Unmarked Graves Page 13

  The rest of it? Well, they’d confront whatever the world tried to throw at them — demons, murder investigations, or various other assorted catastrophes — and know that neither of them would have to face those challenges alone.

  Chapter 10

  Amazing how food could make you feel so much better about life. Rosemary had never been into ribs — and was even less so now that she had cut most red meat out of her diet — but the barbecue chicken she was currently devouring was divine, and the mac and cheese that had come along with it was pretty darn near sublime. Coleslaw she could take or leave, but she could tell Will was enjoying it, and that worked for her.

  No phone calls, either. While they were waiting for the food to arrive, her phone had rung and she’d found herself immediately tensing, but it was only Isabel calling to let her know that she would be the one taking Rosemary’s shift at the store on Monday and possibly beyond that day if necessary, since their mother had gotten in touch to let her know what was going on, and Isabel had decided she’d rather cover those hours herself. Actually, Izzie had sounded almost bubbly — for her, anyway — although that was most likely because she’d realized Caleb was the “darkness” she’d seen surrounding her sister the week before, and now he’d been exposed for what he was, he didn’t pose as much of a threat.

  Rosemary almost told her sister that Caleb was dead and therefore not any kind of threat at all, but something stopped her. Maybe it was only that the investigation was ongoing, and therefore blabbing about his murder when the details hadn’t even been released to the public yet probably wasn’t a good idea. Also, revealing any of the facts about his death most likely would have also let slip that her own sister might be implicated in that death, even though she honestly had nothing to do with it. Isabel had sounded relieved, and Rosemary figured it was better to let her enjoy that feeling of relief while she could. In the very near future, the situation might change dramatically.

  For the moment, though, she could only be glad that she didn’t have to worry about working at the store. Most of the time, she truly did enjoy her job, but she knew she would have been distracted if she’d had to work the next day, and wouldn’t have been able to keep her mind off Will and how he was doing.

  Although, she thought as she watched him make short work of a drumstick, he seemed to have bounced back pretty damn quickly. From time to time, she noticed a hesitancy in the way he walked, as if he might have suffered a very brief bout of dizziness, but those moments didn’t occur very often. His speech wasn’t slurred, and his energy levels seemed very good. Not bad for someone who’d slammed their head basically full force into a wood floor just the night before.

  The rain had slowed down but hadn’t yet let up, which made her doubly glad that they had nowhere they needed to be except right here. Of course, she and Will could also be sitting ducks here in this house, but….

  She set down her fork and gazed across the dining room table at him. Seeming to notice her regard, he lowered his mostly eaten drumstick and lifted an inquiring eyebrow.

  “Do I have barbecue sauce all over my face?”

  “No,” she replied with a grin. However, she continued to look at him, mostly because she enjoyed doing that, liked taking in the contrast between his sooty hair and brows and those extraordinary gray eyes of his, the well-defined contours of his cheekbones and jaw and nose. Still smiling, she added, “Well, you do have a little smear in the left corner of your mouth.”

  He lifted his napkin to dab at the spot. “So, if it’s not barbecue sauce, what’s the matter? You look as if you have something on your mind.”

  “I was just thinking,” she replied. “We don’t really have any idea what kind of powers I can control — ”

  “True,” he cut in. “I was actually thinking we should try testing them to see if we can get any more information.”

  Good idea, although she’d had something a little more concrete in mind. “Yes, we should probably do that,” Rosemary said. “But I wanted to try something else first. How hard is it to set up those demon-repelling wards Michael has all over his house?”

  The half-amused glint in Will’s gray eyes vanished, replaced by a frown. “I’m not sure how useful they are,” he told her. “They didn’t keep Caleb out.”

  “True,” she said. “But they would do something, right? Against real demons, I mean.”

  “Yes. If properly set up, of course.”

  “Do you know how to do that?”

  He shook his head. “Not exactly. I’ve blessed this house, which means it has its own low level of protection. What Michael did — that’s basically advanced spell-casting, and my studies never took me in that direction.”

  “But you’ve worked with him,” Rosemary said. At least, she seemed to recall Will telling her that Michael had used him as backup on several occasions.

  “Yes, on a couple of cases where he needed assistance. But I mostly just provided moral support — and prayers.” Will paused there, his brows drawing together. “What were you thinking, Rosemary?”

  It had just been a flicker of an idea, and yet she figured it couldn’t hurt to try…unless she was inviting disastrous consequences by even attempting to create protective wards without proper training. Still, she thought, nothing ventured….

  “I suppose I was thinking that maybe if I warded this house, those wards might be stronger than the ones protecting Michael’s place because my own powers are, well, stronger.” Oh, that sounded awful, partly because such a proposition made it seem as if she thought the strange talents she’d exhibited ever since their confrontation with Caleb somehow made her more qualified and capable to cast protective spells than Michael Covenant himself, who’d been studying those sorts of arcane practices for more than a decade.

  However, Will didn’t seem put off by her suggestion. Instead, he leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands in his lap, obviously thinking it over. Then he said, “I suppose it’s worth a try. Because if you are able to cast better, stronger wards, then they very well may be able to keep out part-demons like Caleb, and not just your regular garden-variety demons.”

