Hell Fire

Lost Cause

I followed them to the courthouse, where they had a tiny jail in the basement, but it didn’t do any good.

“You can pick him up in the morning,” the sheriff said with a jovial smile. “Once I’ve heard from the doc. Don’t fret, miss. We’ll take good care of him.”

I was afraid of that. I gave Chance a desperate look from across the room. He sat, quiet, on a cot. As if he felt the weight of my gaze, he glanced up from his clasped hands. “I’ll be fine,” he said, obviously trying to reassure me. “See you tomorrow, Corine.”

I wished I could’ve said something that would’ve made a difference. If his luck worked there, then I could believe he would be fine but, like the cell phones, so far it had only functioned in the library, which was closed to us for the duration of our stay. Edna had made it clear that if we came in again, she’d call the sheriff.

Dispirited, I turned and trudged back up to the street, where the Mustang sat at a metered spot. I got in and mangled the manual transmission as I drove out of town. My speed gradually accelerated. I’d lost track of time and thought I might find Jesse waiting for me, but there was no Forester parked in front when I arrived.

Butch hopped out of my purse and did a perimeter check. That meant peeing at various corners of the house, but he seemed calm enough when he returned. The weather was better than it had been, cool and temperate, but not rainy. I didn’t know how I’d like being out here after dark, but before night fell, I had work to do. It kept me from thinking.

With a lot of heaving and huffing, I managed to get all the supplies up on the porch. I had no idea how I was going to get all the herbs mixed and then poured around the foundation of the house. Chuch used a wheelbarrow. I’d never done wards by myself before. In fact, I wasn’t even sure what ratio to use. I couldn’t call anyone to ask, either.

I’d never felt more alone in my life.

Trying not to think about Chance, I unloaded the staples we’d purchased: coffee, tea, sugar, instant milk, raisins, peanut butter, jelly, rice, bread, and a bag of apples. I assumed we could survive for a good long while on this kind of thing. In fact, I remembered my mother making rice pudding out of sugar, rice, raisins, and instant milk. I stashed our groceries in the cupboard, where I found unexpected bounty, a tin of unopened powdered eggs.

I topped off Butch’s food and freshened up his water, then stood staring out the window above the kitchen sink for a moment. Oddly enough, I felt safer in a house where the walls bled berry juice, close to woods that used to terrify me. My dread had solidified, and what I needed to fear lay inside the town borders, not out here. These . . . were just trees, however skeletal and imposing.

I explored the house, looking for a big bin of some kind. Butch trotted along behind me, not seeming to want to let me out of his sight. I couldn’t blame him. He’d whined all the way back to the house, trying to tell me we were a human short. Unfortunately, I couldn’t do anything about it.

“I’ll have to check the attic,” I told him.

He yapped twice, disagreeing. I guess he thought we should get back in the Mustang, get Chance, and blow this creepy town. For a dog, he had good instincts.

After some searching, I found the pull cord and tugged the stairs down in a puff of dust. I stared up into the dark, slanted maw, and then gathered my courage. I climbed slowly, hands on the upper steps, until my head and shoulders emerged into the eerie twilight created by the triangular slatted window.

My imagination too easily created a scenario where a madwoman was locked up there. I felt loath to enter, mainly because the space seemed to be unfinished, boards laid in a lattice across visible insulation. Even at the best of times, I didn’t qualify as coordinated.

Still, the house wasn’t going to ward itself, so I inched up the ladder and onto the first plank. It bucked under my feet, and I let out a yelp that would do the dog credit. As I windmilled my arms, I imagined myself splattered at the bottom of the ladder. That didn’t help, so I skip-hopped forward three paces, and my weight distribution steadied the board.

That was key to walking around up there, sort of like being on a balance beam, except I couldn’t step on the ends. As long as I kept to the middle, it seemed sturdy enough. There was a fair amount of junk up there, most of it worthless. I bypassed a chest full of old clothes and a dressmaker’s dummy, shoved up against the wall.

I couldn’t help my fascination with that triangular window, so I shuffled over to look at the slats nailed across it, definitely not storm shutters. But then, I’d known that, even from out front. A tiny shriek escaped me when I realized what I was seeing.

Scratch marks on the white paint, rusty streaks. Someone had clawed at these, desperate to escape. Someone had been imprisoned.

I shouldn’t. It wouldn’t give me any peace, yet I found myself unable to resist touching my fingers to the scars. I screamed.

Pain subsumed me, and in a fiery rush, the world melted.

She’s not more than twelve or a tiny thirteen, a child, really. Her dark hair hangs lank around her sallow face, all eyes and jutting bone. She’s starving, eating insects to supplement the bread and water. She knows pain, grief, and in-comprehension. They think she’s mad. They won’t listen to what she knows is true. They say she’s demon touched.

She scratches at these boards, day after day. One day, she will break free. One day, she will fly. Then she turns from the window, and—

I lost her. I didn’t know what became of her. Nothing else I touched yielded a flicker of charge; nothing else had absorbed enough of her energy. I felt sick, shaken. The weight of conspiracy seemed too much for me to bear; this town had a hundred years of them, not just what happened to my mother. I envisioned them as blood soaked into the red Georgia dirt, bones buried beneath the stones that paved the streets.

