Splitsville (Rise of the Discordant Book 2) Page 4

  Chapter 3

  Plumbing & Poltergeists

  “I thought you said the storm damaged the bar?”

  From what Desmond had told me, I was expecting to see buckled floorboards and water damage everywhere, but when I flipped on the lights, the place looked fine. In fact, I had to wonder if my experience with the angel hadn’t caused brain damage because I was sure I was hallucinating. The old rotten floorboards had been replaced with new polished oak. The padded benches, threadbare and held together with more duct tape than fabric had been reupholstered in deep green vinyl and all of the ancient brass fixtures shone with a bright new polish as well. Even the stale smell of old beer and smoke was gone.

  “Eh, I took the liberty of fixin’ up a few things,” Bogie admitted with a sheepish grin. “The way I sees it, we’d be outta business if you was havin’ to wait for the insurance appraisers and whatnot to get their butts in gear.”

  The Five Penny of old was a dive bar. This new place had class, possibly too much class, given that the clientele would still be the same mix of students and blue-collar townies.

  “We?” Desmond asked with an amused expression. “I don’t recall signing any partnership agreements.”

  “You still need a bartender, don’tcha?” As if to punctuate this, Bogie hopped the counter and pulled out four glasses and the bottle that I recognized as the pricey small batch whiskey Abbey had left behind. “Them kids still gots a few years before they can replace me.”

  “Speaking of the elephants in the room,” I said, downing my drink and holding my glass out to Bogie for a refill, feeling only a little bit of guilt for slamming the first shot of what was supposed to be a luxury item to savor. I’m not typically much of a drinker, but it had been one hell of a night and the unemployment office was mercifully closed for the weekend. “What exactly are we in for with this new arrangement?”

  “Only the Creator knows,” Pete muttered as he downed his drink and lit what had to have been his fifth cigarette in as many minutes. So much for the new bar smell. “I can’t say that I envy the position you’re in. Just having the two of them in my office was enough to bring on one hell of a headache. But the Creator seems to think they’re the best candidates for the job. To be honest, I think they’re the only candidates.”

  His last, offhand remark confirmed what I’d assumed. If we were anywhere else, this wouldn’t be that big of an issue, but this was Blackbird, the Discordant’s Disneyland. We didn’t have time for learning curves and we couldn’t afford mistakes. Sure, a split soul Guardian made sense on a theoretical level. Sometimes a lost soul required more than a gentle nudge in the right direction and depending on the direction, a soul who was completely light or dark had an advantage. Theoretically, a Guardian who died young also had the advantage of being closer to the age group that finds itself lost more often than not. A teenage split soul, however, was a recipe for disaster.

  “Are they at least aware of our situation here in Blackbird?” I asked.

  “As much as they can be,” Pete replied with a shrug, taking a long drag from his cigarette. “I briefed them on the basics and let them know what they were in for, but they’re fresh. They don’t have a base for comparison, so I don’t know how much weight my words carried. They’ll see for themselves soon enough.”

  “So we’re going to have to brace ourselves for some serious damage control for a while,” Desmond noted with a pinched look of distaste. “We’ll be expected to hunt Discordant all night while simultaneously trying to parent a couple of teenagers. Even with the coven’s help, this sounds daunting.”

  I cringed at the thought. I died too young to have any children of my own, but Abbey and I had helped raise Donna. The emotional turmoil of the typical teenager was usually enough to give me one hell of a raging headache and Donna was no exception. Something told me the outbursts and out-of-control tempers we had seen with her were going to seem tame by comparison to our new wards.

  “Ah nuts,” Pete said and looked at the red warning light on his watch. “Looks like the Creator thinks I’ve spent enough time gallivanting in the world of the living, so we have to wrap this up.” He fished a large envelope and a set of keys out of his pocket and slid them across the bar. “Here’s the keys and paperwork for your new digs. Admin took care of securing the sale and paid closing. You’re on the hook for the mortgage, but hey, I would have killed for an interest rate like this back when I was paying off my home. Thanks for the drink and good luck, you guys,” he added hastily as he was pulled out of the cycle.

