11

GAZING INTO THE DARK

The old book contained nothing but bad news. In archaic English, Tristram spelled out all of the different ways that Dru and her friends were screwed. It turned out that wraiths grew stronger the more souls they fed on. A medieval-looking illustration showed a faceless black-robed wraith wrapping its bony fingers around the throat of a hapless victim, whose eyes were rolled back and arms flung out in abject agony. Lifeless corpses lay heaped at their feet. Just seeing that made Dru nervously rub her own neck.

The book painted a bleak picture of any attempt to combat a wraith. Even if it could be temporarily made corporeal with moon dust or blasted with a magic spell, it would eventually just re-form itself. That meant the wraith would keep coming back, no matter what anyone did. Unless the wraith was itself consumed by an even greater evil, the only way to stop it was to find its physical body and break the dispossession spell.

Unfortunately, Tristram was a little vague on how to accomplish that last part.

Frustrated, Dru shoved the old book across her workbench and sagged back in her chair, rubbing her temples. The more she learned, the worse things got. The only crumb of hope Tristram’s book offered her was a diagram of a magical circle that contained three interlocking triangles. Supposedly, if a wraith stepped into that circle, it could get trapped inside. At least then they would know where it was, and stay back far enough to elude its deadly grasp.

There had to be a way to defeat it. She was busy contemplating various crystals and their chemical properties, tapping a pencil against her teeth, when Opal and Ruiz came in, giggling.

“That reminds me,” Dru began the moment she saw them, realizing too late that she was once again beginning a conversation in the middle of her own thoughts. She had a bad habit of doing that. “Did we ever order another fire extinguisher?”

“Another?” Opal asked, unfazed by the random question. She put her purse down.

“We used ours when we had that magic carpet problem.” Dru stopped just short of saying it was Opal who had used it on Ruiz, who had been on fire at the time. But since Opal had been the one carried away screaming by the magic carpet, Dru was willing to forget it.

“I got a fire extinguisher in the van,” Ruiz piped up. His usual cheer was dimmed with worry. “Where’s the fire?”

“We’re not there just yet. What kind of fire extinguisher is it?”

His gaze rapidly darted around the room, as if the correct answer was hiding just out of sight. Slowly, he said, “The kind that…puts out fires?”

“Right. Do me a favor. Look at the label, see what it shoots. Foam, chemicals, or pure CO2, which is carbon dioxide. If it shoots carbon dioxide, I need it.”

“Okay, cool. You got it.” He turned to go, but Dru held up her pencil like an orchestra conductor.

“Wait, wait,” she added. “Do you have any paint?”

“Paint?” He scratched his head. “What kind?”

“Any kind. I need to paint the floor.”

Ruiz looked uncomfortable. “I don’t mean to be critical or anything, you know? But, I’m thinking, maybe right now is not really a good time for home improvement. Next weekend, though, I got some free time on Saturday.” He held up his hands disarmingly, as if to say, Just my opinion.

“Right. Well, I need to paint a magic circle on the ground.” She crossed over to the back door and drew an imaginary circle around her feet, which made her glasses slide down her nose. She pushed them back up. “I think we may be able to trap the wraith in a circle. So any color is fine. And if you have a brush or maybe—”

“Oh, don’t worry, I got brushes. What kind? Flat brush, angle brush? I got rollers too. Anything you need.”

After a brief discussion, Ruiz enlisted Greyson’s help and tromped in with paint brushes, rollers on sticks, paint trays, folded drop cloths, white coveralls, rolls of blue tape, and several gallon-size buckets of paint streaked with dried drips in different colors.

Ruiz poked his chin up over the mound of stuff in his arms. “I got my paint sprayer in the van too, if you need it.”

Dru glanced up from her circle calculations. “How about the fire extinguisher?”

Ruiz, looking apologetic, shifted under the weight of his burden and held out a thick red fire extinguisher to Dru. “It’s the dry chemical type, not the carbon dioxide type. Real sorry about that.”

