Dweller on the Threshold (14 page)

“What came through the window?”

She swallowed and I wiped at a spot of blood on her hand, cleaned the small scratches. “I think it was me.”

I stopped. “Huh?”

“I came through the window and attacked myself.”

I bit my lip, glancing at Phro and Fred who both looked as confused as I felt.

She started crying again.
Great.
“Blythe, you have to calm down. I mean it. This isn’t the time to lose it. What do you mean you attacked yourself?”

“My spirit. I think it was my spirit. It wasn’t attached. How could it not be attached? I still felt like me—still
feel
like me. But it looked like me and it had claws and it scratched me before Frida jumped in front and fought it off me.”

“Blythe, that’s just not possible. If it physically made these scratches, it was in your plane. Here in this realm, not the next. Frida can’t fight in this world. He—um—
she
can shove energy, add strength to other spirits to possibly do damage, but not fight.”

“But she…” Blythe suddenly broke off and glanced at the spot where I knew Frida sat slumped against the wall. “
He
did. The other me was in both planes and Fri-he fought it.”

I looked at him when she switched pronouns. He shimmered solid for an instant, his eyes narrowed and on Blythe’s face.

“You see him, don’t you?” I asked her, still watching him.

I heard her take a deep breath then whisper, “Beri, I don’t think his name is Frida.”

Chapter Seven

The little witch had spunk. Had to give her that. I expected her to jump at my offer to stay at Elsa’s while I checked out her magic shop, but she’d wanted to come. Now she sat, unnaturally quiet, in the passenger seat of my Jeep. I bit back a grin. She’d said she needed to come along to show me where it was, but I had a feeling Blythe was too scared to stay by herself. Not that I blamed her.

It’s not every day a person is attacked by her doppelganger.

Funny creature, Blythe. She started fires, had a particularly well-developed habit of pissing people off, but she did seem sincere in her desire to help. And—okay—she’d really come through with that demon. I was still impressed.

I’d thrown on clean jeans, my boots, and loaned Blythe one of Elsa’s sweat suits. It boxed her like a huge, wrinkled pair of pajamas, gathering heavily at the wrists and ankles. She looked like a startled, blonde Shar Pei, but I wasn’t sharing that fact. Poor thing had been through enough tonight.

I probably should have waited to look at her shop, but I wanted to be on the scene while it was relatively fresh. Besides, I had this internal clock ticking like mad. Every minute that Elsa lay there helpless brought her that much closer to the demons. Cold fear tightened my chest and I stepped on the gas pedal.

The Jeep shot through a red traffic light.

Blythe reached out to steady herself on the dashboard before shoving up one of the sleeves. At least the sweat suit covered most of the scratches. She had the kind of seriously pale skin that made the angry red lines stand out like a sadistic and unskilled tattoo artist had gotten his needles on her. She still had several showing on her neck and across her left cheek. They flashed a dark, bloody crimson whenever the streetlights blinked into the car. The wounds didn’t seem to bother her as they had Nikolos and me. But then, they weren’t demon-inflicted.

I think.

“Okay, you said that ‘you’ came through the window of the shop and attacked. Do you mean something like your reflection? Nikolos talked about reflections.”

She sniffed and opened my glove box. My eyebrow went up.

Her cheeks turned pink when she glanced at me. “Sorry. I need a tissue and that’s where I keep mine in Eunice.” She sniffed again and used a sleeve instead.

I decided not to even think about why she named her yellow Bug Eunice. “Blythe, are you crying?”

She shook her head. “No, something’s bothering my sinuses. It’s probably the antiseptic you put on my scratches. I don’t usually use anything that isn’t organic.”

Alcohol was organic—my kind of organic—but since I didn’t feel like having that discussion with the witch, I sped up the Jeep, turning down a narrow back street after she pointed. “I’m working on the theory that whatever got my sister came through her mirror. So did you see your reflection before you attacked yourself?”

“That just doesn’t sound right.” She wiped her sleeve on her pants.

