by Norah Wilson
Did they see it too?
“Oh…oh God! Is that…? What the heck is that?” Maryanne cried.
And Brooke, her original suddenly wide awake in the cave, was quite sure that on the hard floor beside her, Maryanne was weeping. Alex, sound asleep on Brooke’s other side, flinched once.
But only once.
“It’s stained glass,” Alex said. “Just…just a picture. Only a picture. It’s just—”
“It’s just us!” Brooke gritted out. Her whole cast tightened.
“We don’t know that!” Alex raised her hands in a calm down way. “It could…it could be—”
“Any three casters?”Maryanne huffed. “Not likely. And those flames! Always those damnable flames.”
“And the thorns,” Alex’s voice hitched with angry emotion. “Forever the stupid thorns!”
Brooke could only stare.
The stained glass picture she’d uncovered was much smaller than the one that had been in the attic window. And while the Madonna and child had been comforting, this depiction was far from serene.
Three casters were caught in the foreground, in front of a backdrop of blazing flames that licked high and reached all around them even as they ran from them. There were no roses at their feet, but the casters raced on a bed of thorns. Here, there were no pieces of red stained glass to indicate blood. Not only that. Beneath the soles of their dark feet, the thorns were bent, broken.
At least, for two of the casters, the thorns were bent and broken.
“Look at our eyes,” Maryanne said. She pointed to the glass. “They’re red.”
“Red?” Alex shook her head. “No, they’re not.”
“If you look a certain way, they are,” Maryanne said.
Alex hovered higher and looked down. “Yes, I see it now. Do you, Brooke?”
Brooke nodded. She’d seen it all along and had hoped that it was something lost to the other two. Faintly in the dark black glass, three sets of caster eyes glowed a muted and sorrowful red like the very smallest, and yet most insidious, flames in the portrait.
“It’s the fire,” Maryanne said. “Remember how my cast burned in Bryce’s shed last January when I was trapped with the iron collar? It burned red. The flames are coming again. There’s no escape. We—”
“We don’t know that,” Alex said. “This doesn’t have to be prophetic.”
“It could be just a warning,” Brooke said.
“It could be nothing,” Alex said. “Just the way the glass was made. The artist’s interpretation. Their imagination.”
“Which raises another question,” Brooke said. “Who made the glass? Who imagined us like this? Casters and flames. Why? Is this supposed to be us in hell?”
Neither Maryanne nor Alex answered.
And Brooke was silent herself as she stared at the stained glass picture. Her vision was riveted on the middle caster; not on the flames that she ran from, nor the muted red in the eyes. But on the way that middle caster moved—arms out in panic, hands flayed wide, knees just slightly bent as she floated over the thorns.
Over them.
It was all Brooke could do not to wilt from the sadness.
“The thorns are breaking.” Alex said, staring at the glass. “Snapping under their steps.”
Clearly, she wasn’t studying the middle caster like Brooke had been; she wasn’t noticing the difference.
“Yes,” Maryanne said. “So what?”
“How does that make sense?” Alex asked, rhetorically. “Iron thorns? Copper ones? I don’t think so.”
“Holy crap!” Maryanne moved closer to the thick glass. “If that is us,” she gestured toward their feet in the stained glass image, “then maybe, somehow, we’re corporeal in this picture. Or at least starting to be, and that’s why the thorns are snapping under us.”
Brooke watched as Alex lowered herself slowly to the floor of the vault. She let her heels hit first. Though they didn’t hit. They sunk in. The casters in the glass picture might have substance, but so far, at least, the three of them did not.
“Look at the flames,” Brooke said.
Maryanne tightened. “What about them?”
“They’re reaching out for the casters.”
“I know that,” she replied. “Do I ever!”
“But they’re not reaching the casters. Not one red speck licks around the black glass. Those casters are definitely running forward. Away from the fires.”
Alex said, “Running from the flames. Like the flames of hell.”
