Beacon's Hope (Potomac Shadows Book 2) Read online

  Beacon's Hope

  Jim Johnson

  Contents

  Mailing List

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Jim Johnson

  The Fine Print

  Mailing List

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  Chapter One

  “COME ON, IT’S RIGHT THERE!” I shouted to the tattered soul floating along next to me.

  I pointed toward the tear in the Veil I had created earlier. The glowing rift served as a pathway into the Holding, the spirit world where souls traveled to and wandered within until they were ready to move on to whatever awaited beyond death.

  Assuming there was something beyond death, anyway. Until recently, I had never given much thought to what happens after we die. But recent events had started me thinking about the bigger questions on a more cosmic scale.

  I reached my hands out toward the old soul and gently gathered up some of the tattered etheric threads hanging off of it. I tugged the threads toward me, being careful to not use too much force—I had managed to damage two souls in recent weeks by being a little too eager. My mentor and teacher, Miss Chin, had read me the riot act a few times already and had drummed into me the necessity of being careful with the souls I’d been called to guide into the Holding.

  Rachel Farran, magical Weaver and Beacon to the reluctant and fragile dead, that’s me. Crazy, I know.

  Had anyone told me a few weeks ago that I’d be trudging through the snow outside of Christ Church in the middle of one of the coldest nights of the year, guiding a soul to move on to the next plane of existence, well, ‘loony bin’ doesn’t quite cover it.

  This particular character had been hanging around the stone and iron fence ringing Christ Church in downtown Alexandria. It had taken Miss Chin and I the better parts of the last two nights to coax him out of his sticky spot and toward the Veil.

  ‘Sticky spot’ is a technical term, of course. It’s what I refer to as a ghost’s haunting place—the place they latch onto for however long they end up lingering. Miss Chin had a more esoteric term for it, of course, but I had forgotten it already.

  Miss Chin cleared her throat to get my attention. She was standing nearby in the snow-covered courtyard, maintaining her warding dome energies that swirled around us. The dome’s etheric energies glowed blue tinged with the unique green cast that was part and parcel of her aura signature.

  Everyone has their own aura color, even those who haven’t yet Awakened to their magical potential. Those who never Awaken have an aura color too, though most of them are so faint as to be largely undetectable unless you look really hard. I tried looking a few times on a couple people I knew, but gave up after I wore myself out trying. Miss Chin had said it wasn’t usually worth the time to try and analyze an Unawakened soul, and so far I didn’t have much reason to disagree.

  She made another little ‘ahem’ sound. Over the last several weeks of training, which had kicked into high gear after that messy battle against the Spinner at my grandpa’s nursing home, I had grown to hate that little noise. It somehow always, always preceded a Yoda-like cryptic statement about how I was or wasn’t handling things.

  I held onto the bundle of etheric threads and spared a glance for her. “What?”

  “Remember that souls cannot be rushed. Disconnecting them from their haunting grounds often confuses them and leaves them adrift.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Like they’re not already adrift.” I shot a thumb toward the gossamer-thin wisps of etherics trailing along behind the ghost. “This thing looks like it’d float away on a sudden cool breeze.”

  I glanced at the ghost in question. Its strands of energies were formed into the vague shape of a face, with two dark spots that had to be eyes and a larger dark spot below that was presumably the mouth, and then an even more vague outline of a body below the face. This had to be an older soul, based on the training Miss Chin had imparted recently. Older souls sometimes had trouble retaining their forms, while newer ghosts and souls generally looked like what their mortal body did before, or right when, they died. The first soul I had guided to the Holding, Kareena Mathison, had looked largely as she had in life, just as she was getting killed. Not a pretty picture, but it’s not like Death’s gonna wait for you to check your makeup before paying a visit.

  “All the same,” she said. “This one has been around for a long time and you must be careful. Remember the other souls you damaged.”

  In spite of the cold, my face flushed. I took a deep breath to avoid voicing the first sarcastic comment that came to mind. Instead, I aimed a quick nod her way. “I haven’t forgotten.”

  She gestured toward the open rift in the Veil, which coruscated in a glow of entwined etheric threads. Since I had been the one to open the Veil, its blue energies were tinged with my unique silvery aura color.

  “The sooner you move him into the Veil, Rachel, the sooner we can close this particular rift. I’d rather not run into another issue like we did the other day.”

