Sapphire Nights (Crystal Magic Book 1)(79)

The scream shivered every nerve in his body.

Without hesitation, he ran toward the amphitheater. The scream had been much more distant than the vortex, but it was hers, he knew it. Fear escalated his pulse.

He pulled out his radio and was calling for an ambulance before he gave it a second thought. His training had taught him better, but he wasn’t following his head. He was following his damned. . . what? Instincts? Heart? He’d been around the Lucys too long.

He swept his big flashlight around the arena, finding no way of tracking Sam on rocks. How the hell would he find her?

Harvey stepped out of the shadows ahead. Harvey, the nightwalker, the maker of crazy sticks—but Walker knew nothing against him. As far as he’d been able to tell, the musician was just exactly what he seemed, an underpaid creative who carved sticks for a living.

“Valdis goes up on Bald Rock when she wants to commune with the spirits,” the long-haired man in black said, pointing one of his sticks at the mountain.

“Why didn’t anyone say that earlier?” Walker asked, stomping out his anger and fear by following the direction indicated. “And that was Sam’s scream, not Valerie’s.”

“No one will go up there but Valdis. Sam wouldn’t know better. She would have followed the vibrations.” Harvey fell in step with him. “If you’ve called for help, I’ll direct them up there, but I’ll only go to the bottom of the path. The rock is haunted, and not by friendly ectoplasm.”

“Charming,” Walker grumbled. Did he hear moaning? “You’ve personally seen ghosts?”

Harvey hesitated. “I’ve personally seen evil. That’s enough to keep my distance. There’s something bad happening out there. That’s all I can tell you.”

“And Sam and Valdis may be up there doing battle with demons?” Walker said cynically. “And everyone is abandoning them?”

“Put that way. . . yes,” Harvey muttered. “So, we’re cowards. We’re artists, not heroes.”

“You’re superstitious idiots.” Walker halted to listen. Did he hear voices? “Sam?” he called, hoping for a response. . . hoping Sam’s vibrant life and laughter still lived.

Maybe he was fooling himself, but he thought he heard “Okay,” float down. He picked up speed, tramping on Harvey’s heels close enough to make the other man hop faster.

“No, we’re neither superstitious or idiots,” Harvey said emphatically. “If you stay here long enough, you’ll see what we mean. I heard about the fouled brilliance of the commune, as my father called it, and came up to find out for myself. There’s not much talent left up here to be brilliant, but the foul part is subtle and doesn’t need talent to cause harm. Sam called it negativity, and she might be closer to the truth, but how does one put negativity into dirt?”

“Explain negativity.” Walker needed distraction from the horrifying images filling his head. Snakes and landslides and broken necks provided more than enough evil without throwing in demons. But negativity, that almost made sense. The world was full of it.

“Talk to Lance sometime,” Harvey suggested, almost angrily. “Look at his artwork. There’s a reason Daisy hands out guardian angels, although I don’t know why the devil she’s using stones from the Ingersson farm, since that’s where the evil erupted.”

Now they were getting somewhere—the hippy farm, where drugs and art ruled. Hallucinogens were probably part of the routine. Cass had learned how to wipe Sam’s memory with that nasty hypnosis trick somewhere. “And you know this how?”

“Listening to the old folks and my father. He was a kid when he lived up here. My grandparents wrote music, played a dozen instruments, got pretty famous there for a while. A lot of the people who lived here were talented. Only the ones who got out survived the evil. My grandmother hauled my father out when he was still young, but my grandfather stayed behind. He was laid to rest on the farm, along with Valdis’s parents.”

Valdis’s parents were buried on the farm, not in the graveyard? Why the hell had no one told him? Because they were superstitious idiots and didn’t want to come out here. Walker thought banging his head against boulders would be more useful than talking to the people in Hillvale.

“Sam!” he shouted again as they climbed high enough to see Bald Rock.

“Valdis is injured.” Sam’s voice called down, sounding sane and safe.

Walker stopped to take a breath and wing a prayer to the universe. “And you?”

“Bruised, embarrassed, but in one piece. There are snakes,” she yelled back. “Be careful.”

All right, keep breathing, he could deal with snakes. No guns. No mad women. No children. Just snakes and rocks and. . . evil. He could almost hear his mother’s voice warning of the evils of vice whenever she caught him with alcohol or pot or flashing cash to impress. She’d chattered at him in Mandarin, smoked sage in his room, cut off his allowance, and invoked the memory of his father. And when he’d really been difficult, she’d planted bamboo outside his window and installed water fountains outside his door—to encourage positive energy flow. So, yeah, he understood superstition.

He’d still grown pot in his dorm room and played beer pong with everyone else, but he’d outgrown flashing cash to impress. Well, maybe his BMW was the adult method of impressing. So sue him. He wasn’t evil, and he still didn’t believe bamboo helped.