  “Caleb is dead,” she pointed out.

  “True,” Will allowed. “But we don’t know how many others like him are out there.”

  Way to make a girl feel better about life, Rosemary thought. But, to be fair, one of the things she liked most about Will was his utter honesty. Better for him to tell her the truth of how he viewed a situation than sugarcoat it and leave her unprepared to face whatever harsh reality might present itself later on.

  “All the more reason why we should give this a try,” she said. “So…how does it work, exactly? Do you have any books with warding spells in them?”

  “A few,” he replied. “There are probably more in Michael’s library.”

  “Assuming he didn’t take those books with him to Tucson,” Rosemary said, beginning to wonder whether this was such a good idea after all. She knew that Michael had packed up the most valuable volumes in his library and brought them along with him when he and Audrey left for Arizona. Unfortunately, what she didn’t know was whether the books that contained the warding spells were the ones he considered valuable, or whether they were something he could easily replace.

  Will pushed his plate out of the way and clasped his hands on the table. “That I don’t know. I could call and ask him.”

  “Better not,” Rosemary said quickly, then paused as he sent an inquiring glance in her direction.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied, wondering what it was that had made her blurt out those words in the first place. A feeling, an odd little spurt of alarm that had flared up when she imagined picking up the phone and calling Michael to ask him about his spell books. Whatever had prompted it, she knew better than to ignore those feelings…psychic flashes…bursts of intuition. They’d saved her ass on more than one occasion. “But if the demons somehow knew he intended to come to California to help us, t
hen it seems reasonable to expect they might have a way of listening to his phone conversations. The last thing we want to do is telegraph to them anything we might be planning.”

  Will didn’t appear overly surprised by this leap of logic. A slow nod, and then he said, “You’re right, of course. Let me get the books I was thinking of, and we can get started with those. After that…we’ll see.”

  “Okay.”

  He got up from the table and disappeared down the hallway. While Rosemary hadn’t done much exploring of the house — she’d thought it would be rude to stick her nose in every corner of the place while the man who owned it was sleeping off a concussion — she’d seen enough to know that it had three bedrooms: the master, a guest room, and a third space that Will seemed to use for a combination office/library, since she’d glimpsed a cluttered desk and a series of antique bookcases jammed into a room that seemed far too small for all that furniture.

  Rather than sit idly and wait for him to come back, she rose as well and stacked their dirty plates, then took them out to the kitchen. After she set them down on the counter, she returned to the dining room to retrieve the leftover food, thinking she could put it in the refrigerator in its take-out containers, since she didn’t know where Will kept his Tupperware.

  “The storage stuff is in the lower cupboard next to the refrigerator,” he said helpfully as he appeared in the kitchen doorway.

  “Thanks.”

  Sure enough, there was a nice matching set of glass storage containers with plastic lids in the cupboard he’d mentioned. There weren’t a lot of leftovers, so it didn’t take very long for her to package everything up and put it away in the fridge.

  “You’ve got them?” she asked as she turned back toward him, noticing for the first time the two small leather-bound books he had tucked under one arm.

  “Yes. Like I said, these are sort of beginner-level stuff, but they’re all I have.”

  Rosemary went over and kissed him on the cheek, and his eyes lit up immediately. Smiling, she said, “Well, since I’m a beginner, I guess it’s good that those books are for people like me. No point in attempting calculus when you haven’t passed Algebra 1, right?”

  “You have a point.” He glanced back toward the living room. “We might as well try this in there. You’ll have more room to move around.”

  She couldn’t quite see why that mattered. “Do I need room?”

  The corners of his mouth quirked — just a little, not so he was actually laughing at her ignorance. However, she knew she was ignorant about this sort of thing. She’d never cast a spell in her life.

  All right, technically, she had murmured a teeny little spell to summon Madeline Nash’s ghost back when she and Caleb had been trying to figure out where Colin had hidden the footage, but that very small bit of magic hardly counted.

  Still looking amused, Will said, “You’ll need to draw the spell circles, and sometimes they can be fairly large.”

  Dismayed, she looked past him to the living room, to the polished oak floor and the friendly mismatch of antique furniture. “I don’t want to mess up your house — ” she began, thinking of the patterns Audrey and Michael had erased from the floor of the Whitcomb mansion in Glendora, how Audrey’s description had made them seem very large and very complicated.

  “You won’t,” Will interrupted. “You’re not summoning demons — there’s no paint or blood involved. No, these spell circles are the kind you draw with holy water.”

  “I’m supposed to write symbols with water?” Rosemary asked, knowing how dubious she sounded. “How will I know if I screw something up?”

  “You won’t. Or rather, you’ll know if we have a horde of demons appear in the middle of the room.”

  She crossed her arms and gave him what she hoped was a convincing stink-eye. “That’s supposed to be reassuring?”

  “No,” he answered easily. “It’s just the truth. Come on.”

