The max porter box set, p.20
The Max Porter Box Set, page 20
Eye-patch scowled before turning his glare onto Mrs. Porter. She motioned with the gun, holding it steady. That lack of nervousness appeared to sway him. He let the knife fall from his hand. Kicking at the dirt, he stormed off.
Max watched the man ignore Wallace and the others as he receded into the woods. How long until they would cross paths again? Then again, Eye-patch would have to survive Wallace first. Max suspected all those who abandoned Wallace would meet dark fates — especially a man like Eye-patch who should have been devoted.
Max paused. He had seen the adoration in the man’s eyes, felt the depth of loyalty. Eye-patch would never leave Wallace — which meant ...
Eye-patch burst from the woods, sprinting towards Max, his mouth open and raging. He bore no weapon but his fingers, arched like claws, ready to tear into Max’s throat.
Another gunshot and Eye-patch dropped to the ground. At first, Max only saw blood. Shock that his mother had fired rippled through him. Then Eye-patch hugged his leg as he rolled on the ground. She had shot him in the thigh.
With animal fury, Drummond-Stanton clamped onto Wallace’s shoulders and twirled him in a circle before tossing him upward into the trees. He launched after the man, meeting him up high, ready to strike. Wallace cast another spell — a green light that flashed an instant and sent Drummond-Stanton tumbling hard into the ground. Those men still standing tackled Drummond-Stanton before the ghost could arise.
“Get the knife,” Max said. J hurried around, grabbed the knife, and in seconds had Max free.
They dashed over to Sandra and his mother. Sandra hugged Max tightly. Over her shoulder, he saw his mother. She looked shaken and cold.
She caught Max watching her. “I was aiming for his chest.”
J backed up to the group, keeping his focus on the fight and his knife at the ready. “What do we do now?”
It was a good question. They had failed to come close to success of the original plan, and Drummond-Stanton was in trouble. Three men kept him from getting up while two more pummeled him in the gut. Being solid had its disadvantages.
Wallace sauntered over as if he owned the ghost — that they were no more than naughty pets. Underneath his cockiness, though, Max spotted aggravation and maybe a bit of exhaustion. The fighting alone would have accounted for some tiring, but casting spell after spell might be more draining then Wallace wanted to let on.
Max huddled close with his team. “We’ve got to help him.”
“Of course,” Sandra said, “but we can’t go running in there. They’d kill us before we got halfway to them.”
Mrs. Porter holstered her weapon. “I only have two shots left.”
“Where’d you get that thing?” Max snapped.
Sandra said, “Drummond had it hidden in a copy of Moby Dick.”
“Of course, he did. There probably isn’t a real book in our office at all.”
“Can you focus?”
“Sorry.” Max looked across the debris on the ground. What could they use? The circle — no. All that fighting had broken the lines. Besides, casting a spell usually took time, especially for a novice. Sandra wouldn’t be able to do much beyond the spells she had come prepared to cast. They couldn’t attack — a novice witch, an orphaned teen, an old woman, and a man with more bruises than anyone should rightfully have. Not a fighting force, to say the least.
Wallace thrust his hands at Drummond-Stanton and another electrical blast shot into the ghost. Drummond-Stanton groaned as he arched violently. The charge ripped through him and into the men holding him. They screamed and tumbled back — one smacking his head against a large shard of bone.
“The bones,” Max said.
Sandra hushed Mrs. Porter from asking questions. She knew her husband, knew what he looked like when his thoughts started to connect intuitively.
“Those femurs belong to the dead men from this battlefield. Or at least, from that time. The others, the majority of people from back then, they all moved on. But not these men. These men had their bones inscribed with the Call to Power against their will. Right? They never chose for this to happen. It’s a curse.”
Sandra saw it now. She leaned up and kissed him. “No ghost could move on while cursed.”
“They’re still around somewhere. They have to be. Maybe they avoid the Other and that’s why Drummond never saw them.”
