Authors: Susan Vaught
“Where—” I reached out with my senses, sweeping through Lincoln Psychiatric Hospital, searching for the familiar flares of energy.
“They’re gone, boy,” Imogene said as she tended Trina’s wounds with touches and bursts of golden healing light. “Forest and Addie and Darius. All three got taken.”
“The whole hospital’s going ballistic.” Trina’s voice sounded jittery. She looked jittery, too, until she sat on the tile floor. “They’re counting patients and locking doors—and the arrows! I don’t know who or what shot them. They looked like people, but
they weren’t. And they weren’t really here! My powder blew up and burned me when I threw it at them. They took Darius. They took him, Levi!”
“Shades,” Imogene said, her voice sounding flat and calm compared to Trina’s. “Weak ones, and from a long time ago, by the way they were dressed and painted up like a tribe. They couldn’t come through from the other side, but they shot me full of holes and swiped Addie before the thin spot shut itself.” Her gray eyes blazed, making her look younger. “They’re closed, boy. All the doors in Lincoln. Sealed off tight.”
My senses swam in circles. Trina’s dark eyes glistened with hurt for Addie and Forest going missing—and Darius. Darius was her heart, just like Forest was mine. She turned that terrible gaze on me, blazing with witch power and a little bit of crazy born out of grief. “We have to go get them back. We have to get them
now
.”
“There’s no way to get to the other side,” I told her, feeling that same grief-crazy creeping up on me. “Forest killed the thin spots.”
“Then you’ll just have to open one,” Trina told me loud enough to make Cain growl.
My eyes darted to the hall door as people started hollering about earthquakes and cracked walls and broken windows. “Imogene and I always use the thin spots Lincoln makes on its own.”
I smashed my hand against the nearest wall, feeling bones snap in two of my fingers. I didn’t care. It didn’t even hurt, but Cain whined anyway and came to lean against my legs. My
bones would heal, and too fast. Since Imogene had brought me back from the other side, it was like I kept her healing inside me, working all the time.
“Who took them?” Trina demanded. “What do they want?”
Imogene said nothing. For a few seconds I saw the shades again, the skinny one and the big one, dressed up and painted like pretend Indians, their faces full of all kinds of hate and meanness.
“They’re killers.” I squeezed my broken fingers so the pain would punish me for failing Forest, but the bones were already starting to heal. That made me twice as mad. How could I be so indestructible when Forest was gone and maybe dead? I wished I could break myself into pieces.
“If they were bad enough to make the newspapers, or if they came through this hospital, they’ll be in my books,” Imogene said as she limped toward the far hallway door. “Let’s get to looking. We’ll have to walk the whole way, since the thin spots are gone.”
Trina let out an angry yell, then turned to me again, her dark eyes blazing with purpose. “Forest’s mother could make thin spots. Her
ghost
could do it—and you’re telling me you can’t?”
“I can’t,” I said, wishing like anything I could.
“But if Bridgette could do it, then somebody else has to be able to!” Trina grabbed hold of my arm like she meant to force me to agree with her—and I wanted to.
Forest
...
Everything inside me hurt, but Trina didn’t care. She shook me and glared at me, and her stubbornness only made things
worse inside. In all the history Imogene had written since she could move a pen on paper, Forest and her mother’s shade were the only folks who had ever been able to make thin spots.
Trina saw the hope draining out of my face, and she let go of my arm. “What about thin spots in other places in the world? There have to be some, right?”
“Mayhap,” Imogene said as she opened the door. “Mayhap not. Levi and I, we’re from this place. I don’t rightly know if we could pass through some other place’s thin spots.”
Trina swore and put her face in her hands. Her shoulders shook, but I didn’t dare touch her. I didn’t know what to say to her, anyway. She hated me now. I could feel it, and I didn’t blame her. I was worse than useless.
After a time, Trina lifted her face, and her hands curled into fists as she lowered them. “Well, we haven’t searched the whole hospital yet, have we?” Her gaze shifted from me to Imogene and back to me again. “This place is different. It’s not totally normal. Parts of it may be hidden from your senses—like the tunnels, when Darius’s grandfather and his witch tree broke through, right?”
Imogene held the door open for us and frowned. “They came through a thin spot as was already there. They didn’t make one.”
