Authors: Scott V. Duff
“You didn’t do anything wrong, Seth,” Richard said, slipping an arm over my shoulders. “None of us knew what would happen up there. And what you’re describing sounds like blood magic. That can hide in some particularly nasty ways from what I’ve been told. I’ve never seen it personally.”
“Blood magic? Like the man at the warehouse?” I asked, looking to Peter for that answer. Richard wasn’t at the warehouse to know what I meant.
“Kieran said it was blood magic,” Peter said, sucking on the chocolate slowly. “I’ve never seen it either, but it looked nasty enough.”
“Any way we look at it, the fact that you were being spied on is bad,” I told Richard. “You need to check on your wife and daughter as soon as possible.”
“The satellite passes into range tonight,” Richard said.
That was puzzling. As covered as this planet was for communication, he timed satellites?
“Why so long, Dad?” Peter asked, saving me the trouble.
“Their magic interferes with everyday satellite phones,” Richard explained. “From there it’s all geography and politics striving to make the world difficult for all. We had to set up links for land lines.”
“This guy just exploded?” Jimmy asked me.
“Burst into flames right in front of me, just like in the comics,” I said, eating more of the chocolate bar. I could get addicted to this stuff. “You saw the building going up, Jimmy. I didn’t do that.”
“Well, we’re away from it now,” Peter said.
“Yeah, let’s get going, then,” I said, pushing off from the hood.
“Are you sure you don’t want to call it a day? That was pretty traumatic,” Richard said, acting very much like a caring father.
“No, we’re no worse off than we were, unless one of you hasn’t told me something,” I said suspiciously, searching them both over carefully. I didn’t see anything but raised stress and higher hormonal levels, but there were things I didn’t know, a lot of them.
“All we did was watch you get barbecued, so, no, we’re fine,” Peter said, taking my keys. “I’ll drive, though.”
I didn’t object until Richard made moves to climb into the back seat. “My father would kick my butt from here to your house in Canada,” I said, pulling on his shoulder then sliding in behind him. Jimmy collected the trash and disposed of it, then joined me in back. I settled back and closed my eyes, replaying the event in my head over and over, looking for some clue that I missed.
“Seth, quit dwelling,” Peter growled at me after ten minutes. “You did nothing wrong back there.”
“If I’d held him down, he’d be alive right now,” I mumbled.
“He didn’t have to take the knife, y’know,” Jimmy said. “He didn’t have to be sitting in that room spying on Mr. Borland. That man made choices, Seth, just like you and me. He chose to pick up that knife. You didn’t force him to do it.”
I looked over at him, seeing the earnestness in his eyes. “Quit being reasonable, Jimmy. It’s unbecoming.” Richard chuckled.
Jimmy gave directions to Peter that sped up our trip to his house. Side roads that looked longer on the maps but had other roads to cut across. A few months ago, I would have taken a similar route myself but I thought a little differently now. I’d have to get back into the locale if I was going to stay around. Fifteen minutes later, Peter was pulling the car onto the dirt road that led to Jimmy’s old house.
Out by the mailbox was a “For Sale” sign, noting the foreclosure on the sign, from Farmers and Families Realty Company. We would definitely have to investigate that group more heavily. Peter drove very slowly, barely above idling speed, as we all looked out windows searching for something, signs of life, I suppose. The first three hundred feet was nothing but fenced in pastures on the left and woodlands on the right. Ahead of us, an old barn, weather beaten but maintained, stood with one door wide open, the other shut. An old but serviceable tractor stood in front, acting as sentry.
The road curved sharply to the right and opened up suddenly to show the house backed up against the woods, a ranch-style house, as big as my house, but only because of additions over years. Over farther left of the house near the treeline were several old vehicles rusting in the sun and rain. A large propane tank sat on the end of the house. The front yard was fenced in with a large swing set, rusty and unused, the slide hanging by one screw and one swing hanging on one plastic-coated chain. It was no wonder all I saw was Jimmy’s two-year-old truck—it was his finest possession.
But today he wasn’t ashamed of it. Today he was worried about it. Damn, that made me feel like crap.
“Everything look like you left it, Jimmy?” I asked quietly after Peter stopped the car. Nothing moved that wasn’t caused by the breeze.
“I don’t see nothing out of place,” he murmured.
“You said there was livestock,” Peter prompted him. He turned toward the barn.
