Storm Road (Old School Book 3) Read online

  He caught her arm. “I’m sorry.” It seemed he’d trespassed on private, disturbing memories.

  She paused. “You have a right to ask. Is vanquishing the ghoul worth risking a hurricane?”

  “You could create a hurricane?”

  She slipped away from his hold. “Don’t worry. I’m accustomed to assessing risks. It’s part of my role on research vessels. Out in the deep oceans, weather is a major event, and out there, there’s nowhere to hide. I won’t risk more than we can afford to pay to contain the ghoul.”

  Contain the ghoul or vanquish it? She seemed torn between a temporary or permanent fix for their problem.

  “If we—” and he said we deliberately. She might be in charge, but she wasn’t alone “—can contain the ghoul, will that remove or lesson the ghoul’s control of its territory and enable the help your friend Yasmin is sending to actually get in?”

  Beulah turned to face him directly. “I don’t have proof. It’s instinct.” Her eyebrows drew together in a frown of concentration. “The dead animals mean the ghoul marked its territory in blood. The cemetery might be its base, but unless I can wrap a containment around its entire territory, I don’t think I can drive it back entirely into the cemetery. It can slip away through the blood.”

  “Can someone outside, a team of people, set the containment beyond the ghoul’s territory? Contain it, then strangle it.”

  A shudder shook her hard enough that he reached out instinctively to steady her. “What’s wrong?”

  “The ghoul will treat any attempt to contain it as an attack. This morning it went after a child, but slyly. It was willing to slip away. If it is directly assaulted…” Her eyes were enormous in her face, dark gray and afraid. “It will kill to increase its power. We’re going to have one chance to attack it and we have to move fast. Containment within its territory leaves it too many options. Too much freedom.” Her hands curled into fists. “I’ve no idea how, but I have to vanquish it.”

  Chapter 4

  Beulah listened to the quiet sounds of movement overhead. Dean was in the roof space, going through her boxes, looking for a personal protection charm she knew she hadn’t thrown away, but which she’d never used. Olga had enchanted it for her, back in the bad days.

  Olga had guessed how terrible things were then.

  No, not completely. If Olga had guessed the full truth, Beulah’s ex-husband, Samuel, would have had his ass kicked to hell before he could—

  “Silver in the shape of a sun?” Dean called down the ladder.

  “You found it?”

  Boots, then legs, then all of him, descended. He jumped the last couple of rungs to the floor and held out a flat silver disc about the size of an eye. A woven cord ran through a hole in the top of it.

  “That’s it.” She didn’t want to touch it. The object was good. She trusted Olga for that. But looking at it brought back too many memories. If she’d been wearing it…

  But there’d been a reason she’d ignored the protection charm during the years she was with Samuel.

  “I found it in a box of old buttons.”

  “Huh.” She didn’t remember putting it there. But perhaps some part of her had been fighting even then. When Olga had given it to her, she hadn’t thrown it away. She hadn’t been able to wear the charm, but she’d hidden it from Samuel. “Put it on. It will act like the ward does for my land and keep evil out of you. Holy objects can do the same, if you have faith, but it’s best to have multiple defenses.” And Dean’s faith was his private concern. She felt better watching him loop the woven red cord over his head, and tuck it and the silver disc under his t-shirt. “Good.”

  “How about you?” He crossed to the sink and filled a glass with cold spring water.

  “I found some more information on ghouls in this.” She nudged the centuries-old book hand-written by an alchemist. She felt dirty reading it. Like her ex-husband, the alchemist had been obsessed with power.

  The alchemist, however, had also possessed a fine instinct for self-preservation. He’d recorded a warning, passed on from an older alchemist, his mentor, on the peril of encountering a ghoul.

  Beulah read the pertinent passage aloud to Dean. “He who would fight the ghoul must know that it will break him open. Every old grief will be new again. The wise man must stay clear of mind and calm of soul, and hold to his purpose. The ghoul cannot be allowed to feign life for the longer it does, the more who will die, and the stronger it grows.”

