Any Witch Way (The Witch Next Door Book 3)

by Judith Berens

  “It seems like a good reason to keep going.” Romeo tilted his head to listen intently and stepped through the wall first. The others followed but it was easy enough for all three of them to walk side by side down the twisting staircase. Her light glowed ahead of them beneath the low ceiling, illuminating the way to whatever truth they were about to find buried beneath Ichacál.

  Twenty-Eight

  Okay, I feel like we’ve been walking down these stairs forever.

  Their footsteps were silent enough on the steps, helpfully muffled by the thick layers of dust coating every stone. Lily didn’t miss the other footprints in that dust and the toes facing both up and down the stairs, but it didn’t seem like the best time to say anything.

  “Hey.” Romeo’s whisper was still loud enough to catch their attention in the almost complete silence. He raised a hand and stopped, so his companions stopped too. “Do you hear that?”

  She tried to listen but all she heard was the three of them breathing in the stairwell. Irritated with herself, she shook her head.

  “You will soon.” He raised his eyebrows. “Voices.”

  They descended even farther on the winding stairs until those in front of them look like they were straightening. At that point, she did hear the voices—soft whispers and shuffling bodies, a few coughs, and someone sniffling after a barely restrained sob. In the moment when her orb rounded the last curve in the wall before them and spilled its light into the room beyond, all the voices ceased. It left a quivering silence in the air for the few seconds it took the three investigators to reach the bottom of the stairs.

  Lily lifted her sphere higher and directed it out into the cavern. Her gut reaction was to draw it back toward her and away from what it revealed—something she knew she wasn’t supposed to see. But she steeled herself and let her light drift past the rows and rows of iron bars that stretched from the cavern’s ceiling to the stone floor beneath, fashioned in narrow rectangles like full-length cages.

  It took a full minute of incredulity before her mind processed exactly what they were—cages full of people.

  The first two shrank away from the ball of light and their fingers slipped off the iron bars as they retreated toward the stone wall behind them. In the next cage, a woman clutched two bars with dirt-caked hands, her fingernails black around the edges, and pressed her face as close to the light as she could. Everywhere the orb moved, there was another cage and one, two, three or more people inside it. From where she and her friends still stood at the bottom of the stairs, she floated her light around the cavern, which was nothing more than a large oval lined with cages. She didn’t see any other exit but the way they’d come down the stairs.

  A man with copper-colored hair cleared his throat on her right. “Greta?”

  At the sound of her mom’s name, she moved swiftly across the cavern toward the man’s cage.

  “Lily…”

  She ignored Romeo’s whispered warning. This man knows my mom. Her glowing sphere followed closely until she stopped in front of the man. In the bright white light, his copper hair could have been flickering flames on his head, matched by a long, scraggly beard of the same color. Although his eyes were red-rimmed and glassy, she knew he was completely lucid and aware of her standing in front of him.

  “No,” she said. “I’m her daughter.”

  He blinked rapidly and leaned away from the bars of his cage. A lazy smile spread across his lips like he’d forgotten there were both metal and freedom between them. “Yes, you are. You’re Lily, right?”

  She swallowed, knowing she had to tread carefully with this even though she wanted to beg the man to tell her anything he could about her mom. Not until I know exactly what this is down here. “Who gave you that name?”

  “Your mother.”

  “You knew her?”

  The prisoner nodded quickly and studied her face and her hair. “Only for a few months, but it was enough to know what kind of witch she really is.”

  “Tell me where you met her.” Her heart pounded, the sound echoed in her head, the blood rushed in her ears as she willed her body not to shake in excitement and something else she couldn’t name.

  “A group of us took a guided trek through the mountains. It wasn’t quite the Yucatán, but we all wanted to see the famous Ichacál.” He glanced at the stone ceiling and walls around them and his nostrils flared. “We made it here in record time. We were welcomed—exactly like I’m sure you were—fed and given somewhere to sleep. Greta stayed here for two days, and when she left, she begged me to come with her.”

