The Paramedic's Witch Read online

“Have you given any more thought to how and when you’re going back to when you came from?” Dean asked.

  “I can’t do it on my own. I have an idea of how it’s done, but the spell has to be cast on me by another witch. It took a group casting to send me back here. It might take more than one of us to send me back.”

  “We should contact the local coven then. They sent you back here in the first place, at least their future selves did.” Dean was getting a headache trying to wrap his brain around the whole time-travel thing.

  “I want to stay a little longer and help Mom out. She is all alone now. She doesn’t even have you to lean on yet. She needs someone else to help her through this.”

  That comment brought them to an awkward silence. They were mostly quiet the rest of the ride downtown. Jaz had taken an apartment about a block away from the location of her family’s bombed-out building. The fire marshal and the feds at the ATF had determined that it was not a mere gas explosion as had originally been reported in the news. Since they were federal security contractors, it was being treated as a potential terrorist incident, given the company’s federal security ties, especially since Jaz and her team had just returned from an unnamed mission in Syria. Dean knew from the news how dangerous that middle-eastern country was. It was a testament to how tough Jaz was, and to her skills as a demon hunter that she had been sent there and survived to come home again.

  Dean found a spot on the street, thumbed a few quarters into the parking meter, and followed Joanna into the building. They caught the elevator up to the sixth floor where Jaz was staying and knocked on the apartment door.

  Jaswinder Errington opened the door. She could have been Jo’s older sister, they looked so much alike. Dean saw right away she had been crying. He knew that she would be embarrassed by his noticing it, so he shot her a big grin when she looked his way and pointed to Jo.

  “Look, I brought you a teenager to lend you her snarky comments while you work.”

  “Oh, joy,” Jaz said stepping back and gesturing to them. “Come on in. I told you I didn’t need your help, Joanna. It’s busy work for the most part. It’s stuff that I just have to slog through and get it done.”

  “No one should have to do this stuff alone, Mom. Besides, Dad is off for the next two days so he can stay and help, too. Together we can get it done faster than you could do it alone.”

  “I told you, Joanna. Stop trying to force Dean and me together. I don’t doubt that we are your parents anymore. That is something I accept now. I do doubt that we are going to become more than friends just because you keep coming up with ways for us to stay in close proximity to each other.”

  “Jaz is right, Jo.” Dean jumped in to help Jaz out. “If we end up as more than friends in the future, it will have to happen in its own time and can’t be forced. I mean, you didn’t want us to just start jumping on each other as soon as you snapped your fingers, did you?”

  “Ew, Dad, don’t be gross. That is not an image any daughter wants to think about.”

  “Well, then, leave us alone,” Jaz said. “Let things happen naturally. You aren’t even born for almost five years, right? Dean and I have plenty of time yet to get to know each other.”

  Dean saw the teen’s shoulders sag a little. If he thought about it from her point of view, he could understand how she felt. She wanted to see the parents she had left behind in the future. They were a happily married couple, not the barely-friends she saw when they were together here in her past. He had very little memory of his own parents together before his father left him and his mother on their own. He had been three when his father left them. After that, his mother had avoided talking about him, at least in front of Dean. He knew almost nothing about the man who had fathered him.

  Dean changed the subject. “On the bright side, we are here together now. Let’s see what we can do to get some work done. What do you think, Jaz? Do you have any work for the kid and me to help you with?”

  “The fire marshal dropped off some boxes of personal items recovered from the fire. I have not wanted to, but maybe since you both are here with me, we can sort through them. I’ve got nothing else to do until a conference call coming up at noon with some of our satellite office managers. I need to make sure that all the Errington private and federal security contracts are being served.”