The hospital seemed to give up a bit of light, showing me Trina’s tear-stained cheeks and the desperate sparkle in her eyes. She was refusing to give up hope. Maybe I needed to borrow some of hers, and at least try to hold on to some possibility that I could reach Forest.
I nodded to Trina as I laced my fingers into the black fur at
Cain’s neck and gave it a tug, pulling him toward Imogene and the door. “Let’s go figure out who we’re dealing with. Then we’ll decide what to do next.”
It took a while to get to the bell tower, Imogene was moving so slow. It was like the last attack on Lincoln had drained her near to nothing. When I tried to give her a little healing, it didn’t do much good. The rooms where she stayed and tended her books, they were darker than they should have been, even when we turned on the lights.
Imogene directed me to some shelves and had me pull down two books marked
Before
on the spines.
“These can tell us about stuff I never seen,” she explained. “Things that happened afore my time that I heard about from live folks or spirits. Given how those shades were dressed, we’d best start looking as far back as we can.”
I sat down at a table with Cain beside me and opened a volume, just like Trina did. I started squinting at Imogene’s scrawl, trying to push away every thought about what might be happening to Forest. My mind kept sweeping back to her being hurt, or maybe dead. I was barely able to read.
Cain whined at my strong feelings and rested his head against my knee.
Each page in Imogene’s books had two dates, one for when she heard a story and wrote it down, and one for when the events of the story actually happened. There were lots of paragraphs about Madocs, like the too-tall skeletons found in nearby graves. Each sentence I read made me that much madder. None of this was what we needed.
“This is about a flood in 1773,” Trina grumbled. “Not much help.”
Imogene nodded and kept reading her own book. I went back to mine. Mixed in with stories about witches and bad spirits that plagued Never and the whole South, I found Imogene’s first scribbled tries at sorting out all the spirits she was seeing at Lincoln Psychiatric.
SpiritGhost—Sad bit of soul what got lost on its way to the other side. Naught more than fog, trapped around where it got made. May take on a bit of shape if it stays too long. Ghast—Full of mischief afore it died. Probably a kid. It’s got more shape and stays around where it got made, but can move a bit.
Useless to me right now.
Forest
...
Not long after the mention of ghosts and ghasts, I finally hit on something that got my attention:
Bloody Harpes
1775—Micajah “Big” Harpe and Wiley “Little” Harpe. Cousins born up to North Carolina. Strong Madoc line. Bad as they come. Burned up farms, defi led women, stole from soldiers.
1780—joined the redcoats just to kill folks. Took up with a group of Cherokee raiders. Kidnapped women and married them by force. Next ten years, had two kids each, killed by their daddies.
December, 1798—come into Kentucky to keep killing.
My eyes focused sharply as I squinted at Imogene’s scrawl. These two freaks, Micajah and Wiley Harpe, had gutted men and stuffed their insides with rocks to sink them in the river—and what they had done to women, it didn’t bear thinking about.
“These guys murdered their own children,” I muttered, and Imogene and Trina raised their heads. “The Bloody Harpes. And they ran with some twisted Cherokees for a while, which might explain the arrows and face paint, and the weak shades who got Darius and Addie.”
Imogene closed her book, and my heart started beating faster. “I remember those stories. Over to Russellville, Big Harpe bashed his own baby girl’s head against a tree to stop her squalling.” She shook her head. “They slipped capture a long time, ’cause their Madoc blood gave ’em a sense of when they was followed.”
“Who were they?” Trina asked. “And what happened to them?”
Imogene’s answer came quick. “This country’s first known serial killers. Little Harpe got killed by his own band of thieves for the bounty, but Big Harpe went down harder.”
“‘Legend has,’” I read from Imogene’s notes, “‘Big Harpe ran afoul of some folks with power down to Natchez, Mississippi, at a place called Witch Dance. They cursed him as he went back to Kentucky, and he finally got caught. One of the posse what took him down got vengeance for his murdered wife and baby daughter by chopping off Big Harpe’s head whilst he was still awake. The posse stuck the head on a pole at a crossroads near Henderson, Kentucky. The place is called Harpe’s Head to this day.’
