Sapphire Nights (Crystal Magic Book 1)(78)

Of course, if she could find those, she might be able to stop the development with science. Her other family would hate her.

An anguished banshee howl lifted the hairs on the back of her neck.





Chapter 25





Sam fought rising panic. Had she come all this way only to find her aunt totally mad and howling at the moon? She glanced nervously over her shoulder, but didn’t see any moon, full or otherwise. The fog was drifting inland.

“Valdis?” she called.

“Go back,” Valdis wailed. “The serpents nest under me.”

Serpents. Deep breath, Samantha, there be no dragons here. “Can you come down here where I am?”

She tried to see her aunt, but the flashlight revealed only large boulders tumbled from a long ago mudslide.

“Twisted the damned ankle,” her aunt said in a perfectly prosaic voice.

Sam was so relieved by the normality that she almost shook with laughter, until she realized Valdis had been up here for twenty-four hours without food and drink. Or drugs. “I have water and a first-aid kit in my backpack. How do I avoid the serpents?”

“They’re in the rocks, hunting. You can’t. Don’t waste your life for mine. You are the only hope of eradicating the evil. It’s spreading. Even Lance is infected now. This is all Susannah’s fault. You were supposed to learn art, not science.” This time, despair and a hint of doom crept back in her voice.

Art! She couldn’t draw a straight line. She could go back and get help. But she hated abandoning her aunt—and leaving her in danger of snakes.

Sam shuddered, realizing Valdis probably meant she was sitting above a snake nest.

Faced with family or phobia, Sam girded her figurative loins, held her breath, and cautiously poked her staff among the rocks. If she believed in magic, she’d hope the stick would guard her safely past snakes and up the boulder path.

A bite would cause excruciating damage before they could reach anti-venom supplies. Snake-bite kits were mostly for pretending something was being done so the victim stayed calm.

“Why can’t Cass hear you?” she asked, hoping to distract herself if not Valdis as she climbed.

“Unconscious,” Valdis said in disgust. “Not good with pain.”

“Well, start sending magic signals to Cass now. I’m coming up.”

Swallowing hard, fighting panic, Sam stepped up on the first rock in the slide area, beating her staff against the stone and underbrush. She almost wished her memory hadn’t returned.

Valdis started to moan, not in pain, but as if possessed. Now, it wasn’t only the hair on the back of Sam’s neck standing up. She had goosebumps up and down her arms.

“He’s here,” Valdis wailed. “He’s here. He’s come back! Be careful. I don’t know him anymore. The evil. . . He doesn’t know what he’s doing. Promise me, you’ll take care of them. Don’t let them give in to temptation. . .”

Sam beat her stick against the next rock, whacked at the bushes, and prayed to whatever gods or spirits looked after mad women. “Who’s back?” she called, just because. She was fairly certain this was her aunt on spirits, not drugs.

“Go away!” Valdis shouted in a voice not her own, confirming Sam’s suspicion. “Go back! Leave this place. Let the evil die here as I did!”

“Okay, that’s not a positive attitude,” Sam muttered. “Valdis, block that jerk. You’re not dying. Find someone useful.”

Maybe she had started channeling Cass and her acerbic take on life. No wonder her great-aunt was a little weird if she’d lived with people in her head all her life. That sounded like a description of schizophrenia if she’d ever heard one.

Valdis fell silent. Biting her bottom lip, Sam climbed a little faster, questioning her sanity as she went.

In the silence, she heard the unmistakable rattle of a diamondback. Sam froze.

Valdis chose that moment to start howling. “It’s in the paint! I see the demons, and they see me! Stop them, stop them now, bury the demons before they reach us!”

Snakes, paint, demons. . . Snakes—snakes were real. The rattle was loud and threatening. She was in its territory. Stay calm, don’t panic. What did the books say she was supposed to do? Freeze. Respect the snake. Okay, she was completely frozen. If respect meant frozen with fear, yup, she was all over it.

“Don’t worry, he’s gone.” Valdis spoke in a sing-song voice with a slight accent—Scandinavian? “You’ll do fine if you don’t give in to greed as the others did. Don’t play with the crystals and be strong, dears. It’s up to you to rebuild our beautiful farm.”

Don’t play with crystals?

The new voice almost sounded coherent. Either that, or Sam figured she was as nuts as her aunt. She’d feel better if the voice had said don’t play with snakes.

Heart pounding frantically, she listened for the rattle as Valdis grew quiet again. Sam ran the beam of her flashlight over the rocks until she caught movement. She inadvertently stepped backward to avoid the slithering shadow and lost her footing on the boulder. She screamed.



Stalking out of the cemetery, surrounded by chattering Lucys, Walker irritably decided he wanted one of Harvey’s big sticks too. They’d be useful in batting off the crazies.