Rarities Unlimited 02 - Running Scared

talked with gods and held power greater than kings. Druids who knew no difference between themselves and a river or an oak or a stag; everything all of one piece, seamless, sacred.
    And all that power was summed up and contained in the ritual artifacts he had stolen.
    He was doomed.
    Setting the book aside, he stared uneasily at the heavy gold torc whose circle of twisted gold chains gleamed coldly in the moonlight pouring through his open window. There was enough light to read by if you had young eyes, but not enough to bring out the red color in the huge rock faces that loomed just beyond his run-down little house.
    Tourists paid big bucks to be hauled over the rugged land in pink jeeps or dusty open vans. He had never understood why. The sun was just as pretty lots of other places. The sky was just as blue. Yet visitors came here to Sedona to stand cheek by jowl with other visitors and shuffle along crowded vortex trails that already had been beaten hard by thousands of aging New Agers.
    Virgil had even tried walking the vortex trails himself, back when he thought he could bleed off some of the bad luck that had hounded him since he went AWOL for a two-day trip to Wales. But no matter how many vortex sites he went to, no matter how hard he tried to open himself to that other reality, he always came back down the trail with the same old reality he had hauled up it in the first place.
    In time he had discovered channeling. A one-hour session cost more than a trip to a fancy cathouse, but he hadn’t had much use for whores after he turned seventy-six. Besides, using a channel was a lot easier than clawing his way alone to the most remote and powerful vortex sites—the ones that weren’t listed in the flashy four-color pamphlets that sold for ten bucks apiece and weren’t worth the paper they were printed on. Using a channel was a lot easier on him than touching the damned gold itself and hearing hell beckoning in his own screams.
    The clock’s hands stuttered and snapped together like the ends ofa fan.
    Midnight. Halloween.
    Samhain, when all boundaries blurred.
    It had to be now.
    After two tries he forced himself to grab the torc. His skin rippled violently as it tried to crawl away from the cold gold. He was certain he heard thunder way far off, hell and gone to Wales, lightning pouring through his clenched hand, searing, burning, destroying . . .
    The sound of his own screams shook Virgil out of whatever he had fallen into. Hell, as near as he could tell. He had seen it, touched it, and was terrified he would spend eternity with it.
    “Can’t do it alone,” he said to the darkness. “Need the channel. Need her now .”
    For a few minutes he put his head in his hands, pushed trembling fingers through thick white hair, and gathered his strength to face the darkness again.
    At least Lady Faulkner would be with him this time.
    The thought gave him enough courage to call the number he remembered even when he forgot other things. But not everything. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t forget the hell he would have sold his soul to forget.
    If he still had a soul.
    Motionless but for the tremor in his hands that never stopped these days, he waited for his channel to pick up the phone and answer questions about the state of his soul.

Chapter 4
    Camp Verde, Arizona
    Halloween night
    T he telephone’s relentless ringing finally dragged Cherelle Faulkner from a drugged sleep. Naked, she sat up and peered groggily through eyelashes clogged with mascara. Outside the window whose only curtain was dust, the motel’s faded neon sign blinked on and off, on and off, a slow heart beating in the darkness advertising rooms by the night or the week or the month.
    The phone kept ringing.
    She shoved her hands through the bleached length of her hair and kicked the man sleeping beside her. “Chrissake, Tim! Get the fucking phone!”
    “Shit,” mumbled Tim Seton. “Listen to you. And here you’re always telling me to watch my mouth around the dumbs.”
    “The only dumb in this bed is you, and we all know that assholes don’t have ears, so I don’t have to watch my fucking mouth, do I?”
    Tim turned his beautiful profile away from her and fell back asleep.
    The phone kept ringing.
    With a hissing curse Cherelle clawed her way across Tim until she could see the Caller ID readout.
    “Virgil,” she muttered. “Shit.”
    Virgil O’Conner was one of their best dumbs— clients , she corrected herself silently.