Witch Craft

by Caitlin Kittredge

  I caught it in the throat this time, with my elbow, heard a crunch as the airway closed. The black dog gave a strangled yelp, some of the malignant life draining from its fire eyes.

  “No …” Morgan moaned. “No … she’ll find me.”

  “Who?” I demanded, struggling with the dog as it snapped feebly at me. “Who is she, Brad?”

  “She walks,” he whispered. “She is the Maiden, eternal. She is—”

  He screamed, and I felt his working slip its bonds and swell, fat on the blood of his psyche. The magick flow from the markings on the floor grew and ballooned until my head was a screaming knot of feedback.

  A cacophony of thunder stopped it cold, leaving my ears ringing but my other senses clear. Annemarie lowered her gun, a little smoke curling up to join the dissipating magick in the low light.

  The black dog gave a howl and shrank back, into the blood marks, until it was nothing but a dense coating of bad magick on my skin. I slumped, legs akimbo, against the wall of the laundry room. “Hex me.”

  “Morgan, too,” said Fagin, putting away his sidearm. “He doesn’t look good.”

  Brad Morgan still curled against the wall, his arms limp now and three tightly clustered holes in his torso leaching his life onto the pure white tile floor.

  “Oh, crap,” I whispered, scrambling over to him. My hands and knees smeared the blood markings with no repercussion now. Without the shaman behind them, they were just blood. “Brad.” I shook him. “Come on; stay with me. Call a bus!” I snapped at Annemarie.

  She nodded, her blue eyes wide as dollars. “Dispatch, this is One-eight-two requesting an ambulance at …”

  Her voice faded out as I focused on Brad Morgan. He coughed, black arterial blood coming up from his lungs.

  “Stay with me,” I told him. “Don’t you go dying. It’s no kind of day for that.”

  “Hate … to disagree with you,” Morgan sighed. “Day … isn’t the problem.”

  He shuddered again, not the desperate convulsion of a body trying to contain too much magick but the last, shocky attempts of a nervous system to save itself. Brad Morgan was dying, and doing it fast.

  “Morgan,” I said. “Who brought the heartstone here? Where is it now?”

  He rolled his eyes over to me, filmy with the last glimpse of the living world. “Grace Hartley,” he said. “She has it. In her basement. Took it and never left.”

  Fuck. It had been right under my nose and I’d backed off, let Hartley slip it past me. “Morgan,” I said, gripping his shoulders, “who is the Maiden?”

  His head lolled against my hand, startlingly warm after the chill of the working and the sudden, sharp shock of a death.

  “No joy,” said Fagin, bending down next to me. “Deader than the proverbial doornail at an undertakers’ convention.”

  I snapped my head around and growled at him, a full were snarl. “Do you have to turn everything into a joke?”

  Fagin raised his hands. “Sorry, Luna … but he did try to kill all of us.”

  “He was scared …” I started, and then stood up. I couldn’t be near the body for another second. “You know what, forget it. Just get out of my way.” I brushed past Fagin, who for once looked at a loss, and stumbled down the hallway, through the TV room, and out into the early-afternoon sun without seeing any of it. I just needed to get out of that tiny space, away from the blood smell and the fear and the rag-doll body that had until recently been Brad Morgan. Alive, scared, and begging for my help. A lot of good I’d done him.

  “Luna?” Annemarie came over to me from where she’d been standing with her cell phone. I looked at her. Usually it was ma’am or Lieutenant, the southern upbringing always in place. Now she sounded like she was falling and asking someone to catch her.

  “What is it, Annemarie?”

  “I’m sorry about … in there. That man was gonna kill you. I had to do it. I’m so sorry.”

  I reached out and clapped a hand on her bony shoulder. “It was a good shooting, Detective. You don’t have anything to be sorry for.”

  She swallowed, and I saw her willowy frame barely containing the shakes. “First time?” I said. I vomited after my first officer-involved shooting, right into the bathtub of the lousy tenement bathroom where the suspect’s body lay, spreading his brainpan across the pitted tile. The evidence tech at the scene gave me hell for it.

  Annemarie nodded, her face screwed up, her cheeks crimson. “I’ve drawn my gun before, but I never fired it on duty. Never. And now I killed a man.”

