Putting her hands out in front of her, palms up, she reached out with all her senses and felt for the power inherent in the threshold.
To her surprise, all she found were a few tattered wisps of energy still clinging to the doorframe.
Something had gone through the door’s threshold uninvited. Doing so had triggered one heck of a backlash, but it had also destroyed the threshold defense itself.
Denise felt her heart jump into overdrive, and she took a couple of deep breaths to calm herself. Focus, witch, she told herself, focus. There were only a few creatures powerful enough to destroy a threshold like this, and she was certain she didn’t want to meet any of them in the dark unprepared.
Cautiously, she pushed aside the door and stepped into the pitchdark interior.
She reached for the light switch and then hesitated. Hunt’s sight depended on the darkness; if she turned the lights on she might blind him at a crucial moment. If she didn’t, she herself wouldn’t be able to see. In the end she settled on a compromise. With a sharply worded command she conjured up a ball of flame small enough to carry in her hand but bright enough to light her way. It was also something she could douse quickly if she needed to. “Lamp” in hand, she moved forward.
She entered the small foyer that opened onto a living room, where there was further evidence of a struggle. A long leather sofa had been knocked over backward and several of its cushions lay scattered about the room. More than one of them held deep gashes that looked like knife cuts, but which could just as easily have been made by claws.
Neither one suggested particularly good news for Hunt.
Denise had the definite sensation that time was running out. She didn’t have time to search the whole house; she had to act quickly. She had no idea where the notion itself came from, but she trusted it anyway. Such was the life of a hedge witch.
No sooner had she stepped inside that house than someone reached out and ran fingers up her cheek.
Her free hand flew to her face, batting away the sensation, and she spun around, ready to blast whoever had had the audacity to touch her into oblivion with a major spell …
… only to find the room around her empty.
Now facing the other way, she felt another set of hands brush across her shoulders, and then a finger slowly slide down the center of her back.
Each time she whirled to face the threat, and each time she found herself still alone.
Voices started speaking to her then, voices so soft that she could barely hear them, but there was no mistaking that they were there. Just as there was no mistaking the glimpses of movement she was getting out of the corners of her eyes at the same time.
Clearly, she was not alone.
It was time to show them that she wasn’t without skills of her own. If they wanted to hide in the dark around her, then it was time to shed some light on her surroundings.
She spoke a second command and the light in her hand flared brightly, lighting up the room around her like the sun and causing whatever had been in the room with her to flee the brilliance.
At the same moment she saw Hunt. He was lying facedown on the living room floor, unmoving, amidst another pile of debris.
Rushing to his side, she dimmed the light again and ordered the ball of flame to hold position a few feet in the air in front of her, allowing her to examine Hunt in its glare.
A quick check showed that while Hunt was unconscious, he didn’t appear to be seriously injured. He had a cut on the side of his face, and a few others on his hands, but that was about the worst of it.
She couldn’t leave him here, but no matter what she did she couldn’t wake him. Looked like she was going to have to carry him.
But even that turned out to be problematic, as she didn’t have the strength to heft him up over her shoulder and move more than a few feet before she was forced to let him slide back down to the floor.
He was too heavy.
“My scrying mirror for a levitation spell,” she muttered under her breath, scowling because she had never bothered to learn one.
She was going to have to do this the hard way.
Grabbing his arm in both her own, she hefted his head up off the ground and began dragging him through the house, hoping he’d wake up before she was forced to do this all the way back to her car.
33
NOW
I awoke the next morning on an unfamiliar couch in an unfamiliar living room. Or, at least it was unfamiliar until I caught a scent on the pillow I was using. Jasmine and cinnamon.
Denise.
What the hell was I doing at her place?
I sat up and attempted to rub the sleep from my eyes, only to yank my hands back into my lap when one of them brushed against the deep cut along my cheek.
“Don’t, or you’ll start it bleeding again,” Denise said, as she came into the room. I could smell the coffee she carried from nearly six feet away.
“Is that for me?” I asked, and moments later accepted it gratefully when she slid the mug into my hands.
She made me turn my head and spent a few minutes dabbing at my face before slapping a few bandages over it and pronouncing me as good as new.
“That’s great,” I said, “but I’d feel much better if I could remember how I ended with my face slashed up in the first place. And what I’m doing here instead of at my place?”
I could almost hear her frown. “You don’t remember what happened?”
“Ah … no.”
At that moment I honestly didn’t. I tried to remember what had happened after we’d left Murphy’s. The last thing I was clear on was entering my house and finding it trashed, only to have something rush out of the bedroom …
“Holy shit!” I said, jerking to my feet as my instinct for self-preservation kicked in at the memory of what I’d faced off against the night before. I was lucky I didn’t dump the coffee all over myself in the process.
Denise caught me by the shoulders and eased me back down onto the couch.
“Easy, Hunt. It’s gone now and everything’s okay. Just try to relax, all right?”
