Witch Craft

by Caitlin Kittredge

  “Healthy as a horse,” said Lucas, slapping me on the ass. “Ain’t that right, sweetie?”

  Oh, I was going to get him for that later. I just smiled and simpered, keeping my boozy just-popped-an-Oxy stance in place. “Whatever you gotta do, man,” I said to Bodyguard.

  “I’m going to have to clear this,” said the woman.

  The bodyguard snapped his fingers. “Get back into the ritual room. You aren’t supposed to be wandering around.”

  Interesting. The woman stank of magick, the guard read as mundane, but the Thelemite wasn’t the one in charge.

  She retreated, and the guard counted out a roll of bills to Lucas, who pocketed the cash and shoved me forward. “I’ll just make myself comfortable.”

  “You can come back Monday morning and collect her,” said the guard. “Medical attention is your responsibility.”

  “All due respect,” said Lucas, “but I don’t leave my product unattended. That’d make me a bad businessman. I’m sure you understand.”

  “Are we gonna have a problem?” Bodyguard asked. Lucas lifted one shoulder. They were doing some kind of masculine stare-down that I didn’t understand, despite my all-too-frequent struggles for dominance with pack weres.

  “Only if you try to mess with my business.” Lucas was better at this than he realized. He altered his voice and his posture, made himself look droopy and sleazy instead of straight arrow and dangerous.

  “Fine,” the guard finally grunted. “If the snatch means that much to you, be my guest.” He gestured at a threadbare sofa in the waiting area, which bore a token handful of pamphlets on things like Reiki and crystal healing, some battered furniture, and little else. “You,” he said, grabbing onto my arm like I was a runaway dog, “come with me.”

  “You’re cute,” I purred as he dragged me down the hall. “What’s your name?”

  “Bud,” he said shortly. “You can call me Bud.”

  “Bud,” I said, and added a giggle. “Like the beer.” A nickname was better than no name at all. I could run a search for him, based on his description and name.

  “That’s it,” he said, not a smidge of human emotion in his face. I bet Bud was the type whom they sent in to execute civilians. He looked like it would bother him less than cutting back a plant.

  The hall took a sharp left and led down a flight of stairs to a steel security door at the bottom, the subterranean level of the house.

  I looked back once at the sliver of light coming from the hallway, where Lucas was. Then I turned around and put the dopey grin back on my face. I couldn’t be relying on a lifeline. I was on my own.

  Bud keyed a code into the door, blocking it with his body. Not as stupid as he looked, then. I filed that in the animal brain, for when and if I had to get primal.

  “Get in there and get yourself ready,” he said. “Then go through the door into the altar space and wait. No talking. No lip. You understand?”

  Deep in my bag, my BlackBerry went off. I jumped and hoped Bud attributed it to my strung-out state. I should have silenced the fucking thing before I came in.

  Bud just glared at me. “I asked you if you understand. I’m not a dumb john, you strung-out piece of meat with legs. You answer me when I talk to you.”

  “Sure, cutie,” I said. “Whatever you say.”

  He bored into me for another second and then opened the door. “You remember that.”

  The door revealed a space that was the direct antithesis of the rest of the house. The furniture was sleek and plush, the walls were done in dark purple silk, the lighting was mellow and indirect, and the entire place stank of blood.

  The were howled at me not to step across the threshold, but I gritted my teeth, breathed through my mouth, and went in. The door slammed behind me with the finality of a coffin.

  “Oh, look,” said one of the girls I’d seen going into the house. “Competition. I thought this here was a private party.”

  “Shaniqua, shut up,” said another. “They’re paying all of us, no matter what.”

  Shaniqua brushed past me, slamming me hard with her shoulder. I grunted and swayed to the side. Fine, let her think she had the upper hand. People aren’t nearly as tough when they think you can’t hurt them.

  Shaniqua curled her lip. “Guess one skinny-ass white bitch don’t make a difference.”

  “Is there a bathroom in here?” I sighed. “I gotta pee.”

  “Through there,” said the second girl. She had a strong face, underneath the cheap makeup, like a hardbitten Lucy Liu. A small black door led away from the plush room that smelled like blood, and I practically fell through it.