  “I know, I know.” I gave the threads a gentle tug again. The last thing I wanted was another lost soul trying to come back to our side of the Veil. I had escorted a handful of lost souls to and through the Veil since that battle at Branchwood, and more recently, several souls had tried to leave the Holding and come back to the mortal world. Miss Chin had suggested they were just restless spirits, but I was starting to wonder if something else was going on.

  “This one’s taking his sweet time moving along, though.” I glanced at the soul again. Even though its face was an indistinct mass of light and dark threads and shadows, I had the sense that it was trying to tell me something.

  I cupped my hands around the glowing crystal pendant hanging around my neck. I reached down deep into my mind’s eye and sought out the massive grid of etheric energy far below my feet, the strange construction of latent etheric energy Miss Chin had revealed to me through training. The grid had apparently been built by the same Founding Fathers and Mothers who had formed the United States.

  Busy guys, right?

  I reached deep down into and beyond myself and dug into the ley grid for some more powerful threads of energy. I wove them into a simple pattern that Miss Chin had taught me, and used that pattern as a focus for what I intended to do
—communicate with the ghost.

  I focused on the old soul. “What do you want to say?”

  It shimmered before my eyes. The larger black splotch in its face fluttered, as if it was a mouth moving around some words I could not hear.

  Through my crystal, I felt a vibration that modulated into recognizable speech, though the words sounded like they were coming to me from a very large distance and filtered through a foot of chewed-up bubble gum.

  “Time…to go home?”

  I nodded and gestured toward the shimmering break in the Veil I had created in order to wrangle this particular shy ghost with Miss Chin’s help.

  That is to say, I was the one doing most of the wrangling. As a Beacon, it was my calling to guide lost souls toward a rift and through the Veil so that they could enter the Holding and then figure out what their final destination would be, whether it was Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, or whatever a hundred different belief systems might choose to call the life after life.

  Miss Chin was a Warden, which meant that it was her task to monitor the Veil and ensure the right souls went in and that none came out.

  Lately she was also doing double duty as my mentor. Since the battle at Branchwood, Miss Chin and I had ramped up our time together, focusing on teaching me how to gather up wandering and lost souls and get them into the Holding.

  We hadn’t gotten to the other part of my calling just yet. Once the souls were in the Holding, I was supposed to help them on to the next phase of their existence. I had no idea how to do that as yet. And honestly, wasn’t in a rush to get started. Gotta take this crazy magic stuff one step at a time. And, given the increasingly cryptic answers I’d gotten from Miss Chin on the matter, I suspected she didn’t even know how to train me in that respect.

  I gathered up the soul’s threads again and gently tugged him toward the rift. He resisted at first, but then slowly started to glide forward, coaxed on by my gentle tugging.

  I glanced at Miss Chin as I herded him along. “I guess he wasn’t quite ready to go.”

  She nodded as she watched me. “It’s fortunate that he’s going now. Once you dislodge a soul from their haunting place, you are committed to getting them into the Holding as soon as possible.”

  “What happens if they don’t make it through?”

  She offered one of her trademark little shrugs, an action that, along with her little ‘ahems’, was starting to become insufferable. “Then the soul becomes truly lost, and wanders around the city and the world without an anchor. Eventually they dissipate into nothingness, and become lost forever, with no hope of rest or resurrection.” She sighed. “Some even become so angry that they take root in a place or an object and lash out.”

  Surprised at this revelation, I nearly dropped the threads in hand. I managed to rally with a deep breath and renewed focus. I covered my discomfort with a shake of my head, which sent my ponytail flapping around my face. My sweatshirt’s hood had fallen to my shoulders at some point during the evening.

  “Huh, interesting. We’ll have to talk about that more, sometime.” I tried hard to keep my tone nonchalant, even though I was hungry to learn more. My friend Malcolm, who had been with me in this magical weirdness from the start, had something of a problem with a possessed ten-dollar bill. I had been secretly training him while Miss Chin trained me.

  I had told him about Miss Chin but I had so far managed to avoid talking about him with her. I don’t know why I kept him a secret—maybe just being cautious. If I could get a little more information out of Miss Chin, maybe I could help him.

  I finally got the old soul to stand in front of the rift. I reached up and wiped the sweat from my brow with my hoodie sleeve. In spite of the chill in the air and the snow on the ground, I had worked up a sweat working the ley etherics.

  I wondered what this soul’s story was; what caused the man to die and why his soul lingered in this area rather than head for the Holding on its own. Miss Chin had told me that every ghost had its own story, even if they were unable or unwilling to share it.

  I nodded toward the Veil. “Here we are. It’s time for you to go home. Just step through and you’ll find what awaits you beyond.”

