Bone Cold: A Soul Shamans Novel (Volume 2) (10 page)

“What’s going on?” I yelled as I rushed into the room, my eyes trained on Nathan. His chest still rose and fell in the same steady rhythm, and a soft and peaceful expression had crossed his face. My shoulders sagged as I stopped short and caught my breath. He looked fine.

Laura was across the room, staring out the the window that overlooked the next door neighbor’s yard. George peered over her shoulder and tapped lightly on the frosted glass.

“There’s something happening next door,” she whispered. “We heard a yell. Then, something crashed.”

My heart sunk down into my toes. The house next door belonged to Jeff Cline, the man whose life I had stolen by summoning a spirit into his house during September’s chaos. He had ended up surviving the ordeal, but I’d never been able to forgive myself for crossing that line. There was life swirling through my veins that rightfully belonged to him.

“I think there may be a spirit over there, Holls,” Laura said without turning around. She knew what I’d done that night. She was one of the few people who did. I never told Mom or Nathan or anyone else about Jeff Cline. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. The only other person who knew I’d made a deal with a spirit to feed on my neighbor’s soul was Anthony Lombardi. And now he was dead.

“Well, then I’ll have to try to banish it.” The words popped out of my mouth before I even had a chance to process their meaning. But after hearing them aloud, I knew it was the right thing to do. Even if all I did was try and fail. I owed Jeff Cline at least that much.

Laura whipped her head around. “What about what your dad said?”

“If I don’t try, he might be dead before someone from Dad’s team shows up.”

“Wait a minute.” George moved away from the window to stand tall before me. “You really shouldn’t banish a demon. It messes up the balance.”

“Fuck the balance. That man could die if I don’t do something, George.”

“Fine.” She held up her hands in surrender. “But I’m staying here.”

“Good,” I said, rolling my eyes as I turned to grab my messenger bag. I didn’t want her coming along anyway. The only person I needed for this was Laura, and even then, I wanted her to stay out of that house. This was something I had to do by myself. No one else was going to get hurt because of my actions.

I dumped all my candles and parchment books and bones on the floor and plopped cross-legged on the carpet. I’d learned my lesson from the screw-up at Jason’s house. I wasn’t going to wait to cast any spells this time. They had to be done now before the spirit got a whiff of my arrival.

Laura joined me and held out her hand without a word. We pricked our skin and lit the wick, using our shaman song to drop ourselves into our magic, our blood mingling together as the spell washed over us. When we had finished binding ourselves together, I moved onto the next spell without a glance in George’s direction. I no longer cared what she saw. The way she talked, she’d probably seen this kind of thing a million times before.

I chanted, long and slow, pouring my mind into the image of a sage leaf. The one thing I focused on when I forced myself to enter the Borderland. Shadows and shifting sand swirled across my vision, weaving masses of black and red and gold into strands of writhing snakes. Taking deep breaths, I stood. The floor below me was a sponge, soft and bouncy, as if I were walking on a sea of marshmallows.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” I said to Laura, though I wasn’t entirely sure she could hear me when I was inside the Borderland. My voice echoed around me, canyons of darkness on every side.

Carefully, I exited the house, my body sliding through the door as if I didn’t exist. It took what felt like hours to walk the short distance from my front porch to Jeff Cline’s tiny home that squatted next to mine. The snow fell from the sky, but it didn’t touch my skin. I didn’t even knock when I reached his front door. Instead, I just slid through the walls, ghost-like and quiet as the dead.

The house was dark, but from somewhere nearby came the unmistakable sound of a man grunting and thrashing on the ground. My astral projected form moved down the darkened hallway toward the sound. A heavy crash exploded just ahead, and then silence. When I rounded the corner, a dark form rose high over Jeff Cline’s body where he lay sprawled on a spattered carpet. It was once a light gray, and now it was nothing but bloody red.

The spirit hissed and jerked its head toward me, mouth nothing more than a gaping black hole. Heartbeat pounding against my skull, I strode forward and held up a hand in front of me, gritting my teeth at the power building up in my veins.

“Leave!” I shouted into the wind that picked up steam, rattling against the open door.

The spirit rose higher in the air and let out a noise that sounded eerily similar to a harsh laugh. Its head lowered so that it was eye-to-eye with me, though all I could see were two oval burning disks of black.

“I said, go!” My hand shot out, and I threw all my power behind my words. It shuddered under my feet and shook the very core of my being. Holding my hands to my head, I steadied myself until the wave of magic had torn through me. When I finally glanced up, the spirit was still there.

It hissed and shot closer, weaving a web of darkness before my eyes. “Your magic has no power over me, shaman.”

Turning, it hovered over Jeff Cline’s fallen body, slivers of life winding from his curled form and into the spirit’s open mouth. I jumped up and rushed forward, throwing out my hands to try again. My fingers brushed against the spirit and ice ripped through my veins. Screaming, I pulled back, stumbling against the bunched up rug and falling flat on my ass.

My astral projected form felt nothing other than the violent sting spreading through my arms. Grimacing, I pushed myself up again. If I could touch the spirit, maybe I could drag it away from Jeff Cline before all of his life force got sucked dry.

But just as I stood, my body ripped in half. Pain tore through my head, and when I blinked my eyes, Laura’s face hovered before mine. The familiar sight of Mom’s ceremonial tapestries on our living room walls crowded in on every side of me, forcing a claustrophobic tightness in my skull. My eyebrows crinkled together as my mind tried to process what had happened.

Two rough hands grabbed my bare arms and hauled me to my feet, spinning me around to look up into the masked face of a shaman task force member.

“What the hell?” I jerked away. “You can’t just stop an astral projection like that.”

“I can, and I did.” His voice was low and dark through his helmet. “We’re under strict orders to stop you from interfering.”

