Page 28 of The Mare Rider of Cornwall Cove
“You won’t. I’m not going anywhere.”
He hummed with delight hearing those words. I moved to my side to kiss and pet him, stroke his face, push the damp hair from his eyes, and just stare at the beautiful man who I adored. Sometimes it didn’t seem real that I could have Phil as my lover, my other half, and yet here he was lying beside me with the cold winter sun falling on his shoulder.
“I love Monique and Grampy Kee,” he softly confessed.
“I know you do. They love you too. You’re part of our family.” I ran my thumb along his puffy lower lip. “I wish we could lie here all day.”
“Yeah, that would be nice.” He drew a big heart on my tacky chest. “Are we sure we can do this? Send that rider back to wherever he came from?”
“Well, we have about twelve hours to figure out our plan.”
He frowned a cute little frown. “Ugh, I guess that means reading old books.”
“Yeah, it does, but it will be fun.”
He looked dubious, so I decided to make a deal with him that for every page he read, I would give him a kiss. That would get him into hours spent bent over dusty old tomes crammed with ancient, arcane ramblings from long-dead people.
Chapter Ten
By the time wehit the noon hour, my lips were chapped, and my boyfriend had just about lost the will to live.
Guess my love of sniffing old pages and getting lost in ancient lore was not Phil’s passion. So, being that I loved him, I set him free. He bolted like a Lab puppy let off its leash to the far side of the store, climbed into a nook by the children’s section, and began working on the electronics Tray had brought over for him. Nifty gadgets all. A new Wi-Fi extender, a digital thermometer, and our trusty night vision camera. There were a few other tiny things as well, but I was too preoccupied with searching through a reprint of a book originally printed in the late tenth century, roughly around 910 AD. It focused on demons, which cited an earlier maleficarum. Since I was not interested in how to sniff out witches, the latter was of no use, but the demonology book was pretty helpful.
A monk known simply as Brother Adolph wrote it, and it had detailed drawings of hundreds of demons in alphabetical order. Handy. The only downside was that it was written in Old High German, which made deciphering the handwritten pages rather difficult. I had to feed it all into an online translator and hope it was accurate. Come to find out that Old High German was not the same as modern German, so I had to just look at the pictures and match up root words. It was not particularly helpful.
“This is not cool, Brother Adolph.” I sighed as I closed the book and then sat there staring out at nothing. Monique was upstairs taking a cleansing bath. Tray and Roxie were out looking for salt and boxes of snack cakes. The salt was for making a circle to trap the mare rider while the snack cakes were to replenish any lost life energy. After sliding my fingers under my glasses to massage my tired eyes, I slurped down some cold coffee. We’d need energy to keep us awake. No naps allowed this time around.
“You called me?” Phil called.
“No, I was talking to Brother Adolph,” I replied and rose from my spot on the worn carpet, bending left and right to crack my back. The pops were loud. “You wouldn’t happen to speak Old High German, would you?” I padded over to where he was hooking up cords to contraptions while sucking down energy drinks. There were four empties by his beanbag chair. “You might want to slow down on those. Your heart will explode.”
He glanced from his trusty camcorder to the cans lying like dead soldiers near his big sneakers. “Point made. I’ll switch to coffee. Just don’t want to fall asleep again.”
I knelt down beside him. “I feel that. How goes the tech side?”
“Pretty good. I have things more prepared than last night.”
“Excellent. Prepared is good.”
“If you wanted to know about German speech, there’s those old German ghosts out at the apple orchard,” Phil commented before testing a battery on the tip of his tongue.
“Hm, yeah, but that’s too time-costly. I’d really like to get to the hospital, talk with the friendly apparitions to see if they have any insight into the rider, and then get things set up to try to capture, calm, and converse with it.”
He made a sour face and tucked the battery back into his equipment case. “So, not to sound like a moron, but what is the plan exactly? Are we waving a Bible around and casting the demon back to hell?”
“No, that’s not our wheelhouse.” I sat down in a lotus next to him. “Monique’s magicks and mine are more positive energy based, so while we can lure and then trap the entity inside a ring of haint paint and salt, we’re going to have to work on getting it to agree to leave this realm.”
His gaze grew wary.
“It’ll be good. We have plenty of paint.” I motioned to the can of paint sitting by the front door of the shop. The shop had remained closed today due to family illness, the sign read. “I’m not sure what works the best, as this isn’t anything I’ve run into before, and the Kee book is sparse on how to handle demons. I’m kind of flying by the seat of my pants with this one. Hoping that with discussion, mantras, and a bit of luck we can steer him from being a negative force into a positive one. Like a dharma protector.”
“Oh-kay. So basically, you’re going to ask the monster that made me cry over my childhood bad dreams to just stop being a bully?”
He was more than a little unsure. He was downright not buying it at all.
“Well, something like that but with a bit more positive energy and gentle karmic persuasion. There’s a reason he’s there. Anda reason he lingers. If we can get to the core of what has him trapped in that asylum, then we can free him.” Phil’s expression was cold disbelief. “That’s the plan, anyway. I feel good about it. We’re covered with charms, protections, and one seer that he seems not to wish to dick with.”
“Yeah, you’re strong. What about me?” He did his best, but I caught the slight waver in his voice.