“Is there a part of this—any of this—that does?” I looked at the wounds on Blythe’s face again. “My sister wasn’t beat all to hell, like you. She only had that one wound. Plus, she was in her car when they found her…how did she end up there?”

“I don’t know.” She aimed her finger at another upcoming street. The grey sleeve slumped over her hand and Blythe growled. She actually growled.

I turned my head to the window so she wouldn’t see my grin. That earlier Shar Pei image flashed through my mind again. Pursing my lips, I flipped on my left blinker. “I know you don’t know how my sister ended up in her car. I like to work things out aloud sometimes. Better get used to it.” I turned the Jeep again. It was freaky quiet on the streets this time of night. Glancing at the clock on my dash, I saw that only an hour had passed since I’d looked at the one in Elsa’s kitchen. Three a.m.

The hair on the back of my neck stood and I felt something sit softly upon my skin—similar to that breeze of evil I’d felt earlier, only this time it clung like static. I sucked in a breath and let it out slowly. Looking in the mirror, I tried to see if any of our guides were paying attention, but all I saw was Fred staring at the ceiling of the Jeep, Frida sleeping and Phro…well, she was either popping imaginary gum bubbles or playing fish. I didn’t know—didn’t want to. Phro had her odd moments.

None of the guides were reacting to the strange feeling in the air, so it had to be just me. I took one hand off the steering wheel and pushed my hair behind my ear. I’d left the hat off since it was too late at night to worry about it. I looked at the clock again.
Something about three
. “Blythe, help me a second. The number three has a lot of significance, right?

“Sure. Body, soul and spirit. Birth, life and death. It represents the whole in numerology.”

I nodded. “And it’s the first geometrical figure…” We were onto something here. I didn’t know what, though. “Beginning, middle and end. And there is that whole threefold rule in your craft.”

“It’s our most basic principle. Cause harm and it will return to you threefold.” She sneezed.

“Gesundheit,” I said automatically as I brought up the image of that soul design on Elsa’s mirror. The circle had been filled with three perpendicular lines.

“Why are you asking about three?” Blythe fiddled with her door handle.

“Something’s hovering at the edge of my mind but I can’t catch it. We need to do some research.” I tapped the fingers of my right hand on the wheel.

“I have a computer at my shop—with cable access.”

“Good. We can look up the soul images Nikolos told me about, too. Did you see a circular decoration on the glass of your shop before you were attacked?”

“There was something. I didn’t stick around long enough to look at it.” She wrung her hands and squirmed on the seat. Some rose-scented perfume wafted over the sharp smell of the antiseptic. At least the Jeep still didn’t have that demon stink from earlier—though a hint of sourness remained.

“Beri, I feel different. And I can uh, see things.” She looked nervously into the back seat. I should have been more surprised that she could see the guides now, but I’d known it would happen sooner or later as soon as I’d seen her flinch that very first time in front of Elsa’s house.

“Boo.”

Blythe hastily turned back to the front.

I shot Phro a frown in the rear view mirror. “Cut it out.”

Phro raised one slim, black eyebrow and blew me a kiss. “Not a chance.”

“Jeez, Phro, you can be such a bitch.” I offered Blythe a friendly smile. “You’ll have to excuse the goddess, Blythe. She gets off on being seen by humans. Terrorized me for close to a year when we first met.”

Fred leaned forward. “So Blythe, can you see all of us?”

Blythe stiffened, looked over her shoulder at him, and then lifted her shoulder in a hesitant shrug. “I think so. There are three of you.” Something about Fred’s boyish, amiable face must have set her at ease because she suddenly leaned close to Fred and whispered, “Does Fri—can he talk?”

Fred whispered back, “Don’t know. He hasn’t yet.”

We were sitting at the longest red light in town. I just knew it. I reached up to twist the mirror so I could see Frida. The spirit was still fading from solid to translucent and in his near-substantial states, his dark skin washed a sickly sallow grey. Bruises and open wounds added a pale, purplish color. I felt sorry for him. Didn’t know how to help him.