Relax. Sure, easy for her to do. She hadn’t been almost ripped to shreds by a faceless thing from the back side of the beyond. If it hadn’t been for … um …
I hit a blank spot in my memory.
“How’d I get out of there?” I asked, and was glad when Denise pretended not to hear the slight quaver in my voice.
“I dragged you out,” she said, and explained how she’d found me in the house in the aftermath of what looked like a struggle.
Her comments brought it all back to me: the fight in the darkness, the way Scream had answered my call for help, the sight of the creature with its human disguise torn away. I was shocked to be alive, given the fact that I’d fought a hand-to-claw battle against the supernatural predator that had murdered forty-seven other individuals in its killing spree so far. It made me want to pull the blanket back over my head and simply go back to sleep. Maybe if I did, I’d wake up from this crazy dream.
Additional sleep wasn’t in my immediate future, though.
“Now that you’re back on your feet, it’s time we got going,” Denise said, getting up from the couch next to me.
“Going where?” I asked.
“To see the Magister,” she replied. That, apparently, was all the explanation I was going to get, for she refused to answer any more of my questions, claiming we didn’t have time for long-winded answers.
So be it, I thought.
It wasn’t as if I had any better ideas.
We cut through the city, crossed the Charles River into Charlestown, and then headed north on Route 1 toward the coast.
“Mind telling me where we’re headed?” I asked, doing my best not to give away the fact that her driving made me nervous as hell. Imagine only being able to see dark, featureless shapes as you rocketed by them at what felt like one hundred miles an hour, and you’ll have an idea what I was experiencing.
“I told
you, to see the Magister,” she answered, as she swerved around some other driver unfortunate enough to be driving on the road with her. Horns blared behind us as we passed, and I found myself actually rather happy to be blind; I really didn’t want to know how close we’d just come to scraping the paint off that other car.
I kept my thoughts on the conversation. “You’ve said that already. I just don’t understand why we’re going to see a judge.”
“Not just a judge. The Judge. With a capital J.” She was silent for a moment and then, “The Magister is our local historian, the practitioner of the Arts who has been chosen to keep a record of all that has happened in this region, mystically speaking, since the time he took office. I spent a summer training under him a few years ago and I learned a lot.”
Here I was expecting some heavy-duty magical enforcer or something and instead I get a … librarian?
“And we’re going to see him because?”
“I think I know what it is that we’re facing. I want to run the idea by the Magister, see what he says.”
Which was all she would say on the subject until we arrived at the Magister’s home half an hour later.
Marblehead is an old town with a lot of old money. I’d been expecting one of the posh mansions that lined many of the town’s major roads and so was surprised when we pulled up in front of a rinkydink little cottage right on the water itself. I say cottage only because of its size; while it was only a vague shape in front of me, I think I’ve seen storage sheds that were a bit bigger than the building we parked in front of. Still, Denise said we’d arrived and got out of the car, so I followed suit.
A cold breeze was blowing in off the water, and the air had the sharp tang of sea salt in it. The water itself must have been very close, for I could hear the breakers crashing against the shore, and I realized that it had been a long time since I’d seen the sea.
I made a mental note to pay it a visit when all this was over.
I came around the car and together we headed for the front porch. We hadn’t taken ten steps before I heard the door ahead of us open and a welcoming voice call out.
“Denise, my dear. It’s been too long. How nice to see you again!”
She stepped forward and climbed the few short steps to the porch. The two blurring shapes ahead of me merged for a moment as she gave him a hug. Curious, I triggered the other half of my sight, wanting to see if this “Magister” was human, as she and I were. The shimmer of Denise’s aura, the special glow that marked her as one of the Gifted, was clearly visible to me, but when I looked at her companion I was surprised to see that he appeared completely normal.
That doesn’t make sense …
As I reached the steps, Denise reached down to give me a hand up.
“Magister, this is …”
“Jeremiah Hunt. Yes, yes, I’m well aware of Mr. Hunt. In fact, I’ve been looking forward to this day for some time. Good to meet you at last.”
His hand was old but his grip still strong. As I shook it, I felt whatever glamour he was using falter just the slightest bit and suddenly the strength of the man’s aura shone forth like a miniature sun, a rainbow of colors so intense that it was like nothing I had ever seen before. While I didn’t know exactly what he was, I did know that the Magister was in no way human. Not with power like that.
My librarian crack had been way off, it seemed.
As he turned to lead us inside, I tried not to think about why the local version of Gandalf might be “well aware” of me and what someone with that kind of power could do if he decided all this was my fault.
The Magister led us inside to the living room, got us settled on the couch, and headed into the kitchen to get us some coffee, an action I heartily agreed with. While he was gone I leaned close to Denise and asked, “Are you sure this guy can help us?”
“No, but it’s our best option at the moment. Besides, he’s been around for just over two hundred years. He’s forgotten more than everything you and I’ve ever known combined, so if something like this has happened before he’s likely to have heard about it.”
