Plague Cult (8 page)

“Will do.”

He squeezed her hand before releasing it and moving forward.

Since she watched him so closely, she saw him stiffen. He turned to look at her, and there was a warning in his stance, but not a gesture to run. She centered her magic and crossed the containment ward.

Oh God.
It was a prayer, shaken from her heart.

Death magic crawled over her skin.

No wonder the witch who’d placed the ward had gone with containment over a look-away or keep-out spell. She or he had needed to hide the evil they’d done.

Death magic in Bideer!

Shawn gripped her shoulder, a question in the tilt of his head.

She nodded once. She was okay. She could cope with this. In mage sight, she could discern the sludgy darkness of the containment ward. It lay behind them, apparently unbroken, which meant Shawn’s ability to mask them was powerful; stronger than whoever had set the ward. That was reassuring. She could see his magic at the edge of her aura, the silver shining in mage sight. It was like a shield.

Possibly he was even protecting her from the death magic, keeping it from her and keeping her healer’s aura unclouded. She was grateful. Ironic to find a hollerider’s magic a protection, but its terror didn’t touch her. That terror was directed outward, masked at the moment, but if Shawn unleashed it…

She had to trust he wouldn’t. The cult had gathered vulnerable people. If they weren’t guilty of participation in the death magic, then they really shouldn’t suffer the fear of the hollerider’s passing. It was likely they lacked the emotional resilience to survive it.

Ahead, a light blinked through the trees. Actually, the light was steady. It was the tree branches that swayed in the night wind. She stopped near Shawn and he put a hand on her waist, moving enough that he blocked the wind from her. She thought the action was automatic, unconscious, but it warmed her more than her fleece jacket.

The old resort was just visible: seven cabins built around the main building that had a dock out to the river and contained conference rooms and kitchen, plus an office and storage.

Ruth checked her watch. Ten o’clock.

“Stay here,” Shawn whispered, nearly soundless, before ghosting away.

She leaned into the smooth trunk of the oak tree. Its sturdy normality helped her feel secure. In mage sight, she could see the silver of Shawn’s magic still merged with the fringe of her aura, yet stretching out, centering on him, as he scouted the area. Where she couldn’t see him physically, she detected his presence by the silver glow.

And if I wasn’t connected to him, I doubt I’d see even that.
She shoved her hands in her pockets, gripping the can of pepper spray that she carried as a just-in-case. Magic wasn’t always the answer to a problem.

She forced her gaze from Shawn to study the compound. There were lights in four of the seven cabins, and in the main building. At the edge of its dock, a lamp glowed faintly.

The river and the woods felt clean. The death magic had rolled out across them before hitting the containment ward, but it hadn’t come from them. Ruth concentrated on the ugliness of the magic, trying to trace it back to its source. It came from the old resort. Not from one of the seven cabins, not even from outside in a scratched circle of dirt. It came from the main building.

Ruth pressed into the oak tree as a middle-aged man exited one of the cabins, closing its door behind him and rattling the doorknob to check it had locked. Not very trusting. He walked briskly to the main building and entered.

Lights went on in the far windows. Unless the layout of the building had changed since she was a teenager, that was the large conference room. A couple of her friends had worked at the resort in the holidays, and she’d picked them up on the way to parties, concerts or other events. She wondered if the man was setting up for the meeting Erica had discussed with Jared.

Or was he setting up for activities that the meeting of a lonely hearts club would hide? The death magic seemed centered in the far end of the building. The longer she stood here, concentrating on the death magic—the opposite of her healers’ talent—the clearer she saw it. Like grey smoke tinted with red lines, yet heavier, as if emptied from a giant vacuum cleaner bag, it clung to the main building and kind of shuddered.

So far in her healers’ career, she’d been lucky. She’d only encountered death magic twice before, and both times she’d been part of a team with a more senior healer who’d dealt with it. Here, she was the healer. Shawn, guardian and hollerider, could defeat the person using death magic. However, she needed to heal its effects.

Not that she could bring the dead back to life.

Death magic, as its name implied, drew its power from sacrifice.

