Never mind, we’re here to do a job.
A circle of salt poured out of a small tin, candles at the cardinal points, a lit bundle of sage—they were running out of sage—and the words of a spell that Cormac still didn’t know by heart since half of it was in Latin and half in what Amelia said was Egyptian. He took her word for it. Three times they circled the house, and back at the north candle she kicked an opening in the salt circle and snuffed the candle w
ith her—with his—hand. And something changed, as if a breath of wind blew out from the house.
Domingo, waiting at the front of the cabin and looked around in wonder. “I felt something. What was that?”
“Check it out,” he said. Amelia retreated, and he stepped into his body again. Stretched his fingers, popped a kink out of his neck. Took a comforting breath of clean air to anchor himself. Domingo unlocked the front door and cautiously stepped in. Cormac followed.
The place still smelled musty and sad, but the sense of doom was gone. The place felt abandoned now, not cursed. Domingo sighed as if waking up from a sleep.
“It’s gone,” she said, amazed. “Whatever you did. . .it’s gone.”
Not really. The prickling on the back of his neck was still there—they still didn’t know what had caused the dank scent of dark magic in the first place. It could still come back. “One more thing I need to do,” he said.
He sorted through his pockets—he was going to have to do a major cleaning and overhaul when he got back to the room this afternoon, since he didn’t know what he had left in them anymore. But Amelia seemed to know. She knew everything.
Does the plumbing here still work?
Cormac tried the faucet at the kitchen sink, and water ran from the tap.
Even better. Water from the same place will anchor the spell even more firmly.
He held a strip of paper under the stream for a moment, just enough to soak but not so much that it would disintegrate. Following Amelia’s instructions, he tied a piece of red string around the paper strip, and tied the other end of the string to a spot in the middle of the room, to a bolt sticking out under the kitchen table. From this spot it was exposed to almost everything going on in the room, yet would be invisible to someone giving the place a cursory look-over.
He must have looked awkward, kneeling under the table, craning up to see, but this was what Amelia wanted so here he was. He closed his eyes, let out a breath—and Amelia was the one who whispered words over the ensemble of materials. Laid out a teaspoonful of incense under the paper, which went up in a flash at the touch of a match and left a spicy scent in the air.
“What is this?” Domingo had been standing watch at the open door, her attention divided between keeping an eye on the film crew outside and watching Cormac. Her nose wrinkled.
“I guess you could think of it as an early warning system,” Cormac said.
“So if this is happens again, we’ll know?”
It was a little more complicated than that. “Sure,” he said.
The strip of paper was dry now, the incense a smudge of ash on the floor, and Amelia retreated. Whatever she needed to do was done, but she had one last instruction for him.
Carefully, he tore the strip in half, left the one piece hanging under the table, and folded the other half and put it in his pocket. If something happened to the first strip, if some kind of magic affected it, the torn piece would be affected as well. They’d know, and maybe be able to get out here to see what it was.
He managed to crawl out from under the table without bumping his head, brushed off his jeans, and considered. He could almost feel the torn piece humming in his pocket, and couldn’t decide if he wanted it to go off— smoke or buzz or whatever it was going to do—or wished it wouldn’t. He just wanted to fix this.
“Now we wait.”
Domingo locked the cabin behind them with a sense of finality. “I guess that’s it then.”
Cormac looked at her. “How so?”
“Part of what’s been keeping me from letting them close the case is just how. . .wrong this place felt. That whatever happened to Arty would happen again, as long as that evil was there. Well, now it’s gone. I’m going to have to let them open the cabin back up.”
“Not sure that’s the best idea.”
“At some point we have to move on. You fixed the big problem.”
“And whatever caused that problem is still out there,” he said.
Bellamy was waiting for them outside the cabin.
“Just what exactly are you investigating up here, Mr. Bennett?’