Bone Cold: A Soul Shamans Novel (Volume 2) (5 page)

T
he three of us piled into my truck, the sky already a deep blue. A bitter chill swept through the crackling trees, and in the distance, I swore I heard a dog howling at the unusually dark afternoon. Shivering, I cranked the engine. Despite what Mom had said, things felt strange in Seaport. They had since the day Anthony Lombardi had disappeared, and last night had put me even more on edge than normal.

Even if it hadn’t been a spirit, Megan had died of something, and as an all-star athlete, she’d never seemed anything other than the perfect picture of health.

Laura and I met eyes as I backed out of the gravel drive, and I knew she felt exactly what I did. Unease. There wasn’t much I could say about it though, not with George in the truck. She may have been witness to Megan’s death, and she might have believed Salem was full of magic and strange things, but that didn’t mean she would understand if we tried to explain to her what we really were.

How do you tell someone you just met that you communicate with demonic beings? You don’t.

The day was still young despite the heavy sky, and Wanda’s shop was open for business when we parked outside. We climbed out of my truck, and George’s eyebrows shot to the top of her skull when she caught a glimpse of the storefront. A massive rune was etched into a wooden door that looked as if it had come from a million year old tree, all covered in rotting bark. Deep claw-like gorges ran down its entire length, as if a werewolf had stumbled past this place while hunting for prey, desperate for whoever stayed hidden inside.

Not that werewolves existed. You’d have to be crazy to believe something like that.

“What the hell happened to her door?” George asked, her easy-going tone dropped for the first time since we’d met her.

“Werewolves.” My lips pressed together to stop the smile, but George caught the look and elbowed me in the side.

“Har har. Nice try,” she said.

“Only Wanda knows what happened to this door,” Laura said, turning the doorknob and glancing over her shoulder. “That’s one secret she swears she’ll take to her grave.”

The doorbell dinged as we trailed inside the shop, and the scent of burning incense tickled my nose. Wanda and the magic shop were a constant staple of Seaport life. She entertained visitors’ notions of covens and grimoires and trials by fire.

I ignored most of that, but sometimes I thought there might be some truth to it. The supplies in her store were half-nonsense to me. Tarot cards, crystals, and wands, but it was hard to ignore that some of it was half-useful and authentic. Runes and sage leaves and charcoal pencils.

Back when I’d been conning people, I frequented the place to stock up on candles and parchment and bones. Wanda had never said anything, but there was always a hint of knowing in her smile each time I paid for my supplies. She’d pat at her bright orange hair and ask if I was sure I didn’t want to take a look at the Dark Magicks book on display in the back corner.

“Holly Bennett.” She smiled a crooked smile full of stained teeth when the door jingled shut behind us. “It’s been awhile.”

“Things have been quiet,” I said, deciding not to elaborate. I wasn’t sure how much Wanda knew about me, but if she hadn’t heard the rumors about my ghost-busting business, now wasn’t the time to fill her in.

Wanda’s eyes landed on George, and a spark lit the dark hollows of her irises. George frowned at Wanda and took a step back toward the door, startled recognition highlighting her usual smirking face.

“Who do we have here?” Wanda asked with the edges of her mouth turning up into something resembling a smile, but there was too much intensity there for it to be real.

What the hell is this all about?
Could George and Wanda know each other? I guess it wasn’t that big of a stretch due to the close proximity of our towns, and I was pretty sure Wanda hadn’t lived in Seaport all her life. Still…that didn’t explain the eye daggers shooting back and forth between them.

“This is George.” I cleared my throat and shifted on my feet. “We brought her to get her tarot cards done. But if you’re busy, we can do it later. Or not. Maybe we should just go.”

No one said anything, and the minutes stretched out like saltwater taffy pulled too tight. Laura stared at Wanda like she’d never seen her before, and I could see why. Wanda’s expression was dark and dangerous, a stark contrast to her standard bumbling nature. Usually, she stood behind the counter with dazed and befuddled eyes, trying to hawk jewellery and books and trinkets to people who didn’t know any better.

