“Love,” observed Zack quietly, “is a good antidote to a lot of foul magic. Leastwise that has been my experience.”
“So,” Lisa asked, her na**d face turned to Rick. “What do we do next?”
I walked over to my van and popped open the back hatch. Inside, I found a nice steel pry bar. “I find the pendant and break it—according to my expert friend.”
“What she said,” Zack reminded me because he’d overheard both sides of the call, “was that breaking it usually stopped the problem—but that there could be a backlash when the item broke.”
“Where is it?” I asked Rick, ignoring Zack for the moment.
“In my bedroom.” He glanced up at the broken window. “Up there.”
• • •
I talked Rick and Lisa into staying outside. Rick wasn’t happy about it but conceded that unless he did, Lisa wasn’t going to stay outside. And Lisa, I thought, was the one in real danger.
Zack and I, pry bar in hand, walked back in the front door—and nothing happened. No weird effects, no weird sounds. No dead women. Nothing.
By the time we walked up the stairs, everything felt pretty anticlimactic. I was basing my whole plan of attack on the smell of bubble gum and ozone—and the intuition of a fae-gifted man who thought his mother had killed his wife.
Zack made me let him walk into the room first. When nothing happened, I followed him in. The room was huge, with a walk-in closet beside the door and a bathroom on the far wall. A king-sized four-poster bed dominated the room in dark splendor. Beside it, the nightstand held nothing but an alarm clock that was blinking twelve.
“It was supposed to be on the nightstand, right?” Zack asked.
And all hell broke loose.
“Are you okay?” I asked Zack as I crouched beneath a library table along one wall. It was one of the few pieces of furniture that hadn’t started attacking us.
Zack had grabbed a silver tea tray and was using it as a shield and baseball bat. It beat my table because it was metal and more solid—and he could move without losing his protection.
The corner of a drawer managed to hit him in the shoulder pretty good, despite his mad tray-wielding skills.
“Tired of this,” he said, shaking out his shoulder. “Finding anything in this mess is going to take an act of God.”
Abruptly, the flurry of thrown objects subsided.
I rolled out from under the table, and Zack walked in front of me, tray at the ready.
“I’ve got an idea,” I said, thoughtfully. “Let’s walk around the room and see what happens.”
“I have a better idea,” Zack said. “We both go outside. Call Elizaveta and set her on this problem.”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to owe the witch any favors.” She worried me, truth be told. Witches aren’t my favorite people to deal with—and Elizaveta raised my hackles.
“She is being paid,” Zack pointed out.
“For pack matters. This has nothing to do with the pack,” I told him. “If this doesn’t work, we’ll rethink.”
“All right,” he said reluctantly. “Shall we try near the bed first?”
He took two steps toward the bed, and a paperweight flew at him. He caught it—and I got hit by a candlestick I hadn’t seen coming because I was watching Zack. It hit me in the ribs with brutal force.
Luckily, Zack was distracted and hadn’t seen it fly at me. I grabbed it as it fell and held it casually in the hand that wasn’t holding the pry bar—as if I’d just picked it up so I would have a weapon in both hands. I tried not to make a sound because if Zack knew I was hurt, he’d grab me and take me outside to wait with the other two, and I had a strong feeling that I was going to have to be the one who confronted the dead woman.
One thing that shapeshifting into a coyote had taught me was that I should listen to my instincts, even if common sense said that Zack was better suited to take on a poltergeist and find the amulet.
I gripped my pry bar more tightly, tried to breathe in shallow breaths, and watched the pattern of activity. As soon as Zack neared the bed (overturned with the mattress on the far side of the room) more things flew into the air. Smaller items this time—more paperweights (someone evidently had a collection of the damned things), vases, figurines—but they were thrown hard and, as we approached the bed, with increased fury. Zack ducked and danced like a professional dodgeball player, and so did I. She couldn’t keep this up for much longer—ghosts have limits.
I have spent a long time learning martial arts. If you spar too much and don’t actually fight, you get to the point where you attack with no intention of hitting anything. Every piece that came at us was intended to do damage. I could almost smell the desperate anger of each missile. Except for one.
The little wooden box would have missed Zack’s head even if he hadn’t ducked. I watched it fly across the room and land in the open closet and roll under a shirt lying on the floor.
The closet was between me and the door we’d come in from.
I moved, and a shoe hit my side just where the candlestick had, and this time, I let out a pained yelp.
“Mercy,” growled Zack, as I had known he would. “I can handle this. Please, please go. If Adam were here, he’d make you go.”
“Fine,” I said, pressing my free arm against my ribs. I didn’t even have to act like it hurt—because it really did. “Fine. You know what you’re looking for, right?”
“I was there when he told both of us,” Zack said dryly.
“Okay,” I stumbled to my feet and tripped over some of the stuff on the floor. The movement hurt. A lot. But it also put me next to the closet.
I used the pry bar to balance myself, feeling the ache in my just-healed left knee because I’d strained it when I fell. I turned as if to say one more thing to Zack and used the motion to hit the box as hard as I could with the pry bar. It shattered on impact. I had a momentary glimpse of a greenish stone, and I aimed my second strike at it. The steel—not as good as cold iron for dealing with the fae, but not a bad second choice—hit the pendant full force and turned it into jade shards.
“What the—?” The barrage of things that had been in the air stopped, a brush dropping straight to the ground, though it had been on a quick trajectory for the middle of his back. He looked at me and saw the broken box under my pry bar.
“You lied,” he said, astonished.