Page 13 of Courting Danger
He nodded. “Okay, so what are we looking for?”
“Any evidence of bones?” I said. “Or hair. Or a spell.”
“From the 1800s?” he said, gesturing around to the pristine white walls, the new crown molding, the polished floors.
Point to the officer.
“Well, something,” I said. “Anything.”
We started in the living room, with the assumption that that was where she would have practiced her fake seances. There wasn’t anything but the scent of cinnamon that we tracked to a plug-in room freshener. He was right. The floors might have been the original, but the contractors had sanded them down and stained them.
Nothing was out of place and there wasn’t any obvious spell work. I made a face.
“Maybe her bedroom?” I suggested.
We crept upstairs, King in the lead with his iron poker, me with the salt. Nothing cold hit us, and after all the exertion from the rushing around and casting, the balmy seventy-eight-degree temperature seemed hot. Since King’s back was to me, I took the risk of starting to draw the salty water from the attic to me.
It had dripped down the attic stairs and puddled in the hallway, soaking into the carpet runner. I could even feel it seeping between the wood planks. This was going to be a mess when it was over. With a murmur, I called it to life.
When water vibrates fast enough, it becomes vapor. All it took was convincing the water that the heated air was about thirty degrees hotter than it actually was. It steamed, filling the surrounding air.
Then I called on the salt, reminding it how much fun it had had earlier with the salt version of a sandstorm. It went eagerly, dancing around the hallway.
I kept it small, hoping that King was too focused on the ghosts to notice. He didn’t even glance at me. Maybe he thought the sudden humidity was related to the haunting.
The master bedroom was beyond the wall that King crashed through, and when we passed it, something niggled at me about the guest bedroom. It was probably just the gaping hole in the wall, but it didn’t put my mind at ease. King reached the masterbedroom two doors down and jerked his head for me to go in first.
I spread a fine line of salt across the doorway, hoping that just blocking the liminal space would be enough to keep the ghosts out. Then we searched the room, pushing aside the large rug, even moving the bed to look for anything hidden under there.
The floor was smooth, the walls smoother, where they’d peeled off the old wallpaper and painted it a friendly blue. When we came up empty, I even squeezed into the closet to check if there was anything on the closet ceiling or floor. Nothing.
Huffing in annoyance, I unfolded myself out of small space and saw King smirking. “Having fun in the closet?”
“Now who’s making puns,” I muttered. “I don’t see anything. Let’s check the other bedrooms.”
“Okay,” he agreed.
Stepping out into the hallway, I looked between our choices. The room that King had been thrown into earlier made me frown, but the room across from the master was closer. Eenie, meenie, minie, mo. I picked the room across from the master and stepped inside. A shiver jerked up my spine like the doorway had electrocuted me. Goosebumps rose on my arms.
I tried to back out of the room, but something slightly pliant kept me inside. Looking behind me, I saw a boundary reminiscent of the barrier King had put up to protect Richmond. Only this one was dark. Black wisps crawled over the air. Trapped on the other side, King pressed his hand against it and frowned.
He clearly couldn’t get through either.
I turned in a tight circle and tossed a handful of salt on the ground. With one hand, I spun it into another miniature sandstorm. It wasn’t nearly as much salt as in the attic, but it would have to do.
King was staring at me, his brows tight. He raised his poker, and it bounced off the barrier, even as it left a golden burn in its wake. I started chanting one of the easier spells that I knew, the one my foster mom had taught me to keep water warm. Hopefully he could just see my lips moving and not hear me, because I had a feeling that he spoke Latin and this bathwater charm wouldn’t hold up to scrutiny.
One of the male ghosts crawled out from under the bed like a cockroach, his arms twisted at an odd angle so that he was nearly flat against the floor. Before he could reach me, I wrapped his head in a salty whirlwind and he hissed.
He scrambled back, and I felt a flash of victory before an icy hand closed on my neck. What felt like a snake wrapped twice around my throat, cutting off my air. I pumped as much magic as I could into the salt I had under my control and shoved it backward, into whatever was behind me.
The hiss of contact made me grin even as I felt the grip tighten. With my thumbnail, I opened the salt canister and tossed some over my shoulder. The grip loosened enough for me to wrap a thick layer of salt around my throat. When the creature went to tighten its grip again, it shrieked, rattling the windows.
I saw a flash of green and then King was in the room with me, swinging at something behind me. If he was taking care of the ghost behind me, I had time to get rid of the one in front of me. I mumbled a few witchcraft sounding words, and pulled the salt together into small crystals the size of a pebbles.
It took some convincing, but eventually the salt went along with it. The pebbles drilled through the cockroach ghost, his face getting pockmarked where the salt drove through him. With a final hiss, he withdrew, and I turned to see King swinging at the female ghost.
Her arms were long; she must have wrapped her entire arm around me. The iron was doing its work, though, and wherever ithit her, it sliced a glowing white cut in her skin. With a shriek of rage, she disappeared.