“That’s him, then.” I pushed the book away from me, thinking about what I had seen behind the mountain man when he took Forest. A pole at a crossroads—maybe with a head on it.
“So, Big Harpe’s got her. And he’s got a grudge against witches,” Trina said.
“A big ’un,” Imogene agreed as she pulled the book out of my hands and started running her finger down the list of Harpe wives and children who hadn’t got murdered, following the bloodline. “If you believe the tales, it was a witch who finally pulled his skull off that pole and ground it to powder for a potion.”
Trina and I were quiet for a long minute, until Trina said what we were both thinking. “Did the Bloody Harpes come back now because of me? Did they pick me out as a witch when I went to the other side?”
Imogene got up and walked to a shelf and pulled down a volume, opening it before she even got back to her chair. “Mayhap,” she muttered, but I didn’t hear much conviction in her voice. “We don’t always know what makes a shade strong
enough to cross when it does, but those that’s bad are always trying.”
“It’s a good bet the shade I killed was Little Harpe,” I said. “And the one who took Forest was Big Harpe.” The thought of Forest in that killer’s filthy hands gave me pain in my guts. Had he already murdered her, or made her wish she was dead?
“Mmm,” Imogene said, and changed books again. She was after something, but whatever it was, she wasn’t letting on yet.
“Let’s go.” Trina stood. “We’ve got a name. Maybe we can call him out.”
“You got a ritual for that?” I asked her. “Because without a thin spot, we won’t be calling anything out from the other side.”
Trina just stared at me, and I knew she was getting mad. Imogene didn’t seem to notice her at all as she got up again and this time pulled down three books, from three different shelves. She opened them all at once.
I got to my feet and went to watch what she was doing, Cain following behind me. Imogene’s knotty fingers flew across the pages so fast I could barely follow. She flipped sections, closed first one book and then the next, until—
“Here.” She tapped an entry.
Trina came to stand beside me, and she was the one who read it out loud. “‘Bridgette Harper.’” The entry had admission dates for Lincoln Psychiatric, and a star by one of the dates with the note “baby girl born” scratched out to the side.
Trina’s eyebrows shot up. “Bridgette—as in, Forest’s mother?”
Imogene nodded.
“Harper.” I stared at the name, and then at “baby girl born.” “You don’t think—”
“I do.” Imogene closed the book. “Most of the Harpe folks changed their names to outrun what happened. Some changed it a lot and moved west, like old Wyatt Earp’s folks. But some stayed local and just went with ‘Harp’ or ‘Harper.’”
“But Forest can’t be one of them,” Trina said. “She’s not evil.”
“Evil gets chosen by the person, not the blood,” Imogene said. “She’d be the balance to her great-greats, as good as they were bad, by her own choice. Big Harpe likely feels he’s got some claim on her, and having her might make him strong enough to do things we ain’t seen from a shade afore.”
“Is he right?” I asked.
“Can’t say. But he was big into blood magic.” Imogene’s frown deepened every line on her face. “I’d bet he thinks he can use Forest somehow, make her open thin spots for him to come and go as he wants.”
Trina shook her head. “She’ll never do that.”
“Then he’ll kill her and try to take her power for his own,” Imogene said matter-of-factly.
That should have scared me stupid, but all I could think was,
Forest might still be alive.
If that bastard needed her for something, maybe he hadn’t killed her. My hand dropped to the back of Cain’s neck, and I slid my fingers deep into his matted fur.
Trina grabbed my other arm and dug her fingers into my wrist. “Let’s search the hospital.”
“Couldn’t hurt to try.” Imogene’s voice came out as cool as a
winter midnight. “Find what spirits you can, and ask what they know.”
“You’re not going?” I asked her, fighting back a wave of worry.
“I’m tired, boy,” Imogene admitted. “I think I might do more good here, readin’ over the books.”
That felt like a lie, and Imogene didn’t meet my eyes when she said it. Instead, she turned her attention to Trina. “What you got left in your witch bag, girl?”
“A few powders to slow down an attack,” Trina said. “And my willow charm.”
I winced at the thought of her charm. It was a lot bigger than the willow circles we had carried, and strong with Addie’s magic. Problem was, when Trina used it, it was about as predictable as lightning strikes in a thunderstorm. That thing might help us, or it might blow us to bits.