Peak of the Devil (The Adventures of Lydia Trinket Book 2) Read online

  “That is completely unfair,” he said, and I could feel us both settling into the old familiar rhythm. I had no time or energy for that shit.

  “Okay. I heard it first from you. I honestly am very in the middle of something right now, but when I have a chance for this to sink in, I’m sure I’ll be happy for you. Congratulations.”

  “You don’t even want to know her name?”

  “Put it in an email,” I said, and hung up.

  When the phone rang again less than three seconds later I did look, thinking Kevin was going to insist I bear witness to his indignant anger. It wasn’t him, but that glance made me miss my exit. No doubt my tone was not the friendliest when I said hello.

  “Am I speaking with Lydia? This is Darius Mosley returning your call.”

  “Mr. Mosley. Yes. I’m sorry. Sorry if my message sounded a little crazy. Thank you for calling me back.”

  More stuttery-babble. I was normally more professional than that, but the truth was, I was on the edge of barely controlled hysteria. Phineas. Kevin. Everything was falling apart, both literally and figuratively. I was already starting to panic without the canteen. It had been with me since I was a child. It was the fount of all my expertise, everything about me that was competent or special. I hadn’t even used it since I got back from the netherworld, but that didn’t matter. It was still there.

  Fucking Phineas.

  But if my nervousness put Darius off, he didn’t show it. “I guess your message might have sounded crazy, if I’d gotten it an hour ago,” he said. “But as it stands, it sounded pretty much right on the money.”

  Which meant he already knew about his ghost. “What happened?” I asked.

  “This… thing. Megan, you called it?”

  “Megan McGibbons. She was a seventeen-year-old girl who killed her parents and then herself.”

  “And she lived in my house? Odd how the real estate agent didn’t mention that.”

  “Well to be fair, she wasn’t there anymore when you bought it. I’m the one who banished her, for the last family who lived there.”

  “Seems it didn’t stick,” he said.

  “No,” I agreed. “Seems it didn’t. I’d like to come and help. I’m on my way now, actually. Is that okay?”

  “The sooner the better,” he said. “This thing is troubling my oldest daughter, and she was already plenty troubled without it.”

  “I’m five minutes away,” I said.

  I spent that five minutes—actually it was more like eight, on account of that missed exit—trying to figure out what the hell I was going to do. My website dealt mostly in advice for people with ghost problems, so you’d think I’d have a handle on that question. But there was a reason I’d spent so many years making a very good wage for banishing apparitions with the canteen: because in my experience, sometimes, many times, the canteen was the only way to get rid of them.

  I pulled into Darius Mosley’s u-shaped driveway with a bloodhound and a canvas shopping bag full of things I hoped might help, but no canteen.

  Darius—who turned out to be gigantic, not something I expected from his voice—came out to meet me. When he opened the front door, I heard shouting inside. Teenage girl kind of shouting. He must have seen the look on my face because instead of saying hello he said, “That’s not the ghost. It’s my daughter. I’m taking the kids to a hotel for the night, but she’s refusing to go.”

  I frowned at this. “I thought Megan was bothering her.”

  “I said Megan was troubling her,” Darius corrected. “Which is not exactly the same thing.”

  “No, I guess it’s not.” I opened the back door of my station wagon, a car I needed despite being single and childless (Kevin’s getting married again, wonder if he’ll get to have kids) to accommodate the big sloppy bloodhound that jumped out, wagging his tail at Darius.

  “Are you okay with dogs? I forgot to ask on the phone, but I need him with me, if that’s all right. Hounds can actually bite ghosts, sometimes.”

  Or so I’d been told. I’d read that about hounds in one of my friend Martha Corey’s books while I was working on banishing Jeffrey Litauer, who had indeed turned out to be terrified of them. That seemed like a handy thing to have, so I’d gone to the rescue and gotten the quintessential hound, complete with everything but the little Sherlock Holmes hat.

  It turned out to be false advertising. I’d never actually seen Wulf bite a ghost. In fact, he cowered from them approximately fifty percent of the time. But he was great at finding them. And having his solid presence beside me, for moral support if nothing else, was as essential right then as anything I had in that shopping bag.

