by Clare Kauter
“Yes, we,” I said, gesturing at the other people around the table. Satan nodded. She’d bought my cover.
“Right. So who are your main suspects at the moment?”
“It looks like his eyes were eaten out by a werewolf,” said Hecate.
“What?” hissed Satan. The fire in the corner began to roar and the flames of the candles on the table grew to twice their normal size. Uh oh.
“We think it was a wolf,” squeaked Henry. Although he was obviously terrified, I admired his bravery in actually answering Satan. Most people just stayed silent when she started to get like this.
“I know, right?” I said. “Public relations nightmare. But it might have just been that some wolves found his body after it had been dumped and ate the eyeballs out of his corpse.”
Satan looked at me. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?” she asked. “You do realise that if the goblins get wind of this, we’re going to have an all-out war on our hands.”
“I thought you liked death and violence,” said Dick.
“Not at the expense of the tourist trade!” Satan bellowed. The fire in the corner of the room had grown so large that the flames were now licking the mantelpiece.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll get it sorted before the goblins retaliate.”
“I’m afraid it’s too late for that,” came Death’s voice from the hallway. He stepped into the dining room, carrying a limp body in his arms.
Chapter Eighteen
Death carried the small girl into the room. With a fluid motion of his head, he lifted all the candles and place settings off the table and floated them across the room, setting them on the floor by the wall. He placed the girl in the centre of the table. She couldn’t have been much more than twelve, which meant she was probably a tourist’s kid (not many children lived here in Hell), although from her energy I guessed she was at least half werewolf. Her shirt was torn and soaked with blood, and she was unconscious.
“Is she dead?” asked Dick.
I shook my head. “Don’t be a dick, Dick,” I said. “Can’t you feel her energy? She’s still hanging on. Barely.”
“You need to do something before she dies,” said Death. “You don’t have long.”
Dick frowned. “I didn’t think saving lives was your thing.”
“If we don’t save her a full-on war will break out,” said Death. “A goblin and wolf war won’t be good for anyone. Not to mention it will be so much more work for me.”
I nodded. That made sense. Death had enough soul-ferrying to be getting on with without a gang war breaking out.
The room had grown very hot and smoky all of a sudden. Clearly Satan was distraught.
“This is a disaster!” she cried. “Why did you bring her here?”
“You have the most powerful witch in Australia, a fae, a shifter and Nessa here,” said Death.
“And a centaur!” Dick butted in. Death turned to Dick and he shrunk backwards. Centaurs were like werewolves – technically magical, but not particularly gifted. They were the only ones who didn’t seem to know it.
“You light-dwellers, fix her!” cried Satan. “Immediately!”
“Why can’t you fix her?” asked Dick. “You’re the all-powerful one, aren’t you?”
Satan’s eyes flashed red as she rounded on him. “I can’t heal people, you imbecile. I deal with the dead, not the living. I torture. Healing is so far outside my area it’s not even on the map!” She turned to me. “Fix her immediately!”
I nodded. “Right. Butler, fetch me all the healing herbs and crystals you have. Satan, Death – you two stand over there in the corner and keep your death magic away from us.” I glanced at Dick, wondering if I should send him to the corner as well. He was useless, but maybe he would give us a little boost. I decided to give him a chance, just this once.
Butler returned with the herbs and crystals. I placed the crystals on the girl’s body and in her hands, keeping the herbs aside while we tried to heal her with magic. If that didn’t work, we’d move onto the plants, but right now a circle was our best bet.
Sitting at the head of the table with an amulet around my neck, I took one each of Henry’s and Daisy’s hands as they sat on either side of the table. Hecate and Dick completed the circle down the other end of the table and we surrounded the girl. I shut my eyes and channelled all the healing energy I could muster.
The influx of power literally took my breath away. It took me a moment to stop gasping for air. What the hell was happening? I was familiar with Henry, Hecate and Daisy’s powers, but this extra energy… It could only be Dick’s. But Dick was pathetic. This made no sense. Maybe Satan and Death were boosting me somehow?
