THE WITCH'S KEY (Detective Marcella Witch's Series. Book 3)

by Dana Donovan

  “Witchit! Witchit!”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m calling for backup.”

  “All right. That’s it. I’m just gonna finish you off right here and now.” He corrected his aim, pointing the gun barrel square at my chest.

  That’s normally is where Carlos and Spinelli show up to save the day. I even grinned in anticipation of that moment. But timing had not always been Carlos’ strong suite, and I guess Spinelli was no different. I watched Smiley’s eyes pinch shut, as he pulled the trigger with a clumsy jerk. The gun went off, splitting the night with a tremendous boom that rocked me off my feet. I remember lying flat on my back after that, looking up at the stars, trying to catch my breath, all the while, that incessant ringing in my ears seemed to reverberate in repeated waves throughout my brain.

  The next thing I knew, Carlos was kneeling over me, cradling my head in his palm and pleading with me not to die. I put my hand up to his face and touched his cheek. It felt wet with tears and rough with stubble.

  “Carlos,” I said, and though the ringing in my ears had begun to fade, I could barely hear my own words. “Carlos, do me a favor.”

  He choked back his tears and answered. “Anything, Tony. What is it? Do you want me to tell Lilith you love her?”

  My hand was still against his cheek, which made it easy to pull back and slap him as hard as I could. “No! Damn it.” I latched onto his coat lapel and yanked hard. “Help me up, will you? For crying out loud, pull yourself together.”

  After getting to my feet, I saw that Spinelli had already cuffed and secured Smiley and was heading over to us. “You all right?” he asked, though clearly he was not as concerned as Carlos about my well being.

  “I’m fine,” I said, pulling my coat sleeves straight.

  “Man,” he said, “that was close.”

  “Close? Dominic, he shot me!”

  “Yeah. Aren’t you glad you saddled up?”

  Carlos grabbed my arm and spun me around. “Wait. You’re wearing a vest?”

  I turned again to Dominic. “You didn’t tell him?”

  He lifted his shoulders and dropped them. “Guess I forgot.”

  “Ah, jeez, Spinelli.” I pointed at Smiley and gestured his eviction with a hike of my thumb. “Get him out of here, will you?”

  I waited for Spinelli to leave before facing Carlos. He seemed more embarrassed than relieved, which was sad considering our long history together.

  “What?” I said. “You would rather I died?”

  “No, of course not.” He slapped me on the chest where the bullet had bruised my sternum, causing me to recoil sharply. Still, I suppose I deserved that.

  I caught my breath with much less effort than before. “Look, Carlos. I didn’t know you didn’t know, but for what it’s worth, I’m touched. You and me, we’ve been through a lot over the years. If you didn’t cry, I’d be hurt.”

  He straightened his back and inflated his chest. “I didn’t cry.”

  I laughed. “You did so. I saw tears.”

  “I got smoke in my eyes.”

  “You got diddley in your eyes. What is it with you Cubans that you can’t show emotion in front of other men?”

  “I can show emotion.”

  “Then show some now.”

  “You’re not dead now.”

  “I gotta die first to see you get emotional?”

  “It would help.”

  “Forget it. Go catch up with Spinelli and see to it that he processes the prisoner correctly.”

  “What are you gonna do?”

  I waved my hand over the campsite. “I’m going to douse this fire, pack up my gear and go home so I can take a long hot shower. Is that all right with you?”

  “Sure.” He gave a nod and then started away. I had already turned to start kicking dirt into the fire when he came up from behind and clamped a big old bear hug on me. I hadn’t the heart to tell him how much it hurt. I gritted my teeth and took it.

  “Glad you’re all right, Tony,” he said into my ear. Then he let go and trotted off down the path to catch up with Spinelli.

  I snuffed out the fire, thankful that the moon had come up high enough by then for me to see without the need of a flashlight. In the breath of tranquility, I found myself keenly aware of the subtle nuances in the sounds around me. The chirping crickets and the gentling rustling of leaves followed a rhythm that seemed in step with my own heartbeat.