  “He’s fine,” Darius said, barely glancing at Wulf. His hands were shaking.

  “Tell me what’s been going on,” I said as I followed him inside.

  The house had been upscale when Megan lived in it, and it had been expanded since then. Now it wouldn’t have been exaggerating to call it a mansion. But despite its size it felt too small, too close, thick with the oppressive air an angry ghost brings to a place. And it smelled like blood.

  Whatever he might have said would have been drowned out by the shouting, so Darius just gestured toward the back of the house.

  One of the many tastefully decorated rooms I went through on my way to the source of the noise was a family room, where two children, one small, one medium, were watching TV. The little girl looked terrified. The boy, maybe around twelve, looked like he was trying very hard not to look terrified. The mirror on one wall was shattered, and there was some broken pottery on the floor. It was quite a day for broken pottery.

  Eventually I wound my way to the kitchen, where a teenage girl and a middle-aged woman, both very pretty, stood face to face in identical poses, arms crossed, jaws set. But while the girl was shouting, the woman spoke calmly.

  “Cassandra, I understand you’re upset,” she was saying.

  “You DON’T understand ANYTHING!”

  “But this is our house.”

  “It’s NOT YOUR HOUSE. It’s HER HOUSE. It’s MEGAN’S HOUSE! She TOLD ME!”

  “And you will follow our rules.”

  “I AM NOT LEAVING.”

  When politely clearing my throat, twice, failed to interrupt them, I said, “Hello?” They probably still wouldn’t have noticed me, had Wulf not punctuated my greeting with a throaty howl of his own. “I’m here to help,” I said. “I know Megan, better than I’d like to.”

  “She warned me about you,” Cassandra said. “She told me you would lie about her, that you’re a fucking liar—”

  “Cassandra!” Olivia Mosley did raise her voice that time, but not much.

  “—and that I shouldn’t believe a word you say.”

  I sized up Cassandra Mosley. She was older than I thought at first, maybe even over eighteen. I decided to risk talking straight. Maybe it would shock some sense into her. “Well, of the two of us, I’m the one who hasn’t murdered anyone or painted any rooms with my own blood. So I’d say I’m the more trustworthy one.”

  Cassandra opened her mouth, but said nothing.

  “Cassandra, are you ready?” Darius came into the kitchen. “We’re all set,” he said to Olivia.

  “I’M NOT GOING!” Cassandra shouted again.

  Olivia sighed. I’d never seen a woman look more tired. “Take the other two,” she said. “I’ll stay here with Miss…” She glanced at me. “Was it Truman?”

  “Trinket,” I said.

  “Trinket,” said Olivia. “And if Cassandra insists on staying as well, let her. Maybe she needs to see this.”

  Darius looked like he was about to argue, but a plan was starting to form in my head, based on what I’d seen so far. I liked the idea of Cassandra staying, although I was sure her parents would not approve if I told them why: I thought I might be able to use her as bait.

  Cassandra was still hostile, but she’d gotten what she wanted for the moment, so she stayed quiet while Darius packed up the other two childre
n and left. Olivia stood at the door and waved until they were out of sight, then turned to me.

  “He wanted to be the one to stay, of course, but I think I might be of more use. I’ve always been sensitive to ghosts. So has Cassandra, unfortunately.”

  “Do you know how Megan has been communicating with her?” I asked.

  “They were writing notes,” Olivia said. “I don’t know how Megan was making the pen move, but that’s what they were doing.”

  “Did you see what they said?”

  Olivia shook her head. “Cassandra ripped them up and flushed them. Clogged the damn toilet.” She made a visible effort not to break down crying.

  Cassandra came into the hallway and said, “It was none of your business.”

  Olivia closed her eyes, then arranged her face into the calm expression I’d seen in the kitchen. “You are my business.”

  “Cassandra,” I said before her daughter could start shouting again. Talking straight hadn’t had much effect, so I decided to try mollifying. “I don’t want to invade your privacy, or Megan’s. But Megan is obviously very unhappy, and we’re not going to resolve this until we find out what she wants.”