  “Old griefs.” He upended his empty glass on the sink. “We’re going to be fighting our own nightmares.”

  “Every loss. Every failure,” she agreed. Her body felt heavy with fatigue. The drag was emotional rather than physical. Dread had a chilling grip on her and she had to shake it loose. She looked longingly at the phone, but they’d already established that cellphones and internet were utterly dead and the landline only worked for calls within the town and surrounds; that is, within the ghoul’s territory.

  They were on their own and she was no nearer to working out how to vanquish the ghoul.

  “Ghouls are stronger at night.” The cabin was cozy as late afternoon merged into evening. She’d bought a chicken at the general store and was roasting it along with potatoes and carrots in the oven. She and Dean would eat early, tonight. When true darkness fell, they’d be needed outside.

  She’d already discarded the first two options open to her. She could huddle within her ward and stay safe through the night, or she could take the personal protection charm back from Dean, convince him to stay at the cabin, and venture out alone. Ha! More like, she’d have to knock him unconscious to leave him behind.

  Neither option was realistic.

  Time was ticking and although she was unprepared to vanquish the ghoul, she still had to act.

  “We’ll have to distract the ghoul.” She opened the oven door, and rosemary-scented steam escaped. She basted the chicken a final time. Cooking it had helped to keep her grounded as she skimmed the terrible books Samuel had collected. “Yasmin, our research, and our experience tell us that the ghoul is stronger at night. So it’s at night that children are most at risk. Tonight, we distract the ghoul, keep it concentrating on us, and thus, keep the kids safe. It’ll give me a chance to study its form and behavior. I need to observe the ghoul, not just run scared. The books give us second- or third-hand experience. I need to know more.”

  “So we surveille and harass.”

  “Exactly.” She closed the oven door. “And we’re going to avoid the cemetery.”

  His tone was very neutral when he asked, “Why?”

  “Because I don’t want to pressure the ghoul into action. It’s seen us at Millie’s farmhouse before. For you to return to it tonight, with me, shouldn’t trigger the ghoul into dangerous, defensive mode.”

  “It could even ignore us completely.”

  She shook her head. “No. It’s fair to assume that it was bound at the farm, possibly for over a century. It might be free to move around, but the connection to that place will linger, and it probably won’t be able to resist checking that no one picks through the remains of its binding spell.”

  “But because we’ve been there before and not challenged it, it won’t be panicked into snacking on more people to power up and attack us.”

  She winced at his choice of words, “snacking”, but nodded.

  He pushed away from the kitchen sink. “How do we keep a ghoul busy all night?”

  They brainstormed over their early dinner and while clearing away. The outlines of their plan were simple. They had to give the ghoul a reason for their return to Millie’s farmhouse, and then, enact distractions so that they survived an entire night engaging with it. Last night, they’d run within minutes of encountering it, and just the thought of the feelings of horror the ghoul had drenched them in had Beulah’s delicious roast dinner churning nauseously in her stomach.

  As they left the safety of the cabin, Dean tried to return the protection charm to her.r />
  She refused it. She had a small gold cross on a chain around her neck, holy water in a bottle in her left trousers pocket, salt in a zip lock bag in her other pocket, and her magic all coiled up and ready to rumble—but the magic she had to hold in reserve. She couldn’t attack the ghoul till she had a chance of vanquishing it. The whole point of tonight was to keep it interested in them, not drive it away, potentially to go after its preferred prey, children.

  “Surveille and harass,” she muttered.

  Dean drove her pickup and she rode beside him. On her knee was a heavy bible. She didn’t own a pocket-sized version. This one had been a thrift store find. It had been someone’s family bible and she’d tried to track them down, only to discover that while the family had lived in the mountains for years, the last of them had recently died. So she kept the mountain family’s bible as a blessing for her mountain cabin.

  People listed in its family tree had lived in the mountains during the Civil War, through the time when Beulah believed the ghoul had formed and been bound. She touched the cracked leather spine of the bible with careful fingertips. Weapons came in many forms, especially when the intent was to distract rather than attack.