  Off in the distance, I heard the faint rumbling of steel wheels chattering on the tracks below the Jefferson Street Bridge. It made me wonder from how far off someone like Pops might hear a train coming with a night as still and wind as calm. Had events turned out differently so many years ago, I might have known the answer.

  A short while later I started for the dirt path, my bedroll tucked under my arm, my thoughts focused again on that hot shower, when I heard a strange noise. I looked over my shoulder, expecting to find that a smoldering log had popped a knot harmlessly into the ashes. Instead, I saw Lilith, dressed all in black and holding a witch’s key up to her eye. I turned around and dropped my bedroll, but as I began toward her, she ordered me to stop.

  “You,” she said. “Are you the one?”

  “Me?” I pointed at myself, as if it could be anyone else. “Lilith, I don’t understand. What are you….” Then it hit me. My mouth went slack and my heart nearly bounced right out of my chest. “Gypsy,” I whispered. She looked so much like Lilith I could hardly believe it.

  “Are you the one?” she said again.

  “The one what?” I answered.

  “The one called, Tony Marcella.”

  I swallowed back a lump in my throat. “Maybe.”

  She held the witch’s key to her eye again. “It is you.”

  I laughed nervously. “What is that, like some kind of magic window or something? You just look through it and you can tell a person’s name?”

  She lowered her hand, slipping the key into her pocket. “So, you have partaken in the right of passage ceremony, I see. That is a shame.”

  “Is it? Sorry to disagree, but as you can see, it’s not been all that bad for me. You have to admit, I do look great.”

  Her expression soured the way Lilith’s does when I try telling her a joke that she doesn’t get. “You are not what I expected.”

  “Hell, what did you? You haven’t seen me in over sixty years. And from what I understand, the candlelight might have shown a little funny on my face, as you tried to KILL me. Did you really try to do that?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s insane. What makes a mother do such a thing? Aren’t there certain maternal instincts that are supposed to kick in once you give birth? Didn’t you feel them?”

  “I felt nothing.”

  “But yet you carried a lock of my hair around on a chain all these years. You must have felt something.”

  She stepped closer to me, but I backed away in equal measure. “I carried a lock of your hair to remind me of the shame I bared in not fulfilling the duties of my covenants.”

  “Why be ashamed of me?”

  “Because you are a boy,” she said.

  I splayed my arms with palms up for full presentation. “Well, boyish maybe, I’ll give you that, but I like to think I can hold my own with the guys down at the Second Precinct.”

  “No!” Her voice grew wickedly colder. “You were born a boy. That is not how it is supposed to happen. The first born to a witch must be a girl, or there can be no more witches in the lineage until the spoiler is eliminated.”

  “Oh-ho, I get it,” I said, cupping my hands together. “That’s why you wanted to kill me. I’m a spoiler. Well, pardon me for living, MOTHER. And trust me, there is another word I’d like to insert after mother, but I am a gentleman, after all.”

  She moved in closer and again I backed off.

  “You’ve kept me in limbo long enough, Anthony. I was willing to wait for your natural death, but now you’ve gone and ruined everything
by returning to prime. I cannot allow another day’s delay.”

  She reached into her pocket and removed another witch’s key, one much more similar to the keys that Lilith had and the ones Carlos found. She pointed it at me, and at once I felt a peculiar sensation, as if gripped by magnetic forces from all around me. I tried stepping away, but found my feet unwilling to move.

  “How did you know I had returned to prime?” I asked, only I thought the words, rather than said them. My mouth, like nearly all the voluntary muscles in my body, had ceased working.

  “There are information sources for such things.”

  “What? Witchit dot com?”

  She laughed lightly, and with a wave of the witch’s key, my body skidded across the clearing to the other side of the fire pit. “Yes, specifically the Chatter Shack forum. You know of it?”

  “I do,” I said, or thought it. “Though I don’t know how that information made it to the site.”

  She waved the witch’s key again and I sailed over rocks and matted brush as if floating on a carpet of air. Suddenly it became apparent that she was working me toward the train tracks.

  “Maybe the witch that helped you through the rite of passage has given you away,” she suggested.