  Cassandra gave me a slow, secret smile. “I know what she wants. But she hasn’t told me how to do it yet.”

  Well that certainly didn’t sound good. But I played along for the moment. “Can you talk to her and find out? If it’s something we can actually give her, she may be satisfied enough to leave. Then everyone wins and nobody gets hurt, right?”

  Cassandra’s smile got wider. Her eyes were flat and cold. I suspected that whatever Megan had asked her for involved hurting her mother, and I was glad the rest of the family was out of the house.

  “I’d suggest going into the garage,” I said. “She died there, you know, so she’ll be much stronger there. She won’t need to write, you two will be able to talk directly. That should be easier and faster, right?”

  These were all flat-out lies, and it seemed Megan didn’t appreciate my deception. Every picture in the hall, every picture in the house, by the sound of it, fell to the floor at once. The smell of blood intensified until it made me gag.

  But Megan had managed a lot over the past few hours. Too much. It’s hugely difficult for an apparition to summon a voice, and I was banking on her not having the power left to even try. Which meant that as long as there was no pen or paper immediately handy, she had no way to contradict me.

  Olivia screamed at all that glass shattering at once, all the thumps and bangs coming from every direction. When she collected herself, she stared at me. “You want me to let my baby go be alone with this thing?”

  “No,” I said. “You should go with her.” This was a dangerous suggestion and I knew it, but someone had to keep an eye on the poor kid and make sure she didn’t sustain any permanent injuries.

  “She can’t come!” Cassandra said. “She won’t talk to me with Mom there! I don’t want her there!”

  “She can stand outside the garage, how would that be?” I asked. “A compromise.”

  Olivia narrowed her eyes, but seemed to decide to give me the benefit of the doubt.

  Cassandra narrowed her eyes too, and looked exactly like her mother. Then she nodded. “Fine. Just let me talk to Megan, okay? Give me a little fucking peace, is that too much to ask?”

  “Not at all,” I said, and gestured toward the door. Cassandra walked out, but I grabbed Olivia’s elbow when she started to follow.

  “Watch her through the window, or the open garage door, if she’ll put up with that. Be ready to go to her,” I said. “Do not let her out of your sight.”

  “As if I would,” Olivia whispered back.

  “And I know she’s your daughter and you won’t want to hear this, but be careful. Of her. For yourself.”

  Olivia’s eyes got hard, but she didn’t contradict me.

  From down the walk, I heard Cassandra start to hum. I recognized the tune as belonging to an eighties song. I wasn’t sure if a kid from today would know such a thing—it was possible, I supposed—but I was quite sure Megan would. She’d died in 1984.

  “We won’t have much time,” I said. “I have to hurry. Just follow my lead.”

  Olivia walked out after her daughter, and I jogged back into the kitchen, Beowulf at my heels. I’d left my bag in there. I emptied it onto the table: cinnamon sticks, a compass, two bundles of sage, a pack of matches, and a large bag of salt. That jumble of crap was what I was proposing to replace the canteen with. I felt like a fool, but there weren’t a lot of options other than to keep going.

  I stuffed four cinnamon sticks and the compass into my pocket. I lit one of the bundles of sage like a torch, and shoved the spare in my other pocket along with the matches. Finally, I poked a small hole in the bottom of the salt bag, then covered the hole with one finger. (A bit of an awkward task, since I had the torch in one hand and less fingers than most on the other, but I’d adapted to that pretty well.)

  “Wulf, watch my back,” I said. He followed me outside and sniffed furiously at the ground.

  I walked the perimeter of the yard, following what had been its boundaries when Megan lived there, waving the sage to spread the smoke, and spilling the salt steadily out of the hole in the bag. Under other circumstances, Wulf would have licked that trail of salt right up, but he could sense Megan’s presence as much as I could, and it put him in professional mode.

  Whatever she wanted from Cassandra, I hoped Megan wanted it bad enough to follow the girl out to the garage. And that she'd have enough power left to go that far, and stay there until I finished. Put together, that was kind of a lot of hoping and not very much solid knowing, which is never what you want in a plan.

