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“You won’t have to,” I said stoutly, even as I hoped I wasn’t making promises I couldn’t keep. “I’ll get dressed and come over. In the meantime, you and Tom stay together and wait for me downstairs. Oh, and if you have any white candles, light them all.”
“‘White candles’?” she repeated, sounding bewildered.
Right then I really didn’t want to go into a lecture about how white candles were one of the best ways to push back against the powers of darkness. And honestly, I didn’t know whether that was even what was going on here. There could still be a perfectly logical explanation for the phenomena my mother and her husband were experiencing…even if I couldn’t quite think what it might be at the moment.
“Just do it, Mom. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. All you need to do is hold down the fort until I get there.”
“Okay. I think I saw some white taper candles in the candelabra in the living room.”
“Perfect. Light them all — and turn on every light in the house.”
Another one of those long pauses. “What’s going on, Selena?”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “But turning on the lights will make you feel better, if nothing else, right?”
“True. I’ll see you soon.”
I hung up then, and set my phone down on the nightstand. My heartbeat had sped up, and little tingles of cold worry were working their way along my spine. In my magic, I took the path of the light and did my best to ignore the darker things in the world.
That didn’t mean they didn’t exist.
Resolute, I went to the dresser and got out a fresh pair of jeans and a clean T-shirt.
As I got dressed, I found myself wondering if there was any place in Globe where I could get some holy water….
4
Hell’s Bells
Lights blazed from every window as I pulled into the driveway of the Bigelow mansion, and I found myself letting out a little sigh of relief. Obviously, my mother had taken that particular piece of advice to heart.
I got out of my Beetle, clutching the jar of moon water I’d been keeping in my fridge for the next new moon ritual. Whether it would be a viable substitute for holy water, I had no idea, but it was the closest thing I had on hand. Globe had one small Catholic church, but I doubted whether Father Estevez would have appreciated me banging on his door at three in the morning and asking for a few bottles of holy water.
As I’d driven over to the house, I’d mentally recited every spell of protection I knew, even as I asked forgiveness from the universe for doing so from behind the wheel of a car rather than properly at my altar. In my purse were packets of rock salt and coffin nails, both of which were sovereign tools for laying down protection spells at the four corners of your property.
Even so, I didn’t know whether it would be enough.
I took a deep breath of cool night air — nights were almost always cool at this altitude, even during the summer— and propelled myself up the steps of the front porch. There were roughly a million other places I would rather have been at that particular moment, but I couldn’t let my mother down.
And maybe if I were really lucky, this would all turn out to be bad pipes and nothing else.
No need for me to ring the bell; the front door opened as soon as I reached the top step, and my mother peered out. Tom hovered behind her, looking far more shaken than I’d ever seen him. That told me it had to be bad, since my mother’s husband wasn’t the sort of guy to rattle easily.
“Thank God,” she said. “I think it’s actually gotten worse.”
Before I could respond, an unearthly clanging and banging echoed somewhere inside the house, followed by what sounded like a slamming door and a peal of shrill laughter that had roughly the same effect as fingernails dragged down a chalkboard.
All of us cringed.
Honestly, I wanted to grab both my mother and Tom by the hands and haul them back to the safe little flat above my store. After all, she who runs away lives to fight another day. But because I’d promised to come and help, turning and bolting the second I got to the property probably wasn’t a very good look.
“Well,” I said, doing my best to sound brisk and businesslike, even though I’d never encountered anything like this before, “let me see if I can figure out what’s going on.”
They stepped out of the way so I could enter the house. I’d expected to feel a chill, or the uneasy prickling at the back of my neck that was the usual sign I was in the presence of something paranormal, but I didn’t sense anything.
Or rather, I didn’t sense anything beyond the unholy racket that seemed to be emanating from somewhere above us, either on the stairwell or the second story.
I moved toward the stairs, even though every instinct was telling me to run. But even as my hand touched the banister and I lifted a foot to place it on the first step, the noise abruptly stopped.