How fitting. That’s where all of Mansbridge thought they hailed from—hell.
But they didn’t know the girls’ personal hells. They didn’t know what the girls escaped from when they cast out. Even so, all they wanted to do was send them back there, back to hell. In every way they could. They only thought they knew what was going on. Only thought they knew the Hellers. But they only knew the legends, and they told them over and over again…
“That’s where they’re trying to send us—back to hell,” Alex said, in an eerie echo of Brooke’s own thoughts. “Back to the hell that brought us here. Screw them.”
“Yeah,” Brooke said. “Screw them.”
“And,” Alex said, the anger in her voice rising unchecked. “Not only are we not being burned, we’re not bleeding. We’re surviving and—”
“And we’re together,” Maryanne said. “There’s hope here, you know, depicted in this glass.”
In the silent seconds that ensued, Brooke stared at the middle caster again. She absolutely knew that caster was her.
No, she didn’t feel things like Maryanne did, and she didn’t have that writer’s way of distilling people’s characters down to their essence like Alex did. Oh, but Brooke did know a thing or two about reading body language, the subtle things in the way a person stood, acted, or in this case, fell forward with their hands reaching out. The caster in the middle, between those soaring sisters, was falling down onto the thorns that wouldn’t break under the soles of her feet. And while hope cheered Alex and Maryanne, it broke Brooke’s heart by its absence.
Maryanne grabbed them suddenly with a hand to each of their forearms. Brilliance shimmered on their casts where she made the connection. “The next verse,” she cried. “Oh wow, I think I figured Vesta’s third verse from her grimoire.”
“Now you’ve figured it out?” Brooke asked. “Like right now? This second? I didn’t even know you were close.”
“Neither did I,” she replied. “Honestly, I thought I was going in circles. The tracks on the page kept coming back to the second verse and sort of circling around again. I wasn’t even sure I was on the track. But now…” She released her grip. “Now it all makes sense, yet it doesn’t make sense at all!”
“Tell us,” Brooke urged her.
Maryanne complied.
Two hold the power! Ring-of-rosy goes around!
Ashes to ashes, do you dare fall down?
The very first portal—the child and the mother
It’s a portal blessed like no other.
Brooke looked down again at the stained glass picture. At the thorns that didn’t bend or break under her feet, while they did under the feet of her two friends.
“Two have the power? That’s shown up in Vesta’s verses twice now.” Alex said, honing in on the line that had caught Brooke’s attention too. “Two what? Maybe that means two stained glass windows! Oh man, could this be another portal?” She started forward, not in a surge, but determined.
“But to where?” Brooke said. It was her turn to put a hold on Alex’s arm. “Remember what happened last time you went through a second pane of glass. And this one,” with a nod of her head she gestured toward it, “this one could be bad.”
Alex held her hands up in a halting gesture. “Okay, okay, you’re right. We can’t do anything rash. But if this is a portal—the door—we have to see if we can get through it. One of us has to take the chance. I know it’s dangerous. But we can draw straws again, or I can go
really slowly and—”
Bam.
Brooke’s hands hit flat on the glass—a palm on each of the casters on both ends. She couldn’t believe it.
“It stopped me!” she said. “Completely stopped me.”
She pressed the glass again, this time more gently. That would be all she’d need, to break the second potential portal.
Again, it stopped her. And it wasn’t like hitting a wall in original form. Or iron or copper in caster form. It wasn’t that kind of stopping. Somehow the picture pushed Brooke back. Pushed her out. Shoved her away. Pushed up against those desperate palms that splayed upon the glass.
“So much for drawing straws,” Maryanne drawled. “Brooke, you could have been hurt. Killed, or worse.”
“God, Brooke!” Alex snapped. “Why the heck are you always so stupid—”
Alex’s angry cries were interrupted by angrier cries from above.
“The bitches are around here somewhere!”
“Maybe they’re hiding in the walls!”
“Quick! Follow me! I know what’ll fix those she-devils!”
