Witch Craft

by Caitlin Kittredge

  “I think you’re ready enough for all three of us, cowboy,” Fagin said, doing a cursory check of his sidearm before sliding it back into his shoulder holster.

  I checked the clip in my Sig. Full, as usual, with a bullet chambered. I stuck it back in its holster with the safety off and unstrapped my holdout weapon from my ankle, checked the cylinders of the .38, and snapped them back into place.

  We descended the stairs to the tunnel in silence, like three pallbearers in a medieval funeral, lowering themselves into the catacombs to spend the requisite time with the dead.

  The lights were controlled by a master breaker on the morgue side, and I threw it, bathing the three of us in the red glow of emergency spots.

  “Yup,” Bryson said, racking the shotgun. “I was right. I’m in one of the seven hells.”

  I shushed him. “Wait by the door, David, in case they make a run for it. Will and I will wait a little further down.” I paced a few dozen feet down the tunnel and knocked the lock off the storage cage. I stepped into the shadows, positioning myself behind a pallet of K rations that had probably been sitting there since before I was born.

  Will stood next to me in the dark, slightly behind and to the right so that I cleared his field of fire. I listened to him breathe, steady as if he were sitting in a movie theater.

  “It’s been twenty minutes,” he said. “Where the hell are they?”

  “Relax,” I murmured. “They want to make sure we’re actually moving the stone.”

  “And if they’ve figured out we’re not?”

  “Has anyone ever told you that you’re a big fat pessimist, Fagin?”

  “I’m not—” he started, but my ears picked up the faraway sound of footsteps on concrete.

  “Shut up. Someone’s here.”

  A figure came toward us in the murky light, sticking to the shadows along the far wall. They walked with a measured step, toe-heel, trying their best to be quiet. A click, and a thin beam illuminated the tunnel from a police-issue penlight.

  The figure moved past us, their heart and breath speeding up as their light caught nothing but bare walls, rusted pipes, and old prohibitions against smoking in the bomb shelter.

  I pulled my Sig off my waist, the trigger guard cold against my finger. The figure in the tunnel stopped moving, and let out a frustrated sigh.

  “Looking for something?” I said, and raised the gun.

  The figure let out a shriek and spun around, the light dancing crazily off the walls. A slice of shadow and bright illuminated a pale, slender face and a coil of red hair. “Lieutenant Wilder?” said Annemarie. “Agent Fagin? What … what are y’all doing down here?”

  All of the air stole out of my lungs, and my gun dipped a fraction. “It was you,” I whispered.

  “Me what?” Annemarie said. Under the red light, her eyes were wide and black, a sick parody of daemon eyes.

  “You’re the one who tried to have Luna killed,” Fagin said at my shoulder. “You’re down here looking for the heartstone. Now that you have all of your answers, I’ve got a question for you: Where is the Maiden?”

  Annemarie backed away from us, shaking her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, ma’am, but you’ve got it wrong. I heard voices down here and I saw the light was out, so I came down to have a look. That’s all …”

  Bryson stepped away from his concealment in the shadow of the morgue exit and put the shotgun to Annemarie’s neck. “Far enough, Annie.”

  She flinched, and dropped her gaze to the floor. Her hands slowly came up, the right traveling away from her waist. From her gun.

  “You shot Brad Morgan,” I said. “Before he could tell me what he knew. You told the Thelemites where I lived. And you were going to try and shoot your way out of here.”

  Sickness and vertigo crashed over me like a wave. This wasn’t like finding out Kelly or Norris or someone I would have pegged as dirty was passing information out of the squad. I’d eaten lunches with Annemarie. We’d talked about our ex-boyfriends. Laughed together. She’d smiled into my face and the whole time she’d been trying to get me killed.

  Annemarie’s jaw set, her hands like small pink birds in the dim light. “So what if I was?”

  “Hex it, Annemarie, I was your friend!” I bellowed. “Why would you do this? Money?”

  She laughed, her thin shoulders shaking. “Luna, you’re bein’ a little bit pedestrian here, don’t you think? Why would I risk a good job for money?”

  “Then what?” Fagin said, calm and still as a tree, his gun barrel never wavering. I wished I could be so calm.