“Seriously?” I threw up my hands. “What was I supposed to do? There’s a spirit next door killing someone.”

“That’s not up for me to decide,” he said. “I’m taking you to see your father.”

CHAPTER 9

T
he thought of seeing my dad would have overjoyed me two years ago. Even two months ago. And to be honest, that’s exactly what I’d wanted two hours ago, too. But now, I felt like a little kid getting slapped on the hand for misbehaving, and I wasn’t very fond of being told what I can and can’t do. Especially by someone who hadn’t given a damn about me until now.

After his team member, a guy who said his name was John Smith—I didn’t believe that bullshit for a second—found us doing shaman magic in my house, he’d locked us up in his SUV so he could do whatever it was he did to get rid of the spirit inside Jeff Cline’s house. A moment later, he climbed in to join us while the blaring alarm of an ambulance shot through the dark.

“You shouldn’t be killing them, you know?” George leaned forward from the backseat to tap John on the shoulder. “I thought the banishing shit was bad enough, but you guys are taking it to a whole new level.”

John twisted to glance over his shoulder, frowning at George. “You’re not a shaman. What do you know about it?”

“George is…special.” I propped my feet on the front dash and eyed his military-looking uniform. Black cargo pants, tight black shirt, black leather gloves. “What do you guys do exactly, anyway?”

John frowned at my feet and revved the engine. “That information is on a need to know basis, and I’m sure your father would agree that none of you fall into that category.”

“You can’t be serious,” I said as John whipped out of the driveway. “We’re more involved in this than he is.”

“Well, we’ll see what he says about it. How does that sound?” He twisted the knob on the radio and blared Metallica over the speakers, a clear signal that he was done talking. Leaning back in the stiff seat, I eyed John now that his face was no longer shielded by his helmet. He was younger than I would have expected. Eighteen, maybe. His chin looked as if he’d tried to grow a beard and failed miserably, a five-o’clock shadow scattered in uneven bunches. As he gripped the steering wheel, the muscles in his arms rippled. Eyes hard and focused on the road, he was all business, but I could see a finger tapping in time to the heavy beat of the drums.

“How long have you been working with my dad?” I raised my voice to be heard over the blaring guitars.

He flicked his eyes toward me and then back to the icy road, silence raining down.

“Fine.” I crossed my arms and slumped down in the leather seat, turning my attention to the mile markers whizzing past. It looked as if we were heading out of town, away from Seaport, away from the spirits. The total opposite of what I’d expected.

I narrowed my eyes. “Where are you taking us?”

He flicked his blinker and slowed, turning the SUV onto a gravel road that led into a thick cluster of trees. “Somewhere out of the way.”

My skin crawled. That sounded ominous. What if this guy wasn’t working for my dad after all? We’d just assumed he was a member of the team because he had the same gear, the same rifle, and he seemed to know what was going on. Like morons, we’d blindly trusted that he was a part of Dad’s team and that he had every intention of taking us to see him. Unfortunately, I’d learned that blindly trusting someone is a sure-fire way to stumble upon a pile of rotting corpses under the floorboards.

Flicking my eyes toward John, I tried to determine if there was any way we could escape. I could go for the wheel, but if we crashed, we were just as likely to fly through the front window as he was. I reached over my shoulder for the seatbelt, risking a glance in the backseat to see if my friends were securely fastened in.

“I know what you’re thinking, but it won’t do you any good,” John said. “I have orders to bring you in, and that’s what I’m going to do.”

“You didn’t say how long you’ve been working for my dad,” I said slowly, clicking my seatbelt into place. Time to put his story to the test. “I’m guessing, what? Three years?”

His lips quirked at the edges. “It’s smart of you to be suspicious. You shouldn’t jump into cars with strange guys who show up at your house.”

“You didn’t give us much of a choice.”

“If I was trying to kidnap you, I wouldn’t bother lying about it,” he said. “And to answer your question, Bennett officially had me come on board a few weeks ago. You know as well as I do that he wasn’t doing this gig three years ago. Instead he was…”

“Instead, he was stealing shit,” I filled in his missing words.

“If you want to put it like that,” he said.

“I do want to put it like that.” I twisted the radio knob, and the music died away, replaced by my voice that rose with every word I said. “I don’t know what happened to change him from a fugitive thief to…whatever the hell this is, but if he’s going to show up out of nowhere and order me and my friends around, he needs to tell me what’s going on.”

John’s eyes stayed square on the road, the headlights bouncing on the pockmarked gravel. “I agree with you, but that’s something you’re going to have to take up with him, not me. I’m only here following orders.”

He flicked the radio back on, and screaming guitars blasted away any hope of a continued conversation.

“Yeah, so you said.” I slouched back down in my seat and threw away all thoughts of a hasty escape. This guy clearly did work for my dad. He was too annoying to be a devil in an angel disguise.

A few moments later, the truck stopped outside an old warehouse in a clearing full of at least a dozen other cars. The metal panels on the warehouse were flaking from years of neglect, and the power lines were sagging from battling too many New England storms. I should have known my dad would find an abandoned building deep in the woods to conduct his mysterious shaman business. Maybe things hadn’t changed that much after all.

“Come on,” John said, unlocking the doors. “He’s inside the warehouse waiting for you.”

Laura and George had been silent for the majority of the ride here, but as soon as we were outside, with the wind howling through the leafless trees, that ended fast.

“I don’t think so, Batman.” George stopped halfway between the SUV and the building. She tensed her body and flicked her eyes to the tree line, clearly calculating how many steps it would take to get there.“I’ve seen too many Halloween movies to be tricked into something like this.”

“That’s not a good comparison,” I said. “Batman didn’t carry a military-grade rifle.”