  The bathroom was utilitarian, black tile and white countertop, a mirror surrounded by harsh bulbs. There was a linen closet full of bloodred towels and a door at the opposite end of the small space held shut by a heavy padlock.

  “Hello there,” I muttered, taking the clip out of my hair. I was good with a set of lock picks, but I didn’t want to risk my police set being found if they searched me. Most padlocks can be broken with simple tools, and I fiddled with the cheap one on the door until it popped. They didn’t expect anyone to penetrate their inner sanctum, and they didn’t take the measures they did on the outside.

  I drew back the hasp and eased the door open, reaching back to flush the toilet with the toe of one shoe. That would buy me five minutes. I silenced my BlackBerry and stepped out, shutting the door behind me.

  The hallway beyond was depressingly normal, plain walls and carpet, devoid of any markings. The low fluorescent lights led on through a series of turns, doors with locks scented of nothing except stored-up dust.

  I sensed I’d made a full circuit of the basement when I came to the door beyond and found another lock, a good one this time.

  Putting my ear to the door, I listened and heard the low rise and fall of voices within. Some kind of chant, or meditation—my fingers came away pricked with magick, like the door was covered over with nettles.

  My BlackBerry vibrated again and I almost fell off the ridiculous shoes. I jerked it out of the bag and saw Pete Anderson blinking on the screen. I jabbed the call button. “What, Pete? What?”

  “I got that list of artifacts you wanted,” he said hesitantly. “Um, is this a bad time?”

  “Couldn’t be worse,” I whispered. “Anything red-flagged in there?”

  “One thing,” he said. “A codex of Thelemite daemons written in the nineteenth century. Basically just a phone directory, but in the right hands your cousin said a decent Thelema witch could summon with the daemon’s name alone.”

  “You talked to Sunny?” I hissed.

  “Well, yeah,” said Pete. “She is my go-to woman for that sort of thing. I like your cousin. She’s chatty.”

  “Pete?”

  “Yes, Lieutenant?”

  “Is there reason to believe that the Thelemites have this codex?”

  “It came through Corley’s antique business and disappeared after it cleared Customs, just like the heartstone. I think it’s safe to assume they have it.”

  “Fantastic,” I muttered. “Thanks, Pete. I have to go now.”

  “Take it easy, ma’am.”

  I hung up and turned back toward the waiting room, to sit with the rest of the girls.

  A codex was bad news. Daemons were bad news, period. If I never saw another daemon, another being from the shadows between worlds where they hid and skulked, it would be too soon.

  Lucas and I had to get out of here. If the Thelemites were calling daemons, it wasn’t anywhere we needed to be.

  I slipped back through the bathroom, relocked the door, and stepped back into the red light and blood smell, working over a plan to get out of the house before the summoning and screaming and dying happened.

  When my eyes adjusted to the low light, I saw I was already too late. The girls were clustered in a corner, naked except for the few scraps of underwear they’d been lucky enough to put on, an eye painted on each of their foreheads in re
d pigment. Open and staring. I slowed, suddenly having the irrational longing for my gun that accompanies walking into a bad situation that has just gotten worse.

  “Sorry, Luna,” Lucas said, and my stomach dropped through the floor. Shit.

  Lucas and Bud stood on the other side of the room. Lucas had his hands behind his head. Bud had a sawed-off shotgun. “Just FYI, that dopey act wouldn’t pass on American Idol, never mind in the field,” he rumbled.

  “Sorry, Louella,” Lucas said. “Looks like we’ve been made.”

  “Your name,” said Bud. “Your real name, or I kill him right here.”

  I shut my eyes. Crap. And it had all been going so well. “I don’t have to tell you shit.”

  Lucas met my eyes, and dropped me a wink. I forced myself to keep looking scared rather than irritated with Lucas, which I was. He could have dropped Bud as easily as he breathed. He was just playing along, letting me see how my grand plan had gone wrong. He didn’t know about the codex, about the horrible danger we’d stumbled into.

  Fine. I could play it cool, too.

  “Yo, I didn’t sign on for any snuff shit,” Shaniqua spoke up.

  “Shut your trap, whore,” Bud growled.