She didn’t recognize the angry voices. But the next voice was all too familiar: Melissa Kosnick. “Get one alive! Get one alive! I have an iron collar!”
How the hell did Melissa Kosnick get an iron collar?
Footsteps hammered on the floor above them. Hard and racing. Angry and resolute.
“Oh God!” Maryanne cried. “They’re here. The hunters are here!”
Brooke heard the squeals in the boards above them. A frantic scratching race. Then she smelled the stench of burning vermin flesh.
“Fire! They’re setting the place on fire!”
Her gaze flew back to the portrait with its burning caster eyes. Was their fate already set? Had the moment caught in this stained glass been the moment just before their ultimate demise? A burning at the stake? Their return to hell? Her sisters’ return to hell?
Screw that.
She blasted up through the floorboards from the vault back into the sanctuary.
And yet Brooke knew, for ones like her, there was no sanctuary…
Chapter 22
Where There’s Smoke…
Maryanne
The memory hammered back.
The iron collar seared into her neck, choking her all the more, and she struggled against it. It had burned from the moment Bryce closed it around her throat, even when the metal was cool, but with every second, it seemed to burn more…
In the cave on Hants High Mountain, Maryanne’s original moaned with the memory. She rolled her head to the side. Her arms flopped up and fell down again and her left foot kicked out. In the old church way out Robinson Road, her cast shot toward the vault’s ceiling and up into the sanctuary filled with smoke.
Panic engulfed her.
“Omigod!” Alex shouted as she flew back up.
No one was in the sanctuary now. They’d clearly retreated once they’d set the old building alight. And their choice of kindling? The pulpit. They’d set the pulpit on fire.
“Here’s a taste of home for ya, Hellers!” Someone shouted from outside. “Here’s a taste of hell.” A jar with a burning rag came flying through one of the broken windows. It smashed on the floor at the back of the church, bursting into flames. Immediately, the fire started feeding on the broken furniture there.
Screaming rats ran from the flames. Yet those who’d been seeking escape, when they found themselves face-to-face with the casters, screamed all the more frantically and raced the other way. One ran madly, its back on fire, its agony and fear clear in its shrieking cries as it tried to outrun the flames.
“They’re trying to burn us out!” Brooke shouted.
There was a shotgun blast; it broke what was left of a small window on Maryanne’s right.
Bryce!
Was he out there tonight with the Hunters? As he had been the other night? Bryce knew that the flames themselves couldn’t hurt them, but iron could. And heated iron? It burned immeasurably where it touched the caster and spread out from there.
A sheen of sweat broke out on Maryanne’s original. Her right hand clenched tighter. Impossibly tighter even as it raised to her chest.
The flames licked higher, up the walls now.
“Burn us out?” Alex screamed. “They’re trying to send us to hell!”
“Those eyes in the portrait were foretelling!” Brooke raced in a panicked circle close to the ceiling. “How much iron is in this building? In the walls? The ceiling? If the place caves in, we’ll be trapped beneath it. Trapped in the burning flames. Burned alive!”
Maryanne shot to the sanctuary ceiling, raced from side to side frantically like a trapped rat herself. “I’ve got to get out of here.”
“Wait!” Brooke called. “If there’s iron in the ceiling, you might not have the strength to break though.”
And the iron wasn’t the only problem.
Alex called out, “The hunters are outside! They’re on the damn roof!”
Maryanne could hear the people on the roof too, the thumping and running, the frenzied whooping and angry yells. Were they complete fools? Or worse, drunken fools. On the roof of a burning building? What kind of an idiot would do that? She knew only too well how quickly a blaze could climb a wall and set a roof ablaze.
She lowered herself closer to the floor, but already the booted feet sounded fewer on the roof. Apparently they were smart enough not to stay up there. They’d climbed up just long enough to try to terrorize their Heller prey.
Brooke suddenly shouted. “Get ready to make a break for it!” She raced toward one of the high, broken windows. “ I’ll draw their—ummph.”