No, that made no sense. Their energy wouldn’t help me. It was completely dark – their energy would only work against me. That meant it was Dick. It was strange magic, though, and I couldn’t wrap my head around it. It was black and white at the same time, squiggly, like noise on a television set that isn’t tuned to a channel properly.
Eventually I managed to catch my breath and get the magic under control, directing it through the circle and down to Wolf Girl. With this extra power and all the crystals, I was sure she’d be healed in no time. I watched her stomach, expecting to see the blood disappear from her shirt and be reabsorbed into her body as her flesh knitted itself back together. I frowned. The blood wasn’t being reabsorbed. In fact, in looked to me as if we hadn’t even managed to stem the flow of blood coming from her wounds. She was not only not healing – we weren’t so much as delaying her death.
Despite the extra power from Dick, the circle wasn’t working, and I was draining fast. Stars flashed before my eyes and my head began to swim. I was… I was about to…
I looked around me. The circle was gone, and now I was suspended in nothingness. I recognised this absence of space as the ether, a place I was now growing rather familiar with.
Oh, hello again, ether. How are you? I think I must have passed out. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I was just trying to do a simple healing –
Stop.
Sorry? (I’d never heard the ether be so forceful before. Usually it was a pretty chill – uh – whatever it was.)
Even a king cannot beat this with magic. The Wolf is poisoned and you are in danger. Break the circle.
The ether swirled around me and gently pushed me towards the surface.
Wait! Please, ether, I –
But the ether had already returned me to my body.
“Stop,” I said, letting go of Henry’s hand and pulling myself free of Daisy’s vice-like grip. Henry slumped over the table, exhausted. Even Daisy looked a little pale. Hecate was rocking back and forth, barely able to keep her eyes open. Dick was the only one who looked unharmed. I frowned as I looked at him. What exactly was going on here?
I didn’t have time to worry about Dick right now, though. “Goblin poison!” I said, turning to Daisy. “What is the antidote?”
“You think she’s been poisoned?” asked Henry, head still resting on the table.
“I know she has.”
Daisy nodded once. “I’ll make up a batch of the antidote.”
She picked up a bag from her feet and took out a small cauldron, which she set up on a collapsible tripod (also from her bag). She lit the small tea light candle that was suspended between the legs of her tripod to heat the cauldron, then removed a tin from her bag.
“Water, Ms Daisy?” asked Butler, entering the room with a jug.
“Please,” Daisy answered, and Butler filled the cauldron. Daisy turned to me. “The rest of you should put on gloves and start scraping out her wounds.”
“I’ve got just the thing,” said Butler. He left the room, returning moments later with a fresh pack of Marigold rubber gloves. Henry and I each took a pair. Hecate had fallen asleep down the end of the table and I was too worried about her health to wake her up, so I simply took one of the healing crystals from Wolf Girl and hung it around her neck, hop
ing it would combat her exhaustion. Dick had taken one look at the girl’s wounds and run from the room, gagging.
I slipped on the gloves and took a deep breath. Henry and I made eye contact, nodded once and got to work. I lifted the girl’s shirt to her ribs and saw that she’d been slashed three times across the stomach, presumably with a goblin dagger dipped in poison. Even if we’d checked the wounds in the first place, I didn’t think we would have realised she’d been poisoned. It wasn’t immediately obvious that there was something wrong beyond the gashes. That is, until I stuck my finger in the wound and green goo began to bubble up to the surface.
Henry and I got to work cleaning up the green sludge. Butler fetched us some paper towels to wipe the ooze off our gloves. The flesh at the sides of the wounds had gone spongy, so we had to squeeze it to get the extra poison out. It was lucky the girl was unconscious because this would have been unbearably painful if she hadn’t been. Even as we squeezed and scraped and mopped, some of the girl’s flesh around the wounds began to liquefy.
