Spirit Caller 01 - Spirits Rising

cane. Tough woman. Mrs. Saunders staggered past me and into the house, wide eyed and breathing hard. Jeremy came up behind her.
    “Look out!” I shouted as a rock hurled towards his head. He ducked and the rock sailed past him, landing harmlessly on the ground. He pushed me into the house, slammed the door shut, and flipped the switch to lock the exterior aluminum door.
    “Are you all right?” I asked Mrs. Saunders.
    She nodded her head, her wrinkled hand still pressed against her chest. “Spirits and demons. Shockin’. Just shockin’. ”
    “What are they doing here?” Jeremy shouted, panting.
    “I don’t know!” My heart thudded in my chest. “Jeremy, stay with Mrs. Saunders. I have to lock the back door.” I cursed my neighbours for getting me into the habit of never locking my doors. There is a reason to lock them: risen flesh-and-bone spirits.
    I hurried about the house, locking the back door and windows. I could hear the screaming agony as a spirit battlefield stretched out across the one-road town. The cries of pain, surprise, and hate shook the ground and my soul to its core.
    Even worse was the guilt of having brought these others to my sleeping village. What was I thinking? I’m not an exorcist. Hell, I’m not even a very good anything. About the only thing I excel at magically is attracting dead stalkers. What the hell was I thinking, trying a banishment spell? The only things I’ve successfully banished were individual spirits who pestered and haunted me, and most of those were just harmless, chatty types. These spirits were powerful and angry.
    What would I have told Mrs. Saunders’s family if she’d been killed? Or any of my neighbours?
    Come on, Rachel. Pull it together .
    The spirits could still break a window and come in, but they seemed more interested in killing each other as opposed to attacking us. There was something to be said for hostilities so strong that they extended beyond the curtain of the living world.
    I returned to the front porch. Jeremy had draped a large brown quilt over Mrs. Saunders’s shoulders, one he’d grabbed from my sofa that I used when I slept in front of the TV. Mrs. Saunders sat at my table and was pouring scotch into Jeremy’s coffee cup.
    “Mrs. Saunders!” I chided. “This isn’t the time.”
    She ignored me and kept pouring what looked like three shots worth. “Don’t tell your elders what to do.” She began drinking Jeremy’s leftover coffee-and-scotch mixture. She smacked her gums. “Not as good as the gin latte you made me.”
    Jeremy stood at the door, looking through the glass. “They seem to be fighting each other.”
    I peered around him. The chaos wasn’t directed at us, but rather the two factions outside. Rocks thudded against the house and I prayed none would hit a window.
    Mom had suggested shining a flashlight at them, which really made no sense to me, but what did I know? I flipped on the porch lights. No effect. I opted not to hunt for the flashlight. If the halogen flood lights didn’t work, I doubted a ten-dollar flashlight from Canadian Tire was going to make that much of a difference.
    I saw my neighbour’s living room lights flip on across the street. Their porch light flicked on a moment later. “Crap,” I said. “Tobe is awake.”
    Moments later, pot-bellied Tobias Mercer and his teenaged sons, Dwayne and Cory, came out of the house, each with a hunting rifle.
    “Get on, wit’cha!” Tobe shouted in his basso voice. “Leave ’er alone!”
    A short man in loose-fitting pants and a tunic slammed against the storm door. The Plexiglas shook and I stumbled back in surprise. Even Jeremy flinched. The spirit turned, his eyes wide and pleading. He pounded on the door for a moment, before grabbing the handle and shaking it. The man shouted at us and kept looking over his shoulder. I didn’t understand what he was saying, but his frantic expression spoke for him. A piece of firewood hurled at the door and when instinctively I ducked, it hit the man’s skull. He slid down the door until out of view.
    The roar of Tobe Mercer’s rifle cut through the night silence and drowned out the crashing waves for an instant.
    The spirits turned on Tobe and his sons and rushed them. Mrs. Saunders still stood at the door, cringing and flinching, but glued to the scene outside. “Merciful Father.”
    I scanned the room, looking for the rabbit’s-foot necklace given to me by my grandfather and the medicine bag found with my