, especially when we claim that we found Claudia sleeping beside Kaylea. She found Kaylea, but fell over, bumped her head, and was unconscious when we discovered them.”

  He made a sound of impressed agreement and readjusted Claudia’s weight. They were nearly to the edge of the cemetery. Not much further now.

  Beulah smiled down at Kaylea. “We need a story the authorities can believe, then we’ll tell Mrs. Johnson and her family something closer to the truth. If Kaylea remembers Claudia taking her, we need to remove the family’s suspicions.”