“The cows could be in the back pasture,” he said thoughtfully. “Momma prolly took the dogs to the pound or got Mr. Mullins to take ‘em. He’s got the farm over the hill.”
We got out of the car and moved toward the house slowly. The three of us searched through the house carefully as we approached, Richard working the astral with Peter and I working the energy plane as well. Jimmy watched us, curious as to what we were looking for but not willing to interrupt us.
“I’m not seeing anything from here,” Peter said finally.
“No, me neither,” Richard said.
“Let’s go in, then,” I said, gathering my courage and starting for the door.
The house faced the southeast and was high enough on the hill to give it a nice view down the pastures. At this time of day, though, it meant the sun was high enough overhead and westward that it gave little light inside the house, even without the curtains. I pushed open the front door and entered the dimly lit room. We were greeted immediately by something rank and rancid. Something had time to rot in the time Mrs. Morgan was gone. The evidence that they’d left in a hurry was on the floors, wads of newspaper and take-out boxes everywhere. I couldn’t blame them for being angry with the mortgage company. The carpeting was marred with divots and stains where furniture sat for years.
The further we went into the house the stranger it felt to me, like I was invading a stranger’s house after it was robbed. It was eerie that way. The layout of the house was simple, rather barbell-shaped. The first room was the living room with the dining room and kitchen behind it. The Master bedroom was to my right. One long hall connected the other two bedrooms to a utility room and the garage, converted into a fourth bedroom.
“Which room is which?” I asked, looking down the hallway.
“My room is the end of the hall,” Jimmy said, coming up beside me and pointing into the darkness. “The bedroom on the left was Cecilia’s. Across the hall was Momma’s sewing room. That’s Momma and Daddy’s room back ‘ere. His office is off of that.”
“I really need to put some flashlights in the car,” I mumbled to myself.
“Oh, I might be able to fix that,” Jimmy said and hurried down the dark hall.
“Jimmy, wait—” I said, but he was already gone, a door slamming in the dark. Peter came out of the kitchen, gagging, as Richard went into the sewing room, chuckling at him and tossing a small sphere of pale blue light into the air. I grinned at Peter and tossed my own blue light up, directing it into the Master bedroom ahead of me.
There was a strange feeling at the door that made me pause. It hit me fairly quickly, the first oddity. The room was still completely furnished. I stood in the doorway and looked around. The furniture was all dark woods, while the walls were lighter. Mrs. Morgan obviously went for lighter contrasts with textures, using fabrics in tablecloths and window treatments. It was hard to see the designs in the dark as the room seemed to drink in the light of the sphere. Not seeing anything dangerous I walked in slowly, still suspicious of the simple amenities of life. Dragging my fingers lightly across the top of the dresser as I rounded the king-sized bed, I noticed the thick coating of dust, grinding it between my thumb and forefinger. It was really thick.
Peter appeared in the door and watched me stare at my fingertips. “This is blood,” I said, looking up at him. That’s when I saw the elephant in the room, the bodies on the bed and, even more oddly, on the wall. The lamp on the bedside table blocked them from the doorway.
I must have showed the shock; Peter walked straight to the bed and said, “Fuck.”
Richard was at the door, too, mere seconds behind Peter, alarmed by his language alone. Peter didn’t use such expletives lightly. “Damn,” Richard added, gripping the bedpost tightly. “Any ideas who?”
“The man nailed to the wall is John Morgan, Jimmy’s father,” I told them quietly, watching for Jimmy. “At least, I think it’s him. I only met him once and seeing as his face is messed up, I could be mistaken. It stands to reason that the woman on the bed is Mrs. Morgan and the girl is Cecilia.”
“Why is it so clean? They’re eviscerated. It should be messier, grosser,” Peter said, disturbed at the sight.
“I think they were drained for some reason,” I said. “Look at the dust. It’s dried blood and it’s all over the place, like somebody misted the room before they left. Dust even fell on top of it. You can see that on top of the chest over there.” Richard turned to stare at me in wonder, apparently surprised at something I’d said. “What?”
“You got all of that in fifteen seconds?” Richard asked.
“Well, a bit more, but, yeah,” I said.
“More?” Richard asked.
“Not a particularly nice ‘more’ either, I afraid,” I said, looking at the blood-free comforter the bodies were so carefully laid out on. I let my senses invade the room again, feeling for the dust that coated the surfaces of everything, like the first time I discovered the blood. Sorting through the different samples and ignoring duplicates, I couldn’t differentiate a cow from a dog from a man by the blood sample. I didn’t know enough, but by counting using Jimmy’s numbers… “The amount and type of blood here appears to account for Jimmy’s family and all the livestock, but maybe one cow,” I said quietly. There had to be something here, something in the blood that set off the magic that caused a spell to ignite. I could see the power working once it started, but I just couldn’t see what was triggering it.
