20
WHEN I AWAKENED, I felt warm. Not so far away, Matthew was preparing dinner. I tugged at the blanket covering me, but it was only the frozen collar of my overcoat. My eyes were frozen shut, and I fought them open.
Above me, the black sky stretched out cold and vast, the constellations brighter than the snow beneath. My legs were exposed, but I felt nothing. The ground between my thighs had glutted itself on my blood. Last I had known, you were still attached to me. I reached down and found you gone.
Your gran’s body lay beside me still, no longer bound to the stake. Someone had crossed her wrists over her heart. Her face was strong and calm, even in the absence of breath. Before I could tend to the dead, I had to tend to the living.
I scanned the shoreline for the source of the footsteps I had heard before I lost consciousness. Some forty paces down the shore, the flames of a small fire whispered to each other. By the firelight was a stout log, a throne for the silhouette of a tall, dark figure. At his hip was a hatchet, its blade deep in the log, in his arms a tiny bundle. You were in the arms of the demon George Dalton.
I found my feet fast, and dropped to my hands and knees faster. Between my loins and my soles, the flesh was without sensation. I whispered an incantation to revive them, and repeated it faster when it did not take. I kneaded my muscles, coaxing the blood now racing through my veins to return to my legs. It was a fruitless effort, and one that both confounded and frightened me.
So you became my beacon as I began to crawl towards the fire, the frozen earth clawing at my empty belly. In the time consumed by the last stretch of unforgiving ground, I took my first good look at the monster holding you. He had a broad face, with high, weather-worn cheekbones and deep-set eyes, black and pitiless as the bottom of a well. I recognized the pitched crown of his wide-brimmed hat.
I crouched beside the fire pit like a wounded animal and waited for the fire to thaw my useless limbs. Even wounded animals still have their teeth. I fought for a first glimpse of you, to see that you were alive, but you were nestled deep in his arms and he had no intention of giving you back to me.
“Congratulations, witch,” he said. “It’s a girl.” He spoke in a decayed English accent, something from long ago, from tomes in the Library. “You know, hunters once believed that a witch, having rejected her baptism, would float upon being thrown into water. It was known as the cold-water test.” His eyes flicked over in the distance from where I had come. “Your poor mother sank like a stone.”
I would not cry. I would not give him the satisfaction of watching me cry. He removed a canteen from beneath his overcoat, and though you started to cry then, I was relieved to know your lungs were strong enough for crying. As he tipped a drop of water from the canteen onto your forehead, he began to whisper.
“I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry.” His voice had turned singsong. “He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.”
The demon was baptizing you.
“Matthew, three-eleven,” he went on, turning towards me. “I don’t know about the sandals, but the fire is appropriate.”
“Only one of us is going in that fire,” I said.
“She has your eyes, Li Lian. Had, anyway.” He laughed. “You’re welcome, by the way. But we’ll get to that.”
Until my limbs were thawed, I needed him to keep talking. So long as he was talking, you were safe.
So I asked him, “Why are you doing this?”
“I was a priest, you know.” The demon traced an inverted cross on your brow as he spoke. “The Church brought us together, soldiers turned priests turned soldier-priests. Each of us, so perfectly devoted to Christ, to our Church. They sent us to root out the devils in our midst set against our Redeemer. And we did. I drowned and burned my way through the borderlands and all of Scotland.”
“You killed innocent women,” I said.
“Innocence.” He cackled. I tried to rise to my feet but collapsed. “I let the others prick and drown and burn the silly girls who would chant whatever nonsense for nourishment. While they tortured, I traveled. I studied. Do you know what I found? Knowledge, Li Lian, older than my Church. It was in the hills of Spain, above Zugarramurdi, where I experienced a revelation. We were standing at the mouth of a cave called Infernuko Erreka by the local people. An inquisitor had tied children to a stake there. He asked me to count the children. I counted twelve.”