  Lily squinted. “Why?”

  The man closed his eyes, then nodded. “She said she’d found something she’d been looking for, for a long time and she had to keep following the clues. This was two years ago…maybe more. I can’t really…”

  “It’s okay.” She nodded for him to continue.

  “I stayed another two days and left. But I couldn’t stop thinking about coming back here so I planned another trip on my own. March, I think. Or April. I should’ve listened to that woman when she said it was too dangerous here.”

  “She knew it was dangerous?”

  The man coughed and nodded again. “She wouldn’t tell me why. But yeah, she knew. It didn’t stop her from coming back either, I guess.”

  “Wait, what?”

  He licked his lips, tilted his head, and pressed his forehead against one of the bars. Slowly, he nodded against the metal. “She was here. I saw her again but only for a few months after those bastards threw me down here too. Then they took her away. She told me not to come back, but I truly thought this was a healing temple. A safe place.”

  Lily didn’t know how long she stood there, staring at this wrongly imprisoned man while her chest heaved with every breath and her jaw clenched way too tightly against her will.

  “Hey.” Romeo’s gentle hand settled on her shoulder to shatter whatever rabbit hole she’d spiraling down for the last few seconds.

  “You saw my mother here,” she said. “Greta Antony. You saw her down here in one of these—” She glanced around and couldn’t bring herself to call them cages out loud. “Only a few months ago?”

  “Yeah, but she was here until…it’s hard to tell in here, but maybe only a couple of days ago.” The man nodded again. “In there.” He pointed to her right and she sent the orb to drift in that direction.

  One much smaller cage existed at the far end of the oval cavern, separated from the others enough to make it feel like a punishment. At the front of the cage inside the bars was a poorly built, rotting wooden table with a candle burned all the way down into a puddle of wax. Two chains were bolted to the far stone wall, each of which ended in iron manacles that now lay open on the floor. Against the far wall, as if someone had spray-painted it through a stencil with soot and ash, was the huge black silhouette of a bird in full flight, its wings outstretched at six or seven feet across. The shadow-bird that had followed Lily since she and Romeo left Charleston, South Carolina was now plastered across the last place anyone—as far as she knew—had seen her mother alive.

  “What’s your name?” Romeo asked the man.

  “Joseph.”

  She turned away from the cage that had once held her mom, feeling stiff and not really there with the rest of them.

  “What are all these people doing down here, Joseph?”

  The prisoner looked away from her companion and swept his gaze over the other cages beside him. “We’re all magicals. Witches. Two werewolves down at the end. They’re fairies.” He nodded toward the cage on his right, where two thin, young-looking faces peered out at them from between the bars. Their purple eyes and seaweed-green hair glowed, illuminated by Lily’s light.

  “The Wisemen,” one of them said in a lilting voice. The ringing quality of it didn’t hide how weak the fairy had become. “They’re not here to help anyone. This temple is a shrine, and they—” She sucked in a heavy, wheezing breath, and the other fairy with her wound thin, ema
ciated arms around her companion’s shoulders.

  “They’re siphoning our magic.” The gruff voice rose closer to the stairwell.

  “We don’t have any magic,” another man growled.

  “Well, whatever makes you a werewolf, Reggie. They’re takin’ it from you, aren’t they?”

  Romeo took a deep breath, and Lily managed to finally force her rampant thoughts into some vestige of order. “Does anyone know why?”

  “They’re probably making a goddamn cake, for all we know.” That was either Reggie or the other guy who’d named him.

  Joseph shook his head. “We don’t know anything. It’s hard to…to know what’s really happening down here.” He frowned. “But some of these people have been down here for a really long time. Others stay for only a week or two. That one witch…” He coughed into a fist and turned toward the fairies again. “What was her name?”

  “Bethany.”

  “Bethany. She was only here for two days. No one knows where they go or why they’re taken. Why the rest of us are left here to be…sucked dry, I guess.”

  “Like magical fuckin’ blood bags.”

  “Shut up, Reggie.”