Drummond-Stanton kicked out, swiping his foot against Wallace’s legs and sending Wallace to the ground. He rose but weaved on unsteady feet.
Max cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “Summon your friends! Call on them. Archibald Henderson and Johnathan Shoemaker. Call them.”
Drummond-Stanton faced Max and paused. His stretched skin wrinkled like a child trying to understand a new concept.
“Archibald Henderson and Johnathan Shoemaker. They want their bones back.”
Wallace’s men tackled Drummond-Stanton to the ground, but one arm of the giant ghost punched through. He reached up toward the sky as if attempting to grasp a hand. Wallace stumbled to his feet, holding his head while spitting blood.
He straightened, staring off into the dark. With a shaking finger, he pointed. “What’s that?”
Max put an arm around Sandra and held his mother’s hand. His mother pulled J against her. “Be ready to run,” Max said.
Floating in from the trees, two pale figures appeared. Both were decayed creatures. One had a tricorn hat askew on his head. The other carried a musket.
Puffing his chest, Wallace said, “I’ve no fear of you.” He closed his eyes, recited his fast spell, and shot another electrical burst at the ghosts. But unlike Drummond-Stanton, these ghosts were not solid. The blast shot through them without harm. The ghosts raced forward and Wallace screamed.
Sandra covered her mouth. “Holy crap. There’s so many of them.”
“I only see the two — which is weird enough for me,” Max said.
“There must be twenty. Maybe more. They keep coming out of the woods.”
As the two ghosts Max could see descended upon Wallace, the hooded men launched into the air, shouting as they went. Invisible hands ripped them away into the sky. And they never fell back. Max squinted as one man soared upward, silhouetted by the moon, and vanished in a puff of smoke.
Archibald Henderson and Johnathan Shoemaker lifted Wallace off the ground and floated over to Drummond-Stanton. Standing his full seven feet, Drummond-Stanton gripped Wallace by the neck and held him in the air.
“Please,” Wallace whispered, unable to make a louder sound. “I promise —”
Drummond-Stanton snapped Wallace’s neck. Even as Wallace’s limp corpse fell, Max couldn’t be sure what had happened. A full second passed before he heard the dull crack of neck bones.
Archibald Henderson and Johnathan Shoemaker faded away.
“Woo!” J slapped his thigh, but Max and Sandra did not celebrate yet. Drummond-Stanton wheeled about at the sound with no sense of camaraderie in his hollow eyes. He stomped towards them.
Sandra scooped up the ceramic bowl from the tray and held it before the group. “What was once put together must now be apart.” She added a few words from another language and shattered the bowl on the ground.
Drummond-Stanton covered his face as if shielding from a bright light. Even as they watched, Max and J kicked dirt over the few remaining flames.
“Now what happens?” Max asked.
Sandra said, “They should have split apart.”
“Did you forget any part of the spell?”
“No. And don’t start with me, I’m trying to think.”
“All I meant was —”
Mrs. Porter touched his elbow. “Let her do her job.”
Sandra tiptoed closer to Drummond-Stanton. “You in there? Drummond? Can you hear me?”
The pale creature dangled his arms at his sides and sniffed the air. Sandra put out her arm, showing the back of her hand as if approaching a cautious dog. But this dog turned rabid.
Drummond-Stanton opened his mouth and roared. Max heard a strange combination of vicious hissing and guttural growls and pained cries. As the creature leaped at Sandra, Max lunged forward and grabbed her hand, pulling her away from the creature she had made.
Chapter 28
BREAKING FROM THE TRAIL and onto the battlefield, all four staggered to a halt. Breathing heavy, Max bent over, hands on knees, and coughed. “He’s not following us,” he managed between gasps of air.
Sandra nodded. “It’s the stone. The spell I wrote on it acts like a tether. Not as strong as one’s bones, but the Stanton part of him will stick close to it.”
“Because he lost his tether?”