  “Listen,” I said. “They’re going to get Internal Affairs down here, and there’s going to be a review, and you’re going to have to talk to a shrink. Beyond all of that, the one thing you need to know?”

  Annemarie put her hands over her mouth, the fingers pale and white as bone. I grabbed her shoulders and made her look at me. “The one thing, Detective Marceaux, that you need to remember is that you did what you had to do and what you were supposed to do. You protected Agent Fagin and me from a dangerous, armed suspect.”

  “Why’d he have to do it?” Annemarie murmured. “What was that thing?”

  “He was scared,” I said. “Shamans, like Morgan—they can call guides, I think. Spirit guardians. I think he tried to call it to protect himself, and it got away from him.”

  While Annemarie got hold of herself I tried, temporarily at least, to block out the image of the teeth and the flaming red eyes, the closest thing to a hellhound I’d ever seen.

  In a small voice, finally, she said, “What do you think he was scared of, ma’am?”

  The Maiden. “Something a lot badder than that dog of his,” I said. Morgan’s dying words. Grace Hartley … Took it and never left.

  “Annemarie,” I said, as the wail of a patrol car’s siren cut the crisp air. “I need you to wait here for those officers and help them secure the scene. Agent Fagin and I have something we need to do.”

  “The room is secure,” said Fagin, stepping out. “And fuck me, could I ever use a cigarette.” He paused. “Dare I ask what it is you and I need to be doing?”

  I was already pulling out my cell to scramble the rest of the SCS. “We need to get to Grace Hartley.”

  Fourteen

  Fagin broke a lot of traffic laws getting to Grace Hartley’s pile, once I told him what the heartstone was and what Sunny thought it could do. Bryson, Kelly, Andy, and Javier were waiting for us. Pete was behind them in a CSU Jeep.

  “Wait here,” I told him. “I’m sure there will be plenty of stuff for you to swab once we’re finished.”

  “So how is this playing?” Fagin asked as I stomped up the walkway, trailed by my four detectives. “Hard entry? Polite knocking?”

  I slammed my fist into Mrs. Hartley’s ornate front door, hard enough to rattle the leaded panes. “Open the door, Grace!” I bellowed. “I know you’re in there.”

  After a long second a face swam up in the glass and the same maid opened the door. She was wearing jeans and a hoodie this time, clearly on her off day, and her wide face went blank with fear. “INS?” she said.

  “So far from it you don’t even know,” I said. “Where’s Mrs. Hartley?”

  The maid’s eyes twitched between me, Fagin, the spread of cops behind us. “You will have to try again later,” she said. “Mrs. Hartley is very busy—”

  I gripped her by the shoulder and moved her aside like I’d push a swinging door—firmly, but not forcefully. It wasn’t her fault that she was trying to keep her crappy illegal job.

  “Grace Hartley!” I bellowed. “We have a warrant to search your house and we’re doing it with or without you!”

  “There’s no need to shout so,” she said, appearing from the kitchen. It was casual day at the mansion, apparently. Grace was decked out in a matching sweat suit, black with gold embroidery, like the oldest schoolgirl in existence.

  “Finally,” I snapped back. “David, give her the warrant.” Bryson stepped forward and pressed the green-jacketed copy i
nto Grace’s stiff fingers.

  “What is this mess?” she demanded.

  “That gives us permission to search your home,” I said. Grace’s lips nearly disappeared as she compressed them into a glare that could have stripped flesh from bone.

  “You have no right,” she hissed. “I’ve done nothing.”

  “Oh no,” I agreed. “Except for bring a heartstone into my city. Terrify Brad Morgan to the point of insanity and have Milton Manners blackmail him to be part of your filthy blood witch plan.” I closed the distance between us. “I know what you’re doing, and if you think I’m going to sit by and let it happen, you’re sadly mistaken.”

  Grace Hartley bored into me for a moment, and I into her. Her eyes were green, flecked with gold, and they were placid as pools. I didn’t scare her, and that got my back up.

  “Lieutenant Wilder,” she finally sighed. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, but go ahead and search for whatever-it-was. Satisfy your curiosity so this harassment by your department can end.”