“Daisy, if you could hurry up with the antidote, that would be great,” I said. “Just so her entire torso hasn’t disintegrated by the time it’s ready.”
“These things can’t be rushed, as you well know,” she replied, taking her time to stir what I was pretty sure was just a cauldron full of hot water at this stage.
Butler returned to the room with serving utensils. “Perhaps these would be better used to scrape away the putrefied flesh,” he said.
I nodded and grabbed a large silver spoon while Henry went for the triangular cake server. We scraped and scraped, trying to get ahead of the poison, but the flesh kept dissolving and turning to green liquid meat.
Meanwhile Death and Satan stood back, watching on and making useful comments. “You might as well be bailing out the Titanic with a teacup,” said Satan.
“You do realise we’re doing this to help you?” I snapped.
“You’re doing this to help her,” Satan said, gesturing to the wolf girl. “Don’t pretend that if you had your way you would have just let her perish. You’re too soft for that.”
She said it like an insult, but I found myself smiling. I was too soft for that. Whatever I was, I wasn’t completely evil. Unlike whoever the hell was responsible for attacking Wolf Girl, it would seem. Now that I was in the rhythm of bailing out the wounds with my spoon, I found my mind wandering. Who on earth would do this? Why a child? Surely the gangs had some honour. She was hardly an equivalent target to Gnawlack. I began to wonder if the same murderer was responsible for both attacks.
We’d assumed Gnawlack was attacked by a wolf because of the bite marks around his eye sockets, but there had been no DNA in the wounds. If a wolf had eaten the eyeballs, surely there would have been slobber all over the place. Likewise, we’d assumed this girl was attacked by goblins, but judging by the rate at which she was deteriorating, there was far more poison in these wounds than I’d initially thought. It was like someone had slopped it in there after slicing her open, rather than the blade simply being dipped in it. Plus there was something about those cuts on her stomach that reminded me of something I’d seen while researching in the library. Something ritualistic. I needed to get back there and check again.
I looked over at Daisy just in time to see her remove a teabag from the tin she’d taken out of her bag earlier, dip it three times in the water and then throw it away. She grabbed the cauldron by its handles and brought it over to the table, ordering Henry and I out of the way. Then she sloshed it all over the girl’s stomach.
Steam rose up immediately, green and swirling, like a spirit was being exorcised from her body. The girl shuddered and writhed on the table, finally stopping at the same time as the steam disappeared. It was over. I looked at her stomach and could see the flesh knitting together before my eyes. The girl was going to be OK.
I breathed a sigh of relief.
“She’s going to be asleep for a while,” said Daisy, “but come tomorrow morning, she should be able to tell us who her attacker was.”
Chapter Nineteen
In order to keep Wolf Girl safe from her would-be murderer, Satan agreed to look after her for the night. To be honest, I think it was mostly so she would look good in her TV show when the cameras returned the next day, but whatever the reason, at least the kid was safe.
The rest of us were exhausted and ready for bed – except for Dick, that is. I watched him return from the bathroom and was reminded of how strange his magic had felt. Frowning, I wondered why, despite his backup, I’d drained my own powers so quickly. Even though our healing spell hadn’t worked, I still shouldn’t have run out of energy that fast. Something was up.
“I might head back to my room,” I said.
“I’ll come with you,” said Dick, scurrying over to my side.
“No need,” I replied. “Death will escort me.” Then maybe I’d be able to bounce some theories off him. And, you know, go to the library instead of the pub.
“With all due respect, the Reaper is not a Department employee.”
“The Reaper runs The Department,” said Death. “You are not needed, centaur.”
Dick shrunk back into himself. (Ew, yep – that’s another one of those sentences that should be avoided. I’ll add it to the list.) Death and I left, and it wasn’t until we were already outside the grounds that I realised that in all the excitement I hadn’t actually been fed. I wondered if Satan had ever intended to give us dinner or if she’d just lured us there to interrogate us.
“So, to what do I owe the pleasure of babysitting you?” Death asked.
