Page 10 of Ace (The Deuces Wild #4)

The distress in the air carried the scent of ash and smoke.

Of incense. Of Death. This was his way of saying goodbye.

Agent Boniface had politely disassociated himself from Savannah the moment he’d released her fingers.

Even now, his calculating brain fluttered over a to-do list. Call the hotel.

Cancel reservation. Turn in rental car. Fly back to DC before—

Something was wrong. Savannah could smell it. “Who’s dying?” she asked gently.

The bleak glance Agent Boniface leveled at her did not invite her into his confidence. Where once a meaningful window had opened, shutters were now slammed tight. Locking her out. He seemed especially good at that. “Don’t worry. You’ve got enough on your mind—”

A silent whisper came to her like an unearthly summons. ‘Isaiah. Me. ’

Savannah leveled her unique gift of sight on the stone-faced man across the table as she told him, “Your friend is here, Agent Boniface. Isaiah is why you came to see Gran Mere, isn’t he? He needed something from her, didn’t he? He needed her. Why?”

Agent Boniface didn’t answer. The sadness welling in his honey-gold eyes confirmed the worst. “Isaiah’s dying. We thought your great grandmother could help, but now...”

“But now there isn’t time to waste,” Savannah said as she hurried into the other room and pulled the middle drawer of Gran Mere’s hutch open. “Please clear the kitchen table for me. I’ll be right back.”

Isaiah didn’t just need something . He needed to live, and just possibly, Savannah could help him do that. She had to. She sensed a terrible menace, a fear and a sin riding him, like conjoined twins tormenting him into an early grave.

‘You can help me?’ that same small voice asked. A child’s voice, really. A frightened little boy’s voice.

‘I will most certainly try,’ she told him honestly.

‘There is no try, only do…’

‘Then hush and let me do,’ she scolded silently.

While Agent Boniface obediently moved Gran Mere’s potted lavender plant from the table to the counter, Savannah chose the items that called to her from her great grandmother’s vast collection.

A red flannel drawstring bag. A crystalized shard of rose quartz for Isaiah’s fragile heart, that even now beat too weakly to sustain him much longer, fell into the bottom of the bag .

Next, she snagged a jagged but not rusty piece of iron the size of a thin dime. Iron invoked raw masculinity, another one of Isaiah’s traits. He also needed the talisman of a pure white feather for purity. A single dried rose petal for....

Her fingertips hesitated over the crispy, dark red petal. Gran Mere always kept a small basket of dried rose petals on hand for love potions and spells. She grew the bushes deep in the swamp. Said they needed seclusion and a certain amount of direct sunlight for her spells.

But this was not a love potion Savannah meant to cast. The iron, rose quartz, and white feather were powerful natural magic that would go into the good luck amulet that Agent Boniface would soon take to Isaiah.

Whoever Isaiah was, he needed the divine help the universe had to offer, and he needed it now.

The reddest roses for the purest love and the brightest passion, so, yes. Into the bag the petal went. Then…

Oh, where in blazes are they? Whatever did Gran Mere do with her marbles?

Any other time Savannah would’ve chuckled at what she’d thought, but the need to ‘hurry faster! ’ shivered up her spine. Isaiah stood at the edge of a precarious cliff. He was running out of time.

Filled with prickling foreboding, Savannah finally located the small wooden box of marbles behind a stack of antique china saucers. Choosing the clearest glass sphere, she dropped it into the bag. Seemingly innocuous, it would enhance the combined energies of the other items .

‘Please hurry,’ Isaiah urged from far, far away, his psychic voice growing weaker, yet fiercer, as if he were engaged in a great struggle. As if he were already losing, yet fighting to hold on to life with all his might.

‘Hold on,’ Savannah ordered as she tightened the drawstring, then grabbed a white sage smudge stick from its newly opened carton, a squat red candle, and one of Gran Mere’s best abalone shells from another drawer.

Once back in the kitchen, she gathered the rest of her supplies: a box of wooden matches, a thick kitchen towel to protect the now cleared table in case the abalone shell grew too hot during the ritual, as well as a few sprigs of fresh rosemary and sweetgrass from Gran Mere’s boxed herb garden by the kitchen porthole window.

Last, but not least, she scooped up a handful of cedar chips Gran Mere used when she smoked— used to smoke —pork ribs.

Once again, the stranger in her mind begged, ‘Hurry.’

“Can you hear him?” she asked Agent Boniface, her heart lodged in her throat at the impending death Isaiah projected. “Are you listening to your friend?”