In its mildest form, and usually called by less ominous names, it could feed on renunciation: the death of a habit, a vow of abstinence, or a surrender could power it. That living self-sacrifice could be immensely powerful not simply for its magic, but because of the intent of the person committing it.

But the dark ugliness of the death magic here indicated that it was by no means so positive. Whoever had cast this magic had physically killed something. Not a person. The cloud of death magic would have been a roiling storm, a crushing psychic pressure in the compound, if a human had died. Instead, it was relatively weak. A small animal had died.

The truly evil used death magic because it gave them a sick thrill to kill. The act was as satisfying as the magic raised. However, evil was rare. Most people who used death magic did so because they were scared. They acted out of the viciousness of their fear. It unbalanced them so that they weren’t able to see healthy ways of dealing with their problems, but reached instead for death magic, which would destroy them.

It always did.

She and Shawn were here to ensure that it didn’t hurt others, or provide the power boost to jump a curse into a plague.

Two women walked out of the cabin nearest to Ruth. The compound was lit enough for safety, but they carried torches anyway, and the younger of them flicked hers this way and that, the beam darting to destroy shadows, only to flinch away.

Death magic destroyed people’s nerves.

Ruth had to control her instinct to send out a protective, soothing energy.

The two women were badly distressed. They huddled together as they nearly ran the last few steps into the main building.

They’d have done better to run away.

A truck drove into the compound. Ruth heard it first, then saw the headlights. Shawn ghosted back to her as Jared Hill and Erica got out of the truck and hurried to the main building. It was as if their arrival signaled the meeting’s opening. Two more men left their cabins and called greetings.

Ten to eleven.

Shawn clasped her hand.

The warmth and positive energy of him glowed through her, and she tightened her fingers convulsively around his.

“It’ll be all right,” he said. “But we need to get in position to see and hear. We’ll go around behind the cabins.”

She followed where he led, still holding his hand. The night wind smelled of the woods and of the muddy riverbank.

At the last cabin, he paused. “I can’t sense magic in anyone in the compound. That could mean that the spell caster won’t be present tonight, or that they’ll arrive suddenly.”

They were crossing the open space from the cabin to the main building when the lights in the conference room went out.

Ruth thought her heart stopped. They were discovered!

But Shawn’s magic remained steady, as did he. He guided Ruth to the edge of the window and positioned her there.

Trusting him, she peered in.

The first man to enter the building struck a match and lit a candle. However, he wasn’t saying anything magical. He was frowning and petulant, middle-aged and carrying some unhealthy weight. It made his crouching over the candle an awkward movement. “Whitney asked me to lead tonight’s session, Doug. You can complain to her in the morning that it should have been you because you’re a
professor
.” So much scorn in that last word. “But when Zach insisted Whitney accompany him to the psychic fair today in Dallas, she knew she wouldn’t be back in time for this session, and she trusted me.”

The speaker rose slowly, shaking out his knees from being crouched. He passed a box of matches to the woman on his left. She was older than him, but bent easily to light the candle at her feet. The box of matches continued around the circle of seven.

“I thought Whitney would be here,” Jared complained, lighting his candle and Erica’s with the swift competence of a man accustomed to starting wood fires. Bideer townsfolk typically heated their homes with wood from the managed forests around them and off-cuts from the local woodworking galleries. “Erica said Whitney called this affirmation meeting.”

Affirmation meeting?
Ruth’s eyebrows rose.

One of the women broke in impatiently, not rude but worried. “Can we just do this and go? I’d like to go to bed.”

The man who’d been quiet so far, leered. “Want some company?”

“And that’s why no woman wants you, Kyle.”

The first man clapped his hands to silence them. “As Whitney taught us, focus on all those who’ve hurt us. We forgive them, but…”

Ruth listened expectantly. A spell could be strengthened or sustained by repetition. The death magic was thick here, so the sacrifice had to have happened in the conference room. Yet she didn’t think any of those currently present knew of it—and Shawn had said they lacked magic.

“Beauty, to me,” the group began in ragged chorus. They used gestures, arms outstretched, pulling in from east, west, north and south.

“Laughter, music, dance and grace, to me.

“Wealth, mine.

“Friendship, mine.

“Renown, respect and power, mine.

“Never alone, never lonely.

