The Paramedic's Witch, page 18
part #5 of Extreme Medical Services Series
The alarm started sounding almost right away. She stuffed her pistol and knife into her purse and rushed out to the front foyer. The man was still standing there. His eyes looked angry more than fearful now. She waved as she passed.
“I’ll return it, I promise.”
She remembered to slow down and walk at a normal pace as she exited the building. The alarm bells were muted once she was on the street but they were audible to anyone who passed by. If they didn’t automatically call the police, someone walking past would. Time was of the essence now. They would be looking for her in earnest, and if her parents found out what she took from the museum, they would be able to piece together her plan.
Her next destination was to find a place in the city park where she could cast the necessary spells to enact the scrying to find Jill. Once she had a location for the possessed woman, she could figure out the next steps. It would depend on how far away she was. If Jo needed a car to get her, she was pretty much screwed. She couldn’t drive and didn’t know anyone else to call for help in this time and place.
She was a few blocks away when she heard sirens and, looking over her shoulder, she saw several police cars pulling up in front of the historical society building. She picked up her walking pace and looked for a place to turn off the main street onto a side street. She needed to get out of sight. There were probably cameras in the museum and within a few hours, they’d have her photo in every police cruiser in the city.
Jo turned down the first side street on her left and crossed over it while she broke into a jog. It was time to get to the City Park as soon as possible now, she had both her parents and the police looking for her. She wasn’t sure which option would be worse if they found her first. She suspected it would be her parents. The police would just lock her up. Her parents were going to lecture her if they found her. That thought jolted her into picking up the pace and she ran the rest of the five blocks to the park.
26
There was no moon and it was very dark in the central, wooded portion of the park. There were streetlights spaced along the paved paths through the trees, but Jo had chosen a secluded area where one light was broken. She knelt in the grass and laid out the materials for the scrying spell on the ground in front of her. The small bowl, a bottle of water, the plastic zipper baggie that contained Jill’s hair, and the small collection of magical herbs she would need.
She poured the water in the bowl and added a pinch or two of the selected herbs while she murmured the incantation. The last thing she did was to lay the strands of hair across the pool of water and herbs in the bowl. She was rewarded with a satisfying glow from the bowl and then she saw the city from above. Jo had been prepared for this, and had her phone open to the maps app, choosing the satellite angle to see the same view.
It was disorienting at first, but once she had the phone turned to match the view in the bowl, she began to focus her mind on the locator spell. With two fingers on her phone scrolling across the map, matching what she saw in the bowl, the witch teen narrowed her search until she had zoomed in on a small storage unit complex on the outskirts of town. She glanced back and forth between the bowl and phone until she was sure she had the same location on both and then tapped her phone to save the location.
Jo heard voices nearby and she closed and darkened her phone screen, dumping the bowl of glowing water over, dousing the light there as well. She slipped back into the bushes beneath a pair of nearby trees, pressing herself against the trunk of one tree as she willed herself into the shadows.
“I saw the light coming from somewhere over here,” one voice said.
“I didn’t see anything. It’s probably just some kids fooling around after dark,” said another.
“Well, they are not allowed out here after dusk. We should run them off. Besides, someone reported a girl running into the park. She could be the one we’re looking for based on that all-points bulletin we heard over the radio,” the first voice said.
Jo froze in place as two police officers with flashlights came down the path to her left. They walked along until they found her scrying bowl, the empty water bottle, and scattered plastic baggies of herbs. The two officers stopped and looked at the strange collection of items on the ground.
One of them laughed, “See, I told you it was just kids. They were getting stoned and we scared them off. They left their drugs behind.”
The other officer stooped down, poking at the baggies and the bowl. “This doesn’t look like weed. I’m not sure what it is, but it’s not marijuana.”
“Who knows what weird internet plants the kids are using nowadays? Every week we get another alert from the poison center about new drugs on the block. Just clean it all up and we can test it back at the station.”
The kneeling officer pulled a larger zipper bag from his pocket and put the scattered trash in it before closing it and standing up. He turned and played his light around the clearing causing Jo to pull deeper into the brush and shadows. He didn’t see anything else worth investigating, and he and his partner continued on their patrol. Their conversation turned to what they were going to eat for dinner later as they walked away.
Jo breathed a sigh of relief. She relaxed and stood to move out of the bushes. She looked at her phone as she did, pulling up the maps app to get directions to the storage facility. As she took a step towards the path, a scaled hand closed over her mouth from behind, pulling her back into the bushes. She felt a blow to her head and she lost consciousness before she could even cry out. The last thing she remembered was dropping her phone to the ground.
* * *
———
* * *
The pounding wouldn’t stop. It just pounded and pounded in her ears until it drove her mad. Jo tried to cover her ears with her hands but she couldn’t. Her arms were secured and she couldn’t seem to free her hands. Why couldn’t she do this? She tried again, struggling both to free her hands and to clear her mind. That was when she realized she was bound, seated and tied up in a chair or something like it. She tried to open her eyes but the bright light overhead seemed to pierce directly into her brain and the painful pounding got worse.