“If there’s a point to your babble, I can’t conjure it.”
Months on the road with Hawk had afforded me ample time to practice deflection by means of sarcasm. Dalton grinned, and despite the soullessness in his expression, I have to say the shadows suited him. Wooed him, even.
“One of the girls, she was no more than fourteen, and she stared back at me. I had never met such resoluteness, such defiance. That it should come from a young girl only impressed me all the more. I could not hear what she said, but she whispered, and the other children stopped crying all at once, even as the flames engulfed them. None of them screamed. I remarked upon this to my guide, who told me to watch closely. When the fire was extinguished, he wanted to know what I saw. I told him I had seen a great purification take place. ‘No, no,’ he said, ‘look closer.’ Upon observing the burnt remains, I finally understood then what my guide had wanted me to see. Eleven bodies, where my eyes had counted twelve.”
“If your plan is to kill me with stories about faulty arithmetic,” I said, “I will kindly take my child and go.”
Dalton laughed before he went on, “My guide had seen this before, in a different mass purification, with the same defiant girl. She was impervious to fire. My guide believed she allowed herself to be taken to the stake that she might cast a spell over the other children, to keep them from feeling any pain. He considered this act of defiance a sin above all others, for how would the children be purified if they felt no pain? It is the pain you feel, the pain of burning and drowning, that saves you. That witch had damned their souls to hell for eternity, just as the devil wanted.”
“The devil told you that?”
“He did, Li Lian.”
“And what’d you have to say about that?”
“Funny you should ask. My guide asked me this very question. He wished to know what I thought about the matter, and I’ll tell you what I told him: this was the first instance of true magick I had ever witnessed. In fact, it confirmed the suspicion I had held ever since I left Scotland and set out alone.”
“That you didn’t know the first thing about witches?”
He laughed again. The sound turned my stomach. “That witchcraft was a rare affliction rather than a skill one could acquire through compact with the devil. I recalled to my guide my own interrogations, the conflicting testimonies, the hysterias. After much wine and argument, he agreed that they were but silly girls or disturbed men. Yes, they had sought a pact with the devil. Yes, they were enemies of the Church. But no, they did not have magick. No, they were not witches. It wasn’t in their blood. Not like the girl in Spain. Not like you, Li Lian. You are a true witch. Not so easy to kill, or to burn. Not without help from something equally powerful. So I ask you the same question I asked the inquisitor: How does a mortal man combat such powers?” He continued without awaiting my answer. This was his stage, and he was enjoying his performance. “That question was answered. But not by my guide, or by my God.”
“Ain’t no God,” I said. “Not the way your book tells it.”
“You may be right,” he said. His eyes burned into me. “But there certainly is a devil.”
He came to stand so close to the fire that the sparks jumped onto his coat.
“So you came after me and Matthew, my mother and her sisters, because you ain’t found no other calling in two hundred years besides hunting witches?”
“Calling?” Dalton asked. “Is that what you think this is?” Laughter made his voice sing like a fresh-honed blade. “Maybe
in the beginning. But I hunt your kind now for the same reason you hunted me.”
“I wasn’t hunting you for sport,” I said.
“You believe, because you’ve done nothing to me, that this makes you innocent? Li Lian, I dare say you are about as innocent as your dead hag of a mother.”
“You’re the one killing innocent people. Your book don’t allow that, last I heard.”
“Oh, but He does. By omission, God allows all manner of evil in this world.” He cast his gaze into the heart of the fire. “A child. A wife. A home. I had those things too, once. The Church would not have approved of them. I kept them to myself.”
I let him wander through his memories, but I watched you in his arms. My body ached to hold you, to glimpse your face. I opened and closed my fingers, and they remembered what it was to move. I thought of de la Cruz’s knife secreted in my boot. It would not kill him, but I might be able to wrest you from him.
