by Nazri Noor
Quill shrugged. “It better be.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means that I don’t know how strong Leonora really is, and whether she’s going to be able to rip through my defenses with her claws.”
“What? I thought you were some kind of genius, independently wealthy, man-about-town magus guy. The fuck happened to all that?”
Quill held a finger up to my face. “I made no such claims. That’s you making judgmental statements about me based on what you’ve seen of my life. That isn’t fair. I don’t go around calling you poor simply because – ”
Florian tapped me on the shoulder. “Um, Mace. Guys. You guys?” He was digging his fingers into Quill’s back, too, with increasing strength and desperation.
“What is it?” Quill snarled.
Florian only pointed up with one finger. I followed and looked up, just in time to see the huge globe of whirring, crackling fire headed directly for our faces.
The flames splashed onto the top of the car, spreading like a horrible, screaming puddle of magma across an invisible glass shield. My heart pounded at the terrifying proximity, the heat of the magical fire far too close for comfort.
But Quill’s idea had worked. If we’d been driving and a fireball had found its way into the car without any kind of magic shielding us, the night, and our lives, for that matter, would have ended with our bodies fused to a massive pile of smoking, flaming wreckage.
“Oh dear God,” Florian said. “We’re alive. We’re alive.”
“Where is she?” Quill hissed, looking up through the glimmering force field as the flames dissipated. “I can’t see her.”
“Neither can I,” I said, poking my head from one window to the other, desperation mounting. We were sitting ducks.
“The shield isn’t going to hold forever.” He grabbed me by the shoulders, pulling me into the driver’s seat even as he squirmed past me, swapping places. I was too stunned to fight back. After some seconds of far too intimate bodily contact, I found myself gripping the steering wheel. “I need to focus on putting up another shield, and on firing back, if need be. Mason, you take over and drive.”
“I don’t have a license,” I stammered. “What if we get pulled over? Or I could crash your car.”
“That is the least of our problems just now,” Quill shouted. “Any cop that tries to flag us down is as good as dead when Leonora gets to them. And this crap heap is practically junk, anyway, thanks to you. Just. Drive.”
“No need to sound so damn bitter about it,” I grumbled. “You’re independently wealthy, remember?”
“Mason Albrecht,” Quill said through gritted teeth. “I swear, if we survive this, I’m going to punch your insufferable face into pudding. But for now, shut the fuck up and let me focus.”
My mouth flew open for just half of a second, then clamped shut again. I wasn’t going to argue anymore. Survival was way more important than getting the last word in at that point. Quilliam started incanting under his breath again, preparing another spell. I smashed my foot on the gas pedal, then looked for Florian’s eyes in the rearview mirror.
“Florian, can’t you help reinforce the car, at least until we get to Monica’s place?”
He shook his head briskly. “No can do. I need to be in contact with the earth to be of any use, or at least have plants close by. It’s why I said to pull over.”
I shook my head back. “Not an option at this point.”
“And I agree. But I’m just saying, if we crash, and my face smashes through the windshield, and I make contact with the ground, and somehow survive? Then I can probably help.”
“Excellent optimism,” Quilliam said, without a trace of sarcasm in his voice. “But let’s hope that it doesn’t come to that.”
He stood up again, clutching the shredded remains of the roof to steady himself, the air wavering with the flickering red of his shielding spell as he poked half his body out of the car again.
“What the hell are you doing?” I yelled. If Leonora came at him with another fireball, the inside of the car would probably end up mostly protected, but I couldn’t say the same for the top. We’d end up with half of Quilliam’s body, the exposed bits seared to a nice, crispy char. “Get your stupid ass back inside the car before she blasts you to hell.”
“Calm down,” Quill said, which was so much more infuriating considering how he was clearly panicking just moments ago. I ventured a glance to throw him the dirtiest look I could muster, then caught him looking skyward, aiming his hand at clouds I couldn’t see. Then, in the softest voice, as of charcoals slithering through a brazier, Quilliam spoke again.