  Wondering if she’d made a terrible decision in attempting to ward the house, Rosemary followed Will into the living room. He took the books from under his arm and set them on the coffee table, then went over to the antique cupboard placed up against one wall and extracted a small plastic bottle from one of the shelves inside. Silently, he handed it to her, and she took it from him.

  “Holy water?” she asked, and he nodded.

  “It never hurts to have a decent supply around.”

  No, she supposed it didn’t. The bottle looked completely prosaic, but she had to trust that the liquid it contained was the thing she needed to create some viable demon-repelling wards.

  Without waiting for her to comment, he went on, “Before you start creating the actual wards, though, you’ll need to prepare yourself. Do you meditate?”

  “Yes,” Rosemary said, glad that she practiced that ancient art on a regular basis. She didn’t pretend to be a master, but she had become pretty good at maintaining focus, on working her way through the visualizations that allowed her to exercise some control over the racing thoughts that all people had to deal with.

  Will looked pleased. “Good. Then this should come naturally to you. The most important thing is to do what you can to remove all negative thoughts, anything that might lead you to believe you won’t be successful in casting these spells. In your case, you might also want to think of what it was you did to protect me — and yourself — from Caleb’s demonic magic. Obviously, you were very effective, so you’ll want to invoke some of that power now.”

  What had she done, exactly? She’d been driven by fear and worry and desperation, but something within her had risen to the occasion and had allowed powers she didn’t even know she possessed to come alive and do their work. She thought of the white light of protection, and how it had somehow coalesced within her and became something tangible, something that made Caleb’s evil demon-fire bounce off its surface as though a glass bubble had encased her and Will.

  That brilliant white light, absolutely pure, absolutely good. It had helped her before, and would help her again.

  “I think I have it,” she whispered, eyes half shut as she imagined that white light flowing through her body, filling her so that her skin shimmered with its energy.

  “My God,” Will said.

  His voice was also hushed, and Rosemary’s eyelids popped open. She looked down at herself, saw the way she seemed to be glowing from within, hands encased in glimmering white light. Because she was wearing a sweater and jeans, she couldn’t see much more of her skin, and yet she somehow knew all of her glowed in the same way.

  Like she was radioactive.

  She gasped, and the glow disappeared immediately. Heart pounding, she touched a finger to the back of her hand. It felt completely normal — if anything, a little cool to the touch, since the house wasn’t overly warm.

  “It can’t hurt you,” Will said. He came over to her and took her hand in his. “It’s part of you, Rosemary. Do you understand?”

  Did she want to understand? Part of her didn’t, not really, because these powers surfacing from nowhere frightened her. On the other hand, it would be stupid to ignore them just because she didn’t fully understand them yet. Her strange gifts were what had beaten Caleb, and so she knew she had to accept them now. Otherwise, there was a very great chance she wouldn’t be so lucky the next time she had to confront someone of demon-kind.

  “I understand,” she murmured. “Or at least, I understand if I don’t think too hard about it.”

  A sudden, swift smile, and he bent and kissed her. Gently, but the touch of his lips against hers awoke a hungry heat within her, one she wanted to succumb to. It would be so much easier to keep kissing Will and then move matters down the hall into the bedroom. However, she knew that doing such a thing wouldn’t help her at all. Oh, she wanted to be with Will, but sex wouldn’t be anything except a distraction at this point. Once the house was safely warded…well, then they would talk.

  “Try it again.”

  She nodded, then pulled i
n a breath and made herself focus again, closed her eyes and imagined the beauty and strength of her power as it grew within her, light pulsing like a star gone nova, only healing instead of hurtful. This time when she opened her eyes, she knew what to expect, and the pale shimmering glow that surrounded her hands didn’t surprise her, but instead only awoke a sense of wonder.

  “What do I do now?” she whispered.

  Will bent and lifted the book from where it had been waiting on the coffee table, then opened it to a page toward the beginning. “We’ll start with a simple charm of protection. Considering the power you seem to possess, you may not need to do anything more than that.”

  Should he be that confident in her ability to create the wards? Rosemary didn’t know for sure. Yes, that glow had been extraordinary, but just because something looked spectacular didn’t necessarily mean it possessed any real substance.

  However, she supposed she’d find out soon enough.

  She glanced down at the page Will had selected. The book was either quite old or a facsimile of a much older edition, since it had been printed in an old-fashioned font, the kind that had the funny lower-case “s” shaped like an “f” — like you’d see on the Declaration of Independence or something. Because of the typography, it was a little difficult to read, and she made herself go over the charm several times so she wouldn’t trip over her tongue while reciting it out loud.

  “All right,” she said, looking up from the book to see Will watching her intently. As soon as their eyes met, however, he gave her an encouraging smile.

  “Then go ahead.”

  One brief pause to pull in a breath and steady herself, and then she said in a firm, clear voice, “All within is good. Circle of air and spirit, surround this place. Let no harm come to those who dwell here or remain within these walls. Light against dark, bright against black, so let it be.”

  As she spoke, she raised her hands and saw again the pulsing white glow of her power — or talent, or gift — emanating from beneath her skin. More than that, though, it seemed to spread out from her body to encompass the entire room first, and then move beyond that, going to include every square foot of Will’s house.