  Jaz’s family had been one of the world’s great hunter clans, serving as the guardians of humans against demons and those Unusuals who saw fit to take advantage of them. Once they moved to the United States before the Civil War, the family set up a security and private detective firm to serve as a basis for them to investigate demon and Unusual attacks on humans. Since then, the Errington Security Firm had become one of the preeminent private security and personal bodyguard companies in the nation. They provided protection to people like movie stars and corporate leaders around the country. They also took special jobs from a clandestine federal agency related to their core mission, hunting demons who broke through to the human world from the netherworld. It had been one such group of demons the three of them had battled to rescue the angel, Ashley Moore, just a few weeks before.

  “So where are these boxes?” Dean asked looking around the room. He saw a stack of six large cardboard boxes on the far side of the room along with some charred, hard plastic Pelican cases in various sizes.

  Jaz pointed to the boxes and Dean and Jo walked over to them.

  “Where do you want us to start, Mom? Do you want us to just pick a box or case and dig in?”

  “Yeah, sure. Pick one. I don’t care.”

  Jo picked up one of the cardboard boxes and moved over to the dinner table with it. She unfolded the flaps and looked inside. Dean noticed the smoky odor coming from the contents of the box. Jaz came over and the three of them started to pull some picture frames and other odds and ends from the box.

  * * *

  ———

  * * *

  It took them about two hours to go through all the boxes, and it wasn’t until they got to the last box that Dean found something strange.

  “Jaz, what’s this?” Dean asked. He pulled a small jade figurine from the bottom of the box. It had been hidden under a piece of charred linen.

  Jo hissed in alarm and Jaz drew in a sharp breath.

  “Dean, where did you get that?”

  “What? It was in the box. Here,” he said trying to hand it to her.

  “Don’t hand it to me. Just set it down on the table, quickly. You shouldn’t touch it at all.” Jaz looked at Jo. “Do you have any protection magic that will counter that?”

  “Just a normal ward against evil. It might work.”

  “Cast it. Now.”

  Dean was confused but set the figurine down. Jo closed her eyes and started chanting under her breath. He looked at the jade figurine. It was about the size of his fist and portrayed a short, squat man-shaped figure holding a sword. It appeared to be smiling, but as he looked closer he saw there were double rows of sharp teeth in the figure’s mouth that made the smile more of a grimace.

  The hair stood up on the back of Dean’s neck as Jo’s chanting got louder. He didn’t understand the language, but knew that many spells were spoken in Latin, Greek, or even other, more ancient languages. She finished and opened her eyes. Looking at Dean and the figurine, she nodded.

  “That should do it, Mom.”

  Jaz stood up and looked in the box Dean had been unpacking. He looked inside, too. It was empty except for a few scraps of paper.

  “Crap, where are the other two?”

  Jo looked alarmed. Dean looked from one to the other, still not understanding.

  “There were three?” He asked.

  “Yes, a matched set of three that were kept in a specially warded box. The wooden box must have burned in the fire, but the jade would have survived, as we’ve seen.”

  “Will someone please explain to me what is going on?” Dean asked, careful to stand very still. He had been afraid to move and touch anything.

  “It’s a summoner, Dean, and Jo’s spell should serve to contain it for now. They are meant to be used to summon the presence of a demon lord to earth. They work when all three are set at three of five points of a pentagram scribed in a warding circle.”

  “They can also cause really bad luck to those who hold them, Dad. Like evil sorts of bad luck! I think I cleansed the effects from you with my spell. You only held it for an instant.”

  “Why would your family have a way to summon demons, Jaz? You’re demon hunters after all.”

  “Dean, we didn’t use them, we kept them safe from others using them. My clan captured them centuries ago when we wiped out a ring of demon worshipers back in the old country, if I remember the family lore correctly.”

  “Wow, Mom. I know you can’t see it but the aura radiating off that thing is disgusting and really powerful. If I look at it for too long it makes me queasy. I can’t imagine what it would be like with all three of them in one place. We need to see if we can find the other two. If someone else picked them up in the rubble of the fire and ran off with them, we could have a big problem on our hands.”