Jo realized the pounding sound she heard was the blood pulsing past her ears in her arteries. It matched the throbbing pain in her head. She remembered being captured in the park and being struck from behind, and she stopped struggling. She turned her energy inward, listening for anyone else around her. Trying to open her eyes again, slowly this time, she again was forced to shut them after the bright overhead light caused waves of pain and vertigo to course through her head.
Damn, she thought, I’ve got a concussion. That would explain the light sensitivity and pain she was feeling. She slowed her breathing and tried to say a few healing incantations under her breath but the words were muddled and she couldn’t concentrate enough to direct the magic. It was the brain injury from the concussion that was muddling her thoughts and concentration so that she couldn’t cast the magic. She would have to try something else.
She needed to get a sense of her surroundings and she decided she had to look around, despite the pain the bright light caused her. She tried opening her eyes only far enough to let the tiniest amount of light in, and looked around through slitted eyelids. It still hurt, but it was bearable and she could see her surroundings.
There were boxes and assorted items of furniture in this room. The floor was concrete and the walls, where she could see them, were made of corrugated metal. The room appeared to be about twenty feet long by ten feet wide. She looked down and saw that she was secured in what appeared to be an old, metal desk chair on wheels. Her arms were duct-taped down to the arms of the chair. She couldn’t see her feet. They were pulled up under her with the souls of her feet facing behind her and the toes of her shoes resting on the floor.
Turning her head and looking around carefully, she could only see one part of the room. She thought she’d try something and attempted to push against the floor with her toes. She was rewarded when she started to swivel a bit in the chair. She tried again and again until she managed to turn around one hundred eighty degrees. That was when she found Jill, or what was left of her.
Jo forced herself to look even though she wanted to scream in terror. The woman’s body was stretched on an old wooden bed frame, fully assembled but without a mattress. Her body laid on the wooded slats that rested across the side rails, usually to support the mattress and box spring. In this case there was just the bare wood. The woman’s arms and legs were secured with ropes to the four bed posts.
Her lifeless eyes stared back at Jo, unseeing, glazed as they were with the film that covered them in death. She had bloody gashes in her chest and abdomen and what looked like burn marks on her arms and legs. The wound that probably killed her was the gaping slash across her throat. Jo noticed the metal basin on the floor set beneath her head and neck to catch the blood. She could see the dark pool of fluid there.
Wait, this didn’t make sense, Jo thought. Jill was the demon lord. Had some other hunter gotten here first? No, they wouldn’t have tortured her like this, they would have just killed or captured her. Could there be another demon in competition with the first one? Maybe it was the other demon that killed her, some sort of internal power struggle between the netherworlders?
Her mind was foggy, but she forced herself to puzzle it out and the realization struck her like a thunderbolt. Jill was never the demon. It had been Sam all along. He was the possessed one. He was the demon lord’s host. He had fooled them into looking for his wife and they had missed their chance to get him when they had him in their hands.
She knew where she was now. She was in the storage unit where she had scried for Jill. Something or someone had brought her here. This must be one owned by the couple and where Sam could commit his horrible rituals on his wife without anyone hearing them. If you came in here, on the outskirts of town, late at night, it was unlikely anyone else was checking their storage rooms. You’d have all the privacy you’d need to do whatever you wanted.
Jo pulled at her bonds again and tried to look around for a way to get free. She vaguely remembered a scaled hand clamping over her mouth. That meant that Sam had summoned another lesser demon to do his bidding, maybe more than one. That they had captured her and not merely killed her meant that Sam needed something from her - and the thought chilled her to the bone. She stared at Jill’s body in front of her and renewed her struggles to get free. If she were going to get out of this, she had to do it herself. No one else knew where she was.
27
Dean was losing patience, but he didn’t let it show. Jaz was doing the best she could to track Jo’s phone signal. Jaz revealed that she had given Jo a sim card for her phone that worked on her family’s network plan when they got back to town after rescuing Ashley a few weeks before. The teen’s own device from the future didn’t work here in the past on its own, and had served only as a media playing device, serving up whatever music it was that the teen listened to when she retreated into her earbuds. With the addition of the sim card, Jo had been able to access the local phone network.
The new sim card meant that Jaz was able to track it, sort of. The phone’s GPS system had localized them to the park but they had been unable to narrow their search down to less than a one hundred by one hundred yard square wooded area at the center. Now the two of them were scanning the ground, a step at a time, playing their flashlights back and forth as they tried to find some clue, and hopefully their daughter.
They had tried to call it at first, hoping they would hear the ring as they walked around. They soon realized it must have the ringer set to silent. Now they had resorted to a step by step search of the entire area after a quick sweep had shown them nothing. Dean took his time, trying to keep his emotions under control as he searched.
There was evidence that Jo had been involved in a break-in at the Elk City Historical Society building. They had heard the report over the police scanner in Jaz’s SUV. He was not sure what Jo had been looking for at the museum. The police did not report anything about what was missing over the radio. They only reported on video in the security cameras showing a girl matching Jo’s description.