“I don’t suppose you saw whoever attacked Wolf Girl?”
Death shook his head. “Afraid not.”
“Yeah, I thought you probably would have mentioned it, but I figured I’d ask anyway,” I said. “Second question: have you noticed anything odd about Dick?”
“Oh, too many things to name.”
I snorted. “Yes, but I meant particularly his magic.”
Death shrugged. “I haven’t really paid attention to his magic. Should I?”
“I think – yeah,” I said. “You should.”
“Why?”
“I don’t recognise it.”
Death furrowed his brow. “He’s not light?”
“No, he’s like – he’s like static electricity.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Neither do I,” I said. “It’s just… I don’t know. It’s like his magic is fuzzy at the edges. He’s way too powerful for a centaur.”
Death was silent for a moment. “Do you think he’s a wizard or shaman? He might have fortified his magic that way.”
I shrugged. “Could be. It wasn’t a style of magic I recognised, that’s all.”
Death nodded. “OK. Next time I see him I’ll have a poke at his energy. See what I find.”
“Good,” I said. “Thank you.”
“Next item on the agenda?”
“I don’t think that girl was attacked by goblins, and I don’t think Gnawlack was killed by wolves.”
“I agree,” said Death. I raised my eyebrows at him and he continued, “Wolves would have stripped the body entirely. Eaten all of him, not just the eyeballs. And goblins wouldn’t attack a child. Not to mention the ceremonial cuts on both bodies. No, the murderer was just trying to cover his or her tracks.”
I nodded. “You think they were killed by the same person?”
“Almost definitely.”
“And have you figured out what the ritual’s for yet?”
Death shook his head slowly. “No.” Something about his tone made me wonder if he was being entirely truthful.
“Not even a suspicion of what it could be?”
He shrugged. “No, but there are plenty of rituals I don’t know about.”
“If you had to guess?”
He sighed. “If I had to guess, I’d say it’s a reinterpretation of an old ritual. Maybe one where the specific instructions are
lost, and the person is trying to guess what they’re meant to do from a vague description. You know, a really general overview of a forgotten ceremony described on a stone tablet or something as part of a story. Maybe the person has the broad strokes, but they’re trying to guess the smaller details.”
I nodded slowly. That made sense. A lot of sense, in fact. If someone had seen an old painting or carving of a ritual, for example, they wouldn’t know exactly what they needed to do, but they’d have enough details to start experimenting. My worry was that I could only really think of one individual who was interested enough in research, dark magic and old rituals to undertake something like this.
And I’d been helping him with his studies.
I didn’t want to believe Ed had done it, but not wanting something to be true wasn’t the same as the thing not being true. Ed had proven himself dangerous and manipulative in the past. It wasn’t much of a stretch to imagine that he’d been lying to me this time. Still, I’d hoped that maybe he wasn’t completely evil. Slashing a kid’s stomach and poisoning her was an irredeemable act. There were no second chances after that.
I had Death escort me to the library, but I continued up to the third floor by myself. I was ready to confront Ed, and if things got out of hand then I had the Doomstone to save me. If people came looking for it after I used it, I could simply say it had been Ed who was responsible and everyone would believe me. After all, he was the one who had stolen it.
But when I reached the top of the staircase, I found the room empty. Ed was nowhere to be seen. Presumably he was somewhere washing the blood off his hands and hiding in case I’d figured him out. Well, fine. It wasn’t like I particularly wanted to see him right now anyway. And while I was here with the secret floor of the library to myself, I was going to use my time to figure out what exactly Ed had been up to with these ritual murders.
Poring over reference books late into the night in a library lit by a candle’s flame and the moonlight, I felt like Hermione Granger. I’d never studied anything so diligently in my life. I’d been here for hours and were the candle not enchanted, it would have been burning low by now. My eyelids were heavy and I was so tired that I as I turned to a new page of the untitled book I was reading (I was into the really ancient tomes now), I nearly missed the picture on the page.
