“So,” King said. He swung the poker in a quick circle like he was a knight getting ready for a sword fight. “The iron works. Whatever your spell with the salt seemed to work, too.”
I hoped that he got most of his witchcraft knowledge from TV, because if he ever asked an actual witch about what I’d been doing with the salt and water, they would have called him crazy.
“I think they’re trying to keep us away from something,” I said. “This felt like a trap.”
“Yeah,” King agreed. The dark boundary had disappeared, and I saw a paper with a circle drawn on it flutter to the ground. The circle had burned itself out.
“You got in,” I said. “How?”
“With a lot of energy,” King said. “I don’t know that I could do it again.”
“It’s a good sign,” I said. “It means that our magic works against them.”
“Yeah, but I’m not prepared,” he said. “I don’t have enough circles drawn to use them as an offense. You?”
I could dig into my satchel and pull out things that would make his eyes pop out of his head, but that would be more headache than it was worth. Instead, I shook my head.
“We’re better off with the salt and the iron,” I said. “Can you draw your circles now?”
With a quick nod, King pulled out his special pen and notepad. He started drawing, his hands steady. I wondered how long he’d trained that he was so fluent with his circles. He wasn’t even pausing to think.
How did he end up a uniformed cop?
His eyes cut to mine. He was depending on me to defend him if they attacked us again. I nodded and let my eyes go slightly distant as I felt for the salty brine in the carpet around us. Itried reaching farther, to see if I had any more weapons at my disposal, but at the walls of the house, my senses grew fuzzy, like I was listening through water.
The sound of King’s pen was quiet, and he flipped to a new page, then another. I called some of the salt from out in the hall to me. Hopefully wouldn’t notice that our salt had increased from maybe half a cup to several pounds.
Finally, he said, “That’ll be about all I have the power to do.”
“Okay,” I said. “I think the only room we haven’t tried is the one that you got blown into earlier. They’re trying to trap us here, or keep us from something. Whatever it is, I think it’s there.”
With his hand hovering over one of his hasty circles, King followed me out of the room. I headed for the guest room. Before we got there, cold shivered up the back of my arms.
King shouted something and powered up the circle he’d chosen. When the circle glowed green, he tossed the paper into the air. It spider-webbed out, the circle growing exponentially as it created a barrier between us and the two male ghosts poised to attack. They slammed into the wall, their fingers leaving dark trails where they scratched at it.
Running to the room, I rounded the doorway and skidded to a stop in the middle of the small space. Looking around, I couldn’t see anything obvious. If it had been obvious, though, we would have noticed it the first time.
A hand reached through the floor and grabbed at my ankle, wrapping around my calf familiarly. Oh, no, the little boa constrictor wouldn’t trap me the same way twice.
Pumping magic into the air, I turned the salt around me into a crystal that wrapped around her fingers. She hissed, the crystal staying on her arm until she pulled it back into the floor.
I glanced at King, but he was focused on the barrier he’d put up. It had trapped the two male ghosts like flies in a sticky web,and as they struggled to get out, it tightened around them. No wonder he said he’d only be able to power a few spells. If this was the level he was talking about, he was going to burn every ounce of magic he had left in his body.
With a shriek like something out of a nightmare, one of the ghosts pushed itself halfway through the spell, dripping acid onto the floor where the circle cut through its skin. A shiver danced up my spine, and I began searching, shoving aside the small table, looking everywhere for any hint of a spell or remains.
Nothing but a smooth floor with a gorgeous, dark stain. I huffed and squinted at the bed. It wasn’t in the right place.
The double bed took up a considerable portion of the room, and it was situated right next to the door, so you had to almost squeeze past it to get all the way in. Maybe the intention was to give enough space for people to have a lot of room to get ready for weddings, but I couldn’t see any bride wanting the guest room instead of the master.
In fact, it would have made more sense to push the bed under the window and leave enough space as you came in to drop bags, change, do whatever you needed there. The bed looked classic, the headboard a white painted wood, but I saw a hint of wheels underneath the feet.
As King panted, the strain of the magic getting to him, I shoved the bed to the side, pushing it into the doorway. King, who was standing in the doorway, danced back into the hallway, throwing me a confused look.
The moment of distraction loosened his hold on the spell and the ghost that had gotten halfway through freed itself, lurching at King. He pulled out the fire poker and swung it at the ghost. I yanked back the rug positioned under the bed.
Bingo.
Someone had burned a circle into the wood. I couldn’t read what it had been initially for, if it was actual alchemy or a bastardized witchcraft, whoever had done the floors had tried to sand it away, the floor curving from how far down they’d sanded. But it was etched so deeply that they would have had to replace the entire section to get rid of it.