I staggered, hardly remembering why I’d come up. At last I spied a galvanized metal tub, probably used for laundry a hundred years ago. Butch barked somewhere in the distance. I called, “Heads up!” before letting go. The tub clanged when it hit the floor, but I didn’t hear anything else.

The house sat weirdly still and silent, waiting, as I came down the ladder. I felt like I was no longer alone, and yet, conversely, Butch had stopped barking. I didn’t know where he’d gone.

Did I leave the door open?

Tub forgotten, I pressed my back to the wall and inched my way along toward the parlor. I found nothing so convenient as a candlestick to use as a weapon. Whatever waited for me out there, I’d have to face it bare-handed. I heard the unmistakable sound of a gun being cocked.

Then I went boneless as a familiar voice said, “Come out where I can see you. Slowly. I have a weapon. I will not hesitate to use it.”

“Jesse?” I breathed.

“Corine?” He stepped around the corner, and he seemed to slump a little in relief. Nothing like fearing for someone’s safety to make a man forget he was mad. After the mess I’d left him in Laredo—a dead partner and a field full of bodies used in necromantic magick—it was a wonder he would come looking for me at all.

Jesse Saldana was an intriguing mix of long, tall Texan in battered boots, touched with Latin heat. He had a nice face, if scruffy and unshaven. He looked tired, as if he’d continuously run his hands through his tawny, sun-streaked hair. Ostensibly my mentor, in charge of introducing me to Gifted society, he’d hinted that he wanted to be more. Empathy was his particular gift; sometimes it was nice to have a man who knew how you felt. Right then, it was damn convenient.

I managed a smile. “The same.”

“Your dog was out front in hysterics. I came in, saw your car, but couldn’t find anybody. I had a feeling something was wrong, but I couldn’t get a fix on what. I pounded on the door, but it was unlocked, and—”

“You got worried.” Up in the attic, I hadn’t heard a thing, lost in someone else’s memories.

“To say the least.” He came toward me then and swept me up in a big hug. A small blue spark showed when we touched, not unpleasant—just the reaction of our two gifts renewing acquaintance. I let myself lean for a moment, so glad to see him I couldn’t speak. He stood back and took a look at me. “You seem to be in one piece . . . but I wonder what had that dog so worked up. Where’s Chance?”

A strangled laugh that wanted to be a sob hiccupped out of me. I backtracked to where the tub lay on its side in the hall. “Put the ladder back up, help me with the wards, and I’ll fill you in.”

If Jesse thought my priorities strange, he didn’t say so. Instead, he gave me a quick and dirty course on what herbs we should mix and how much, along with the spoken words. He explained, “This would possess more power if we were practitioners, but the herbs alone should work. You bought just about every protective plant known to man.”

“That was the idea.”

“A good witch can ward a house without the herbs,” Jesse told me, “weaving protective energy in place like a net.”

He’d know that because of Maris, an ex-lover who died because she could have identified the warlock involved in a kidnapping we’d investigated in Laredo.

We went around the house three times, intoning, “Three times around, three times about, the world within, the world without; we deny all access to any who mean us ill, whether through doorway, tiny crack, or windowsill.” I made sure we wedged the ward mixture well up against the foundation, where it would theoretically bond with the stone. The last step sometimes failed in newer houses where there was often too much inorganic material.

Not content with that, I went through the interior of the house and lined the windows and doorjambs. I had mixed feelings about protecting a house where that poor girl had been locked up . . . but maybe she hadn’t died there. By the time we finished evil-proofing the place, I’d filled him in on everything that had happened.

Saldana got out his cell and dialed. At first I thought he didn’t believe me; then I realized he meant to test our wards. To my delight, my phone rang.

“Well, there’s one problem solved,” he said, ending the connection. “As for the rest, it’s a hell of a mess, sugar. We should get back to town and see what we can do for Chance. We can’t leave him there overnight.”

Tell me something I don’t know.

With Jesse, a cop from Texas, by my side, they might listen. He knew the law better than I did, and he had physical presence to back up his claims. We just needed to grab Butch and . . .

The silence troubled me. For a moment, I couldn’t decide why, and then it hit me. I hadn’t heard or seen the dog since Saldana arrived.

“Have you seen Butch?”

Jesse cocked his head. “He was outside, watching us work, wasn’t he?”

“Was he?”

We scoured the yard, calling for him. I grew more frantic with each passing moment. I would’ve given a year of my life to see Butch come bounding out of the woods. I saw only stillness, trees wrapped in autumn skins.

“Should we go looking for him?”

Definitely, we should. I just didn’t look forward to thrashing around in the woods. This felt like a trap, like we were being herded, but I couldn’t just leave him.

I sighed. “Let’s make a couple peanut butter sandwiches and then take off. Looks like we’re going for a hike.”

The forest stood watchful, as if it had eyes trained on us. Trees tangled their limbs together, creating a thorny wall, ringed in deciduous greenery. Inside, it would be cool, shadowed, dark, with soft things squishing underfoot. I remembered well.

If I’d ever wanted to do anything less, I couldn’t remember.