  “Hey,” I said. “Don’t talk to her like that. At least her living is honest and doesn’t hurt anyone.”

  “You,” Bud said, jerking the shotgun at me, “didn’t answer my question.”

  “Luna Wilder,” I said, meeting his eyes and letting my own flame gold. “Lieutenant, Nocturne City police.”

  He started to laugh, which wasn’t the reaction I was used to getting from letting my monster out to play. “You think we didn’t know what you are? We felt your filth from the minute you came in the door.”

  Shoving Lucas ahead of him, Bud stepped up to the door of the altar room and pounded with the flat of his fist. “Open up. I got a real treat for you out here.”

  The door swung open and I saw three Thelemite women, one of them with red paint on the tips of her fingers. They were draped in diaphanous purple robes that didn’t leave much of anything to the imagination.

  I memorized the faces behind the veils, those red eyes staring back at me, tattooed into their foreheads instead of merely painted.

  “What is this?” one demanded. I had expected husky voices, foreign accents, ancient tongues, but she sounded like she was from somewhere around LA that existed in a valley.

  “Spies,” said Bud. “They say they’re police, but do you really care?”

  The three stared at us for a moment. “No,” said the lead woman. “Bring them in.”

  Bud shoved me ahead of him, and I stumbled into Lucas in turn. “Shift as soon as they’re all in,” I whispered into his ear. “They have a daemon codex. We need to get the Hex out of here.”

  “Codex?” Lucas hissed. I rolled my eyes.

  “Long story.”

  “This is a great motherfucking plan,” Lucas whispered. “Really.”

  I didn’t have a comeback. He was right—this was hasty and the worst possible outcome that could have happened from my confronting the Thelemites.

  The girls filed in after us, and Bud slammed and locked the door, staying outside. He looked relieved. That worried me.

  “One by one, you will step to the circle, kneel, and prepare to receive the bounty of our gifts,” said the tall Thelemite. “We are Myra, Kendra, and Pauline. You do as we say and you do it when we say it. As for you two …” Myra smirked at us. “You stay put. We’ve got something just for you.”

  The altar at the center of the room wasn’t much, just a wooden box with a lid inlaid with the same eye symbol, a painted working circle on the floor, and that same stifling smell of blood.

  Kendra lifted the lid of the box and drew out a long-handled black knife and a book, bound in leather, with the smell of dust clinging to it.

  “Now,” I said to Lucas. “Shift.”

  I stepped up to Kendra and grabbed the book out of her hands. She gave a shriek and lifted the knife, and I felt her magick clamp down around me.

  Falling, like I’d stepped off the side of a building, while all the air whistled out of my lungs. Kendra hit me again and it was like taking a two-by-four across the chest.

  “Lucas,” I wheezed. “Shift!” I rolled over to look at him, fighting off Kendra feebly as she snatched the codex back from me.

  Lucas stood stock-still, sweat beading on his forehead. “I’m trying,” he gritted. “It’s not working.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Pauline, knocking on the door. Bud opened it and passed her a pair of plastic riot handcuffs. “It happens to lots of guys.”

  Lucas backed up, his fists coming up. “You stay away from me, lady.”

  Kendra pressed her knife to my throat. “Calm down. Unless you want her to get cut because of your carelessness.”

  Pauline narrowed her eyes, and Lucas slammed back against the wall, hands whipping behind him. It was disturbing to watch, like a puppet writ large. Pauline pulled the handcuffs tight while I lay still and tried to breathe, and thought of fifty creative ways to kill Kendra when I got out of this mess.

  Assuming a daemon hadn’t chewed my head off by then.

  Pauline strapped the second set of handcuffs to my wrists, tight enough to draw blood, and then tossed me into the corner with Lucas. He sighed.

  “I don’t like it when things don’t go my way, Luna.”

  “Join the club,” I muttered.

  The Thelemites laid the open codex atop the box and stood around the edges of the circle. Their chanting was low and deliberate, and I felt the power in the room rise, like humidity on my skin. I couldn’t Path it—it didn’t touch me like a normal working would. I just felt it inside my head, dense and painful like a dark mass on a CAT scan.