She shook her head. “That’s okay. Don’t worry about it.”

Opal patted his arm. “Keep that thing handy, honey. You never know when we might need to put out a fire around here.”

Dru had Ruiz paint the ground just outside the back door with fine lines of leftover white house paint. They stood out starkly against the concrete. What began as a simple circle about four feet in diameter became much more complex as Dru kept refining her calculations. Inside the circle, three interlocking triangles swept around one another, their outer points all meeting the circumference of the circle. Dru and Opal flipped back and forth through various magical texts, finding more powerful details to add to the circle. Tiny swirls, swooping arrows, and angular glyphs painstakingly spelled out the circle’s protections in sorcio, the symbol-language of magic.

While Dru gathered up more crystals, Opal supervised Ruiz painting an identical circle in front of the front door. Apparently, in Opal’s mind, the word “supervising” was synonymous with giggling and flirting.

They had the doors propped open, letting in the hot summer air as the circles dried, filling the shop with paint fumes. Dru was feeling pretty good about their progress until Greyson took her aside.

“We should paint one around that thing too.” He nodded his square chin toward her workbench, where the apocalypse scroll sat.

“On the floor? The wraith shouldn’t be able to get inside the shop. And even if it could, I’m not sure I want to trap it in the same place with the scroll.”

“Better than letting it get away with it.” He considered the workbench. “You know I keep a spare tool kit in Hellbringer’s trunk.”

She wasn’t sure what that had to do with anything. “Right. Which seems a little bit unnecessary, seeing as how Hellbringer can fix itself.”

“You just never know when you’re going to be broken down on the side of the road in the rain.” He gave her a wry smile. “Sometimes, things don’t go as planned.”

He had a point, she realized. She took his hand and gave it a squeeze. “I’ll ask Ruiz to paint one more circle in here.”

“He’s busy. I’ll handle this one for you.”

With a measuring tape, masking tape, and Dru’s directions, Greyson carefully painted a third circle around the workbench. It was a laborious process, getting all of the little symbols and glyphs just right, but he painted exactly what she asked for, often finishing her sentences for her.

The fact that the two of them were so different, yet they worked so flawlessly together, always gave her a warm feeling. If only the threat of the wraith wasn’t hanging over them, it would have been the perfect summer afternoon.

But still, something was obviously bothering Greyson. Ordinarily, he had total faith in her and her magical plans, which she so often desperately needed. But this time, he seemed less sure.

She studied his expression, wondering what was on his mind, until she finally just came out and asked him. “What’s wrong?”

He shook his head. It took him a minute to reply. “I don’t like this. It feels like we’re just sitting ducks. There has to be a better way than holing up here.”

She followed his gaze to the apocalypse scroll sitting on top of the workbench and shook her head. “There is no better way.”

“There is. We take the scroll, we hop into Hellbringer, and we go.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere.” Finished with the circle, he straightened up and carefully avoided stepping on the drying paint. He set down his paintbrush and wiped ineffectively at the paint streaks on his well-defined forearms. There was something about his efforts that she found endlessly endearing.

“I wish we could.” She laid a hand on his now-clean arm. “If this thing was an ordinary ghost, you’d be right. We could leave it in the dust. Ghosts generally manifest around a specific geographic area. A mansion, a river bank, a basement, whatever. But wraiths don’t have any boundaries. They can roam at will. No matter where we go, this thing will catch up to us eventually. And if we leave now, we won’t know when to expect it. It could catch us just when we let down our guard.”

His jaw set. “Where is the wraith now?”

Dru crossed her arms. “Your guess is as good as mine. It’s daytime. They can’t be out and about in the daylight. Beyond that? We don’t know.”

“But it has to be somewhere.” His gaze was steady. Not judgmental, but persistent. He pointed at the Tristram book. “It say anything in there about how to go looking for them?”