Another report had come in saying someone had seen a girl running into the park, but police officers on the scene had searched and sent back that they had found nothing. Now that Jaz had tracked Jo to the park, it confirmed those reports were probably accurate. His thoughts swirled through the events of the night over and over again as he searched for the missing phone and his daughter.
He was thinking through this jumble of thoughts when his flashlight caught a glint of a reflection on the ground ahead. He ran forward and shouted with relief when he reached down and picked up the phone. He called to Jaz, waving the discovered phone over his head in triumph. He spun around as Jaz came over to him. He shined the light in all directions, trying to pierce the gloom around him. Jo had been here, she must be close by.
“Jo. Jo,” he called. “Where are you? Are you out there?”
Jaz joined him and called out as well. Their only answers were the resumed chirping of crickets in the darkness surrounding them. Dean’s shoulders slumped as he looked at the phone in his hand. He pressed the button to activate the screen and saw all their phone calls to her listed on the notifications there.
“Here, let me take a look,” Jaz asked. Dean handed her the phone and she tapped a security code in to get past the lock screen, opening up the phone’s access.
“How did you know her password?”
“I didn’t. All the phones in our plan for Errington Security have an override to wipe the phones in case they are stolen. It works on the sim cards, too. I used that to open the phone.” Jaz gave him a grim smile. “It pays sometimes to be paranoid security types.”
She tapped around on the screen, opening different apps. “I’m trying to see what she was doing before she dropped it. It looks like she was looking at the maps app on the phone.”
“Could she have cast the scrying spell on her own and found Jill? She wouldn’t have gone after her on her own would she?”
Jaz cast him a sideways glance. “You were a teenager not that long ago just like me. What would you have done?”
“I get your point. So where was she searching for on the maps app?”
“It looks like she was looking for this address on the outskirts of town. Do you recognize it?”
Dean looked at the screen when she turned it to him and shrugged. He watched as Jaz took out her phone and entered the address into a search program and the address popped up right away as a self-storage facility.
“That could be where Jill is hiding,” Jaz said.
“But we have no way of knowing if Jo went there. She wouldn’t have left her phone here. Could she have been taken and dropped the phone?” Dean was starting to get anxious.
Jaz took his hand in hers. “Look at me, Dean. We need to work together and stay calm. We’ll find her. This is the best lead we have right now.”
He gave her hand a squeeze and looked around in the darkness. He felt responsible for yelling at Jo and making her feel guilty about the attack at the mall. His reaction to her going out on her own may have forced Jo’s hand to run off like this. Jaz was right, though. He had to keep his head on straight and not overreact. It was time to take action.
His phone buzzed in his pocket and he took it out to see a number he didn’t recognize. He tapped the screen to answer and put it on speaker so Jaz could hear. The voice on the other end was garbled as if it were being run through a computer program to alter it.
“Hello Mr. Flynn. I have your witch girl and know you have found her phone. I left it so you would know that I have her.”
“Don’t you hurt her,” Dean blurted out.
“That is entirely up to you and Miss Errington. Can she hear me?”
“I am here,” Jaz answered. “What can we do for you? I assume you want something,”
“You know very well what I want. I want the idol. It belongs to me. It belongs with the others like it.” Dean listened to the voice, trying to decide if it was a man or a woman. He couldn’t tell. The computer voice alteration was too good.
“If we bring you the idol, what guarantee do we have that Jo is still alive and will remain that way?” Dean asked.
“Say something to your friends, witch,” the voice said.
There was a pause, then Dean and Jaz heard Jo’s voice clearly over the phone. “Mom, Dad. I’m in a storage shed or something …” Her voice broke off suddenly with a yelp.
“Jo, are you there?” Dean called out into the phone.
“She is quite alright, for now, Mr. Flynn. Whether she stays that way is up to you. You have one hour to come up with the idol. I will turn this phone number back on in sixty minutes and leave it on for exactly one minute. If you don’t call me in that minute for instructions, I’ll assume you want your friend to die and I will oblige you. Is that understood?”
Dean looked at Jaz. She gazed back at him and nodded. “I agree. You’ll get my call in one hour.”
“Very well,” the altered voice said. “I look forward to your call in sixty minutes from now.”
The call disconnected and Dean saw Jaz take out her phone and set a timer for sixty minutes.
“What do we do now?” Dean asked. He paused and continued. “We have to get the idol from your apartment and get it to him.”
“Whatever happens, Dean, we cannot let Sam get his hands on the third idol. It will enable him to fully manifest on this plane. You have no idea what a demon lord can do if he is able to walk physically on this earth.”
“So we let Jo die?” Dean was astonished with her callousness.
“I didn’t say that, Dean. We have to try and rescue her. I agree. I just want you to understand that we cannot let the idol fall into his hands. No matter what else happens, that cannot occur. If we have to kill Jill, or me or you, or even Jo, we cannot let that happen. Do you understand?”