“Tarot cards, eh?” Wanda asked with a smile while brushing nonexistent dirt from her multicolored, tie-dyed skirt. She reached underneath the front counter and brought out a deck of cards that looked as worn-down and beat-up as the front door did. “Now is fine. I have a special deck just for you girls.”

She shuffled the black cards slowly, her eyes never flicking away from George’s face. I glanced at Laura and tried to communicate how freaked out this whole situation was making me feel. Wanda was being weird. And to be honest, so was George. She stood there still as a statue. Not even her eyelashes moved as she watched Wanda rustle through the deck.

Wanda slammed the cards onto the table, and the entire store seemed to rattle from the force of her blow. I sucked in a sharp breath and watched George stride to the counter with an outstretched hand as if to touch the deck. Like she knew the steps of this strange dance without being shown.

“Nuh uh.” Wanda flicked up her hand to stop George from touching the cards. Instead, she turned to me and pointed a long, crooked nail in my direction. “Holly Bennett will touch the deck.”

“Her?” George asked, whipping her head in my direction.

“Me?” I asked, almost in the same beat. “You’ve always made the person being read touch the cards before.”

“Well, before was different than now, wasn’t it?” Wanda frowned at me. “You brought her in here to get read. If you want her read, you touch the deck.”

“You don’t want us to pay you first?” Laura finally spoke up, her voice sure and solid despite whatever the hell was going on in here.

“I don’t need money for this.” Wanda chuckled at her own joke, one that no one else in the room seemed to get.

With timid steps, I moved to George’s side before brushing my fingertips along the top of the deck. Instantly, the air left my lungs. A biting current coursed through my body, like a jolt of electricity singeing every single one of my bones. The world darkened, and the corners of the room seemed to dance with shadows. Wanda stared right through me. Her eyes were hollow pits of blackness. Gritting my teeth, I jerked my fingers off the deck, and the world blinked back in around me.

“Holly?” Laura snaked an arm around my shoulder and held me steady. “What just happened?”

Sucking in a deep breath, I shook my head and turned to Wanda, but she was already dealing out the cards like nothing strange had just happened.

“Wanda?” I asked as she put the third and final card face down on the table. “What was that?”

If I hadn’t known better, I would have said Wanda had a deck of cards that held some sort of dark magic in the paper folds. The kind that gave me a glimpse of Lower World. But that couldn’t be right.

“Nothing.” Wanda tapped the last card and met George’s gaze. “We’re going to do this backward and start with your future instead of your past. Are you ready?”

George nodded, and I saw her throat clench as she swallowed hard.
Interesting
. George was just as unnerved by this strange interaction as we were, even if she was trying her hardest not to show even a hint of what she felt.

Wanda flipped the card over. Its face held a skeleton on a horse, surrounded by bloody corpses that littered the ground.

Wanda’s voice was a harsh whisper when she spoke. “Death. I should be surprised, but I’m not.”

“You rigged it,” George said, gripping the table with white-knuckled hands. “I’ve had my cards read a dozen times before, and this never came up. Not even once. You’re just trying to freak me out.”

“I do not rig my cards.” Wanda tapped her nail on the next card. “Shall we move on to the present?”

“You didn’t tell us what that one meant,” Laura said. The skull wielding maniac card was one we’d never seen before, despite the many times we’d visited Wanda’s shop. Its name—Death—made it pretty damn clear what it meant though.

“It means someone is going to die.” Wanda leaned forward, palms flat on the front counter. Her breath curled across the short space, holding hints of pachouli and rotten eggs. “I don’t rig my cards, and I don’t need to tell
her
what this one means. If anything, you should be asking Holly how that card came to be.”

George flicked her eyes toward me, and I held up my hands to block the accusation. This was getting weirder and weirder way too fast for me to wrap my head around anything.

