Brew (Salem's Revenge Book 1)

by David Estes

  It’s over and I’ve failed.

  Clutching my shoulder, I look over at Laney’s collapsed form, the pain and sorrow tugging moisture from my eyes and blurring her body. Her head lifts up and I gasp. “You okay, Carter?” she says.

  I have no words. There’s death all around me, but not her. Not Laney. Thank God. I stumble forward and kneel down and ask her, “Are you hurt?”

  She shakes her head. “Just my pride, a little. The Siren’s Call vanished so I thought I could help.”

  “They were distracted when I was fighting them,” I say, still in shock that the knife somehow missed Laney and sliced directly into the ground next to her. I lift a hand to

  (Touch her hair?)

  (Rub her cheek?)

  Before I can decide my purpose, she grabs my hand and uses my weight to pull herself to her feet, recollecting her shotgun. “Thanks,” she says.

  “Help!” a high-pitched female voice screeches before I can respond. Laney and I look at each other, then at the mound that is the dead mountain-like Siren. “Help me!” the voice squawks again.

  Laney and I reach her at the same time and work together to roll the Siren off of her. I grit my teeth at the torturous pain that lances through my shoulder and arm, but don’t cry out.

  A scared, disoriented old woman with a sandy complexion and gray eyes stares up at us. Vines of greasy gray-white hair hang around her face. “Leave me alone!” she shouts. “Murderers, rapists! Help! Help!”

  “It’s okay, ma’am,” Laney says, her voice low and calm. “We’re not going to hurt you.”

  “Where’s my husband? What have you done with Jim-Bob?”

  Laney gives me a look that says Jim-Bob? Really? but she says, “Let’s get you somewhere safe.”

  “First I need to find Jim-Bob,” she moans.

  Two horrific images flash in my mind, thankfully in black and white: a man dying with a sword in his chest and blood in his mouth, stifling the last noise he’d ever make in this life; and a headless corpse collapsing, its head tumbling past me.

  Acid roils in my stomach, rises up. I turn to the side and hurl in the dirt.

  “Ma’am,” Laney says, keeping remarkably calm. Spitting the foul taste from my mouth, my respect for her goes up another two or three notches. “Jim-Bob didn’t make it. I’m sorry.”

  “What?” I don’t look at her face, but I feel the horror and shock in her tone. “My Jimmy? What—what happened?”

  “The witches got him, ma’am.”

  “No…No. And Mary and Tom?” Finally I look at her, using a small patch of non-bloody fabric on my shirt to wipe my mouth. Glistening tears are pooling in her eyes, which aren’t gray at all, but as blue as a clear mountain spring on a summer day.

  Laney shakes her head. “I’m sorry.”

  The woman weeps into her hands, and I bite my lip until it bleeds.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  The old woman fell asleep as soon as we got to her farm, emotionally and physically drained.

  I saved her and I saved Laney. Finally. Before now, I was wondering whether the limit to my skill was saving myself.

  But what was that weird slowing-down-time thing? And the arrow turning in midair and impaling the Siren? Was it some glitch in the warlock’s magic? Or was it simply my adrenaline making everything distorted? I’ve got no time to think about all that though, as we’ve got a very distraught woman here to think about.

  After we collected Trish and Hex, the heartbroken and defeated woman managed to lead us to her farmhouse. I carried her thin, frail body the whole way, while she directed me in monotone emotionless whispers.

  I have to admit, they have a pretty smart setup, which is what kept them alive for so long. They’d abandoned the farmhouse, leaving it with broken windows and a smashed-open door, making it appear as if whoever had lived here was long gone and that the place had been picked clean of anything of value. Instead, the four of them had been living in the big red barn a little ways off. Around the outside of the barn, they’ve scattered dead horse and cow carcasses, which are now half-rotted. An animal graveyard to ward off any humans who might happen upon their farm. And an indication to any passing witches that the occupants of the farm have already been killed, along with their animals. Pretty smart.

  And yet, not enough to fight the Sirens, an enemy they couldn’t even see, as an invisible force swept over them, turned their own legs against them, and pulled them out of hiding, across their farm, and into the sunflower fields. And now three out of the four of them are dead.

