I closed my hand tight around the handle of my grandmother’s wooden spoon and tapped into the warm, safe memories. A cone of cold, blindingly bright white light flared from the athame, forcing back the darkness.
Teag began to murmur under his breath. He reached down to several macramé knots that hung from his belt loops, and loosened one of them, sending a surge of stored magical power through his staff. He swung the staff in a semi-circle behind us, and the darkness crept back, just beyond the reach of his staff.
My teeth were chattering. Light frost glittered on the windshield. Murmured voices were all around us, so many that I couldn’t make them out clearly, only a word here and there.
Help us… save us… beg for mercy… hunting us… destroyed… feed on us… mercy…
The speakers might have been long dead, but there was no mistaking the cold terror in their voices. Something had frightened the dead out of their wits, scared them badly enough to beg the living for help, to use what precious energy they hoarded to make themselves seen and heard to us.
“We’re trying to help,” I said, addressing the darkness. I’m not a psychic. For all I knew, talking out loud without being a medium was like yelling at your cell phone without a signal.
“Who’s doing this? Who is trying to hurt you?” The spirits remained silent, but I took it as a good sign that they had not surged toward us. “Is it the Reapers? We’re trying to stop the things hunting you. Please, help us do our job.”
Teag and I exchanged a glance. If it came to a fight, he and I had the skills and the weapons to do some damage. I hoped it wouldn’t get that far. “Do you think they heard me?”
Just then, the darkness rolled back like the tide, away from the rental car and back toward the edges of the lot. “Thank you,” I said. “We will find an answer.”
Hurry…
KELL HAD INVITED Teag and me to come out with his group and see the havoc the ghosts were causing, so here we were at the place everyone called the ‘murder house’.
The big white house on the outskirts of the city was stunning in its day. Teag and I had called up everything we could online. It didn’t take us long to find details. The Blake house was built in 1936, and the white-columned mansion was large and impressive. A brick and wrought iron fence faced the street, opening onto a long curved driveway. Even now, after years of neglect and vandalism, I could imagine what the old place must have looked like in its heyday.
Kell grinned. “Nobody’s surprised that the Blake house has ghosts. We’re surprised how much the ghosts have changed.”
I had the floor plan to the house in a pocket of my jacket. The Blake house had been on and off the market for a long time, so details were easy to find. Once I read the house’s history, it didn’t surprise me that the house hadn’t sold. Some stains don’t wash clean.
“I’m surprised the place is still standing,” I commented. The front door and the large French doors on the first floor were boarded up. Upstairs, some of the windows were broken and the rest were filthy. Knee-high weeds and overgrown bushes nearly hid the house from the road.
“Must have been amazing when it was built,” Kell said, looking up at the big home.
“I heard it had its own movie room, back in the 1930s.” Pete was a short, wiry ginger with the look of a welter-weight wrestler.
“I heard it had air conditioning, even way back then,” Calista added. She was rocking a goth librarian vibe, even dressed to explore.
Tarleton, as the Blakes called their new home, was once a showpiece. Magnolias flanked the wide front porch, an old live oak graced the front yard and there was a swimming pool in the back. The mansion was meant to impress.
“They bombed with the name,” Kell sniffed. “The only worse thing they could have called it would have been ‘Sherman’s Acres’.”
I couldn’t resist chuckling. Kell was right. Charleston has a long memory, and doesn’t forgive easily. Banastre Tarleton was a British general who laid siege to Charleston during the Revolutionary War and tried to burn Middleburg Plantation, a local historic treasure. That made him about as popular as Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman, who burned his way