“And then I lost them,” Dalton said. “It began with a cough. No, not quite a cough. My little girl was choking. I found tiny animal bones in her bile, entangled by herbs that grow only in the Highlands of Scotland. And then came the fever. Sweat blistered her forehead. She lay shaking in my arms during the day, her eyes pleading for help, but there was nothing I could do. And when night fell, she would howl in our bed as though she were burning alive.” He paused, his eyes closed in foul pantomime of a man lost in his own memories. “She died on a Sunday. My wife blamed me, my work. She believed witches had cursed our family. She held on to that blame, and her Bible, until the same death as claimed our child came for her. In the span of a fortnight, Li Lian, I found myself utterly alone. Just as you are now alone. But I didn’t blame myself, or God.” He turned away from the fire to look at me. “I blamed you.”
So soon as I opened my mouth, he held up a hand. He moved you closer to the flame, demonstration of where my protests would cast you.
“Of course you weren’t born yet. But the seed of your lineage had already begun to sprout roots. I swore that so long as I held breath in my lungs, I would rid the earth of your kind. And that’s when my prayers were answered.”
I asked, “Why is it every time a madman’s prayers are answered, a witch burns?”
“I prayed, Li Lian. I prayed, and I studied, and I searched. And I found she who had taken my family. Your great-great-great-grandmother Eimhir. She was hiding in Horse Meadow—Marc Innis, in your people’s tongue. Of course the old crone denied what she had done, they always do, but after I peeled away a few layers of her skin, she became much more cooperative.” He adopted a mocking, high-pitched brogue. “ ‘I’ll confess, I’ll confess, just make it stop.’ ” He ceased his mimicry. “Unlike Eimhir, I cannot say I held up my end of the bargain.” He waited for my response and I gave him none. “Have you heard this story before?” he asked. “Surely you have. Eimhir, granddaughter of Mór, the witch’s daughter who ran off with the parson’s son, your line’s namesake? Your ancestor?”
I stared at him, my face wrenched in anger but silent.
“No?” He feigned injury. “I thought you’d have heard about that one. I husk an old woman, and nobody in your family talks about it? It hurts to be forgotten.”
“All the pain you’ve inflicted,” I said, “all the women you’ve killed, you’ll have to excuse me if I can’t scrounge up a damn to give you.”
I thought I knew what it was to feel cold, until I looked him right in the eye as he smirked at me.
“Killing one of you was hardly a drop in the ocean, and I realized I would have to make my own sacrifice if I hoped to drain it. I prayed, not to my God but to the world beyond ours, the world from which you draw your power. And that world sent answer to my prayers.”
I could not tell where the man ended and the spirit began. Neither could he, I imagine. Dalton went on: How he had followed us. To Salem. Across the Americas to our south. How he killed us wherever he found us. How all this work had brought us here, to this moment. To me. The witch-turned-huntress. Did I not appreciate how our positions were reversed?
“Don’t lament,” he said. “You weren’t the first to hunt me and fail. After I scattered your family, the bishops accused me of witchcraft. They believed I had fallen from priesthood to devilry. My methods had become too much for them. But I did not flee. I let them come to me, and I purified them as well.”
You stirred in your swaddle, opened your eyes, and began to cry again. A yearning I had never known before brought tears to my eyes.
“Ah, there, there,” he cooed, rocking you in his arms above the flames. “Soon, none of this will matter, little girl.”
“If you’re going to kill me,” I said, “quit your yapping, and get on with it.”
“Anyone can kill,” Dalton said, “or set fire to flesh. Flesh does not interest me. To truly purify the soul of a witch, one must turn her spirit to ash. Do you see the difference? One must diminish a witch to her barest and lowest quality. For you, that’s vengeance. That is what I have done for you, Li Lian. That is why your magick is failing you. That is my gift to you. Your suffering will be your purification.”
“And what’s your barest and lowest quality, demon?”
A boyish grin flickered across his face as he considered me, cocking his head.
