Where There's a Witch Page 8

  Tara shrugged off my question. “It’s no biggie. Really. There is nothing to worry about. Come on, Maggie—would I lie to you?”

  Did I have a moment to think about that?

  I could “just say no” . . . but I had a feeling if I did, they would just go off and Ouija by themselves. At least with me there keeping a watchful eye, things couldn’t get too out of hand.

  I plopped down on the sofa and folded my arms. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Well, for one thing, you can get rid of any bummer energy you’ve got goin’ on,” Tara said with a measuring glance. “Loosen up, for the god’s sake. It’ll be okay. Trust.”

  Somehow I found it hard to trust my spiritual well-being to the willful actions of a teenager. Sue me.

  “All right, have it your way.” I closed my eyes, shook my head a little bit and shook my hands at the wrists, letting my breath huff out of me. It might look goofy, but it was a tried-and-true method that worked like a charm. With a last purposeful swipe down the length of each arm, I opened my eyes again and tried a smile. “Better?”

  Tara shrugged. “It’ll do. Put two fingertips on the glass. You, too, Evil.”

  “Just like with the pointer, I’m guessing?” said Evie, complying.

  “ ’Xactly. Now center yourselves. Find your place. Just like when you’re meditating. Now, I’m going to ask my Guides to protect me from any and all negative influences. You can do the same either out loud or mentally; makes no difference either way. Both ways work.”

  I most fervently and earnestly requested protection from my Guides. Other than with the pendulum, I’d not been in contact with them on a conscious level, but I had no doubts that my Guides—or angels, if you prefer—were in fact an influence on my life. They were out there somewhere, working away in the background. I was still trying to figure out how to work with them, or how to step aside completely and let them do their job without me mucking things up.

  “Everyone ready?” Tara asked.

  “First question: who is Maggie here going to marry?” Evie asked quickly with a grin and a giggle. Obviously she was less worried about the use of the homemade board.

  “Well, that wouldn’t have been my first question, but . . . whatevs.”

  The glass zipped smoothly to the letter M.

  “Very funny,” I said wryly. “Which one of you pushed it?”

  “Not me!”

  “I didn’t push anything,” Tara said indignantly. “No one better be pushing the glass. The whole point of this is to be able to trust the response as not coming from us, capisce? All right, then. We will skip Evie’s nosy-ass question, since it has nothing whatsoever to do with the church weirdness. Sorry, Eves. No offense. Anyway. Just like a séance here.”

  Séance? Had we said anything about a séance? It was one thing when Liss was leading a foray into the beyond. I wasn’t sure I was entirely comfortable with this . . .

  Still, what could happen? It wasn’t much past four thirty in the afternoon. Daylight was filtering through the small windows, and we had the lamps in the living room turned on high. It didn’t eliminate all the shadows in the room, but it was a good start.

  “We’re going to think together, back to the churchyard construction site, because we’re going to send ourselves back there. I want you both to retrace your steps. Really see it in your mind’s eye. Feel the crunch of the dried-out grass beneath your feet. The heat from the sun on your face. Taste the lemonade on your tongue. Remember the faces of the people you passed. Got it all in your mind? Are you really seeing it? Experiencing it again? Good,” Tara said in an even tone that was surprisingly soothing. “Now go back to the moment the excavator broke through the crust of the dirt, when we moved to stand with the crew, to see what was happening firsthand. There was an energy there at that place. Focus on that energy. Really focus . . .”

  I was beginning to feel . . . unsettled. My stomach . . . it felt as though the muscles were tightening in my abdomen, from the very core of me all the way up, like an elevator moving up in its shaft, floor by floor by floor. Tightening. Gripping. Closing like a vise. My breathing had grown shallow; no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t seem to draw a deep breath into my lungs. I could only get so much air, and I was starting to see stars, I was starting to see . . .

  Next to me, Evie moaned.

  I came back into myself, just the teensiest bit. Enough to realize that the wineglass beneath my fingertips was quivering, ever so slightly.

  I opened my eyes and looked at Evie. Her eyes were squinched together hard, making the middle third of her face a mass of furrows and lines.