Alex was on her. She wrapped her arms around Brooke and soared sideways, like they were locked in some strange and violent dance. They both fought, Brooke to get away and Alex to hold her back. They both dropped with pain when they slammed into the side of the church. Maryanne knew that complete and sudden wilting look for what it was. Not from the wall they flew partially into, but from the iron that had to be within it.
Spikes.
Not one or two like where they’d shot in. But many more.
Brooke and Alex fell back and spiraled down, and Maryanne rushed to thwart their momentum, catching them as best she could.
Alex was first to break free of the hold. She wasn’t even trying to hold back her rage. “Damn it, Brooke! You were going make yourself the target!”
“So what!” she cried. “I’m the fastest of the three of us. I’ll draw their fire, and—”
“No!” Maryanne shouted. “We go together or not at all!”
Brooke stiffened. Maryanne could feel her fear now. It almost matched her own. She whispered, “Then what do we do? There's iron in the walls, iron in the roof, guns at the windows ready to blast us out of the sky with iron pellets!”
Maryanne realized she was moving only as she looked at her terrified friends and saw that they were moving too. Travelling in that familiar clockwise motion above the flames and around the smoke-filled, burning room, the three of them together.
She glanced at Alex, who was trembling. No, not trembling, Maryanne realized, but shaking in her anger. Oh God, Alex could barely contain it. Then another thought struck Maryanne—Alex didn’t want to contain it.
Her fists were angry. Her posture was tense with rage. Even her voice as she chanted Vesta’s verse—
Whoa, voice as she chanted Vesta’s verse?
Maryanne stared. Brooke was chanting too. Did they even realize it?
And with cold shock, she realized she was chanting too!
All three of them sang a single line from the last verse that they’d learned.
ASHES TO ASHES, DO YOU DARE FALL DOWN?
“The vault!” Maryanne cried, stopping them.
“What?” Alex shouted.
“We all got down into the floor without any iron ripping into us. Whoever spiked the walls—”
Alex finished for her. “Did it from th
e outside of the church. Not the inside!”
“We’ll go through the floor,” Brooke said.
Her words were followed by the roar of a section of roof falling, and a chorus of shouts and laughs from outside. Horseshoes, iron pipes, railroad spikes, and Lord knew what else showered down through the flames. Of course! That’s what the hunters had been doing on the roof, seeding it with iron objects. Bastards!
Alex raged, “If any of those had hit us—”
“They didn’t! And we’d better get to the vault before the whole roof caves in.” Brooke screamed at her, and when she turned, Maryanne saw it: her eyes were muted red, as if she were already burning.
“Come on!” Maryanne yelled.
Brooke was at her other side and the three casters flew across the sanctuary to the floor over the vault.
Rats.
The few that hadn’t yet perished had gathered up by the front of the church, cowering from the smoke and flames. They squeaked in alarm as the casters approached, looked at them with horrified eyes, dark yet reflecting the flames around them.
They didn’t know what to do. The rodents had to choose between facing the flames and facing the casters.
Screaming like demons, the vermin raced into the fire.
Then the screaming stopped.
There was a loud, slow cracking sound overhead.
“Down!” Brooke commanded. “Now!”
Maryanne dropped instantly. Brooke and Alex were right behind her as they passed through the iron-free floor and into the vault.
The light was out, yet caster vision allowed them to see minimally around them. What stood out most of all were the glowing red eyes of the casters in the stained glass. And in Brooke.
Only Brooke, not Alex. Maryanne wondered what her own eyes looked like. Either Brooke was the only one whose eyes had turned red, or Alex was the only one whose eyes hadn’t. Only one way to find out.
Maryanne turned to Brooke, making sure to get in her face. If her eyes had turned red in her otherwise featureless caster face, Brooke would sure as hell notice. “Now what?”
“I don’t know,” Brooke said. “Are we safe for the moment? Or are we even more mercilessly trapped?”