“All I did was touch the cards, George. Like she asked me to.”

My cell phone rang, and a breath escaped my throat in a rush. Desperately, I snatched the phone from my pocket, thankful for the interruption. Maybe it was my mom, checking in. I could ask her about Wanda. She’d know if there was something more to her than met the eye.

I glanced at the readout. No such luck. Jason Harris’s name lit up the screen.

“What’s up, Jason?” I asked as a greeting. We never said hey, hello, or goodbye. Sometimes we picked up our conversations where we’d last left off with a smile or a joke or a laugh. But after last night, there were no jokes to toss into the air for him to lob back.

“I have some bad news, Holls.” His voice held a frown, and my heart sunk deep into my toes. “There’s been another attack. My mom is dead.”

CHAPTER 5

M
y face drained of color as Jason filled me in on what had happened. His mom had been rushed to the hospital with the symptoms of a heart attack, but she’d gone on and on about invisible frozen snakes wrapping around her as she fought for her last breaths.

Jason was vehement it hadn’t been a heart attack. Something had swarmed around her body. And whatever it was still roamed around inside his house.

I snapped my cell shut and pulled Laura away from the weird scene between George and Wanda. “Laura, we’ve got to go. Jason’s mom just died of what the doctors are saying was a heart attack.”

Laura’s eyes widened. “You don’t think it’s…?”

“It has to be,” I whispered. “Jason said he still feels the spirit inside the house.”

“But your mom said…” Laura twirled her nose ring and frowned down at the speckled hardwood floor. “She said it’s impossible for spirits to attack humans out in the open.”

“Well, this one was inside their house,” I said. “So, we need to get over there ASAP and get that thing banished back to where it belongs.”

Laura nodded, skin blanching. “Okay. What do we do about…?”

We both glanced up to find George standing right next to us, listening to every word we said. I jumped and knocked my head against a towering shelf of magic books. George’s face was only inches from ours, so I knew she’d caught our entire conversation, even if she didn’t know what our words meant. But right now wasn’t the time to explain our whole history to an almost-stranger, and I hoped Laura would keep her mouth shut as well. There was something off about George. That much was very clear from her interaction with Wanda.

Maybe I could try to get Wanda to share her intel the next time I visited the shop. She clearly knew something about this girl that she wasn’t letting on.

“Sorry, we’ve gotta run,” I told George, pressing a palm against the rough door to exit the shop. “Something’s come up. It’s urgent.”

“Yeah, I heard that. It has to do with what happened to that chick last night, doesn’t it?”

“We can’t really talk about it,” I said. “It’s complicated.”

George crossed her arms over her chest and jutted out her chin. “You brought me along and had me get a tarot card reading from
her
.” She yanked her thumb at Wanda, who was watching the exchange with hawkish eyes. “The least you could do is fill me in on whatever the hell is going on in this town. And don’t tell me it has nothing to do with the dark arts, because I sure as hell won’t believe you.”

I raised my eyebrows. “The dark arts?”

“Magic, sorcery, alchemy, whatever you want to call it.” She waved a finger back and forth between me and Laura. “I heard about your ghost business. You know they call you the Queen of Weird? Anyway, Laura let it slip that she was in on the whole thing. And by whole thing, I mean that your business was a massive con.”

Eyes wide, I whirled on my friend. “Laura, what the hell?”

“I don’t know. It just came out.” Laura nibbled on her bottom lip. “She already kind of suspected something weird was up, so all I did was confirm it.”

Sighing, I closed my eyes. I couldn’t believe Laura. First, she’d told Nathan way before I was ready to share, and now George was in on it, too. If she kept up the secret blabbing, everyone in school would know I was a total con artist by the end of the week. We barely knew George. How could we be certain that she’d keep this information private? Not that it really mattered now, I had to remind myself. Mom was back, and I didn’t need to rely on my fake spirit business anymore.