  “If there is anyone here with us now who would like to make a connection with us, someone with information about what happened at the churchyard, then we invite you to speak. Use the glass to give us your message,” Tara intoned, taking no notice of Evie.

  But I noticed. I could feel her tension traveling through the glass and up my right arm, settling itself at my shoulders until they felt knotted and tight. I breathed deeply. Normally I would have gathered my own energy and pushed back to keep the stray tendrils from infiltrating my own . . . but this was Evie we were talking about here. Whatever she was experiencing, it was better that I didn’t close myself off, just in case. Two intuitives are better than one when it came to protection.

  “There is something here,” Tara said, her eyes still closed.

  “Evie, are you okay?” I whispered. Waves of energy were coming through the glass, either from Evie herself or from something that had joined the party.

  She didn’t answer. Her head had fallen forward, her chin dropped down toward her chest, and her pale bangs fell in a wispy curtain over her eyes. Her fingertips rested lightly on top of the overturned glass, but the nail beds had gone white, as though she was applying great pressure.

  The glass lifted on one side, then set itself back down. I blinked at it. Had I actually seen that?

  I had.

  Chapter 6

  I yanked my fingertips from the glass. “Tara, snap out of it. Something’s wrong.” I reached out and put my hands on Evie’s cheeks. “Evie, honey. Look at me.”

  Tara pulled her hands back in her lap and rubbed them together as though trying to scrub away dirt. She was looking at Evie now, too, and biting her lip. “What happened? Why is she like that?”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be the expert at this Ouija thing?” I snapped. I’d probably regret that later, but right now all I could think about was Evie, and I didn’t like what I saw. Evie’s eyes were unfocused but open, her breathing shallow. I brushed her hair out of her eyes, willing everything to be all right.

  “She’s never done that before,” was Tara’s defiant answer. “Come on, Evie, whatever it is, switch it off. Just like we’ve talked about, remember? You’re in control. Flip that switch.”

  “Trouble.” The word sprang from Evie’s lips, and all of a sudden her eyes flared open, clear as the morning sky. Her gaze searched out mine. “Trouble.”

  Relief flooded through me. I could have hugged her, but instead all I did was pat her maternally on the cheek. “Oh my goodness. Oh, thank heavens.” And God. And the Goddess. And all the angels and Guides and Guardians, for that matter. I was an equal-opportunity gratuitist. “You scared the bejeebers out of me for a second there, Evie.” Then I paused, frowning. “Wait. What do you mean, trouble?”

  “There’s something wrong with that . . . that place,” she said. She still looked like she was in that half-dazed state of trance, where threads from the astral were tugging at your energies, pulling you in.

  I frowned. The glass jumped again. “Evie, take your hands from the glass.”

  She blinked drowsily at me. “Hm? Oh, sure. Sorry.” She slipped her hands back into her lap, leaving the overturned wineglass on the coffee table with its surround of alphanumeric sticky notes.

  “Eves, what did you mean that you think there’s something wrong with that place?” Tara asked a little impatiently. �
��What did you get just now?”

  Evie turned dreamy eyes her way. “I think something bad is going to happen.”

  Such a strange voice, so sleepy and sweet and calm. So preternaturally wise with the kind of knowing I recognized. It came with the territory, the knowing. The intuition. Thanks to my own so-called gifts, I had come to understand with a resigned sense of certainty that, whatever the underlying cause of the Very Bad Things that had plagued Stony Mill in months past, it was not done with us. Whatever it was that had gotten into people, whatever was making them go a little crazy. Well, crazier than usual. I knew without a doubt that the murder of Joel Turner was not going to be our last, and I knew it in a way that only another sensitive would understand. So that left only the question that I gave voice to now: “When?”

  She lifted her gaze to mine. “I don’t know. I don’t know when. And I don’t know what.”

  “What did you see?” Tara pressed her.

  A tiny frown marred Evie’s brow. She shook her head. “A jumble of images. I don’t know for sure. Darkness, closing in. A pale moon of a face with blank eyes. Tiny little bones. And I felt . . . pain. Pain and terror and anguish all mixed up together in one sickening, horrible spiral.”