The lights snapped on suddenly, blinding us for a few seconds as every light in the room blazed to over-sized life. The hum of older fluorescent lights started a second before the flicker.
Threes do seem to be important numbers in the universe. I had one mistake under my belt and now for number two: I was in too deep. There had to be something that connected the blood to magic. The answer was sympathy. A very peculiar kind of sympathetic magic links the blood to the astral plane just enough to ignite the spells. It limited the types of magic it could work, too.
Jimmy ran through the door. “I jumped the breaker box. What are y’all staring at?”
The sympathy magic ignited. I got to see it up close and personal. Didn’t like it, not one bit. I was just the passenger of the psychic onslaught that attacked Jimmy as he first saw his father nailed to the wall. In one searing instant, the pain and horror visited on each and every member of Jimmy’s family until their deaths was pounded into his head and mine as I fought to understand how to break its hold on Jimmy. Breaking the sympathy was the only answer I had.
And Daybreak said,
Mine.
“Tell me he’s okay, Peter,” I said, nervously pacing over Jimmy in the front yard. He looked all right to me, just in shock. Aftershock, really, I’d come on pretty strong when I hit him.
“He looks like he’ll be okay,” Peter proclaimed, sitting back on his heels. “What happened? It looked like he was attacked by static electricity.”
“Interesting analogy,” I said. “When Jimmy came into the room, his shock at seeing his family desecrated triggered the blood magic to attack. That would be the static electricity effect, I believe. The magic then pounded his mind with memories of each person’s torture including the evisceration. My bet is that this was merely a distraction for the main spell, which took longer to activate, but would be nicely hastened by the victim’s misery. The one that burned them to a pulp and took the building with ‘em.”
“Damn, you’re good, kid,” Richard said quietly.
“Not good enough,” I said, glancing his way. “This spell, and maybe all blood magic, works on sympathy. The blood had a sympathetic hold on Jimmy through his family bonds. I broke that hold by claiming a stronger, previous bond.”
“What kind of bond?” Peter asked, confused. “What came before his family?”
“Not before his family, before the abomination that attacked him,” I explained slowly, barely taking the ramifications in myself. “Peter, I forced the geas and claimed him. The one I put there earlier today.”
Peter looked up at me, eyebrows furrowed together. “You mean, like…” he let the question hang there, unasked.
“Just like Marchand suggested?” I finished it for him. It wasn’t the direction he was going, but the trail ended in the same place. And it was a shameful place. My guilt.
“Seth, this isn’t the same thing as what Marchand said,” Peter argued, standing up between me and Jimmy, crossing his arms and looking angry at me.
“Isn’t it? Consider this carefully, Pete,” I said softly. I could see Richard watching a short distance away, not understanding anything we were talking about. “First I’m getting ticked off at you for thinking I can tear through some poor sucker’s head. Next thing I know, I’m pickin’ up the fact the some asshole likes to hit his women to prove his manhood. Marchand says I’ll be stealing men’s souls and lookie here…” I point to Jimmy lying on the ground in some sort of fugue state, both conscious and unconscious at the same time.
“Show me.”
“What?” That shocked me.
“Show me what happened, from the time Jimmy Morgan came into that room to when we hauled him out. Show it to me,” he insisted. I could feel him opening his mind and probing into my cavern. We’d shared this intimacy before and these were familiar paths for us.
I clamped down hard on those connections, though. “No! I won’t put you through that! That’s why I took Jimmy in the first place because of the torture that spell put him through!” Now I was angry with Peter. We faced off in the yard, arms tense and ready to strike out.
“That’s why it’s different, Seth,” Peter said. He was still mad, but not fighting mad. “If, and it’s still a big ‘if,’ it turns out you claimed Jimmy like one of the Fae, you didn’t do it to build an army or enthrall him, you did it to save his life. It’s that simple. And, damn it, Seth, you’re seventeen years old! You will make mistakes.” He pointed at his father. “He’s a hundred and eighty-eight years old. He makes mistakes. Your father is over six hundred years old. He makes mistakes. Get over it!”