“Historically, I don’t think people actually went looking for wraiths. They ran the other direction as fast as they could. Then again, if we did know exactly where it was, maybe . . .” She chewed on her lip, thinking back over the massive amount of information she had just uploaded into her brain from the smelly old book. “Well, there was this one case where a wraith was stalking a fishing village in the Balkans somewhere, and they weren’t sure if the wraith was coming from upriver or downriver, so they didn’t know which way to flee. Tristram figured out how to build a compass of sorts using hammered copper and cat’s eye.”

Greyson’s eyes narrowed, which was as close as he ever got to a wince. “I feel bad for the cat.”

“No, no, not an actual eyeball from a cat. Eww. No. Cat’s eye is a crystal. It’s a form of chrysoberyl. Here, I’ll show you.” She led him up to the front room of the store and down one of the long, narrow aisles. Wooden shelves rose almost to the ceiling on either side, packed with dusty cardboard trays full of thousands of different crystals of all colors, shapes, and sizes. As she went down the aisle, she ran her finger along the hand-lettered labels.

“Let’s see. Peridot…alexandrite…cymophane. Here we go.” She pulled out the narrow white tray, just a few inches wide, and was disappointed to see that she had only a single polished cat’s eye in inventory. It rolled to the front of the tray like a large marble. She picked it up and held it out on her palm. It shimmered like translucent gold, split by a narrow band of bright white reflected light, like a slitted eye staring back at her. “See?”

Carefully, he picked up the cat’s eye crystal with his thumb and forefinger and held it at eye level, staring deeply into it. Then his gaze ticked back to her. “So you’re saying you can use this to find the wraith.”

“Well, I don’t know about that. I mean, theoretically. Assuming Tristram didn’t leave out any important details, and the spell doesn’t backfire and burn my eyelashes off.” Dru regarded the crystal thoughtfully.

Rane stomped up the aisle toward them, hefting a huge sledgehammer with a long black handle and a traffic-cone-orange steel head the size of a brick. “Hey, check this out! New toy.”

Dru pointed frantically. “Careful! Fragile!”

Rane eyeballed the shelves to her left and right. “What is?”

“Everything.”

“Listen. You know that strength tester at the carnival where you ring the bell?” She let out an evil chuckle. “Dude, you should see the look on Salem’s face every time I score him a big stuffed bunny.”

“So, that’s your plan to win him back? With a stuffed animal?”

“What? No way. Screw that.” Rane shifted her grip on the hammer. “Point is, I’m going to take out the wraith with this. Before he gets close enough to grab me.”

The thought of Rane swinging that enormous hammer around the shop was enough to give Dru nightmares. “Where did you even get that thing?”

Rane jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “Out of the back of Ruiz’s van. Dude has everything in there. You should see his power tools.”

“Let’s not go all the way to power tools yet,” Dru muttered. “First, we need to—”

“Wait! That’s not all.” Rane set the hammer down on the floor with a metal clank, then held up a black metal wrecking bar the length of her leg. She hefted it and held out the hook-shaped end to Greyson. “Merry Christmas.”

He regarded it seriously, then reached past Dru and took it. The four-foot bar curved at the end into a sharp forked tip, and it made a hearty clang when he rested the tip on the floor.

Rane jerked her chin at the cat’s eye crystal. “What’s with the freaky eyeball thing?”

Greyson pressed it back into Dru’s palm. “She found a way to track down the wraith.”

“Sweet. We’re gonna go kick its ass?”

Dru shook her head. “That’s not exactly what I—”

“No, that’s awesome.” Rane’s face lit up with savage glee, and she clapped a heavy hand on Dru’s shoulder. “Beats sitting around here. Come on, don’t be a wuss. I got the sledgehammer. You find that wraith, give it a shake shake shake of moon dust, and I’ll hammer its ghostly ass clear into next week.”

A nagging worry settled in Dru’s stomach as she looked down at the crystal and it stared back at her. Would she really be able to cast a medieval undead-finding spell and go poking around in dark places looking for a soul-sucking wraith? What could possibly go wrong?

Everything.