  “No!” I said, closing my eyes and forcing the image of Lilith from my mind so that Gypsy would not know of her. “That’s impossible.”

  She closed the gap between us, stepping close enough that I could smell the residue of diesel on her clothing. I imagined she had worked the railroad yards and jungle camps since the first supposed suicide nearly two weeks ago.

  “Then another witch has betrayed you,” she said. She ran her dirty fingers down my face, scratching my cheek with her nails until it bled. “I heard of your return to prime and then of your return to the rails.”

  “So then you set out to kill me; is that it?”

  The heels of my shoes skipped across a bed of broken glass, propelling me another ten feet toward the tracks.

  “I had to finish what I started, Anthony. Your father interrupted me in that shed before I could complete the reversal.”

  “Reversal? That’s quite the euphemism for murder.”

  “You were never supposed to happen. A witch’s first-born must be a girl if she is to become a witch. Your birth threatened an entire lineage of future witches. That’s something your father would have never understood.”

  “So, Jersey Jake is my real father?”

  “He was.”

  “No, he is. That is to say, he’s still alive.”

  She glided effortlessly over the broken glass and rusted tin cans, stopping once again within a breath’s reach of me. “J.P. is alive?”

  “He is.”

  A short distance away, the train that had passed the Jefferson Street Bridge began bearing down on us. The ground rumbled low closest to the tracks, but a wide bend in the rails prevented the locomotive’s powerful headlamp from reaching us yet.

  “Jake’s the one who’s gone back to riding freights,” I told her, “not me. You’ve been out here killing innocent men, thinking I might be one among them, when all along, J.P. has been using my name as an alias.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said, and she cast her hand in a broad sweep, sending me flying twenty feet to the base of the tracks. “You are the one I’ve been looking for. Tonight I shall eliminate the spoiler once and for all.”

  Gypsy pointed the witch’s key at me again, and with a flick of her wrist, sent me toppling onto the ties between the rails. I strained to move, but my body remained paralyzed. I knew then the horror that the others must have felt in their last moments, wondering how this beguiling young beauty could so coldly execute the work of the devil.

  As I lay in frozen confine, she came to me and cast her vengeful eye upon me. I don’t know what I expected—certainly not an apology. But any twisted frame of rationalization might have gone a long way in explaining the need for such drastic measures. And though it would not have taken much, she offered nothing, instead, the very key that held my fate became the ultimate insult.

  She held it up for inspection one last time before flipping it like a coin onto the ground only inches from my feet. I felt its magnetic influence on my body intensify immediately and realized that the key, not Gypsy, held absolute control over my powers of movement.

  Amber light from the approaching train soon spilled before me, sweeping onto the tracks like desert winds over rumbling sands. I watched helplessly as Gypsy turned and walk away, her blackened clothes fading into moonlit shadows.

  A faint dizziness overcame me. The surreal sequence of events seemed to spin in hollow loops like recurring nightmares in which nothing else mattered but the ticking seconds and the expectation of sudden death. I tried calling to her, to plea my case and appeal for mercy, realizing that in the imminence of final judgment, the will to survive was as primal as life itself. But the link between us, connecting my thoughts with hers, had broken, severed when she discarded the witch’s key at my feet.

  The train neared, growing ever larger in my sights through a narrowing field of tunnel vision, distorted by the yellow tint of moonlight on steel. The clanging of metal on metal, the clatter of the wheels on hardened tracks and the steady drone of a heavy diesel all convinced me that the train was not trying to stop.

  I closed my eyes and waited, tensing to the rise in ground vibrations that teased my nerves and tickled my gut. But the end came not as I expected. I experienced no sudden jolt or bruising pain. Instead, I felt the frantic hands of Carlos and Spinelli clamping down on my arms and pulling me off the tracks just seconds before a CSX northbound plowed through in a storm of wind and stirring dust. Freed of the key’s paralyzing grip, I scrambled to my feet. Instincts drove me straight toward Gypsy’s trail, but Carlos pulled me back by the collar.