  I feel my hands start to tremble at the thought of three dead people, but I don’t let them, squeezing them into fists. Because I can’t have any regrets when I saved one of them. And I killed a whole lot of evil in the process.

  “You okay?” Laney’s voice cuts through the thick, wheaty barn air. She steps into a beam of dust-mote-filled late-morning sunlight that shines through a window high above us. Her gaze flicks to my fisted hands and I unclench them.

  Pretending I don’t hear her question, I say, “Did you find anything of value?”

  “Some food, some water. We’ll take only what we need—as payment for saving her life.”

  I’m about to say that life-saving isn’t a paid gig, but she cuts me off. “Oh! And I almost forgot. They have an arsenal, too. All kinds of guns and plenty of ammunition. I think we’ve got all the weapons we can carry, but I restocked on shotgun shells. Can never have enough of those.” The way her eyes light up when talking about guns and ammo makes me want to laugh but I’m still in too much pain.

  “Good. Is the woman still sleeping?”

  “Yeah. Trish and Hex, too. We need to do something about that wound, by the way.”

  I glance at my left shoulder, which is covered by a blood-soaked t-shirt that I wrapped around it to slow the bleeding and hide the injury. The ache and zinging pain comes back in a dizzying second. “Call an ambulance,” I say. “The cops, too,” I add. “I’d like to report a crime.”

  Laney looks like she wants to laugh, her cheeks lifting slightly, but she doesn’t and I don’t blame her. I can’t laugh either right now. “Today I’m the ambulance. And the cops. Vigilante justice and backyard surgery.”

  “What are my chances, doc?” I say.

  “Good if you let me see the wound.”

  So far I’ve refused to let her examine me, for no reason other than I’m afraid of what a hardened girl like her might do. “Maybe later,” I say.

  Two beats pass. “Okay, it’s later,” she says. “Pull up some hay and lie down.”

  I’m so close to smiling…but no. Not yet. Not with three dead farmers nearby. Someone’s husband, someone’s wife. Fathers? Mothers? Brothers? Sisters? Friends? Lives ended at the hands of witches, for seemingly no reason other than being human.

  Humans killed witches for no reason other than them being witches, Mr. Jackson had said. It shouldn’t be a surprise that they’d do the same to us.

  That doesn’t make it right, I’d argued.

  That doesn’t make it wrong, either, Mr. Jackson had said. I’d refused to speak to him the rest of the day after that.

  The glaze vanishes from my eyes when Laney says, “Now let me see that shoulder.”

  I cringe, but lay back on the hay-covered ground, grimacing slightly at the impact.

  Laney pulls out a knife. “Hey, that’s not one of Huckle’s knives is it?” I ask, imagining being cursed for life because of Tillman’s parting gift.

  “What do you think I am, stupid?”

  Guess not. I close my eyes and try to relax as I feel her cutting my shirt away. My shoulder throbs with each push and pull.

  I open my eyes to find my skin bare. “Whoa!” she says. “Nice six pack.”

  “Mr. Jackson didn’t hold back,” I say. Your body is your most important weapon.

  “We’ll burn your shirt,” Laney says, tossing it aside. “No amount of washing will scrub all the blood off of it.”

  “Don’t y
ou think wearing a bloodstained ripped shirt will make me look tougher?” I say.

  “A big teddy bear like you? Nothing could make you look scary,” she says, her eyes twinkling in the light.

  A sudden jolt goes through me as I remember how she mashed her lips against mine. “Laney…” I say.

  “Yes, Teddy Bear,” she says.

  “About before…” I let the words linger in the air, hoping she’ll figure out what I’m asking about.

  “You mean before when you saved me or before when I gave you the kiss of your life.” Her eyes dance with amusement.

  “It wasn’t the kiss of my li—”

  “I’m just messing with you, Straight-and-Narrow. I know it meant nothing to you. Me either. Your heart still belongs to Beth.”

  Her words sound so right, and yet I hate the question that pops into my head. Can your heart still belong to someone who’s dead? I desperately want the answer to be yes, but the pain I feel in my chest tells me I don’t really believe it.