  “That’s really none of your business,” Annemarie said.

  “You came into my squad and poisoned it,” I said. “So help me, if you don’t tell me why, I will send you to prison in the general population, and I will tell everyone from the warden to the prettiest prison bitch in the joint that you used to be a cop. You won’t last a week.”

  Annemarie flinched. Fagin tightened his firing stance. “I think you’d better tell her, Detective Marceaux.”

  “Thelema can be learned,” said Annemarie. “The sisters instruct me and I help them out.” She met my eyes, and there was something in her face that I had never seen before, a blurring of the features, something that my were recognized as off from normal. I’d seen the same thing in hard-core tweakers, and religious fanatics. It was desire, so bright it burned from the inside out.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. My lips felt numb, and my words echoed from a long way off. Annemarie. Annemarie sold me out.

  “They have so many things to teach me,” Annemarie said. “Workings, wonders to show me, curses for those that seek to harm me. Blood doesn’t matter … just will.”

  “You cursed me?” Anger poured from my hindbrain, that kind of cold, clinical rage that precedes the phase. My monster wanted out, wanted its chance at the woman in front of me. “Well, I got news for you, Annemarie—whatever those tattooed nutcases told you, you have to have the blood to be a witch. Fact of biology. Oh, and you couldn’t curse a turnip, you two-faced, incompetent, sneaky little magick-whore.”

  I was yelling by the time I finished, and I felt my eyes and teeth begin to phase as the were fed on my rage like carrion. Bryson flinched, and Fagin took a step away from me, but Annemarie was placid.

  “The Maiden provides,” she said. “She’s forever and eternal, and I will be touched by her.” Her hand dipped, and it all happened inside of a second. “And now I’m going to make her proud of me.”

  “Gun!” I bellowed, as Annemarie swung her arm back and knocked Bryson in the face. He discharged a shotgun round into the ceiling and cement dust fell like snow.

  Annemarie drew her pistol and I heard the fall of the firing pin at the same time I realized that I was just standing there, a target big as a house.

  The H & K boomed, the muzzle flash bright as the sun in the dim tunnel, and Fagin slammed into me, knocking me into the mesh of the storage cage and then to the ground. He grunted and jerked, and the hot, wet scent of blood filled my nostrils.

  “Shit,” Fagin said.

  “You hit?” I grunted from under him.

  “Not bad,” he said, voice wound tight with pain. “Missed my heart.”

  “Huh. Didn’t know you had one.”

  Annemarie turned on Bryson, taking a firing stance. Bryson scrambled to his feet, his nose gushing blood. He’d never get the shotgun up in time—

  “Annemarie!” I shouted. I wriggled out from under Fagin and got up to one knee.

  “Make another movement and I’m going to put two in his head,” she said. “Somehow, I don’t think the world at large will mourn the passing of David Bryson.” Her hands tightened on the butt of her pistol. “But you-all might.”

  “Jesus, Annie,” Bryson said. He was quivering all over, sweat radiating in rank waves from his body, mingled with pure base fear. Bryson thought he was going to die. “Is this really worth it? Really? You don’t want to kill me.”


  “Actually, I do,” she said. “You’re easily the most irritating man I’ve ever met.”

  I plucked at the leg of my slacks, drawing it up, praying to anyone listening that Annemarie wouldn’t notice.

  “Please,” Bryson said, in a small voice. “I’m sorry.”

  “Not as sorry as you’re gonna be when they deliver you to the gates of Hell,” Annemarie said. “You three dead will be just what my sisters need, and they’ll have to take me in.”

  “You,” I said to her, “are one deluded bitch.”

  Annemarie whipped her head around, snarling at me in fury, “I told you to be quiet!”

  I closed my hand around my holdout pistol and pulled it free, shooting upward, three taps. The .38 made a boom in the closed space, echoes rolling like we were caught in a summer storm.

  Annemarie wavered, staggered, her gun arm hanging uselessly at her side. “You shot me,” she said, matter-of-factly, eyes clouding. “Why’d you go and do a thing like that?”

  She collapsed, her legs buckling like a cheap skyscraper in an earthquake.