“Ignis.”
The tremendous roar of fire had me believing that an actual, live dragon had descended from the clouds to douse us in a shower of flames, but the sound was coming out of the palm of Quill’s hand. I could have been whiplashed with how quickly my head moved between glancing at the road ahead and the frightening, frankly awe-inspiring sight of Quilliam J. Abernathy firing a goddamn flamethrower out of his fingers.
A little voice in the back of my head told me to never, ever tell him that I had, at any point in history, found him cool. I bit my bottom lip, pushing on the gas as I maneuvered the streets, this time not breaking focus or flinching, not even when a huge, blackened lump of something crashed to the ground and rolled off the road some feet away from the car.
“What the – holy fuck. Was that Leonora?”
Quilliam pulled himself back into the car, arranging himself across the seat, his face a picture of demoniac smugness. I could have punched his teeth in right there, but he’d just saved our asses twice in one night.
Don’t say thank you, I thought to myself. Don’t give him the satisfaction.
“That was so fucking awesome,” Florian yelled, so excited that he was shoving and shaking the back of Quilliam’s seat.
Quill scoffed, pretending to be annoyed by the boisterousness. But his smile somehow turned even smugger.
I’m pretty sure I figured out Quilliam J. Abernathy’s middle initial. The J stands for jerk.
31
I barely took the time to park Quill’s car, pulling up as close to the sidewalk as possible, then hauling ass right out of the driver’s seat. Florian and Quill followed closely behind. They probably suspected exactly as I did. Things worked differently in the arcane underground. Dead things don’t always stay dead, especially when they’re dedicated servants of deities of the underworld.
My fists hurt as I banged wildly on the front doors of the Rodriguez house. Who cared that it was past midnight? This could very well have been a matter of life and death. All we needed to do was hand Monica the peineta with Leonora’s hair in it. Then the younger Rodriguez would take care of everything, preferably by laying her grandmother to her final rest, where she would be way too dead to be interested in trying to kill me and the boys.
The door flew open and I sprang back. Monica Rodriguez, wearing a negligee, a fierce scowl, and very little else, stared wild-eyed at us from the threshold, one hand gripping white-knuckled over the haft of a knife, the other clutching what could have been a pointy chopstick, but was far more likely some kind of magic wand.
“What the hell do you want?” she rasped. We’d woken her up, clearly, as evidenced by the disarray of her hair and the groggy, distant look in her eyes. “Do you idiots know what time it is?”
I pushed past her, Florian and Quill filing in with me, and I slammed the door shut, apologetically nudging Monica out of the way. “We wouldn’t have come if it wasn’t important,” I said hurriedly. “Oh. This is Florian.”
Florian lifted a hand. “Hi.”
Monica shot both of us confused, irritated glares.
“And this is your grandmother’s hair,” I said, handing her the ornamental comb. Monica’s eyes went huge at the sight of it. “Now, could you please deal with her? You never mentioned that she was going to fly off the handle and come chase us down if we tried to
steal her hair.”
She looked between the three of us, held the peineta to her chest, then rushed towards the kitchen. “Come quickly. We have to end this. Now.”
Monica moved like lightning. Within moments, she’d laid out a large, ornate bowl and a prayer candle, setting her knife next to them. She’d also extracted what looked like a round tupperware filled with – God, was that blood?
“Pig’s blood,” she said to no one in particular. “Comes in handy for rituals.” She uncovered the tub and threw the whole thing into the microwave.
I patted my hands along my shoulders, wondering why my back was so cold. Sweat was drying against my shirt. I was more freaked out than I thought. “Is all this really necessary? Leonora was genuinely just chasing us through the streets.” I clapped my hands for emphasis. “She was flying after us. Flying.”
“Plus I set her on fire,” Quill said, “but I’m not sure that was enough. Dropped her out of the sky, sure, but I’m willing to bet she’s still alive.”