A bleak shadow shifted over the staunch agent’s face, and Savannah’s breath caught. He’d turned as pale as a ghost. He hadn’t the gift. “Isaiah? He’s talking to you?”

She nodded.

Keller groaned. “No. I can’t hear him. I’m not that kind of psychic. But I feel his pain. He can’t breathe. He’s dying. We have to…” At the same instant, he and Isaiah ground out together, ‘Hurry!’

“I am!” she replied. Frightened now that there wasn’t enough time in the universe to do what needed to be done, Savannah’s fingers trembled as she retrieved her smudge bowl, holy oil, and the tiny, precious bottle of frankincense from the kitchen cabinet. At last it was time.

“Sit,” she told Agent Boniface while she quickly organized her altar on the now cleared table and took a seat. The shell went to her right, the smudge bowl to her left. Everything else went in between while her heart pounded that all was already lost. That she was too late.

“No,” Agent Boniface said, which told her he knew precisely what she now meant to do.

“Yes,” she told him sternly. If he knew what these items meant, then he needed to stay out of her way and let her work. There wasn’t time to argue. “This ritual isn’t for you. It’s for your friend, so sit and do what I tell you. Please,” she added, trying not to sound like a shrew.

He made that sound at the back of his throat again.

“Did you just growl at me?”

“No,” he declared, then lifted one shoulder. “Yes. I hate this mumbo jumbo stuff. It’s useless. A waste of time. It won’t help him.”

“You say potato, I say po-tah-toe,” she told him firmly. “Now either join me in trying to save your friend or take your negative energy out of here and leave me to my work. ”

“I say bullshit,” he grumbled. Yet even as she fluttered her fingers at him to give her his hand, he took hold.

“And I say everything, even the most unlikely cure in the known world, cannot hurt a man who believes he’s dying,” she replied evenly. “The mind is a powerful thing. Let’s us turn Isaiah’s away from the path he is on.”

Her inner sight had never before been so in tune nor so crystal clear with the universe as it was this morning.

Maybe that clarity had to do with Gran Mere’s passing, but Agent Boniface needed to face facts.

Mankind did not yet know everything there was to know.

Like most teenagers in the cosmic universe, the human race just thought they knew everything.

“Let us now be the conduit your friend needs to live.”

Hurry! A wave of despair flooded her with darkness, but Savannah knew better. Of course, Isaiah would project his anguish and hatred at her. That was all he had.

“Please,” she pleaded out loud to Isaiah. “Don’t let go. We are coming. We are here.”

Gran Mere always said the darkest dark always proceeded the brightest bright.

Savannah meant to be that brightness. Closing her eyes, she began the purification ritual she knew by heart.

The holy oil went from her fingertips to her forehead as she quickly blessed herself and called upon the four elements to join her.

Water came in the guise of the abalone shell, Fire in the wooden matches.

The feather brought Air, and rosemary was the Earth.

So simple yet so powerful in the right hands.

She’d barely started the blessing when shuddering, angry images hit her with a force far stronger than anything she’d encountered before. Intense. Definitely male. Probing. Frantically touching places in her soul she hadn’t realized she had. Sensual places. Dark places. Forgotten places.

Opening her eyes, she said, “You think you are stronger than me, but you are not, Isaiah. Step back and stay out of my mind. Give me space that I may pray for you.”

Releasing Agent Boniface’s hand, she selected a single matchstick, snapped her thumbnail to the end of it, and lit the sage.

Into the abalone shell the sage went, sending its lovely fragrant tendrils wafting upward into the air, tickling her nose.

Purifying everything within her circle. Her heart.

Her mind. Even Agent Boniface. At the same time, it drew Isaiah in to the circle of Earth, Air, Water, and Fire. He was now anchored to life.

Agent Boniface’s fingers tightened as she gave him her hand once more, then interlocked fingers. “Hold onto me,” she ordered. “Do not let go or we’ll lose him.”

“I won’t,” he answered, tightening his grip. For a professed non-believer, he seemed to understand how strong this circle needed to be.

Breathing deeply, Savannah exhaled and projected the aromatic scent in her home out into the universe and onto Isaiah, who felt more like her adversary at the moment.

Yet she sensed a vulnerability to this frantic, angry spirit, an out of control innocence that spoke of integrity and honor and an undying, childlike love, nearly lost. She sensed pain and panic.

Fear. He didn’t want to leave, yet he didn’t know how to stay.