  Tara thrust a cup of water at her, and Evie took it, gratefully gulping down a mouthful.

  A knock at the door made everyone jump.

  “Pizza!” I said. Relieved to have something normal to do, I leaped to my feet and headed for the door. “Tara, there are plates in the cupboard to the left of the sink and napkins on the table. Evie, you stay put.” I scooped up Minnie on the way to be sure she didn’t try to escape out the soon-to-be open door.

  I turned the knob and gave it a yank, swinging the door toward me. “Hi, what do I owe y—”

  “Well. Let me think. What . . . exactly . . . can I get away with here?” Marcus waggled his eyebrows at me over a pair of black shades, a playful grin spreading across his face. He tipped his shades down, blasting me with the full effect of killer blue eyes that had no problem taking my breath away. “I mean, if you’re offering up the opportunity—very generous of you, I might add—then it seems the least I can do is take full advantage of it.” He let his gaze drift down to my mouth and reached out to tuck a stray curl behind my ear. “Hello, sweetness.”

  Yup. No breath available. None whatsoever. Heart was working just fine, though. Even at double-time.

  From the living room came a lively tag-team effort of, “Hi, Marcus!” in full, blooming harmony.

  I cringed.

  Openly surprised, Marcus removed the soft look from his face and leaned sideways to peep around me. “Well, well. If it’s not two of my favorite girls in the whole world, all together in the same place,” he said. He flicked his gaze back in my direction. “Make that three,” he whispered for my ears alone. Then he laughed as Minnie reached up a paw to him. He shook it gently. “All right, four. I’m easy.”

  “I-I wasn’t expecting to see you today,” I stuttered, thankful for sturdy doorknobs and the support they so obligingly provided. Once, not too long ago, he’d kissed me thoroughly up against this very door. I still hadn’t fully recovered.

  His lips quirked on one side as he glanced pointedly at my tight grip on the door. Of course he’d noticed. He noticed everything about me. That’s what made him so damned dangerous. “I guess this is just my lucky day.”

  Thinking that perhaps it was a good thing after all that I’d brought the girls home with me, I followed him dazedly into the apartment, where Evie seemed to have fully recovered from her strange episode and was now giggling openly with her darker-natured compadre.

  “Cousin,” Tara said with a nod of acknowledgment, smirking.

  “Little cousin,” Marcus countered solemnly. “I didn’t see your scooter outside.”

  “It’s acting up again. The Loumeister is going to have to look at it again.”

  “I can take a look at it for you if Uncle Lou has too much going on.” He slipped off his shades and tucked them into the collar of his T-shirt. “Well, well. What do we have here? A good-ladies-behaving-badly get-together?”

  “Well, if we were, you wouldn’t be invited, now would you?” Tara replied smartly.

  He laughed. “Good point. Was Miss Maggie here taking part?”

  He gave me a sidelong glance that had me blushing. Again. Or was that still? “Um . . .”

  “I’ll take that as a yes.” On a more serious note, to Tara he said, “You did protect yourselves?”

  Tara looked insulted. “White light, protection from my Guides, yadda yadda. We didn’t have any problems . . . well, except for Evie . . .”

  Marcus narrowed in on that loophole fast. He looked at the three of us, one at a time, ending with Evie. “What kind of problem?”

  Faced with having to admit her experience to Marcus, a grown man she had never quite owned up to having a bit of a schoolgirl crush on, Evie clammed up faster than you could say Timbuktu. Or even Terre Haute. Seeing her hesitation, I stepped forward and told Marcus what had happened at the church, what had happened with Evie here in the apartment, and what she’d said she’d seen.

  “Hm. Interesting.”

  Was that all? He didn’t seem overly concerned. Maybe I had been making too much of things.

  “So you’re thinking that the cave-in was caused by something paranormal?”

  “No,” Tara answered for all of us. “Not the cave-in. Obviously that was caused by the weight of the machine and the vibration of the ground. But there was something that we felt out there, after the cave-in. We were just trying to figure out what it was, that’s all.”