  Joseph cleared his throat and offered Lily an apologetic shrug.

  “No, it’s okay. I’d probably say the same thing.” If I were unlucky enough to be down here. Still, it doesn’t feel right to say it out loud. “So the not-so-Wisemen are siphoning your magic. Is that why you haven’t been able to get each other out of here?”

  “You have no idea how many times we’ve tried,” one of the fairies whispered.

  “Two of them come down every night. It’s the only way to tell time in this place.” Joseph nodded toward the stairwell. “They put up some of the most complicated wards I’ve ever seen. But I think that’s why nothing we try ever works.”

  “Yeah.” A wry chuckle came from down the line of cages. “So complicated, they have to put it up all over again ʼcause it blows all its power out every twenty-four hours.”

  “Okay, stand back.” Lily nodded at Joseph, who staggered away from the iron bars as she raised her hand toward his cage.

  “It’s not gonna work—”

  She delivered a sharp, slicing attack at the bars—sharp enough to cut through a steel door the last time she saw her mom cast this spell. The iron bars sparked with a squeal of grating metal but absolutely nothing else happened. “Yeah. Those are seriously powerful wards. And they do this every night to keep it from failing?”

  He nodded. “Unless you know of another reason to stack something like that as regular as clockwork.”

  “No.” She stepped beside Romeo and looked at him. “I think I know how to unstack it, though.”

  “You really are stupid, arntcha?”

  “Reggie.”

  “You come down here with your floating light and your weird-ass friends. Yeah, I smell you, too, wolf. I dunno what this other asshole is.”

  She brought her fingers up to the tiny, silver-framed mirror on the chain around her neck—the first clue her mom had left in the invisible cabin on a Canadian lake.

  “Seriously, Reggie.” The stronger fairy looked over her shoulder and glared into the darkness. “Cut it out.”

  Moving slowly, Lily turned to face the solitary cage at the far side of the cavern and stared at the charred imprint of the shadow-bird on the stone.

  “And you think you can simply undo those robed bastards’ wards that are more powerful than anything all of us have put together?” Reggie sniggered. “You walked right into the biggest trap of your life, girlie.”

  Looking backward. Her fingers tightened on the mirror. Unravel the most powerful setback. That’s what her note said. Come on, Lily. You’ve already done it once. A disgruntled Reggie continued to mouth off, but all the noise fell away while she concentrated on what this would mean.

  In the next second, a bright flash of silver light erupted from the mirror and spread in a single shock wave from her to every wall of the cavern. The belligerent complaints cut off abruptly, and the silence was thicker now than when Lily, Romeo, and Neron had reached the foot of the stairs.

  With a challenging smile, she turned to face the prisoners. “Try it now.”

  Reggie cackled. “You’ve lost your damn mind. If anyone in this hellhole is stupid enough to believe this—”

  A red glow flared beneath Joseph’s palms as he tightened both hands around the iron bars in front of him. Something snapped, and the man with the massive red beard and fiery hair jerked both pieces of metal out of place before hurled them aside and they clattered on the stone.

  “Well, shit—” Reggie chuckled.

  “I’m convinced.” Joseph stepped through the hole he’d made and thrust a hand toward Lily. As the other magicals in all the other cages took the opportunity to cast the spells that would set them free, she took the man’s hand and he held her there with both of his. “Thank you.”

  “Of course.”

  “You look exactly like your mom, doing all this.”

  She swallowed. “How well did you—”

  A loud bang echoed above the cavern, muffled through so many miles of stone but still loud enough to make everyone glance automatically at the ceiling. A squeal of bending, tearing metal filled the cavern as Reggie pried the bars apart way farther than he had to in order to step out of the cage.

  “Well,” he said and spread his arms in an expansive gesture. “It looks like we’re in time for a fight.” The short, intensely muscular werewolf—his sleeves ripped off at the shoulders and his mohawk now grown out so long it flopped over his forehead and into his eyes—snarled at the stairwell. His eyes flashed silver, and the werewolf behind him stepped through.