“He’s been wandering, unconnected to his body, for centuries. This is the closest he has to a real connection with anything. Would you leave that just to chase us?”
Mrs. Porter said, “Okay, so he’s not following us. Who cares? Let’s go home.”
“No,” Max said. “Drummond is our partner and our friend. We won’t leave him like that.”
“Like what? If what you’ve told me is true, then he’s a ghost. He’s dead already. You can’t save him. But I’m real. J is real. And we should get out of here before that Wallace fellow comes back with his crazy cult.”
Sandra motioned forward, but Max blocked her path. He said, “Mom, we are not leaving until this is done. All of it.”
“There’s more?” In those two words, she became a little girl full of fear — fear of the dark, fear of the bogeyman, fear that the world might be not what it appeared. Max heard the need in her timbre — she had to find a way to rationalize all that she had seen.
J paced by the entrance to the trail. He focused on the woods, his stride strong yet cautious. “What else we got to do?”
“You saw that creature, right?” Max said to his mother.
She peered back with a haunted gaze. “Creature? You mean that tall fellow? The one that helped us?”
“Yeah, him. We can’t leave him alone in there. Um ... he’ll die of exposure.”
Sandra said, “That’s right. We have to help him.”
“How?” Mrs. Porter asked.
Max turned to Sandra. “That’s a good question. Any ideas?”
“One,” she said. “Chester Stanton needs to find his resting place. Even though he broke his tether, he still needs his bones.”
“Why? Drummond’s bones are long gone, and he’s fine.”
“He didn’t shred himself into pieces to be free. We broke his curse. There’s a difference. If Stanton can be brought to his remains, I might be able to cast an easy spell that will help him re-connect to the tether.”
“But he won’t go back to being cursed, would he?”
“The Call to Power has already been cast and used up. His curse is lifted because it’s gone. Look how he hasn’t come after us because of that stone. If it were his actual bones, he’d detach from Drummond through sheer will. He should be able to move on after that. At least, that’s how I understand it.”
Max closed his eyes. He wanted to sleep — for a good year or two. “Then we have to find where he’s buried.”
“And we have to do it tonight. We can’t let people walk that trail in the morning and find him.”
“Okay. Let me think.” He pursed his lips as he paced back and forth. “We know that Stanton was buried somewhere on or near this battlefield. That’s why he haunts this area. He’s not on this open section here because he would have found his body easily out in the open.”
“What if he’s under one of these monuments?”
“It’s possible, but wouldn’t this one with the statue or even the other one — wouldn’t they be like big lights signaling to him that his body is right here? Besides, this section of the battlefield was in British control. The Regulators were camped on the other side of the street, hiding amongst those trees. It’s easy to get confused around trees — they all start looking the same. Maybe he can’t find the tree near where he was buried.”
Max tossed away those thoughts with a flick of his hand. It didn’t matter which part of the field had been under control of which side. Stanton died after the battle had ended. Wherever he had been buried and cursed, it had to be less open to people finding him.
“What about the visitor’s center or the parking lot?” Sandra said. “Maybe after he broke free, his body was paved over or built upon.”
“Possibly. But that building looks the most modern. Maybe built in the 1980s or later. And it’s large enough that they would have had to dig a deep foundation. I didn’t come across any articles about finding bodies in the ground.”
Mrs. Porter tapped her watch. “Are we going to stand out here all night? If you don’t have a plan, we could at least go home where it’s comfortable and think there.”
Max’s synapses fired off — home. He jogged a few steps toward the street, peering into the dark. “I know where he is.”
“Then can we go?”
Whirling back to his family, he said, “Where did you leave the car? Is it far?”
“A few blocks from the park.”
“Go there. You and J, get the car and park it on the other side of the street a few hundred feet down from the entrance. If any cops come by, I don’t want them getting curious, so cut the engine and keep low. But be ready if we come running.”
J grinned. “You want us to be the getaway car.”