  And yet, I say, “It does.”

  “I was just trying to get you to stay, so we could’ve avoided you getting shot with an arrow and having to care for a shell-shocked and heartbroken old woman when we should be on our way.”

  I let out a deep breath and force a smile.

  “You were really worried I had a thing for you? C’mon, you’re a good-looking nice guy and all—more so after seeing you without a shirt—but I don’t think either of us are in the right mind for that kind of thing. I mean, what would we do for our first date? Tonight let’s have a real treat. We could eat instant noodles and go hunt a Siren or two, honey, what do you think?”

  I finally laugh, although it sends tendrils of agony down my arm, numbing my hand. “No, I was thinking we’d assassinate a dark wizard and then eat the Ramen noodles.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Laney says, pretending to get excited. “To ration, we could even share a pack and slurp at opposite ends of one of the curly noodles Lady-and-the-Tramp style, meeting in the middle. That’d be H-O-T-T hot!”

  We’re both laughing now, except I’m clutching my shoulder, which feels like it’s been shot with an arrow. Oh wait.

  Blood dribbles from the wound, adding a second coat to the dried crimson river already snaking down my arm.

  “Does it hurt?” Laney asks, giving my other arm a hard pinch.

  “Ouch!” I say. “What was that for?”

  “Just trying to take your mind off of it.”

  “Epic fail,” I say. “Now both arms hurt.”

  “It was worth a try,” she says. And then, “Oh, God.”

  I follow her gaze to my injured shoulder to see what’s caught her attention. A circle of bright green ooze has wormed its way through the hole in my shredded skin. My chest clenches.

  Witch poison.

  Chapter Forty

  “How am I not dead?” I breathe, feeling ill all of a sudden.

  “I—I don’t know,” Laney says, moving a hand toward the wound as if to touch the goo, but then pulling it away sharply. “Is that…?”

  “Yeah,” I say lifelessly. “Witch poison. According to Mr. Jackson it usually kills within seconds. And yet…I’m still here.” My heart stutters at the thought that it could just stop at any moment, like a watch hand the moment the battery runs out.

  “Maybe part of the arrow is lodged so tightly against muscle or bone or whatever that the poison can’t get into your blood stream,” Laney says.

  A good theory, but… “The arrow went completely past. It didn’t break, just sliced across my skin. Plus, witch poison doesn’t need to enter the bloodstream to kill you,” I say. “You get splashed with the stuff and it’ll eat right through you. It should be burning through my skin right now.”

  “But it’s not.”

  “It’s not,” I agree, watching as the green ooze sizzles on my skin, forming bubbles that pop and fizz.

  “We need to get the poison out,” she says.

  “How?” My abs start to ache from my stomach being clenched. I try to relax them.

  “Are you scared, Carter? A big, bad witch hunter like you? Listen, I’ll suck out the venom. I saw this guy do it to a snake bite on TV once.”

  “I’ll pass,” I say. “Just get wet towels to clean it and see if the farm’s got any antiseptic and pain killers.”

  “Okay,” Laney says, and starts to turn away.

  I close my eyes.

  Fire-lightning-pain-glass-spikes-agony-agony-agony-agony!

  “ARGH!” I roar as my eyes snap open to find Laney scrubbing at the wound with a wet cloth, her arm muscles tight and sinewy.

