Unbound Spirits Read online

  “If she’s an earthbound spirit that’s tied to this location, then having the demons show up would have been extremely disruptive. It would be like having a bunch of noisy frat guys move into your house.”

  Even though the situation was serious enough, both Jackie and Edgar chuckled a bit at Michael’s description. “So the ghost is trying to help us so she can get back to her quiet life?” Edgar asked.

  “That seems the most likely explanation,” Michael replied.

  “Explanation for what?” Colin asked as he came through the door to the breakfast room. Daniela was at his side. If they’d gotten busy the night before, they weren’t showing any sign of it — they both looked rested enough, and there weren’t any telltale marks on Daniela’s throat. Then again, she was a makeup artist. She probably knew plenty of tricks for hiding that sort of thing.

  Audrey couldn’t tell if Michael was discomfited by the arrival of their producer, because he replied easily enough, “I saw a ghost a few minutes ago. We were just talking about why she appeared to me.”

  “‘She’?” Daniela repeated. “I thought the ghost here was just a blob of light. That’s how Colin described it to me.”

  Michael shrugged. “It could be a different ghost or — more likely — the same ghost using a different form. That sort of phenomenon really isn’t too unusual.”

  Judging by the way Daniela’s expertly groomed eyebrows lifted at that comment, Audrey could tell their makeup artist wasn’t completely buying that explanation, but she didn’t say anything.

  “Where did you see her?” Colin asked, his tone eager. “Was it anywhere near one of the motion-sensing cameras I set up?”

  “Outside Audrey’s room,” Michael replied. “So no — the closest camera is a few yards away and pointed in the other direction. Anyway, the ghost was just standing there and not doing anything, so I’m not sure she would have set off the motion detectors anyway.”

  Jackie seemed to recall her duties as hostess then, because she got up from where she’d been sitting and told Daniela and Colin, “There’s fresh coffee and hot water for tea, and pastries to hold you over until I get the strata out of the oven. Actually, I should go check on it now.”

  She excused herself, and Edgar rose and went with her, saying she would need some help. As Daniela poured herself some coffee and Colin looked over the tea offerings, Michael said, “I’m not sure how well this ghost would read on camera anyway. She looked like a regular person, or at least a regular person in clothing from a little over a hundred years ago.”

  “Pretty?” Colin asked, his tone sharpening with interest.

  One-track mind, Audrey thought, but she remained silent and pretended to be absorbed in sipping her coffee.

  Michael’s mouth twitched, but he answered Colin seriously enough. “Yes, she was attractive. Young, probably in her mid-twenties. Very dark hair and eyes, so I have a feeling that whoever she was, she had either some Mexican or some Native American blood.”

  Which probably wasn’t so strange, considering the locale. Audrey wished she’d been able to see the ghost for herself, because Michael hadn’t mentioned much about her expression. Had she been frightened? Or did she look more pleading, as if she knew how hard it was to get her message across to anyone who could help her?

  “Maybe she’ll show up again,” Daniela suggested. She’d gotten some coffee and a cherry danish, and was now sitting in the chair Jackie had occupied up until a few minutes earlier.

  “It’ll be interesting if she does,” Michael said. “But she shouldn’t be our focus. We need to concentrate on drawing out the demons and dispelling them.”

  This suggestion made Colin give an indelicate snort. “Demons, my ass. I slept like a baby last night. No disturbances. Even though we found that Ouija board yesterday, there hasn’t been a damn thing going on.”

  “Well, something tried to drive a wrought-iron cross through my head last night, so there’s definitely some kind of presence here,” Michael said, tone so casual, he might have been mentioning that he found a spider in his bathtub.

  “It what?” Colin had been dunking a teabag of Earl Grey in and out of his mug and carefully eyeing the color of the liquid inside, but now he stopped dead.

  “The cross in my bedroom — it’s been moving around a lot, turning upside down, then going back in place. But this was the first time it actually pulled itself off the wall.”