  Bryson ran his hand down his face, palm coming away with a sheen of sweat. “Hex me. Hex me. I am so beyond too old for this shit it’s not even funny.”

  “Check on Will,” I ordered, tucking the .38 back into its holster. I got up, my own joints stiff as if I’d been out in the cold, and knelt by Annemarie.

  One of my hollow-point rounds had torn into her shoulder, ripped the ligaments under the shoulder blade clean out, and her arm twitched involuntarily, the body’s feeble attempt to say, I am not dead.

  The second round had gone wide, tearing a gash in her sleeve but little more. She choked, and I saw where the third bullet had gone. “Oh, gods,” I whispered.

  There was a dark island of blood on Annemarie’s crisp shirt, just below her rib cage, the entrance wound lost amid the slow creep of black, vital blood from her abdomen.

  “Gut-shot,” Annemarie sighed. “Hell of a way to go, ma’am.”

  I tore off my jacket and pressed it against the wound, but she swatted me away. “I don’t want it. I did my job. You leave me alone.” Her eyelids fluttered with the beginning of shock. “The Maiden provides. She opens the gates for all of us to walk in paradise.”

  “You are so stupid,” I whispered. “You threw your life away for nothing, Annemarie. Nothing. You don’t have the blood, and you’ll never have magick. Why do any of this? Why come after me?”

  “You know more …” Fluid bubbled in her chest, and she gasped in pain. “You know more than you think you do, ma’am. My sisters fear what you might see.”

  I took her by the shoulders and lifted her face close to mine, the dribble of blood from between her lips a tattoo on her skin in the red light. “What do you mean, Annemarie? For everything Hexed and holy, stop the riddles and just tell me.”

  “It wasn’t for nothing, ma’am,” she whispered, her eyes showing white, fading. “My death … I kept you down here … long enough. I gave my sisters time.”

  My fingers tightening as her breathing slowed, I shook her. “They’re not your sisters. They used you. Tell me what they’re doing, Annemarie!”

  “Open the gate …” Her voice was barely anything, now. It could have been a ghost on my shoulder. “Open the gate and walk in paradise …”

  Her body gave a little jerk under my hands, and then she was gone, limp and still.

  Will crouched next to me, blood droplets on his snowy shirt. “I hate to be the insensitive one here, but what do you think she meant by I kept you down here long enough?”

  My ears picked up noise from the SCS end of the tunnel, and I stood, scooping up my Sig from the floor as I ran. “I think we’re gonna find out in short order.”

  Bryson, Will, and I crested the stairs and I bolted through the empty office, toward the direction of the sound. It was screaming, a hopeless, droning sort of screaming without any sense behind it.

  Pete lay on the floor outside the evidence locker, clawing at his face and arms, screaming, his eyes rolled back into his head. “Pete!” I grabbed him, holding his arms down at his sides. A working crackled around his skin, the same flat, cold Thelemite magick that I couldn’t Path.

  “Get them away from me!” Pete shrieked. “Get them off!”

  “Stop it!” I shouted as he thrashed. There was no turning him back from what the Thelemites had made him see, at least not with my voice and my hands alone.

  “Luna, he’s gonna check himself out,” Bryson said, standing well back from Pete’s convulsions. “He’s like a goddamn hooked fish.”

  “Crap,” I hissed. “Crap, crap, crap.” When I had broken Grace Hartley’s circle I’d touched the physical working, the earth that gave the binding shape. This working was on a living person, coursing through Pete’s blood …

  I fumbled my folding knife out of my pocket. “I am so sorry,” I told Pete, and then drove it into his shoulder, the soft spot under the collarbone. Blood blossomed at the spot and I clapped my hand onto it, willing the magick worked into Pete’s blood to come to me.

  The first wave hit me, made me fang out and double over as the pangs of the phase hit. Will stepped in. “Luna …”

  Cold and smooth, like mercury on my senses, the magick flowed. I felt myself begin to phase, the twinge in my lower back and the cracking of my joints that accompanies the shift from woman to wolf. I snarled at Will, “You might wanna back off.”

  I held the phase back, fought as hard against it as I ever could, but I did not push the magick away. Pete’s life depended on it.