  The woman’s long, curly brown hair almost looked like she’d been electrocuted, and the bruise around her eye that had most likely been black at some point was now yellow and dirty-green. When she turned to look at Lily, the bruise faded quickly. “Reggie’s a dick,” she said. “But if you can forget all the crap he spews, we’ll fight with you.”

  She nodded briskly in acknowledgment. “What crap?”

  “Cool.” The woman snarled too and her eyes flared into silver rings.

  Lily glanced at Romeo, and they both fought to keep from shrugging.

  Every other magical who could still wield their magic without the wards had broken free of their cages. Those who couldn’t were helped out by the others and the odd collection of prisoners and rescuers turned toward the stairwell to face the large and imminent attack.

  “It sounds like some kinda stampede.” She summoned the crackling red sparks of her favorite attack spell in both palms.

  The werewolf whipped his shirt up over his head, dropped it, and undid his belt. She stared at the stairwell when she heard his pants drop but she smiled when, from the corner of her eye, she saw him pull his shoulders back and tilt his head. His spine popped like cracking knuckles before his eyes flashed silver too. “Then let’s go hunting,” he said darkly

  Twenty-Nine

  The first rippling wave of magic erupted from the bottom of the staircase before the Wisemen arrived. It thrust those closest back to stagger and stumble against the iron bars of their former cages.

  Reggie and the woman snarled and shifted in place and simply shook themselves out of their already ruined clothes. The first Wiseman barreled down the stairs and the gray wolf that pounced out of the ripped shirt leapt at the man’s throat with a vicious snarl. Two more in blue robes appeared in the cavern and released bright, streaking flashes of spells in all directions without really taking stock of the situation.

  Romeo shifted into his huge, shaggy black wolf and darted into the fray. Lily focused her crackling attacks on the Wisemen who appeared above the entrance to the cavern on the first few stairs. If she could stop a reasonable number of them from entering, there would be that much fewer men in blue robes for the others to fight. She caught one in the arm and a shout of pain and surprise echoed from the stairwell,
immediately followed by a hundred tiny shards of glass.

  She raised both hands and trapped the attack in a suspension charm before she threw the whole thing into one of the empty cells with a tinkle of shattered pieces on stone. Without even a glance at her handiwork, she continued her attacks.

  With a roar, Joseph ripped out the cages’ iron bars from ten feet away and released them javelin-style toward the Wisemen in rapid succession. Several of the attackers fell over one another and onto the stairs when the bars connected with flesh, stone, and more metal. One of the men in blue robes directed a dark-green, snakelike tendril that darted through the brawl. It lashed out at the prisoners’ ankles until Romeo snapped his massive jaws around it. The vine vanished in a puff of smoke, and the black wolf shook his head before he mauled another adversary.

  At least a dozen of the temple’s supposed protectors had clustered to fight them in the space, which was much too narrow and small for a battle like this. Lily couldn’t take every shot she wanted with her sparking attacks. Most of them were more likely to injure one of the magicals she was trying to protect before it found its intended target. There were definitely more than a dozen prisoners, plus Lily, Romeo, and Neron, but almost half of them were too weak to fight.

  The fairies huddled together in the back, having sunk to the floor as they held one another and watched. The woman who’d pressed her face against the bars of her cage had been freed, but she hadn’t yet found the ability to grasp the freedom and step out from behind her captivity. Two Wisemen were definitely dead and sprawled at odd angles with a few broken bones. The brown female wolf yelped when a spell caught her in the side and singed her fur.

  Lily delivered a series of blasts at the robed man who’d attacked the wolf and he actually retreated behind the curving staircase again. “Okay, this isn’t going quite like I’d hoped.” She threw a warded shield around the huddled fairies seconds before a conjured lightning bolt had the chance to completely annihilate them.

  “Yeah, I was hopeful for a minute.” Joseph grunted and raised sharpened stone spikes from the ground. One impaled a Wisemen against the ceiling and the other enemies scattered as much as they could in the confined space to avoid the missiles.