  Just the right amount of bored frustration verging on anger in her tone. I didn’t bite. “Where’s your basement?”

  “Through the kitchen and down the stairs,” she said, tonelessly.

  I jerked my head at Andy. “Watch her.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Zacharias nervously, stepping in front of Grace Hartley like she might sprout wings and fly away. I wouldn’t put it past an old witch like her, honestly.

  “Bryson, Batista, search the upstairs,” I said. “Kelly, see what you can find down here. Agent Fagin and I will check the basement.” And find the heartstone, and bring the whole mess to a close.

  The basement was one of those endemic to old houses—low ceiling hung with cobwebs, beams with nails sticking every which way, waiting to catch someone tall as I was in the forehead. I found an old-fashioned round light switch and flicked it experimentally. A string of weak, flickering bulbs struggled to life, showing me stone walls, an antique washing machine and hand-crank dryer, and a small archway leading farther into the subterranean depths. Deep rust-bleeding bolt-holes ran around the rim, as if something had been fixed there long enough to rot, and then summarily ripped away.

  I looked at Fagin, then at the archway. He nodded, and took out his gun.

  The room beyond the arch was dark, and I snapped my light on, sweeping it over the dirt floor and the curved brick walls, barely large enough for me to stand straight in. Water had worn the bricks smooth and rounded, like rotted teeth, and moss pushed between the cracks.

  “It’s a sewer tunnel,” I said to Fagin. “For the original plumbing, looks like.” I shone my light into the darkness, trying to see how far the tunnel went.

  Something gray and about the size of a large suitcase, sitting on a crude scaffold of boards, jumped under the light’s beam. “Hex me,” I breathed. The swirl of blood witch lettering was familiar and sickening to me now as it had been the first time I’d seen it, on the Skull.

  The heartstone sat in front of me, innocuous and smaller than I’d imagined. There wasn’t even any magick curling around it, like most objects of power I’d encountered.

  “That’s it?” said Fagin from behind me.

  “Expecting something guarded by sinister robed witches and stained with the blood of the innocent?” I said.

  He holstered his weapon and stepped closer to it, reaching out a hand. “Something like that, yeah.”

  I closed my fingers around his wrist and jerked it back to his side. Fagin grunted in surprise.

  “Best not to touch it,” I said. “Trust me.”

  I pulled out my radio. “Guys, we found it. Pete, get ready to come down here and process the artifact. Andy, arrest Grace Hartley.”

  Only a fizz of static came back to me. I looked down at the radio’s display screen and saw that I had no bars, just a blinking antenna. “Shit. Fagin, go upstairs and get the rest of the team down here.”

  Compared to what might have happened, no reception underground was the least of my worries. The heartstone was here. No one else had died.

  So why was my heart still thudding as if a pack of blood witches on brooms were chasing me?

  I looked back at the heartstone, battered and chipped at the edges from centuries of wear. It should have been so much harder to find it, to touch it. Instead it was under my hands with no resistance. I shivered at the proximity of the thing, and felt dampness on my face. It was cold in the tunnel, too cold to be sweating, and in the recesses of my hindbrain the were snarled a warning that this had been way too easy.

  “Fagin,” I said as he started back into the basement. “Wait a second.”

  The moisture hung in the air all around us, chill against my hands and face. I knew the feeling of the cold, oily mist—I’d felt it before, as I lay on my back in a filthy alleyway waiting to die from the knife wound in my stomach.

  A Wendigo.

  “What is it?” Fagin said, his brows drawing together as I took out my weapon and aimed it into the darkness. “You see something?”

  “Get out of here,” I hissed at him. “Get out and get out fast.”

  Fagin took a step back, still staring into the shadows. “Luna, what in the hells—”

  The gunshot split my head, a flash and a boom like a grenade in the enclosed space. The muzzle flash blinded me for a split second and I saw Fagin jerk backward like he was on a string, an explosion of brick erupting behind him, carving a hole the size of a fist into the tunnel wall.

  Whoever was in the tunnel fired again, five shots, fast and high. It was suppressing fire, not intended to do anything except make us duck and cover.

  I dropped behind the heartstone and rolled over to rest next to Fagin. He was still, facedown.