  The garage was newer than the house. After the McGibbons family died, land on their street became a bit of a bargain. The man who bought the McGibbons house bought the house next door, too, then leveled it to put in the new garage, the pool, and a small pool house.

  In other words, the garage was not a part of the land Megan McGibbons was anchored to, a fact that my entire hastily constructed and possibly lame plan depended on.

  My sage supply lasted until I finished with the salt line, but only just. I put cinnamon sticks into the ground around the house at exactly the four points of the compass. Then I closed my eyes, cleared my mind, and concentrated on walls and moats and tall hedges made of thorns. Boundaries. Wards. Things I’d learned in the netherworld.

  I finished with a prayer; this was no exorcism and I was no priest, but I figured it couldn’t hurt. Beowulf sat beside me, tense but quiet.

  Just as I muttered my “Amen,” I heard a scream from the garage. I couldn’t tell whether it was Olivia or Cassandra.

  “Okay,” I whispered to Wulf. “Let’s hope it holds.”

  He growled and ran ahead of me to the garage. When I got there he was standing at the open garage door, howling. Things were flying everywhere. The sort of sharp, dangerous things you keep in a garage. Olivia was bent over Cassandra, trying to shield her and drag her outside at the same time.

  “YOU TRICKED ME!” Cassandra was shouting. “I need to be INSIDE! I need—”

  Whatever else she needed was cut off by a scream as a shovel came hurtling toward her. Both Cassandra and Olivia ducked to avoid it.

  Megan McGibbons, it seemed, had gotten a second wind. And she was about to get a lot more pissed off, if things went my way.

  Cassandra broke free of her mother’s grip and ran for the house. Olivia followed, and so did Megan, her ghostly form barely visible in the sunlight.

  Only two of them made it to the door.

  Megan McGibbons raged and tore up the garden, uprooted two holly bushes, killed a squirrel and three chipmunks and two cardinals. She cracked the sidewalk and knocked down the mailbox.

  But she could not cross the boundary. And if she couldn’t cross the boundary, she couldn’t get back to the place she was anchored to. Megan McGibbons had nowhere to go.

  I almost
couldn’t believe it. My plan actually worked. I was wrong about one thing, though: Megan did manage to find the power to summon a voice, at the last. With one horrible shriek that went through my head like a bullet, she was gone.

  The pain in my head was so intense it disoriented me for maybe a minute. (I would have a headache behind my left eye for the next three days.) When I looked around at the wreckage of the yard, I saw that Cassandra was sitting on the ground, rocking back and forth and humming that same tune. Megan’s song, whatever it was. Olivia was beside her, crying and begging her to say something.

  Wulf walked up to Cassandra and slobbered all over her face. She stopped rocking and humming, and looked at him. Then she put her hand on his neck. He turned and licked it.

  “Body,” she said. “Bristol.” Her eyes weren’t cold anymore, but she didn’t look like she was entirely behind them, either.

  “What body?” I asked. “Whose body?”

  “My body,” said Cassandra. Then she burst into tears.

  Olivia hugged her daughter, hard, then got to her feet. “We have to go.” She reached into her pocket for her cell phone, then took a quick glance around. “A microburst,” she said. “We’ll say this was a microburst, or even a real tornado. The weather service will contradict us, but what else could this be?”

  She looked half crazed as she nodded to herself, and I wondered why the hell she was talking about weather at a time like this.

  “We’ll say the noise and the destruction gave her a flashback,” Olivia finished.

  Before I could ask her what any of this meant, she called 911 and said she needed an ambulance, that her daughter had PTSD and was in shock. I don’t think it was even five minutes before paramedics were shooing Olivia away and examining Cassandra.

  Olivia stood beside me and said quietly, “She went to Cane’s Meadow. Until last spring. She’s been home ever since.”

  Well, that explained it. I stared at Olivia, then hugged her. It wasn’t like me to just go and hug strangers, but what the hell else was there to do? Cane’s Meadow was a small private college three states west and two states north. I probably never would have heard of it, except that it was all over the news a few months before. A sophomore had walked into one of the dorms with four guns and some minor explosives strapped to his chest. Almost thirty people had died.