  I grabbed the paperwork and skimmed the details. I recognized the address as one of the oversized homes on the riverfront a few blocks away. It was a relic from Blackbird’s prosperous years that had sat empty and neglected because the owner was asking for more than the current market value. The price had been negotiated down and Pete was right, the interest was nominal, but I still cringed when I saw the monthly payment we would now have to make. Back when Abbey bought the Five Penny, the building and business both had been only a fraction of what this house cost. I mentally chastised myself for thinking like a cranky pensioner. Sometimes it was tough to act like a modern thirty-something when I was born in a time when a penny was still considered valuable currency.

  “Uh, not to add to the manure pile or nothin’, but did yous all see this?” asked Bogie as he slid the front page of yesterday’s newspaper across the bar. The top story in the Blackbird Chronicle read, RECENT SPATE OF FALSE CONFESSIONS BAFFLE POLICE.

  “I don’t see how that has to do with anything,” Desmond said. “Wait a minute.” He looked over at Bogie. “Is that the woman who confessed here on Wednesday?”

  “Same one,” Bogie said. “But this here’s the thing: I took a look in her head, remember? What I saw weren’t no fabrication. This broad truly believed she whacked her abusive husband.”

  “Didn’t you say she had dirt under her fingernails?” I asked, recalling the incident. It was hard to believe that it had only been a couple days ago.

  “Sure did,” Bogie confirmed with a nod. “I hates to say it, but this looks like demon activity.”

  “Oh really? Well now, that’s certainly interesting.” Desmond leaned in closer, narrowing his eyes at Bogie. I frowned. Even after Bogie proved himself by uncovering the truth about Amara, which not only saved my life, but also my soul, Desmond still didn’t trust him.

  “Calm down there, big guy. Ain’t no way a lesser demon’s got that kind of power. Read the rest of ‘em.”

  I’d skimmed the rest of the article, but I went back and looked at the others. Mary, the woman who confessed to murder, was the biggest story, but there were two others. One was a man who admitted to dealing drugs in Blackbird on behalf of a violent gang in Chicago. The other was a man who had claimed to have embezzled money from the city’s treasury.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “Don’t demons require some sort of payout? Creating liars seems below even a lesser demon. No offense, of course.”

  “None taken,” Bogie said with a wave of his hand. “Them lies all has repercussions, see? Mary’s husband really was an abusive creep, but he didn’t know where she had gone. Now he does. She’s going to need to up and move. The guy claimin’ he worked for the gang is on their radar and I dunno what yous know about gangs, but in my experience, they don’t like it when people go bringin’ attention to their activities. This last guy too. He may not have done nothin’, but now there’s gonna be an investigation and I’ll bet dollars to donuts that they is gonna come up with some shady dealin’s. To me, this looks a lot like the work of a wraith.”

  “What is a wraith?” I asked. I’d only ever heard the term used fictionally as another name for a ghost and while residual spiritual energy was real, ghosts were one of the few creatures that were still truly fictitious.

  “A Discordant on the DS,” Desmond replied. DS stood for Demon Spectrum. Ironically, Chaos had a structured pecking order when it came to different levels of Discordant and we
of Order used this hierarchy to assess threats. “Not quite as rare as angels, but obscure enough that I’m not surprised you’ve never heard of them. They’re formless and require a host to survive. The trouble is, catching them is nearly impossible. For everyone’s sake, I hope Bogie is mistaken.”

  “Yeah, me too, but that ain’t likely,” Bogie said with an apologetic grimace. “See, alls of these confessions fall right in with a wraith’s MO. We demons, lesser and higher, just poke around and bring up the ol’ skeletons folks be havin’ in their closets. Wraiths though, they look for the irrational fears. Things you might think about, but never plan on actin’ on. Those is the things they bring to the surface. Ain’t no lost like the mentally unstable lost and wraiths is all about the mental instability.”