  He stopped convulsing with a gasp, finally, and then groaned. “What … Did someone stab me?” He sat up, pressing a hand over his knife wound. “Seven hells, that hurts.”

  I floated for a time, feeling my limbs twitch as the magick ran through my nerves with no outlet, and then Fagin was over me, cupping my face in his hands, pulling my eyelids back, checking my pulse. “Come on, doll. Don’t you go napping on me.”

  “Just Pathed,” I muttered. “Not dead.”

  Fagin helped me sit up. “Take her easy. We’re fine. We’re all fine.”

  “I’m not fine,” Pete said. “I’m stabbed!”

  “Man up, lab rat,” Fagin said. “Your lieutenant just saved your life.” He helped me up, brushing his suit pants off. “The Thelemites got you pretty good. What did they want?”

  Bryson grabbed a rag out of Pete’s office and applied pressure to Pete’s shoulder.

  “I don’t know,” Pete sighed. “It was that Hartley woman and two I didn’t recognize, and one of them hit me with a working and before I knew it …” He shuddered. “Cockroaches. All over me. I hate cockroaches.”

  “You’re all right now,” I said, rubbing my forehead. The were retreated, leaving me sore as if I’d just run five miles at top speed. “Bryson, call a bus for Pete and let’s figure out what they were trying to do.”

  “Luna.” Will stood at the door of the locker, his face drawn. “Pete may be fine, but the rest of us may not be.”

  I stood up and looked into the locker, hoping that I wouldn’t see the gap in between the neatly labeled containers on the floor, knowing I was going to anyway, and feeling a sick drop in my stomach. The gap was there, only a little dust to show something had ever filled the space.

  The heartstone was gone.

  Twenty-Four

  The aftermath of trauma is always slow-moving, cold, nothing like you expect. I called the team back in, plus an IA investigator and CSU team to deal with Annemarie’s body. I couldn’t look at the blood-speckled sheet when the EMTs carried her up the stairs from the tunnel. There was nothing left of her now, just bloody bones.

  Another set of EMTs checked out Pete and declared his need for a hospital and stitches. I let him go.

  It was quiet then, just me, my detectives, and Will. They were all looking at me like I had the answers. All I had was a headache and a sick, empty hole in my guts.

  “I know we’ve lost someone,” I said
. “And you’re probably all feeling …” Annemarie’s eyes, staring up at nothing. Annemarie’s smile, as she drew her gun to kill me.

  “This wasn’t supposed to happen,” I started again. “We were supposed to be a team, and Annemarie broke that trust. I shot her. It’s not how things are supposed to go, but here we are.” I looked up at their faces. They ranged from grim, Kelly, to sorrowful, Zacharias, and every range in between.

  “I need your help, guys,” I said. I wanted to put my head down on my desk and sob, but I didn’t let my voice break. “We’ve got a real situation here. If we don’t close this case, the commissioner is going to shut us down.”

  A rush of murmurs broke out and I held up my hands. “I know. I should have told you. But now all that matters is that you’re my team and I need help. We still have a city to look after and right now things are going badly. I know that you feel betrayed. I know that you just want to go home or go get drunk or hug your cat, but I need you to stick with me a while longer. I need us to be a squad for one more night.”

  Silence, for a long minute. I waited for them to walk out, which was exactly what I deserved after the cluster-fuck of today.

  Batista stepped forward. “For a start, Lieutenant, how about you fill us in on what’s going on?”

  “Thank you,” I said, giving Batista a grateful nod. “I’m sorry I had to keep all of you in the dark, but it had to happen.”

  “Doesn’t matter, ma’am,” said Zacharias. “But you be straight with us from now on. I don’t think that’s too much to ask.”

  “Fair enough,” I said, feeling a tiny bloom of hope grow. “Here’s the deal: There’s a sect of witches who have gotten hold of our heartstone, and that’s bad news for us.”

  Zacharias stuck his hand up. I rolled my eyes. “You don’t have to ask permission, Andy.”

  “To what purpose, ma’am?” He shrugged. “They’ve got the stone—so what?”

  “It’s a huge amplifier,” Fagin said. “If they channeled a working around it …”

  “What working?” said Kelly. He stood at the back of the group and his eyes kept darting toward the door.