“Life, deliver me love.”

That’s not so bad
, Ruth thought.
Maybe even a bit sad.

But then the voices rose in a shout. “You owe me. You owe me. You owe me!”

The death magic surged.

“Let’s go.” Shawn practically carried Ruth back across the compound to the shadow of the last cabin.

She got her legs to work then, overcoming the shock of the curse renewed in front of her, and ran with him, back to the river, along it and to their truck. The relief of exiting the containment ward and shedding the taint of death magic was immense. The cool, clean scents of the river, of water and damp earth, floated on clean air and she sucked them into her lungs gratefully. Even the truck, secondhand and ordinary, was something to appreciate.

“They didn’t set the curse,” she said to Shawn as he started the truck and reversed it out of its concealed parking spot.

“No. But it sounds like Whitney Stirling did.”

That was the conclusion she’d come to as well. It was Whitney who’d established the “affirmation” ceremony. And it was Whitney who people in town seemed distant about. Her husband, Zach, the leader of the cult, was liked; “a good guy, city but not cissy”.

Ruth rubbed her hands one over the other, as if she washed them, while she thought. “The mission briefing didn’t supply much information on Whitney. Zach had been a real estate agent, got out of that during the sub-prime crash, worked for a while as a self-proclaimed marriage therapist, and then, started the Moonlit Hearts Club. Whitney met Zach when he was in real estate. She was a beauty technician. When they got married, she stopped working. Although she seems actively involved in the Moonlit Hearts Club.”

“She does, doesn’t she?” Shawn tapped the steering wheel. “From what they said at the meeting, Whitney and Zach will be back, tomorrow. I’d like to meet them.”

“Me, too. After I’ve contacted the Collegium.”

He glanced at her.

“That spell they chanted,” she began slowly, thinking out loud. “The final line of ‘you owe me’ was tacked onto a standard fortune-calling spell. They were summoning good luck to themselves.”

“Trying to,” Shawn muttered. “Death magic won’t bring them good fortune.”

She nodded. “But that final line, a triple repetition of ‘you owe me’, is different. I need to consult a senior healer at the Collegium if it’s a recognized variant of the fortune spell, or if…”

“If Whitney taught the group that chant, who is the ‘you’ she thinks owes her?” he asked grimly, evidently on the same page as Ruth with his concerns.

“Revenge,” she said. “Vengeance. It’s required for a curse to make the leap to become a plague. If Whitney is trying to get back at someone, and she’s willing to sacrifice an animal to do so, what more might she do?”

“That body in the morgue, the one Dr. Li contacted the Collegium about, no one could find a connection between him and anyone in the cult. But a random stranger as victim, I don’t buy it.” Shawn slowed the truck to pull into the driveway of Rose House.

Ruth gasped and clutched his arm. Thoughts of curses and plague were forgotten. “We switched off the lights upstairs.” The turret windows, on every level, glowed. At her bedroom window, a woman’s figure stood outline a moment, then vanished.

“You’ve got a ghost,” Shawn said.

“Don’t sound so matter of fact.” She slapped his arm.

“Well, it—she—hasn’t proved unfriendly. And the lights look welcoming. Maybe she was worried about you. We did discuss death magic, cults and plague.”

“Huh.” Ruth stared at the house. “I don’t believe in ghosts,” she whispered.

Shawn, meantime, had gotten out of the truck, walked around it, and now, opened her door. “Jump out.”

She thought about her options. If she went to her parents’ farm…they’d never let her return to her house. Not without an exorcism or something, and even then…

Stiffly, she got out of the truck.

Shawn slammed the door shut and put an arm around her. “We’ll get you a bourbon so you sleep. Then you can tell me the ghost stories about the house tomorrow, in daylight.”

“No one died in my house.” She heard her voice go shrill.

“Okay.” He guided her up the front porch steps. “You got your key?”

While she fumbled in her pocket, the door swung open.

Ruth yiked, spun to run, crashed into Shawn, and then tried to burrow into him.

He hugged her, and uttered perhaps the most ominous words of the night. “Good evening.”

“Good evening.” The answering voice was low, musical and feminine. “Won’t you come in?”

Ruth fainted.