  Audrey held back a shiver, because of course she’d been there to see the whole thing. However, since she and Michael were trying to be discreet, she thought it better not to mention what the two of them had been doing the moment when the cross launched itself across the room.

  “Bloody hell,” Colin said. “What did you do?”

  “Well, Audrey and I were talking when it happened, so I grabbed one of the pillows from the bed and used it to shield the two of us. After the cross got stuck in the pillow, I doused it with holy water, and that seemed to calm it down.” Now that he’d related the story, he picked up his coffee and drank some. With a shrug, he added, “There haven’t been any occurrences after that one, though.”

  “It sounds like that should be plenty,” Daniela remarked. “I would have run screaming into the night.”

  “Well, as demon attacks go, I’ve suffered worse.”

  Now Colin looked almost annoyed. “If you’d only let me put a motion-activated camera in your bedroom — ”

  Michael sent him a glance that managed to be both disbelieving and annoyed. “Sorry, I had to draw the line somewhere. The world doesn’t need to see me walking around in my underwear.”

  Privately, Audrey thought the show’s ratings could only improve with the addition of a few shots of Michael in just a pair of boxer briefs, but she kept that opinion to herself. Thank God he’d managed to dissuade Colin from having those damn cameras everywhere — they were all entitled to a little bit of privacy, after all.

  Colin didn’t seem inclined to respond to Michael’s remark, and instead made a sound halfway between a snort and a growl before stepping over to the trash can in the corner so he could dispose of his used teabag.

  “Anyway,” Michael went on, now that it seemed as though their producer wasn’t going to force the issue, “like I said yesterday, Audrey and I should smudge the place, try to see if that will draw out the demons. They’re obviously still here, but they’re engaging in classic demon infestation behavior by attacking, then backing off. Their whole game is to put us as off balance as possible, so we need to make sure we all stay on our toes.”

  “I’ll be on my toes,” Colin grumbled. “But I’ll be happier about it if they give me something filmable. Your little blob of light in the shed yesterday was decent, but I’m not sure if that was spectacular enough for the viewers at home.”

  Would anything be? To the jaded types who would call everything some kind of CGI trick, maybe not. But everyone here knew what they were seeing was real.

  “Well, here’s hoping they fling some more crosses at my head,” Michael remarked, his tone now noticeably caustic. “I won’t try to block them this time — I’m sure your audience would get off on some blood and mayhem, wouldn’t they?”

  Colin didn’t rise to the bait. “It would make for a good episode, that’s for sure.”

  Luckily, Jackie and Edgar reappeared then, she with a large casserole dish of strata, and Edgar with a plate of bacon in one hand and a bowl of freshly cut fruit in the other. The sight of the food apparently was enough for everyone to agree to a temporary ceasefire, because Colin sat down next to Daniela, and for a minute or two, all was quiet as the food was dished up.

  After he’d set down the bowl of fruit, however, Michael looked up at Jackie and Edgar and said, “After breakfast, we’re going to smudge the house. We figure that’s a good way to force the demons out.”

  “‘Smudge’?” Jackie repeated, looking dubious. “Is it going to leave marks on my walls?”

  “No,” Michael said. “There’ll be a scent
of burning sage, but I promise, it won’t hurt anything, and the odor will disappear after an hour or two. We just figured it would be a good way to provoke the demons into appearing?”

  Edgar spoke then. He seemed vaguely alarmed. “Is that really necessary?”

  “It’s the best way to draw out the demons,” Michael replied. “These ones are kind of cagey. I think they like it here and don’t want to run the risk of coming across someone who can dispel them.”

  That response got a rueful shake of the head. “Should I be honored?” Edgar asked.

  “Probably not.” After breaking a piece of bacon in two, Michael said, “Did you have any luck checking your records around the time you found the Ouija board?”

  Jackie volunteered that information, saying, “We weren’t very busy in late August — peak season around here starts in October. But we had at least fifty-percent occupancy for most of the month, so it’s going to be hard to know for sure who might have left the Ouija board here.”