“Le—av… Seth—” Jimmy mumbled, dazed, barely a whisper. He was beginning to come out of whatever paralysis held him. All my attention turned to him. His jumbled thoughts were a hurricane of disjointed pictures and ideas without reason. His words, though, were very clear, “Leave Seth alone.” He was trying to defend me against Peter, an idea wrong on so many levels but predictable considering the circumstances.
Without really thinking, I reached into my room on Gilán and retrieved a blanket and a good-sized pillow off of my bed as I moved with Peter to Jimmy’s side. Shushing him gently, we eased him up and shoved the pillow under his head and shoulders and wrapped the blanket around him.
“Just relax, Jimmy. You’ll be okay, now,” I said softly. He latched onto my arm tightly.
“Seth?” he croaked, his mouth and throat dry from screaming. Peter lifted his head up and put a bottle of water to his mouth.
“Sip slowly, Jimmy,” Peter said. “Easy now. Seth’s right beside you.”
“I’m right here, Jimmy,” I murmured, searching through him again for anything I might be able to heal or help in some way. The blood magic hadn’t gotten very far in the physical aspects. Most of the damage was emotional, spiritual—the interface between the body and the soul. I didn’t know enough about those areas to even begin to help… That’s when I realized how wrong I was.
“Damn.”
“What’s wrong?” Peter asked, still helping Jimmy drink.
I touched Jimmy’s forehead lightly and said, “Jimmy,
go back to sleep.
” I wasn’t exactly sure what language it was, but it worked. “Richard,” I called past Peter, “I need to speak to my brother for a moment, so I’m going to box us in. I do apologize, but it’s rather personal for me.”
“Oh, no, no. I understand,” Richard said and went to the car to give me privacy.
“I don’t know what to do, Peter,” I said, sitting down cross-legged, taking Jimmy’s hand as I moved to keep the skin contact he seemed to need. “This is
so wrong
to do to someone, but I can edit his memories. I can take out the gutting of his family of this sadistic—, rgrhg, I don’t have a word for this person. How can I not do it? But how can I justify doing this now? And against his will?
“What do I do?” I pleaded.
“Wow. When you open a can o’worms, you don’t do it by halves, do ya?” Peter said, grinning sadly. “Think about it this way: those memories were not Jimmy’s experiences. They were manufactured in some way, whether recorded or produced artificially. We don’t actually know certainly. You would be removing the affects of the magic, not actual memories that he went through himself. And if you’re worried about it, tell him. Let him decide if he wants to know about it. You’re not excising brain cells. You’re changing memory heuristics, right?” I nodded to answer the question, still thinking about his argument.
“And that’s not really going to change a lot for him, either,” I said as I readied my mind to do something I felt so reprehensible for doing. “Damn, I can’t believe I’m doing this,” I said softly as I invaded Jimmy’s mind. The geysers of horror were easy to see, in inky black and purplish-pink in his psyche, odd colors I thought. From there, it was easier to stand in the way of those memories, to actively block them, than to remove them. For now anyway, I capped the geysers with solid nodes of Gilán blue. Jimmy could decide later if I should enclose the nodes and destroy the contents. Now if I could do that to my copies…
“Jimmy, you can wake up now,” I said softly, pulling back from his mind. “I’m done.”
“That helped,” Peter noted as Jimmy’s entire body relaxed at once, released from its torment. Now I had physical affects to work with, and pushed healing energies through him, releasing the power evenly and allowing it to be used to nourish. I sent a short wave of power through to finish off the last of the rigor-producing acids in his muscular system. He fell into a natural sleep rhythm that would wake him very soon.
Dropping the sound-blocking barrier around us, I called loudly, “Thank you, Richard. I’m done.” He ambled back slowly, looking back and forth between the house and us. “Peter, go ahead and tell your father what I’ve done and why, but let’s keep this in the family, please.”
“I understand that. We should call somebody about the murders, too,” he added. “Probably out of the city’s jurisdiction.”
“Call Harris. See what he says,” I suggested. “I’ll buzz Ethan, tell him what’s happened, so he can tell Kieran and Mike.”
“Okay, Seth,” he said, reaching over Jimmy and lifting my chin up until I met his eyes. “You did good in there, Seth. And you did good out here. Don’t keep kicking yourself because you’re not perfect, or I’ll have to start kicking you, too.” I gave him a weak smile as he patted my check twice and stood up.