  “Fuck,” I hissed, shoving my finger against his neck and groping for a pulse. Nothing.

  After Brad Morgan, it deadened me like a blow to the chest. Fagin couldn’t be dead. Couldn’t be.

  The tunnel lit up with another burst of gunfire and I heard the clink of an empty chamber after the last shot.

  If I was lucky, I’d have five seconds before the person in the tunnel reloaded—if “person” was even the right word for what was waiting down there.

  I tucked my legs under me and sprang up, jumping over the heartstone and rattling it on its base, aiming myself for where the muzzle flash had come from.

  The figure hunched before me slid the clip home in his gun, the silvery mist swirling around him thickening as he looked up, black eyes meeting mine.

  I froze. I had expected to see a Wendigo, nightmarish silver flesh and teeth, out for my blood, but I’d never expected to see him.

  “Lucas?”

  Lucas Kennuka snapped the slide closed on his pistol and held it up to my face. “Luna Wilder. Wish I could say it was good to see you.”

  My gun was at my hip. I’d relied on strength and surprise to carry me through and I’d miscalculated.

  Now I was going to die at the hands of a man who’d already nearly killed me once before. Fantastic.

  “Don’t move,” Lucas said. “It’s not personal, but don’t you move. I know you’re tricky.” His eyes bled to silver and back to black, and his tongue flicked over his lips. Lucas had delicate features, almost pretty, and it was easy to forget that there was a monster, a real one, hiding under his skin. He was a bloodthirsty shape-changer, and while we weren’t enemies, he hadn’t been happy with me the last time we’d met. Well, he’d been unconscious and nearly dead the last time I’d seen him, but the words we’d had before that hadn’t exactly been tender loving endearments.

  “What are you even doing here?” I said. “Why did you shoot at me?”

  “I heard voices, voices that don’t belong to anyone who has business down here, and I shot at a trespasser,” said Lucas in that maddeningly calm way he had about him. “Like I said—not personal. But I forget everything’s personal with you.” He had a soldier’s cool, the dead calm of a special operative who was most at e
ase in a hot zone.

  “Like hell you shot a trespasser!” I exploded. “That’s a federal agent that you gunned down!”

  Lucas flexed his grip on his pistol. “Sorry. Humans all sort of look alike.”

  I knew he didn’t really need the gun—he could change at will into a Wendigo, made of little more than smoke, teeth and hunger. He was just pointing the cannon in my face to get a rise out of me.

  It worked, too—I cut left and grabbed the gun, clamping my hand over the slide so Lucas couldn’t fire. Twisting the weapon backward, I heard a pop as his trigger finger dislocated. Lucas let out a snarl, showing his sharp incisors as his lips curled back. The pistol went skittering away across the dirt floor of the tunnel and I wrapped my hand around Lucas’s throat, squeezing hard enough to cut off the air.

  “I don’t want to hurt you, but you bring out the worst in me,” I snarled at him. “Don’t give me an excuse.”

  Lucas just smiled. “What makes you think I won’t shift and eat you whole, Luna?”

  He had a point there. I squeezed, and he just kept smiling. “What makes you think you have any hope of stopping me leaving here?” Lucas tsked.

  “This,” said Fagin. His gun came into my narrow field of vision, kissing Lucas’s temple with an oily print. “Want to bet I can put one in your brain before you shift? You want the long odds or the smart money?”

  Startled as I was, I didn’t slacken my grip on Lucas in the slightest. “We’re even, Kennuka. I don’t want to see you again.”

  Lucas looked at me, looked at Fagin. “Your new knight, riding to the rescue? I never thought you were the type, Luna. The were I knew didn’t need any human man.”

  “You do not know who I am, Lucas, and you suck at pretending that you do,” I snarled, pushing harder against his throat. “Got any more insights before I arrest you?”

  He sighed and relaxed under my grip. “I give up, Luna. Take me in.”

  I grabbed him by the front of his T-shirt and turned him around, putting on handcuffs, for all the good they’d do if he decided to shift, and reading him his Miranda rights.

  “Nice work,” said Fagin. “Guess it helps when you know the bad guys on a first-name basis.”