  “I think it was those damn kids,” Edgar said, sounding so grumpy, he might as well have been a character in an old Scooby Doo cartoon.

  “What kids?” Audrey asked. They must have done something to make Edgar respond so negatively. Up until that moment, she’d thought he seemed fairly even-tempered, especially when you considered that he’d been dealing with demonic disturbances for the past six months.

  “A group of college kids from California,” Jackie said. “I think they were from San Diego, someplace like that.”

  Well, that made some sense. Even up in the San Gabriel Valley that was her home, Audrey had heard what a party school San Diego State was supposed to be. If a bunch of students from that school had descended on the Thunderbird B&B, she could see why they might have left a trail of destruction in their wake. Why they would choose a sleepy bed-and-breakfast like this one and not a bigger hotel where their antics might be overlooked, she didn’t know. However, her question was answered in the next moment.

  “I think it was partly my fault,” Jackie said. “I was trying to bring in more business during the summer, which is always slow for us. So I did one of those Groupon things. That’s how they found us.”

  “There were six of them,” Edgar put in. “They were here for three nights, and we were definitely glad to see the last of them. Drinking every night — ”

  “Smoking pot, too.” Now Jackie looked almost as annoyed as her husband. “It took days to get the smell out of those rooms, and we had to replace all the bedding. That may be legal in California, but it isn’t here — ”

  “And all our rooms are nonsmoking, so it’s not like they didn’t know they weren’t doing anything wrong,” Edgar said. “They left all kinds of trash behind, and I suppose they could’ve dumped the Ouija board out back when we weren’t looking. They seem like the most likely suspects, anyway.”

  Audrey was inclined to agree. She’d attended a few wild parties in college, but they’d all taken place in student housing, not in someone’s carefully maintained historic bed-and-breakfast. Even at her most disaffected, she would never have taken those kinds of liberties with someone else’s property. Glancing over at Michael, she said, “Do you think there was any kind of malicious intent in their leaving the Ouija board here?”

  He was eating the second half of the piece of bacon he’d broken in two. After he was done chewing, he replied, “I suppose there could have been, but I don’t think so. It sounds as if they were just being careless. They probably thought it would be funny to get high and play with the thing. Maybe they got some answers that spooked them, and they dumped it rather than take it back with them to California.”

  This explanation seemed plausible enough. She was still learning to read Michael’s expressions, but now he seemed almost disappointed, as if he’d hoped the abandoned Ouija board might point them to some sort of larger conspiracy. Instead, they’d gotten a group of hard-partying college kids who probably hadn’t wasted a second thought on what might happen if they left something so dangerous behind.

  “So, dead end,” Colin announced cheerfully. He’d seemed halfway bored with the conversation, and probably had been framing shots in his mind and hoping for something really spectacular from the demons instead. “Finish eating, everyone — we need to get to work.”

  Both Jackie and Edgar appeared a little startled by his cavalier attitude, but Audrey knew it was just Colin being Colin. Since she’d been steadily making her way through a large slice of Jackie’s excellent strata while everyone was talking, she was almost done with her breakfast anyway. After spearing the last sliced strawberry from her plate and eating it, she put down her fork and said, “I’ll just go and brush my teeth. Daniela, will you come by when you’re ready?”

  “Sure.” There was still a large chunk of strata on her plate, along with a healthy pile of fruit, but she looked resigned to not being able to eat it all. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  Audrey gave her an encouraging smile and then headed out, glad of the warm sunshine and the bright blue sky overhead. It was hard to believe that demons and ghosts inhabited this property, what with the quiet splash of the fountain in the courtyard and the brightly blooming geraniums and pansies and petunias.

  A whisper of movement caught her attention, and she looked over at the guest house where she’d been staying. There, next to one of the stucco-coated pillars, was the woman Michael had described seeing earlier that morning. Yes, she was very pretty, with her shining black hair and warm-toned skin, which contrasted nicely with the lacy white gown she wore.