  “So it causes bad luck. So what?” Dean asked.

  “So what, you say? The problem, Dean, is that this is evil associated directly with bad luck,” Jaz said. “Like Jo said, it won’t just be stubbing-your-toe, or tripping-over-a-fallen-branch-on-the-sidewalk kind of bad luck. This will be run-out-of-gas-in-the-middle-of-a-railroad-crossing-while-a-train-is-coming bad luck. This is the kind of bad luck that brings down a fully loaded passenger airliner while you’re on board.”

  “And it will get worse unless it can be contained. There could be other effects on an unprotected person, as well,” Jo said.

  “Well, let’s head over to what’s left of the building,” Dean suggested. “There’s a construction crew there. Maybe they have seen something or someone. If not, we’ll see if we can find the other figurines in the rubble. Jo, you can see the glow of the figurine’s aura, so if we get there and the other figurines are there, you should be able to find them, right?”

  “In theory, Dad, yes.”

  “Good. Then let’s go before some homeless guy decorates his cardboard box with a new knickknack and brings down an asteroid on the city.”

  * * *

  ———

  * * *

  “Look honey,” Sam said. “Today was my lucky day. I found these cool bookends on my demolition job. I thought we could use them on our bookshelf.”

  The matching figurines he held were set on the shelf and turned so they looked out over the construction worker’s small apartment. Sam didn’t see the eyes flare with an internal light for an instant, glowing and pulsing a sickly green before they faded.

  3

  Dean, Jaz and Jo left the apartment building and started the short, two-block walk to the burned out remains of the former Errington Security headquarters. They had just gotten to the intersection across the street from the site when a delivery truck swerved out of passing traffic. It hopped the curb heading straight for Dean. He wasn’t paying attention. He was going through some emails on his phone and looked up, startled by the noise and shouts, to see the truck barreling towards him. He couldn’t move. He just froze in place.

  He tried to move out of the way, but felt like he was mired in glue. Then he felt an iron grip clamp onto the collar of his uniform jacket and yank him backwards out of the path of the out of control vehicle. He fell backward as he lost his balance, and landed on top of whoever had rescued him. He realized after a moment of struggle that it was Jaz.

  “You can get off me now,” she said.

  “Oh, sorry.” Dean rolled off of her onto the sidewalk and got back to his feet. He extended his hand to help her up, and after looking up from the ground for a moment, she took it and he helped her back to her feet. “Thanks for that. I couldn’t move. It was all going in slow motion, kind of like one of those dreams where you can’t get away, no matter how hard you try.”

  “Dean you need to be more careful. I mean seriously, Jo and I told you that you’ve touched a demonic idol that will bring you bad luck. You would think that you’d be more aware of your surroundings when you know your luck is compromised.”

  “I thought Jo’s spell solved that problem.” Dean looked at his daughter. “What was all that mumbo jumbo back in the apartment about if it wasn’t to protect me?”

  “It was a protection spell, Dad, and it worked. Mom grabbed you and saved your life. You were lucky. That truck could have splattered you all over the sidewalk.”

  Dean turned to look at where the truck had come to a stop just before crashing into one of the shops that lined the street. The store owner had come out and was shouting at the driver. Dean looked around to make sure no one else was injured. There didn’t appear to be any other casualties, just his own pride.

  “Come on, Dean, we need to get over there and find the other two figurines before it’s too late,” Jaz said.

  Dean joined the two women and together, after carefully checking that all oncoming traffic was stopped by the light, crossed the street to the newly erected construction fence that surrounded the remains of the Errington Security building. The three of them had to walk halfway down the block to get to the construction entrance where trucks and workers were coming and going from the site.

  “Let me talk to the construction foreman when we get inside. They are pretty careful about anyone but their demolition workers coming on the site,” Jaz said once they got inside. She walked up to an office trailer nearby and went inside.