  “So they’re also on the Possession Spectrum,” I said, more to myself. This didn’t bode well. Spectral Discordant were difficult because they couldn’t be harmed while they possessed a host. They had to be drawn out and trapped in a vessel. But unlike the creatures of the Entrapment Spectrum, they weren’t easily bound by shiny objects like bottles and lamps. They could only be trapped in relics, items infused with a mystic power that negated their own energies. Just thinking about it made me reach once again for the whiskey bottle.

  “They are,” Desmond confirmed, giving me a look that managed to convey both concern and disapproval. I hated to admit it, but he was right. If I drank anymore, I’d be in for an even more unpleasant weekend than this one was shaping up to be. “But unlike a spectral demon,” he continued, “they’re seeders. By the time the host shows signs of possession, they’ve moved on to the next victim.”

  “Oh,” was all I could say. Thank the Creator that this was a rare Discordant because they didn’t sound nearly impossible to catch, they sounded completely impossible to catch.

  “We’ll need to concentrate on finding the true host,” Desmond said.

  “Wait, what’s that?” I asked. “What is a true host?”

  “The true host is the person that the wraith will embody when it is not possessing victims,” Desmond explained.

  “Well that should make it easier to find them,” I said, letting out a sigh of relief.

  “Not exactly,” he cautioned. “A wraith does not affect its true host, so figuring out who that could be isn’t as easy as reading an emotional state. They will show no outward signs of possession and they will not be lost themselves.”

  “So much for good news,” I muttered.

  “Hey, buck up there, Seth,” Bogie chided. “At least we has a likelihood they’s is gonna show up here. Nice thing about this dive at least.”

  “Not sure how much that’s going to help if we can’t recognize them,” I grumbled and took up the paper again, hoping to see something, anything that might give us a place to start. Down in the corner of the page, another story caught my eye. Gary Marsden, a local man who had gone missing while hiking in Oklahoma, had apparently returned under mysterious circumstances and with no recollection of the time period when he was missing. I’d seen his picture on the news all summer. Gary had been a clean cut, nondescript, middle-aged man with graying brown hair and glasses. The picture in the paper had been taken after his return and showed a weathered and gaunt face nearly hidden behind a scruffy beard, which was understandable, considering he had been lost in the wilderness, but the picture sparked a memory.

  “Hey Bogie, wasn’t this guy in the bar the night Mary confessed?”

  Bogie squinted at the grainy picture and nodded his head. “Oh yeah, Gary. He was a weird one. Guess that makes sense.”

  “I thought you said he was new in town.” Gary had been lost, but with the commotion surrounding Mary, he managed to slip away before we could reach him.

  “That’s the sense makin’ part,” Bogie explained. “He thought he was new in town and I couldn’t get nothin’ else outta him. Says here he got bumped on the head or somethin’. I can’t get nothin’ outta someone if they ain’t got memories for me to get. Ya got me?”

  “I… actually yes, Bogie. That makes sense,” I said after I slowly parsed the meaning out of Bogie’s word salad. At least there was some good news. Since he’d been picked up by the police and reunited with his family, his memory had been returning. It was possible that his story would have a happy ending, but still, the amnesia was suspicious and he had felt lost, so I made a mental note to keep an eye out for him.

  I heard the squeak of the lock on the side door disengage and momentarily panicked before remembering how well warded we were. A moment later, all three of the Rosewood witches entered the bar, covered in dust and looking a little worse for wear. Louise looked over at Desmond, who was refilling his glass and motioned to the bottle.

  “Pour three more, my good man, because hot damn, we deserve a drink after that fiasco.”

  “What happened?” I asked, feeling a little guilty. The three of them had stayed behind to clean up the damage that had been done to the church. Damage that, while indirectly, I was responsible for causing.

  “Harry showed up and assumed we were there to trash the place,” Betty answered with a dirty look but her expression brightened immediately when she noticed Bogie behind the bar. “You’re back!”

  “Who’s Harry?” Desmond asked as he slid three full glasses across the bar.

  “The groundskeeper,” I explained. “He’s the resident Catholic mystic.”