  Her expression was strained, however, and she pointed upward with one hand, indicating the rough-beamed ceiling of the covered walkway. Audrey followed the movement and then sucked in a breath as she realized what was sitting on the roof there.

  She might have even noticed it as she walked over here and dismissed it, thinking the small, grotesque shape was only a statue of a gargoyle. The garden had several statues scattered here and there, although they were the sort of thing you’d expect to see in such a place — a graceful girl with a watering can, a gnome peeking out from underneath some elephant’s ears.

  This wasn’t a girl or a gnome, however. It wasn’t even a gargoyle.

  No, as her eyes met its red ones, she realized she was staring up at a demon.

  Chapter 12

  The demon was much smaller than the terrifying, shadowy beings Audrey and Michael had battled in the basement of the Whitcomb mansion in Glendora. Crouched up there on one of the beams that supported the adobe structure’s roof, it really did look like a gargoyle — not quite three feet tall, with black scaly skin and bat-like wings that beat slowly against the warm air.

  As their eyes met, its mouth opened in a wide grimace of a smile, revealing several rows of yellowish, pointed teeth. Before Audrey could even begin to react, it launched itself from its perch and dived directly at her, small hands with their curved black talons reaching out toward her face.

  A scream escaped her lips, and she flung herself to the ground, thinking in her panic that maybe a quick tuck and roll might send her out of range of the creature’s claws. But even as she smashed into the concrete walkway, something wickedly sharp slashed across her shoulders, shredding the cotton shirt she wore.

  From somewhere behind her, she heard a confusion of shouts, of running feet. And then there was Michael’s voice, crying out, “You will not touch her!”

  Something wet splashed against her cheek, and Audrey realized he must have deployed one of his bottles of holy water, since the miniature demon let out an ungodly screech. As she pushed herself back up to her feet, she saw it zoom across the courtyard and then disappear into thin air.

  At once Michael was at her side, his hand on her arm. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m okay,” she gasped, then pulled in a breath to steady herself. “But that thing scratched me.”

  He touched the shoulder of her torn shirt, pulling the torn edges away so he could get a better
look at her wound. “We’ll need to get that cleaned up at once.”

  Then Edgar was next to her, saying, “We have a first aid kit in the kitchen. Let’s go back to the breakfast room, okay?” He seemed more concerned than shocked, which made her think he hadn’t seen the actual attack, only the aftermath.

  Somehow, Audrey was able to nod. With Michael steadying her, she managed to stumble back to the room where they’d all been sitting just a few minutes earlier. The cuts along her shoulder felt like they were on fire and throbbed with each step. Dimly, she realized that Colin and Daniela were tagging along as well, Colin with his phone out for some reason.

  Oh, right. He didn’t have the big video camera with the Steadicam unit, but he could still get all the action on his iPhone.

  Jackie pushed a glass of cold water into her hands. “Drink this. Do you want some aspirin or ibuprofen?”

  The ibuprofen would help with any swelling, so she asked for that, and Jackie left the room to fetch the analgesic. In the meantime, Edgar had reappeared with the first aid kit and began to dab at her wounds with some alcohol-soaked pads.

  Audrey couldn’t help but let out a hiss of pain, because the antiseptic only made the demon’s scratches hurt that much more.

  “Sorry,” Edgar said, “but we need to get these cuts cleaned out.”

  Gritting her teeth, she nodded in reply. He went back to work while she clutched the glass of water and tried to tell herself that it really didn’t hurt as much as she thought it did.

  Colin and Daniela were now huddled over his phone, apparently watching the playback of the video he’d just shot. Maybe he’d decided he didn’t need a long, drawn-out sequence showing her wounds getting tended. At any rate, he exclaimed, “Bloody brilliant! I caught almost the whole thing!”

  “Colin, that goddamn thing tried to kill her,” Michael bit out, sounding as if he was ready to commit mayhem himself.

  “Just scratches,” Colin scoffed. “Anyway, she’s getting patched up. You’re all right, aren’t you, Audrey?”