  While she was inside, Dean and Joanna looked around as the workers went about their work knocking down the remaining brick walls. A front end loader was scooping up rubble and filling a dump truck nearby.

  “Do you see anything, Jo? Any sign of the other figurines?”

  “No. They could be covered by the rubble and wouldn’t show as easily, but I think I would still see the aura emanating from where they were.”

  Jaz came out of the trailer, followed by a tall man in work khakis and a blue button-down shirt. He was wearing a white hard hat and carried two others. Jaz was putting a similar hard hat on, adjusting it for her ponytail.

  “Guys, this is Joe Anderson, the construction foreman.”

  Dean shook his hand and took the offered helmet, putting it on. Jo did the same.

  “Yeah, we need to be careful,” the foreman said. “I’ve had three guys injured in the last three days by fluke accidents and the insurance inspectors are due here any minute. Everyone on the site has to wear their helmets and I have to ask you three to stay back from the work. I know you are looking for some personal effects and I’ve had my guys keeping an eye out. We’ve been putting whatever we find over in that storage trailer over there. If you’ll follow me.”

  The three of them filled in behind him as he walked over to storage container trailer nearby. Dean brought up the rear and leaned forward so that his companions could hear him over the machinery. “Fluke accidents sounds like we have a confirmation that the other idols were here, right?”

  “I was thinking the same thing, Dean. Jo, keep your eyes open.”

  “I am, Mom. Nothing pops out to me so far.”

  Joe unlocked a padlock and opened the other trailer. There were a few boxes and dusty items set on tables inside. There was no light in the trailer, just what streamed in the door.

  “I’ll be outside if you need anything. I’ve got to keep an eye out for that inspector,” Joe said. He stepped outside the trailer and left the three of them to look through the piles of stuff.

  Jaz went in first. To Dean, it seemed as if her steps were tentative, as if she didn’t want to be there. He knew this must be tough for her. Jo followed her and stayed close to her mom.

  Dean kept back a few steps to give the two of them some space. This was all that was left of her family. To Jaz and Jo this was something like visiting a grave site. Jo had grown up hearing about this in the future.

  After a bit of searching, Jo let out a squeal of delight and rushed forward past her mother to one of the tables. Dean thought they had found what they were looking for. He craned his neck to look past Jaz in the dim light streaming through the open trailer door. He saw Jo pick up something and turn around holding it out in triumph.

  “Look, Mom. It’s Grandma’s sword. My sword. You gave this to me when I turned thirteen.”

  Jaz stepped forward and took the katana in its scabbard from her daughter. She held it in front of her, brushing her fingers across the pattern on the lacquered wood of the scabbard. Then she reached out and pulled Jo into an embrace. Dean could see Jaz’s shoulders shaking from the sobs and saw tears streaming down Jo’s face over her mother’s shoulder.

  He turned around and gave them some room while he looked at the scattered items on the table next to him. Most of it appeared to be junk, or the items were ruined enough in the fire and building collapse that they would not be usable anymore. Dean looked through all the items on the table in front of him and looked over at the other two tables in the trailer. A thought occurred to him.

  “Jaz, what happened to all the guns? I know your family had to have a lot of guns and ammunition in the building.”

  Jaz pulled away from her embrace with Jo and wiped at her eyes. “We did. Most of them were in the building’s armory which largely survived the explosion and fire. It was built with additional structural and security support. There is a large gun dealer we know outside of the city that has taken possession of them until I can get some place secure to store them again.”

  Dean knew that the Erringtons’ national security business had an arrangement with the FBI and U.S. Marshal’s office that gave the qualified team members nationwide carry permits. Jaz had once mentioned that the close relationship with the Marshals carried back to just after the U.S. Civil War.

  “I still have all the gear from my personal SUV, so I have my full load out. I don’t need the rest right now. The other weapons will have to wait for me to go over them. I can’t do that until we get local offices set up again. Right now the remaining staff is stretched pretty thin covering all of our existing contracts.”