“That’s right.” True, too. But even truer — Max wanted both of them out of harm’s way. They had endured enough on this case, and they couldn’t really help much for the rest. As long as the rest went the way Max now saw it going.
Once they had left for the car, Sandra said, “You going to let me in on where Stanton’s buried?”
Pointing off with his chin, Max said, “The John Allen House.” The one-room home they had looked at earlier that day.
“But that’s not even from the actual battle.”
“I know. It didn’t come here until the 1960s.”
“Then how is that the place?”
“Because they brought it over from Snow Creek intact and set it down. There’s a root cellar, not a foundation. Deep but not too deep.”
Sandra gazed at the shadowy area where the house sat. “You think he’s under the root cellar.”
“Where else could he be on this battlefield that he wouldn’t be able to find himself? And what kind of goofed-up life are we living that I can ask that question seriously?”
With a grin and peck on the cheek, Sandra said, “My kind of goofed-up life. Okay. I know when to trust your intuition. Let’s go.”
She started toward the trail, but Max pointed back to the road. “The house is that way.”
“We have to get Drummond.”
“I thought we’d go to the root cellar, and you’d cast your spell to call him over and split him.”
“You thought wrong. Nothing is going to draw him away from that stone until he finds his bones.”
Max’s stomach tied up. “We have to get the stone, don’t we?”
“Afraid so.”
“Fine.” He trudged to the head of the trail. “You go to the Allen House and get everything set to cast your spell. I’ll get the stone. But be ready. I have a feeling ol’ Drummond-Stanton won’t be too happy about me swiping his precious.”
Sandra followed him onto the trail. “No.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We are not splitting up again. Not tonight.”
“Honey, that spell —”
“It won’t take long to cast. And you saw that thing we’ve created — how strong it is. There is no way I’m letting you go in there alone to get yourself killed.”
“So we’ll go in together to get killed?”
Sandra slipped her arm around him. “At least then, I won’t have to hear your mother blame me for your death.”
“She probably would hold that over you.”
“Forever. Even from her grave.”
Leaning into each other, Max and Sandra hurried down the trail.
Chapter 29
DUCKING BEHIND TWO BIRCH TREES, Max and Sandra peeked over at the circle. Drummond-Stanton clumped in one direction, stared at the ground, whacked his head with his fists, and then moved off in a different direction. He never went more than ten feet from the circle.
Not the circle, Max thought. The stone.
“Got any thoughts on how we’re going to get in there?” he whispered.
Blanching at the idea brewing in her head, Sandra said, “Yeah, I kinda do.”
“Let me guess — I’m not going to like it.”
On the plus side, the plan was simple. Max had learned long ago that simple plans worked far better than complex ones. On the minus side, Sandra had to be the one to get the stone. Max hated the idea of putting her in jeopardy, but even if they switched jobs, she would be on the minus side of the plan. There was no plus-side job in this.
“Ready?” she asked.
“No. But dawn will come eventually, so we might as well get this over with.”
“It’ll be fine,” she said with no conviction. “Just remember that Drummond is in there.”
Max stepped out from behind the tree. “You hope,” he said as he strolled up the path toward the circle.
At the sound of his steps, Drummond-Stanton whirled around, huffing like an angry bull. Max waved. “Hi, there. Drummond? Can you hear me?”
Drummond-Stanton leaned forward and bellowed that horrid noise that melded too many sounds together. Trying to appear confident, Max wiggled his pinkie in his ear.
“That was loud,” he said. “You know you might want to consider some mouthwash. Your breath’s a bit off.” Drummond-Stanton reared back. “Oh, come on, Drummond. Just a little playful banter. You know, like we always do. Remember?”
Max meandered around the circle, always staying at least fifteen feet out — out of reach but close enough that Drummond-Stanton followed him, stepping away from the circle and the stone. Once Max had the pale creature with its back to Sandra, he stopped.