  Twilight brought bats swooping among the trees. The river had been left behind as Dean drove to Millie’s abandoned home.

  After her display of magic that morning, he hadn’t asked again for what she knew of Millie’s disappearance. She might have suspected that her display of mini-weather phenomena had shocked him into silence, even scared him, except that he hadn’t shown signs of fear.

  He’d quietly contributed to their plan for tonight. He’d been thoughtful as he agreed that she try to keep her magic and its nature from the ghoul as much as possible. Until she was ready to launch an all-out vanquishment attempt, the less the ghoul learned of her and her magic, the better.

  So tonight was going to be one of ordinary human trickery and courage.

  Before they encountered the ghoul again, Dean deserved to know as much as she could tell him of the circumstances of his aunt’s disappearance. That the timing of her tale would prevent him from asking questions was just a bonus.

  “You wanted to know Millie’s story,” she said quietly. “Mrs. Johnson may be having trouble reaching her, what with the phone lines not working beyond the ghoul’s territory, and she won’t tell you where Millie is until she has your aunt’s permission. However, I have my friend’s story. I stopped in Boston two days ago to hear it.”

  He didn’t ask about the scientific study she’d been returning from or why her first stop on returning home was to check on her friend. He just waited.

  They didn’t have long before they reached Millie’s house. She had to say what she meant to say in a hurry, and it was a complicated story for someone new to the world of magic.

  “Sadie is a finder talent. One of our Old School members is a marine biologist who studies fantastical creatures, but she doesn’t have a trace of magic herself. So Sadie was searching for a means by which Naomi could see through the glamours that hide these creatures.”

  His hands twitched on the steering wheel.

  “Fantastical creatures are things like jackalopes, rocs—the big birds—hoop snakes and flying pigs,” she answered his unasked question. “There are lots of them. Your aunt had an amulet that let her see through glamours. She hadn’t used it in years. She’d left it buried under a barn. Or perhaps not buried. In a forgotten cellar or some other hiding place. The Civil War encouraged hidden places to be dug. Millie had retrieved the amulet before Sadie arrived, and she didn’t seem surprised at Sadie turning up. She said it was time for the amulet to move on. It sounds as if Millie and Sadie hit it off. They chatted and had tea. Millie told her that she’d taken the amulet from a boyfriend decades ago. He’d been a street wizard, someone with a tiny talent for magic. She’d thought that the glamour-piercing amulet would help her in her work as a journalist, but she grew to trust her instincts instead, and hid the amulet.”

  “So why dig it up now? Why did the amulet have to ‘move on’?”

  Beulah shifted the weight of the old family bible on her lap. The same intelligence that made Dean a good ally and, undoubtedly, a successful lawyer, could also be a nuisance. There was no glossing over issues with him. He dug till he had the truth.

  “You’ll have to ask Millie,” she said. “She freely gave the amulet to Sadie to pass on to Naomi. As Sadie drove away, she glanced in her rear vision mirror. She saw smoke in the distance. Your aunt’s barns, and then, house were burning. Sadie ended up running for her life. She’d seen the two men who’d driven past her on the road to Millie’s, and they’d seen her. Fate took a hand and Sadie bumped into someone who could help her. He identified the men who set fire to Millie’s barns as Stag mercenaries. Anyone else would have run a mile, but Marcus is a scary guy, himself. With his help, Sadie escaped and got the amulet to Naomi. Then she went back to check on Millie, who was gone.”

  They were nearly at the burned out farmhouse. He slowed the pickup. “You said your friend was a finder’s talent? Does that mean she can find people as well as objects?”

  Dean was definitely too acute to hide things from.

  Beulah nodded. “Sadie tracked your aunt from her house to Mrs. Johnson’s. Mrs. Johnson told Sadie that on the day of the fire, Millie rode up on her dirt bike. She left a message with Mrs. Johnson, to tell anyone who came looking for her—and she mentioned Sadie by name—that she was safe and to leave her to her privacy. Sadie had shared with Millie that she was a finder’s talent so Millie knew who she had to stop from searching for her. Millie then phoned a friend, and a man Mrs. Johnson didn’t recognize came and collected Millie.”