  The soul seemed to stare at me, and I think I caught a ripple of gratitude. Might have just been my imagination though—I was ready to be home and curled up in a warm bed with my girlfriend.

  I shifted the threads in my hands and gently flicked them toward the rift, using them as a bit of a prod to get the soul moving along.

  It stared at me for a moment longer, then took the hint and glided toward the rift. Once close enough, he reached out and touched the rift, and then disappeared from sight with a hollow ‘pop’.

  Once the ghost was gone from sight, I sighed in relief. I waved my hands toward the rift, shifting the energies to close it down. The threads moved as I commanded them and the rift started to zip shut, as if I were pulling a magical zipper pull. The zipper snagged about a third of the way, though. I frowned, shooting a glance toward Miss Chin.

  “I think we have a problem.”

  Chapter Two

  MISS CHIN SPREAD OUT HER HANDS to stabilize the warding dome I was sure she had planned to close down, then hurried her little self over to my side. “What are you sensing?”

  I reached out with my Eye and tapped into the ley grid again for a boost of etherics, then focused them on the unsealed section of the rift. “Not sure. Feels like it doesn’t want to close entirely.”

  Her face changed to match my frown. I sensed her reach out into the ley grid as well and call forth an assortment of threads. She wove them into the existing structure of my rift. She manipulated them with a grace and economy of motion and effort that as yet eluded me, though I liked to think that I was getting better.

  “Is this another attempted breakout?” I watched carefully as she wove the green-tinged blue threads into my rift as if she were repairing a ripped seam in a dress.

  She closed her eyes, deeply focused on her weaving. “Uncertain, but a good possibility. It feels more like…something is trying to place a wedge into our rift.”

  I couldn’t entirely see what she was doing, but I could feel her etheric manipulation well enough. I focused my Eye as she laced the threads together and then pulled them tight, sealing off the rift. She had a talent for locking up the ends that I wanted to study more closely. Sort of like burning off the cut ends of a nylon rope. Whatever it was, it sure beat my ham-handed efforts.

  “Whatever it was, it won’t bother us again, not with this rift, anyway.” As she mentally tied off the last of the threads she’d used to seal the rift, she glanced at me with a weary smile. “I sensed you watching and learning, Rachel. What did you See me do?”

  It was one of the usual questions she asked me when she knew I had been studying her actions. “I was watching how you worked the threads in and out of the rift, treating the fabric of the Veil as you would, well…fabric.”

  She tucked her hands into her coat pockets and led me toward one of the snow-covered benches set along the fence surrounding the Christ Church courtyard. Her warding dome followed us as we moved, keeping us always in the center of the sphere.

  She gestured toward the bench. Etheric threads rippled toward it and melted the snow and then evaporated the remains. I raised an eyebrow as Miss Chin took a seat and then gestured to me to sit with her.

  As I sat down, I asked, “Won’t someone see the bench in the morning and wonder why someone cleared it off?”

  She offered a little smile. “It’s supposed to start snowing again in a couple hours. I expect it’ll get covered enough that no one will notice.” She shrugged. “Besides, who really pays attention to such things?”

  I nodded and blinked my bleary eyes. I was feeling the fatigue from two straight late nights filled with corralling ghosts and manipulating ley threads.

  Miss Chin nudged me with an elbow. “Your skills are improving. How do you feel about the rifts you’ve been creating?”

  I
stared at the old stone and brick structure of Christ Church, struggling to imagine one building standing for as long as this one had. I adjusted my focus to where I had constructed the rift.

  “I guess I’m all right. I don’t have to try as hard to reach down into the ley grid for the energies I need to split the Veil. It’s gotten easier the more I practice.” I glanced at her and smiled through my weariness. “Your training has helped me a lot in controlling how much etheric energy I pull from the grid. Helps me not feel so burned out so quick.”

  Her training had also helped me give Malcolm some pointers on not burning himself out, so in a way I was stealing a two-fer from her. I wasn’t about to tell her as much, though.

  She reached over and patted my forearm. “It’s clear you are practicing with your abilities, and it’s also clear that you are flexing more than just your ability to open rifts within the Veil. Your time in independent study and with your friend Bonita is paying off.”

  I didn’t pick up any second meaning in her words, though that might have just been my paranoia at work that maybe she did know something about my secret training sessions with Malcolm.

  I nodded and offered her a smile that I hoped was disarming and distracting. “I try to keep my practice sessions short, and I really try not to practice much without you or Bonita keeping an eye on me.”