Arrest, Search and Séance : Book 1 of the Fringe Society by R.D. Hunter (pdf e book reader TXT) 📕

I gripped the precious stone in both hands, feeling its energy pulsating up my arms and settling in my chest. The Smiling Man stopped just inside the room, about fifteen feet from me, his body language uncertain now that he’d sensed a change in the air. Faced with the grinning visage of a creature that wanted nothing more than to torture and kill me, injured and uncertain, I did the only thing left to me; I smiled back.

I raised my power in record time, mingling it with the slightly sweet energy of the rose quartz. Then, I projected it out into my words.

“Creature of shadow,

Terror and night,

Begone from this place.

Begone from my sight.”

The spell surged forward, basking the Smiling Man in a luscious, pink glow that made him howl and stumble back. Still, that damn smile never left his face and I poured more energy into the spell. It tore at the air around him, causing little blotches of howling darkness to open as our plane of existence struggled to evict him. Still, he didn’t go. He dug his fingers into our universe and hung on, making the whole house shake and groan from the stress.

I was running out of power. If the spell fizzled out while the Smiling Man was still here, our reality would heal itself in moments and my corpse would be found hours later, in much the same shape as Nichole Barret’s.

No! I wouldn’t allow that. I was a witch, dammit. I wouldn’t fall prey to a hyped-up bad dream.

I emptied the rest of the power in the Rose Quartz, pouring it into my spell along with a healthy dose of my own. It reacted like a caustic acid to the Smiling Man, causing his shape to burn and shrivel before my eyes. It was a welcome sight.

But it wouldn’t be enough. Whatever had brought him into our world, he’d soaked up too much energy from it to be banished by one witch. I was going to lose, and it was going to hurt.

Tilly saved the day. Without warning, she jumped up on the table chair beside the Smiling Man and hissed in a way I’d never seen her, or any cat for that matter, do. Her mouth spread back, revealing sharp fangs and, it may have just been my imagination, but I could have sworn I saw a faint glow at the back of her throat.

Whatever it was, it did what my spell and all the power I’d pumped into it couldn’t; it scared the Smiling Man.

He recoiled in what I guessed was horror, throwing his hands up in front of him in a defensive gesture. Without his will to keep him here, my spell tore away at the fabric of reality around him. In an instant, there was nothing more than a gaping maw, roaring at me from the middle of my living room. Then it snapped shut with a CRACK like God slapping a mosquito, and all was quiet.

I sunk to the floor, spent and exhausted. Any kind of rejuvenation I might have gleaned from my self-care routine earlier was gone and I felt like a newborn baby trying to arm wrestle the Rock.

But I was alive, and that was all that counted.

Tilly came over to me, nuzzling my face with hers and purring loud enough that it made my teeth vibrate. I absently reached out and scratched her in her special place, marveling at the fact that, if not for her, I’d be dead or at least wishing that I was.

“Good kitty,” I said.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Sleep was an impossibility that night. Even though I was certain my spell would keep the Smiling Man at bay at least until the next nightfall, that didn’t mean that whoever had summoned him up and sicked him on me wouldn’t try something else in the meantime. Of course, that was the only thing on my mind.

It takes a lot of juice to communicate with something from another realm, much less summon it completely to our realm. But, more than that, in order to send it after someone, you had to have a connection with them. Usually, it meant either having something personal of theirs, a piece of them, like hair or blood, or their true name spoken from their own lips. I’m usually really careful about those sorts of things, but obviously someone out there had my number. The only question was who?

Fortunately, I had a theory on that. It was entirely possible that Trisha and the Things managed to snatch some of my hair or dig some of my skin out from under their nails after the fight and was using that to aim the Smiling Man, but it didn’t track, mainly because Trisha knew I still had her poppet. If she took her shot and missed, I’d use it to make her look like a hairless ape for the rest of her life.

No, if I had to guess, the only one who would spend the time, energy and resources to harness a malicious entity, was someone who knew I was coming after them and had something to hide; and the only thing that came to mind was the murder of Nichole Barret.

So, who knew I was investigating her death? Practically the whole city. The press release I’d typed up had been uploaded to all the major newspaper websites less than an hour after I’d sent it in. That didn’t narrow things down.

But who knew I was looking at them for the killing and was a part of the Fringe? Probably the same person who had plenty in the way of time and resources and who I had a meeting with in the next few hours. It all fit.

Harold Mason had just tried to kill