She patted my hand reassuringly. “Don’t worry; he’s not going to bite. Just let me do the talking.”
Getting bitten wasn’t something I was worried about. Getting turned into a stone statue for knowing about him in the first place, well, that was another matter entirely. Not being able to see it coming made it worse. But I trusted her, so I sat back, kept my mouth shut, and let her do the talking just as she’d asked.
Once the Magister had rejoined us and coffee had been distributed all around, Denise let him know why we’d come to visit. She laid it all out for him. The multiple killings stretching back fifteen years. The unusual way in which the victims died. Her two attempts at scrying out the location of the killer. My daughter and her apparent connection to the killer. Even the assault on my house the night before and her subsequent rescue of yours truly from a horde of rampaging ghosts.
It made quite a story.
If I didn’t know her, didn’t know the things she could do or hadn’t experienced half the events in the story right along with her, I’d be questioning her sanity right about now.
The Magister had no trouble believing what he was hearing though. “So what do you think it is?” he asked us.
Denise took a deep breath, let it out again, and then said in a rush, “It’s a fetch.”
The fear in her voice was crystal clear.
The Magister, however, wasn’t convinced. “That’s a pretty big leap of faith, isn’t it?” he asked.
“What the hell else could it be?” she answered hotly. “You heard Hunt. It can change shape and form at will, can enter protected dwellings as if the wards and threshold do not exist, and it has been seen masquerading as a human to fool its victims. It has to be a fetch!”
They started to argue the merits of their opposing points of view, but I cut them off. “Would somebody mind telling me what the fuck a fetch is?” I asked, glancing back and forth from one to the other.
Denise sighed. “Sorry, I forget that you are new to all this. Fetch is the old term. The more common name is doppelganger. Double walker, if you want the literal translation of the German.”
That was one I had heard before. “A body double?”
“Yes and no. That’s the modern definition of the word, the one most people know. Like you said, it is usually used in referring to the idea that everyone has an alter ego, an evil twin if you will, who does the things they wouldn’t normally want to do. The yin to their yang.”
“But that’s not what we’re referring to here,” said the Magister.
“No, it’s not,” Denise agreed, almost reluctantly. “Some say that when a sorcerer gets powerful enough, it can create a kind of double, a physical representation of the darkness in his soul that he can use to carry out certain tasks that he can’t do himself. Because the creature is created out of magick, its flesh is malleable, unfixed, and it uses that ability to take the form of any creature it has come into contact with in the past. The longer a fetch exists, the more forms it can take.
“Legend has them being used for everything from messengers to body doubles to assassins. They are completely inhuman and are crafted with a certain animal cunning that makes them extremely dangerous, especially given their resistance to pain and injury.
“The creature that attacked you and the creature I saw in the street painting both match the physical description of a fetch.”
I frowned. “But how do we know for sure? And more importantly, how do we get rid of it?”
The Magister sighed. “That’s the problem. We really don’t know. No one has seen a fetch in at least a century or two. It takes incredible power to create one; I don’t know of anyone powerful enough to do so right now.”
“That doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened,” I said, and Denise agreed.
Unlikely was a far cry from impossible.
“So what you are really saying is that we’re not only
fighting this doppelganger-fetch thing, but also the sorcerer that created it?”
“Unfortunately, yes. Fetches don’t act of their own accord; they carry out the wishes of their masters.”
“Well isn’t that just great.” It was bad enough we were dealing with some shape-shifting supernatural beastie. Now we had to deal with its sorcery-wielding creator, too.
We all sat there for a few minutes, thinking.
“All right then, riddle me this,” I said. “What’s the point of crisscrossing the country? Wouldn’t this thing be safer staying in one place, where it knows the territory, knows where to go to ground if things get too hot?”
There was a moment of silence as they considered my question, then the Magister spoke up. “I would think it had something to do with the victims. Have you uncovered any ties between them, any reason why the doppelganger or its master might be after them?”
Denise answered. “Not a strong one, no. I did see several of the victims when I attempted to scry out the location of the killer, but that’s all we’ve found to date.”
“Was there anything common to the victims you did see?”
“I don’t think so,” she replied. “At least nothing obvious. It was a mix of men and women, of varying ages.”
Listening, I decided maybe a fresh pair of eyes might be useful. I picked my satchel up off the floor and pulled out the photographs of the victims that Dmitri had printed out for us. I passed them to the Magister.
I could hear him flipping through them, occasionally stopping to take a longer look.
“These are the most recent victims?” he asked.
He must have been holding up their pictures, for Denise said, “Yes, the one on the right is Brenda Connolly and the one …”
“ … on the left is James Marshall,” the Magister finished.
“How did you know?” I asked. I was certain we hadn’t mentioned any of the victims’ names during our conversation so far.
“Because I know them,” he said. “They are both practitioners of the Arts.”
34
THEN
Eyes to See Page 18