  Burning…burning…burning…“ARGH!”…STOP…Stop…stop…

  Just as I feel another lance of mind-numbing fire plunge through my shoulder my eyes flutter shut and everything goes black.

  ~~~

  With a jolt, I awake from the nightmare about Laney cleaning my wound. Staring at the dusty sunlight streaming above me, I take two deep breaths, hold the second, and then let it out in a rush of relief. Even Laney wouldn’t be so reckless.

  I spy movement on the edge of my vision. “Laney,” I murmur.

  “Welcome back,” she says. “Sorry about that. You were being a baby and didn’t give me much choice.”

  “Wha-what?”

  “You know, the whole getting-shot-with-an-arrow thing? It had to be cleaned eventually, and it’s not like it was going clean itself out, right?”

  “You mean, you really did that?” I say incredulously. I look at my shoulder. It’s wrapped tightly with some type of gauze.

  “What did you think—that you dreamt that?” Laney laughs. I don’t tell her that’s exactly what I thought. “You should have seen what I had to go through to stop the bleeding. I had to use my shirt, which, by the way, we’ll have to burn along with yours now. It was half-chewed up by the poison.”

  “Did you—”

  “Use protection?” she asks, laughing at her own innuendo. “Of course. I already told you I’m not stupid.” She holds up four pairs of dirty work gloves. They’re full of uneven holes, charred around the edges. “I even double bagged,” she says, “although that witch goo is nasty stuff. It ate through the gloves so fast it almost got me.”

  Still wondering how I’m not dead, I eye the dirty gloves warily. “There’s a chance of infection,” I say.

  “Maybe,” Laney says, “but after I got all the green crap out of the wound I used about half a bottle of whiskey to clean you out. I used the other half to relax.”

  “Are you drunk?” I say, wondering if I’ll find M&Ms stuffed into the arrow wound when I unwind the bandages.

  “Relax, Carter. It was just a joke. I only had a sip. You know, to even me out. My hands were shaking so badly after hearing you scream like that, I was worried I’d make things worse.”

  “God,” I say, realizing that what she went through to help me might have been worse than it was for me. At least I got to sleep through most of it. “Thanks. I wouldn’t necessarily refer any wounded friends to you, but still, you did good.”

  “No problem,” she says.

  Then, randomly, a thought springs to mind, and I raise my eyebrows.

  “What’s wrong?” Laney asks, and for the first time I notice her left hand is holding a bloody arrow like a trophy.

  “Where’d you get that?” I ask.

  “You were out for a while, so I went for a little walk. Thought you might like a souvenir. What’s on your mind?”

  She’s just full of surprises. “You mean aside from the fact that you just scrubbed witch poison from inside my ragged flesh?” I say.

  “And saved your life,” she points out.

  “And that,” I agree. “Something doesn’t make sense. Why did the Sirens kill the farmers?”

  “Because that’s what witches do,” Laney says. “Do you really need a reason?”

  I narrow my eyes, thinking. “You could be right, but Sirens are different. They usually only kill when necessar
y to protect themselves, or if they feel a human has outlived their usefulness as their personal slave.”

  “You’re asking why they didn’t try to capture them?” Laney asks.

  “Sort of. They had already captured them,” I say. “Their Call guaranteed that those people would follow them off a cliff if that’s what they wanted. And yet…they slaughtered them.”

  “You showed up,” Laney says. “Maybe you surprised them and they just reacted. Went nuts.”

  “No. One of the guys was screaming before I reached them, and they’d just killed him when they saw me.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you, except every time we come up with a theory to one of your questions, another ten questions seem to pop up. Maybe there are no answers. Maybe the witches are all crazy, performing random acts of cruelty just because they like it. Hell, Carter, maybe there is no government and the missiles were fired off by another witch gang looking to remove some of their competition. I don’t know anything except you should be dead right now, but you’re not.”

  I twitch because she’s right. That witch poison should have killed me for sure. Unless it wasn’t witch poison. Unless it was just meant to scare me. But what would be the point of that? And who would even think to do something like that?

  The questions continue to pile up like blitzing tacklers on an unprotected quarterback.

  Chapter Forty-One

  “You shouldn’t have interfered,” the old woman says.

  I just stare at her.

  “We saved your life,” Laney says, eying her shotgun as if rethinking that decision.

  “I didn’t ask you to,” the old woman says. “The last thing I ever wanted was to die alone. My Jimmy…” Her voice cracks and tears fill her eyes, sliding into the canyons of her wrinkled cheeks. “He was a good man. Without him, I’m…” She doesn’t finish, but the emotion in the empty space is as heavy as if she did.

  “Come with us,” I say. “You don’t have to be alone. Maybe we can find you a safe place to stay. Other survivors. If not, you can stay with us.” She has to listen to reason, this woman. She’s alive and so there’s hope.