One Grave at a Time (Night Huntress #6)(59)
“Every Halloween, three women are kidnapped, raped, tortured, and burned alive by the ghost that Madigan’s interruption prevented us from trapping,” I replied, meeting the gray gaze that was identical to my own. “Bones and I might not get another chance to trap that ghost, and if we don’t, many more women will die.” I drew in a breath for courage. “I love you, Don, but you can’t keep treating me like an employee on a need-to-know basis. Even if you don’t trust Bones to react rationally to whatever you know about Madigan—and I disagree with that—after all we’ve been through, you should at least trust me. I’ve more than earned it.”
Bones slid his arm around me, his aura changing from dangerous spikes of anger into strength, pride, and compassion. Those emotions flowed over me and through me, seeping into the very fiber of my being until it felt like we’d melded into the same person.
Don’s expression hardened into a stubborn mask that I well recognized, and I knew with deep sorrow that my words had fallen on deaf ears.
“I can tell you this—Madigan doesn’t have ties to the undead world like you’re thinking. Any vampires he’s getting blood from are his captives, not his allies, and no, I don’t know who they are or where they are.”
He didn’t say anything else. He just dissipated with that mixture of stubbornness and how-could-you still stamped on his features. I blew out a long, slow sigh, leaning in closer to Bones’s embrace.
“Looks like that’s another problem we need to deal with,” I said. If these captive vampires were random Masterless murderers, then Madigan could keep them and tap their veins like tree trunks for all I cared. But if they were innocent vampires snatched up while minding their own business, or they belonged to a powerful Master who might take revenge on their capture by wiping out my entire former team, we needed to act.
Right after we found a way to lock up a homicidal ghost, that was.
“Indeed. Madigan’s playing on dangerous ground, and so is your uncle,” Bones said, his tone still edged in anger.
Tyler patted his shoulder in a comforting way. “Family. Aren’t they a motherf*cker sometimes?”
That summed it up so well, there really was nothing else left to say.
Twenty-seven
A thick cloud of smoke hung in the air, its acridness stinging my eyes. The cellar had no windows, and the single door that opened into the farmhouse pantry was always closed when Bones and I were down here. If I were human, I’d have passed out within the hour, but of course oxygen wasn’t an issue for me. Neither was the darkness. The only light came from the orange halos around the sage as the flames curled the plants into blackened, smoking remains, but Bones and I had no trouble seeing as we pieced together hunks of limestone, quartz, and moissanite into another trap. We’d spent the majority of the past five days down here, working toward that single goal. Good thing we’d helped Chris and the team make the last trap so we knew what we were doing, and if we spent the next week down here, we’d have it done in time.
Then we had to worry about finding a way to force Kramer into it. No matter how I turned the problem around in my mind, it always came back to our best chance being when he was solid. I couldn’t force vapor into the trap. Neither could Bones, even considering that he worked on expanding his telekinetic powers almost as much as on this trap, but those were useless against a disembodied form. Yet waiting until Kramer was solid meant waiting until Halloween night, and we hadn’t found the third woman yet, so her life was at risk. Plus, the Inquisitor might only show up if we used Francine and Lisa as bait to draw him out. All the different things that could go wrong haunted me whenever I considered that option, no pun intended.
A knock sounded on the cellar door. “He’s back,” Tyler called out.
Bones rose, but I waved him back before wiping aside a chunk of hair that had come loose from my ponytail.
“You went the last two times. My turn.”
His lips tightened, yet he made no comment, knowing it would lead to an argument that I’d win. I wasn’t about to let him bear all of Kramer’s loathsome personality, and the ghost only got more pissed when he was ignored. Considering the damage he’d already done to this house, we had to buy it by the time this was over.
I went up the stairs, noting that the wooden steps vibrated from the multiple thuds reverberating through the house. What’s he using now? I wondered. Kramer couldn’t come inside, not with all the sage we kept burning in every room, but he made good use of everything in the near perimeter. The car we’d driven here had been impressively destroyed, its windows and tires not lasting the first night, the rest of it bashed and battered over subsequent days. The old farmhouse lost its windows on that first night, too, plus a section of the front porch. We’d nailed wood over where the glass used to be, which proved far more durable, and spent a few hours watching TV until Kramer ripped off the satellite dish and chucked it through the car windshield.
Thank God there were no neighbors nearby to hear the unbelievable racket, but that was why we’d chosen this property. The surrounding land had once been a soybean field but clearly hadn’t been planted or harvested in a while. I didn’t know what circumstances had led the former owners to leave and, failing the sale of the house, choose to rent it, but it was the perfect place for Bones and me to build the trap without Kramer’s prying eyes seeing what we were doing. All the materials had been delivered and put in the cellar before I got here, so Kramer hadn’t been able to follow us to this place until after they were safely out of sight. I had no doubt the ghost knew Bones and I were busy with something, but he could only guess at what.