The worst part was the way he felt. In addition to seeing spirits, I could tell the strength of a spirit—its age. Well, not age. Everything was the exact same age, but a spirit’s time in that particular stage gave it a certain age-like feel. Fred had explained years ago that all humans were born at the same time and each soul chooses different paths. They would reincarnate into different lifetimes to experience things and in those off-times between lives, they’d work as guides or become scholars. After-life scholars tripped me up big time.

Phro? Who knows? You’d think a goddess would have the secrets of the world at her gilded fingertips. But what did I know about goddesses other than what I’d read? Phro certainly didn’t share a lot of information. Every now and then, she’d mention one of her children and I’d heard her compare men to Ares. Shaking my head, I squinted into some incoming headlights. She must be right about her presence here being some sort of punishment. Even she didn’t know who she’d angered.
Long time to be in the dark
.

 
Frida shifted again, pulling my gaze back to him in the mirror. He was normally a strong spirit. I’d felt the punch of his force immediately. Either he’d gathered tons of experience and knowledge in different lifetimes or he’d remained a spirit guide so long he’d nearly perfected the gig. His silence still bothered me.

Always in the past when I’d seen a mute spirit walking behind a person, it hadn’t been a spirit guide, but a ghost.
A ghost of a murder victim
. Unfortunately, when a person’s murderer goes uncaught, that poor person is trapped with the killer until he’s either punished or dead. It was horrifying and one of the reasons I’d done so much work for the police. I’d loved nothing better than leading the police to a murderer. Or I had until Elsa and I had tracked down that last one.

Fucking black wizards
.

I kept Frida in my sight. Instead of his normal, strong punch, now there was this thready, delicate feel to him—something he probably wouldn’t appreciate. He struck me as a proud individual, spirit or not.

As if he could hear my thoughts, Frida shifted, opened one eye, glanced at Blythe and shut it. He still took his duties seriously—that said a lot about his character. You’d think being a spirit guide alone would say a lot about a character but surprisingly it didn’t. I’d come across real asswipes over the years, but I had to admit that each and every one had been attached to the kind of human who had no business walking the earth. Serial killers, pedophiles and—yeah—black wizards. It was my theory that their spirit guides absorbed their evil over the years. I always wondered how long it took them to shake it off when it was time to move on to the next job. Fred, as usual, didn’t have that answer for me. I looked at him only to catch him watching Frida, that queasy-looking confusion muddying Fred’s features.

None of us had ever seen a wounded spirit. And Frida’s injuries looked awful. Too bad he couldn’t talk and let us know what happened. Oh, and tell us his real name.

“My shop is up here.” Blythe interrupted my thoughts, leaning forward and staring through the windshield. “That’s funny—I didn’t leave any lights on. I never even made it inside. I was attacked outside by the windows.”

My senses went on alert. I flipped the Jeep lights off and brought the vehicle to a crawl, then parked a few shops down. We sat in the dark for a couple of minutes as a man came into view inside the shop. His back was to us and he wore a blue, short-sleeved shirt, dark slacks. Walked funny—like he was stepping over debris. “I think it’s a cop, Blythe.”

“I didn’t call the cops.”

I shrugged. “Someone else could have. Maybe one of the other shop owners is still inside—maybe they heard the racket.”

She nodded and bit her lip.

“You want to wait here?” I had to offer.

“No, it’s my shop. It’s just—” She broke off, squinted and then her face twisted into a look of such dismay I felt my own mirroring it.

“What?”

 
“Oh no!” She jumped out of the Jeep, leaving the door open wide as she ran toward her shop.

“Twit,” Phro muttered from the backseat.

I quickly followed. It did look like a cop, but experience had taught me not to assume. My boots on the pavement sounded loud in the quiet of the morning. Hoping Blythe wouldn’t just run inside, I kept her in my peripheral vision as I took in the front of her store. She’d decorated the place to look like an English country cottage, complete with dark wooden shakes on the façade and forest green shutters around the windows. The door was a bright, friendly blue.