  “So Aunt Millie knows about the fire.” Dean drove along the farmhouse driveway. The ruins of the house and flattened barns loomed before them. He reversed and parked the pickup facing back down the driveway, ready for a fast escape. “Would she return if she learned of the ghoul?”

  “No—” Too late, Beulah recognized the trap.

  He switched off the pickup’s engine. The silence was loud. “What else do you know or suspect about my aunt?”

  Beulah frowned at the broken front porch.

  Sadie and Millie had sat there, talking. Mostly Sadie had listened. Millie was dying. She had lung cancer. Mrs. Johnson probably knew the truth.

  Beulah suspected that Millie had chosen to die with what peace she could manage in a private hospice. As much as Beulah hated the thought of Millie dying without her family around her, it was Millie’s choice. And family dynamics were odd things. They weren’t safe for outsiders to meddle in.

  She unbuckled her seatbelt. “When this is over.” She kept her words vague in case the ghoul was already listening. “Mrs. Johnson will be able to phone Millie. Then you’ll have your answers.” She got out of the pickup.

  The first stars were pinpricks of light in the cloudy sky. As the clouds drifted, driven by a high wind, it was a case of now-you-see-them, now-you-don’t. Beulah tucked the bible under one arm and held a flashlight in the other. She bumped the pickup door closed with her hip.

  Dean collected a canvas knapsack of occult goodies from the back of the pickup.

  Beulah wasn’t interested in the occult, so collecting paraphernalia likely to intrigue and mislead the ghoul as to their intentions hadn’t been easy. Hence the bible. Prayer and readings were one way they might occupy the night hours. She’d marked certain pages with slips of paper. They needed to keep the ghoul around, but not actively hostile. Their best chance was if they could get it to talk.

  Did ghouls talk? None of the books she’d consulted had mentioned conversing with a ghoul, but she and Dean had heard this one moan its demand for blood and possession. Perhaps it could be convinced to elaborate, like a murder mystery novel villain proclaiming his reasons at the end of the story.

  First, she and Dean had to show the ghoul that they were harmless yet worthy of the ghoul’s attention. Entertainers to a ghoul! She
snorted at the thought. They had to give it a reason for their return, but not panic it into killing someone to increase its power to attack them.

  “Foul fiend, show yourself,” Dean shouted. They’d decided to present themselves as supernatural investigators, in addition to his status as Millie’s nephew.

  Nothing moved in the shadows. The trees were still. The ruins of the house sagged sad and abandoned in the gloom.

  In a pre-arranged move, Dean turned away from the house and crossed to the empty graveled space in front of the flattened barns. He crouched and opened the knapsack, extracting five tea light candles Beulah had found at the back of a cupboard. They were scented with rose, sandalwood and other oils. They’d been a housewarming gift.

  He dragged a stick through the gravel to mark a pentagram and set the candles at the five points of the star.

  As he flicked his lighter to light the candles, she opened the bible, setting it on the hood of the pickup at her first marked page. She didn’t switch on the flashlight, but used it as a bookmark, turning away from the pickup to study the house.

  From their experience last night, the ghoul’s presence would be preceded by an intensifying sense of doom.

  Her gaze returned to the ruined porch. It wasn’t Millie handing over the glamour-piercing amulet to Sadie that had released the ghoul. The unbinding had been the result of the fire. If the Stag mercenaries who’d started it were within reach, she’d kick them. They might have been hired to find the amulet, but setting fire to barns as an act of intimidation was unnecessary.

  The barns weren’t a random target, though. The mercenaries must have tracked traces of the amulet to one of the barns; hence, her and Sadie’s conclusion that the amulet had lain hidden beneath it for years. Unfortunately, that wasn’t all that had been hidden there. The ghoul had been bound to that dirt until the fire freed it by breaking the binding.

  Millie’s digging up of the amulet had been the catalyst for many dramatic events, but not all of them were bad.