  “Wait!” he said, shouting over the noise of the passing train. “Look.” He pointed into the clearing just beyond the fire pit. “It’s Lilith!”

  I visored my brow with my hand to shadow the moonlight from my eyes. As Carlos, Spinelli and I observed, Lilith and Gypsy squared off in the ultimate battle of the witches.

  The two appeared armed with a witch’s key, both trained on the other in dueling fashion. I could feel the static in the air from the vibrant fields of energy exchanged between them. They hummed like swarming bees and glowed like phosphorus, cycling in alternating pulses as if absorbing and emitting shared resources.

  It seemed obvious that each were captured in the other’s invisible grip. First Lilith’s advance pushed Gypsy back to the outer ring of the fire pit. Then Gypsy regrouped, forcing Lilith’s loss of ground back to where she started. I edged forward, wanting to intervene, but Carlos tugged on my collar again and stopped me.

  On the southbound track, another train approached, its headlamps shining on the clearing like a distant star. I could see then the stark evidence of the key’s violent effects, which crushed the surrounding vegetation with blasts of circular forces. All the while, Lilith and Gypsy’s tug-of-war continued; only now the women’s bodies were flying about like stringed puppets.

  I clenched my fists when Lilith finally pinned Gypsy to a tree from ten paces out, but then gasped when Gypsy dropped Lilith over the still hot cinders of the fire. As Lilith clambered from the hot ashes, Gypsy took advantage and moved in with the power of the witch’s key in hand. She looked upon Lilith with that same vengeful eye that she had cast upon me, and I knew then what I needed to do.

  I grabbed Carlos’ gun from his holster and shoved him aside. As he fell back, I took aim and squeezed off a round that should have dropped Gypsy like a stone. But the incredible forces of the witch’s key deflected the bullet, sending it ricocheting into the woods in a scream. I leveled my aim again, when I heard Lilith holler for me to stop.

  The distraction, though brief, proved fatal for Gypsy. Seeing me alive enraged her beyond reason. She turned abruptly, unleashing the powers of the witch’s key on me once more. The force
drove me backward, slamming me into a tree. It pinned me there, my toes barely touching the ground, my arms locked by my side with Carlos’s gun still clutched in my impotent hand.

  Even as I struggled to catch my breath, I could see Lilith in the background, moving in on Gypsy. Spinelli joined her from behind, returning from a sprint down by the tracks. He handed something to her, but for the life of me, I could not figure out what it was. I looked to Carlos. I knew he pulled his backup piece and had already drawn a bead down on Gypsy, but the shot I expected never came.

  The headlamps from the southbound no longer lit the clearing as before. The train now rolled parallel on approach, wheels rumbling like stampeding horses. Gypsy stopped at arm’s reach before me. Her eyes looked black and hollow, her expression cold and stark. With indifference to the others, she pulled a blade from beneath her coat and wound her hand back for the strike. I tried to speak, to scream, to utter any verbal indication to convince Carlos that now was the time to shoot, yet his hesitation seemed to suggest that the witch’s key had somehow rendered him incapable of action, as well.

  Gypsy smiled at me wickedly. Veins in the side of her neck throbbed as if they might explode. Finally, my voice returned, and I saved my last words for her.

  “You are forgiven,” I said.

  The gesture crushed her smile. Her brows crossed tightly in a stitched link. She spat at my feet and snorted fire. “I don’t want your forgiveness,” she answered. “I want your life.”

  To that I laughed. “Then piss off, you old hag.”

  She drew back the blade. In that instant a pulsating force of energy hit us both, dropping me to the ground and lifting her off her feet. It swept her across the clearing, her body spinning and tumbling until it came to rest on the tracks just as the southbound train tore through. I heard the impact even above the rush of noise that came with the train.

  Carlos and Spinelli heard it, too. The look on their faces confirmed it. I know Lilith heard it. She stood with bent knees, still pointing the witch’s key at the spot where Gypsy landed before the train hit her. I could see then what Spinelli had handed her moments earlier. It was the key that Gypsy had dropped at my feet when she deposited me on the tracks. Lilith had doubled the two of them up to form a sort of super key.