  “And a real dick,” Louise added. “He thinks we’re a bunch of Satanists.”

  Desmond frowned. “When I first got here I checked out the church. I felt the power in the building, but none of the clergy had the sight.”

  “No, the clergy are neutral. Harry’s the only one,” I explained. “He’s been out of town for the last week. I’ll introduce you. He’s old and cranky, but he’s pretty powerful and has helped keep the Discordant population down in the past.”

  “Old and cranky is an understatement,” Donna grumbled, tossing back her drink. “We had just finished putting the doors back on when he showed up and blasted them off again, saying we’d desecrated the chapel with our dark energy. I had to call mom out to calm him down and she wasn’t too happy about it.”

  “Wait, so he has a problem with witches but not psychics?” Desmond asked.

  “He grudgingly respects mom as the elder of the mystic community. The rest of us he just sees as hooligans and whippersnappers.”

  “Well, I’ll reach out to Harry later in the week,” I said with a glance at the clock. “I’ll fill him in on what happened and make sure that he understands the situation was my fault.” Not that it would help much. Harry wasn’t very open-minded, especially when it came to pagans.

  “I’d like to come with you,” Desmond said. “I’d like to find out how much he knows about exorcisms.”

  “I’m pretty sure all you need to know is that they’re completely bogus fear tactics used by the church to scar young women for life,” Louise said with disgust.

  “Admittedly, those exist,” Desmond acknowledged. “But a Catholic mystic should have some experience with performing a proper demon expulsion.”

  “Are you already in trouble?” Betty asked Bogie with her hands on her hips.

  “Me? I ain’t done no misbehavin’. Not yet at least,” he added with a suggestive wink.

  “Speaking of misbehaving,” Desmond interrupted, giving Bogie a tight smile. “Would you be a dear and check on your houseguests? Seth and I can bring the coven up to speed.”

  “With pleasure, boss,” Bogie replied sarcastically, muttering not so quietly about his feelings on the situation as he left.

  “Houseguests?” Donna asked, raising her eyebrows.

  Desmond explained the situation we now found ourselves in and the challenges that our new Guardians were going to pose.

  “Kids? I mean, why? How are they going to help?” asked Louise with a look of disgust.

  “Careful, there, Weezy,” Betty said with a wink. “You’re starting to sound like Harry.�
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  “Oh shut it and don’t call me Weezy!” Louise shot her a dirty look. “You know what I mean. They can’t get into the bar and they probably have to go to school.”

  “I think that could help us, actually,” I said with a shrug. “We can cover more ground if they can get to the lost kids at school. After school, they can hit those that I’ve pegged during the day and they should still have time to finish homework.”

  “Um, are you forgetting how much homework they pile on kids these days?” Donna asked with a skeptical snort, adding for Desmond’s sake, “I was all set to drop out, take my equivalency test, and get some vocational training. The only reason I graduated is because mom and Seth threatened to bind my magic permanently if I dropped out.”

  “We’ll figure something out,” I said dismissively. I really didn’t need to be reminded of the hell that was Donna’s teen years. “Besides, we have bigger issues at the moment,” I added and let Desmond explain Bogie’s theory regarding the wraith.

  “Huh,” said Louise, looking around at the others, who all wore the same grim yet apologetic expression. “I hate to say it, but that does sound more up Harry’s alley than ours.”

  “We’ll still do everything we can to help,” Betty added quickly and looked over at Donna, who nodded her agreement.

  “Thanks,” I said. “You’ve all done more than any of us should ever expect already and I’m truly grateful. Go home and get some rest. We’ll let you know if we come up with any breakthroughs.”

  “Are you…” Louise began, but glanced over at Desmond. Even with my brain slightly fuzzy from too much drink, I didn’t miss the silent communication that passed between them. Though I had no idea what it meant exactly. “You’re right. We all need some rest,” she said with a puzzling half-smile. “You know where to find us if you need us.”

  After the witches left, I locked the bar back up and turned to see Desmond staring at me with a troubled look, similar to the one Louise wore.