  “Why don’t we all try it, then?” Marcus surprised me by asking.

  “What, here?” I blurted. “Now?”

  “Why not? There’s safety in experience.”

  Well, I didn’t know why not, but I knew I had felt a little strange about using the Ouija at all—the many horror stories and warnings I’ve heard over the years, I suppose, not to mention my relatively way-too-new acquaintance with the spirit world itself—but using it with Marcus . . . well, let’s just say I already felt exposed with him in the vicinity. My inner world laid altogether too bare.

  “Besides”—leaning toward me, Marcus murmured for my ears alone—“I’d like to get a feel for how Tara is using this, whether she’s using it responsibly. Will you trust me?”

  Taken aback by the simple request, I could only nod in assent. Suddenly it didn’t seem like too much to ask at all.

  We both took a seat on the sofa. Briefly Tara told him how she’d lead the mini-séance, thankfully skipping over Evie’s initial silly question. “And then when we were all focusing on the things we’d experienced out there, that was when Evie had her visions.”

  “Except they were all mixed up. Flashes. Not a running dream,” Evie clarified. “Flashes, one right after the other. And they were so intense, I couldn’t get a grip on them, but I couldn’t ease back, either. Does that make sense to you?”

  He smiled and chucked her under her chin to ease her anxious question. “Perfect sense. No worries, hey?” He thought a moment. “Why don’t the four of us try again to make a connection with the spirit or energy that you sensed there, whatever it was, and see what it has in mind. Maybe together we can make sense of what you were seeing.”

  Minnie jumped onto the table and walked across the sticky notes as though she wanted to remind everyone that she was involved in this, too. Evie and Tara giggled and argued back and forth between the two of them over who should hold her next.

  “Do you really think this is wise?” I whispered to him with the girls’ attention drawn away. “I mean, Evie sensed something bad, as did both I and Tara. That’s three separate negative impressions. Are you sure we should push this?”

  His eyes held mine, but he didn’t lower his voice, as I had. “What do you think the best way to conquer fear is? To face it head on and know in your heart that you are strong enough to overcome it . . . before
it gets to you. There is no better way. And you know as well as I do that, as intuitives, we are by our very natures prone to observing the negative forces that are out there while they’re in action, whether we want to or not. Right now, we don’t know what that entails exactly. Where it’s stemming from, or why. I think every bit of knowledge we can get our hands on is going to help us to understand what we’re dealing with. That’s got to be a good thing.”

  I sighed. “All right. Let’s get this over with.”

  “Tara? You lead?”

  Tara nodded, took a deep breath, and shook out her hands to ground herself. “Okay. Just like before . . .”

  Except it wasn’t just like before. The glass moved almost immediately this time, as soon as we’d all provided a looped connection through our fingertips on the glass. The energy was unreal, humming through my body like a power station on high and vibrating the glass until I thought it might sing. There was no need to go into a meditative trance—it was as though the energy that we had tapped into before knew we were coming and was sending out a welcome wagon.

  Time would tell whether that was a good thing.

  “Interesting,” Marcus murmured. “Everyone be sure to shield. We don’t want any mishaps if we can avoid them.”

  I was actually getting fairly good at shielding. It came as second nature to put on that cloak of Teflon, to protect oneself from hurtful words, hurtful feelings, hurtful thoughts . . . but how does a girl know if her protective measures are strong enough to withstand an attack from the astral? Belief and trust? I couldn’t help wishing there was a more definitive answer than that.

  “Okay,” Tara said quietly but firmly, “if there is a spirit here who followed us from the church this afternoon . . . well, we know you followed us, that’s not a question . . . the one who wants to give us a message . . . speak through the glass this time and tell us who you are.”

  We were all watching the glass, focusing on our fingers and the energy traveling through them, and reaching out with our minds. I felt that same viselike squeezing of my core. I breathed as deeply as I could, but it was so hard. Dimly I watched the glass begin to move, slowly at first, then gaining speed. Circle after circle. My eyes widened, and I surged back to the present.