  “We call upon the one who is named in these pages Cerberus,” said Myra. “We call him to his feasting place, and offer him his spoils.”

  She and the other Thelemite women joined hands, and their working shimmered against the air, while Lucas and I watched. This was a practiced maneuver, which meant it wasn’t the first time they’d tried to call a daemon. This was bad.

  “What the hell do we do now?” Lucas whispered.

  “I can’t Path, you can’t shift, and they’re calling a daemon,” I said. “What do you think we’re gonna do? We’re gonna sit here and wait for them to get bored with us. Then they might get sloppy while they’re feeding us to some creature from the pit.”

  Lucas snorted. “Cerberus? Even I know that’s not real. He’s a myth, straight out of a gods-damned storybook.”

  “You might be surprised,” I said faintly, as a shadow started to gather on the pages of the codex, to grow and shape itself, a narrow serpent body topped with the triplet head and shoulders of a huge, snarling wolf’s head.

  “Welcome,” said Myra. “Feast and be whole, and walk in this world as if it were your own.”

  Cerberus swung its still-spectral head from side to side, scenting the air with nostrils that could enclose my fist.

  “This is so not good,” I muttered to Lucas. “We are so Hexed.”

  “Duh,” he whispered back.

  I fell silent. There had to be some way out of these cuffs, out of this room, while the Thelemites were feeding their new pet dog.

  I strained against the plastic and got blinding pain for my trouble. The person who realized the thin plastic strips were mighty effective for subduing big crowds of people wasn’t stupid. The harder you pulled, the tighter they got.

  My usual strength had deserted me, and the same negative effect on shifting descended on me—I couldn’t even get my claws to grow to try to saw through the cuffs.

  Some were you are, I thought. Brought down by some naked chicks and a strip of plastic.

  Lucas nudged me with his shoulder. “I don’t want to alarm you, but that thing is getting pretty solid.”

  The figure of Cerberus was no longer shimmering and translucent like the daemons I’d seen before.
It looked real, and only slightly out of focus, like we were looking at a projection rather than a solid object. The hard, smooth, powerful magick of the Thelemites had pulled the thing through the realms faster than I would have believed possible, even with a blood sacrifice.

  This was seven kinds of not good.

  “We are honored to hold your presence here,” said Kendra. “Please eat of what we offer, and return our offering with your favor until we require it no more.”

  This was not like any daemon summoning I’d seen—admittedly, I’d only seen one and that guy was insane, but I’d learned a few things since then, and I knew that the Thelemites were off-book.

  Cerberus flowed off the sad little altar, its serpent tail trailing it, powerful front legs pulling the flaccid body along like a dead thing dragged across the burying ground. “Our hunger is prodigious,” it spoke. A high, thin voice, at odds with its huge, many-fanged heads, ragged ears, and lolling tongues. “And we will sate our lust on your altar.”

  “I really don’t like the sound of that,” Lucas said.

  Cerberus turned on us with a snarl, and its nostrils twitched. “And what of you, shape-changers, skin-slippers? Do you taste sweet?”

  “I’m a bag of bones,” I said, snarling at the thing reflexively. The heads were like those of a giant wolf, and my were saw challenge in its pure black eyes. “But you’re welcome to come get a taste of me.”

  Cerberus let out a wet, hacking sound and it took me a moment to realize it was laughing. “Away with them. They can do nothing to my hungers.”

  Pauline bit her lip. “Are you … are you displeased?”

  “I came when you spoke my name aloud, did I not?” Cerberus demanded. Hex me, was that all it took with Thelemic skills behind you? I’d be in a crapload of trouble if that was really the case. More than I was now, even.

  “Get them out of here!” Myra hissed at Pauline and Kendra. “They are insulting to our guest!”

  The women hauled us up, and once again I was shoved like a cheap shopping cart through the double doors to the ridiculous anteroom. I looked back. Cerberus approached the girls, paws and tongue passing over and through each one of them, its incorporeal state allowing it to reach into the faint pink halo that surrounded each girl, their auras visible in the high energy around the altar. Each girl in turn shuddered like she was in the throes of an orgasm, a smile lighting her face and her own hands rising to touch her sweat-sheened body.