“You want to hurt me, don’t you?” he asked. I neither saw the point in lying nor felt I owed him the truth. “You’ve allowed your soul to become consumed by revenge, the greatest fire there is, and you’ve nearly attained purity. If this is what you truly desire, then there is only one final thing left to do.”
He strode to the opposite side of the fire. Tears streamed down my face as he held you over the blaze. I found my balance and readied myself to leap in after you. I would cover your body with mine and shield you the way a fallen tree protects the flowers during a forest fire. If he thought I would just lie still and let him burn my baby right in front of me, then I do not believe George Dalton knew me near as well as he believed he did.
When he released you, I reached out my hands and gasped a spell that would part the flames so that they would not touch you. Not knowing if the spell had taken, not trusting it after my Work had failed me so many times in such recent memory, I jumped into the fire after you. It gnawed at my legs and feet, but it could not blister the skin. From the white-hot coals I scooped you up and clasped you to my breast.
Tears have a cleansing power of their own, under certain conditions. This was a condition I could not have met before I met you. You changed me, my dear. I held you in my arms for the first time, and you made a mother out of me.
Dalton recoiled not from the fire, but from me. At the time, I thought nothing of it, but I know now he had expected to have broken me by the time he released you. That I would have nothing left to fight with. That I would be the one to burn.
I stirred the embers from within the fire and, as I had the night I burned de la Cruz and Mackey in their cabin, I bid the fire roar up hotter and higher than it could have on its own. The flames reached out and coiled around Dalton’s ankles and wrists.
As the flame engulfed him, Dalton began to pray in a dead language and raised his arms again. I felt his mind reach out to mine, the malevolent entity inside him now willing me to release him as it had willed those men to walk into the lake.
I held you tight and fought for my sense, but the spirit brought me to my knees. A disembodied voice whispered to me, bid me cast you back into the fire myself. Though I could no longer hold Dalton at bay, I clutched you, somehow noiseless in all of this, to my breast.
Dalton paced towards me, rubbing at his wrists as if they were sore from handcuffs and clicking his tongue in disapproval. He reeked of burning flesh.
“I see your purification is still incomplete, Li Lian.”
I murmured a protection spell beneath my breath and struggled to find my feet again, to turn and run from him. But the spirit rooted me in place. Dalton was mere paces from us now, his arms extended to take you from me.
“Come, come,” the demon said in a soothing voice, “let me take her.”
My grasp began to fail not because the cold had claimed my strength, but because a force beyond my control was prying my fingers from you. I pled aloud, as if my tears and my voice could do what my Will could not, but each time the word please passed my lips, another finger abandoned me. By the time the demon’s shadow fell over us, all that kept you from tumbling to the ground was the crook of my arm and my smallest, weakest finger.
I searched his eyes to separate the man from the demon, unable to distinguish the two, and then they went wide. As I watched, something came plunging through him, driving him forward.
It was a wooden stake, now slick with his innards.
He coughed, spraying us with blood I did not flinch away from. His hands dropped down from the sky and hung at his sides a moment. Before I could breathe relief, he reached to grab the bloodied point, trying to push it out of him as if it were no more a nuisance than a splinter in the pad of his smallest finger.
But the stake drove farther through him, drove him to his knees.
It was not the spirit’s releasing me that caused me to gasp.
Your gran’s hair was frozen into gray-red ringlets, her skin pale as the waters that had nearly claimed her. She stood behind him, her ragged breath steaming as it left her body, and said nothing before releasing the cross to which Dalton had bound her. He fell backwards, the stake end ripping through him until his back came to rest on the cross bar.
I tightened the arm supporting you and used my free hand to move aside the fabric covering your face. You were content in your swaddle, your cheeks pink and your eyes closed, though when I brushed my fingers across your face, you blinked and tried to move your bound arms. This was the first time I laid eyes on you, and all of the pain and fear that had driven me so far melted away to reveal something stronger.
Devil's Call Page 17