Peter pulled his cell phone out just as Jimmy woke, screaming at the top of his lungs, “Momma!” He bolted upright, tensing every muscle he had again. His eyes were bloodshot and his face bright red as his scream waned with his emptying lungs. All three of us had jumped, but none of us were surprised by his outburst.
I wrapped an arm around his shoulder, took his hand in mine, and began murmuring: “I’ve got you, Jimmy. You’re safe now.” Over and over, like a mantra, I repeated it in his ear as he melted against me, sobbing. He still had the visions of his desecrated family. His father nailed to the wall and his mother and sister laid out on the bed below him. All I blocked from him was how they got that way. Finally, I did take some comfort in that.
Ethan, we have a problem,
I brushed the anchor and sent my thoughts through.
Seth? What’s wrong? You seem… depressed,
Ethan pushed through the anchor and into my cavern. I dropped down and related everything that happened since lunch. He was not happy. Kieran and Mike were finishing the second interview as we spoke. He would explain to Kieran between the second and third, but we both expected that they would come back to the house. He said they’d go ahead and hire the first guy, but probably not the second woman, too flighty. They’d see about the third. Our conversation took about three seconds. Peter was still on “…this is Peter Borland…” and Jimmy was still wracked in sobs and tears.
I considered overriding Jimmy’s emotions for a moment. Push the pain of loss and grief back and let him deal with it in smaller increments. There’s where I caught myself.
That
was exactly the slippery slope I needed to avoid, the minor editing of people’s lives. Whether I liked it or not, whether
he
liked it or not, he’d seen the bodies of his family and he needed to deal with it. I just had to have the decency to be there for him now.
“Yes, Marshal, we’re quite certain it was blood magic,” Peter said tersely into his phone, coming back to me. “If you’re doubting his veracity, I’m sure that Seth would be more than happy to replay both directly into your brain… You sure? He’d love …” He rolled his eyes at me while he talked to Harris. “We don’t care. We just need to know who we should call… Okay, how long will that take?”
“Seth?” Jimmy whispered hoarsely.
Peter handed me a small bundle of napkins from the car, along with a bottled water, and walked off to finish with Harris.
“Yes, Jimmy?”
“Why do I keep seeing you in my head?” he asked, still holding himself tightly against me, sniffling, his head tucked under my chin like a child’s.
“I don’t know, Jimmy,” I said, handing him the napkins. “How are you seeing me?”
“Bright,” he said, softly, then he pulled away, dropping a hand to my thigh, keeping contact subconsciously. “You’re so bright, even now.”
I handed him a napkin to wipe away the rivers of snot and tears. “I guess you’re seeing part of my magic at work,” I said. Not wanting to push him, I peeked into his mind to see what he remembered of the last hour. He appeared to have a complete memory of it, not blocking anything as too horrifying except what I had locked up. “How are you feeling?”
“Awful,” he answered after a few seconds of thought. “I guess I have my answer, though, huh?”
“Yeah,” I said, sadly. “I guess ya do.”
“Sumpin’ was tryin’ ta eat me in there, wadn’it?”
“Yeah. Pretty much.”
“You stopped it.” It wasn’t a question. He just knew I was responsible.
“Yes, I stopped it.”
“What’s that sound?” he asked, crooking his head a little to the side.
“I don’t hear anything unusual,” I said. Hooking into his hearing didn’t help either. Moving up to his consciousness, I heard what he meant fairly quickly. “Oh, that. That, Jimmy, is Gilán calling to you. I… need to explain something. I made a pretty big mistake and I’m not sure how to fix it. And that sound is part of it.”
Peter walked over again covering his phone, a welcome interruption. “Harris is sending someone from the FBI over. Lead agent’s name is Messner. He says it’ll take over three hours to get them here from Atlanta.”
“What about the Dugard Suite Hotel? How fast can they get there?” I asked, remembering that parking lot extremely well. That was where Kieran and Ethan had floated away after Harris first attacked us.
Peter relayed the question to Harris. “Well, have them turn around, then,” Peter snapped. “This is going to save all of us and them three hours, Marshal.” He listened for a moment, then said, “Thank you. We’ll meet them in the parking lot in twenty minutes. There’ll be four of us.” He cut the connection, breathing out with “Idiot,” showing just how edgy he was feeling. “Dad and I are gonna get a quick look in his office. You need to decide how you’re gonna set up a portal for the FBI team. There’s gonna be trucks or vans for evidence gathering, fairly sensitive equipment. No idea how many.” He took off for the house hurriedly, meeting his father halfway to the door.