“It’s her bond to the Lady,” Monica said. “Grandma might have fallen out of favor with our goddess, but that doesn’t mean she’s lost all ties to the underworld. She won’t be that easy to kill.”
Monica was picking through the peineta, pulling out wispy gray strands of her grandmother’s hair. She collected a bundle of dry twigs from a drawer – whether they were weird-looking sticks of cinnamon or some kind of bark, I couldn’t really tell. The workings of witches differed depending on their cultures, traditions, and even families. I wasn’t sure what Monica was doing, exactly, but I knew that the goal was to neutralize Leonora, maybe even kill her.
The kitchen filled with the overpowering smell of hot blood. Florian sneezed, then retched. I pulled my shirt up over my nostrils. Quill wrinkled his nose, but otherwise seemed unbothered, probably because he was more accustomed to arcane work than the two of us.
Monica pulled the tub out of the microwave and poured it into the bowl, careful to avoid spilling even a single bead of blood. She crushed a dried leaf, sprinkling its contents over the bowl, then cut the tip of her finger with the knife, adding her own blood to the mixture.
“And now, the final touch,” she said, her voice quivering with anticipation, perhaps a bit of fear and reverence.
She touched the tip of her wand to the bundle of sticks and hair in her hand, then to the prayer candle, setting both alight. Monica whispered a string of words that I recognized as Spanish, part of it a prayer, part of it a curse. The twigs and hair burned to a pile of blackened ashes in the palm of her hand, which again went into the mixture. With her wand, Monica stirred once, twice. Then she lifted the bowl in one hand.
I was not expecting her to throw its contents directly at my face.
My eyes went huge, my reflexes failing me as time itself seemed to stand still. The blood spilled from the bowl in every radial direction, almost as if it were sentient, guided by Monica’s power into the shape of an ever-widening circle. Larger and larger it grew. I couldn’t have escaped it even if I tried to run. And where could I run? By the time the blood hit the ground, it was shaped into a pool as big as the room itself.
I looked at my hands, my clothes, marveling at how the seemingly massive quantity of blood had sprayed everywhere but on my body. I glowered at Monica, my mind still working its way around this sudden betrayal. “You missed,” I growled.
Monica tilted her head and grinned in a way that made my insides shiver.
“Oh. Did I? Look again.”
The blood hadn’t fallen onto the floor in puddles like I’d expected. Instead it had splashed into the shape of a perfect ring. I watched in slowly increasing horror as the blood began to run in rivulets into a series of sigils and glyphs. A sealing circle. I willed my legs to move, but couldn’t. I forced my hands to lift, so they could accept something, anything that my spirit could call from out of the Vestments – but all my limbs were locked in place.
Florian was the first to attempt to step into the circle, but an invisible force shoved him back, as if the ring around me was only the base of some durable unseen wall. Quill’s attempt was subtler. He slammed his open palm against thin air, and the collision of his hand with the field produced a hollow, ringing thump. Monica had locked me in.
“What – what did you do to me?” I grunted. I could hardly speak. My lips were frozen nearly as badly as the rest of my body.
“Surely you know yourself,” Monica said, stepping around her kitchen counter so that it stood squarely between her and my friends. “With the right kind of wards, with the right kind of glyphs, you can use ritual magic and arcane geometry to create a circle of protection, to lock out any kind of entity in existence. Gods, angels, demons.”
My heart pounded as my mind put the pieces of the puzzle together. I couldn’t move, but I sure as hell could feel the sweat trickling down my throat.
“Ah,” Monica continued. “So you’ve figured it out. You can use wards to keep entities out. But you can also use them to seal entities in. And since only half of you is human, I can use the same sigils that might affect lesser angels to keep you trapped here.”
“No,” I groaned, the sweat pouring out of me in buckets. Something else was happening to my body. It wasn’t just the paralysis. Heat was flaring from every one of my cells.
“I should have mentioned,” Monica said, examining her fingernails. “Against a regular angel, the sigils I drew would be enough to keep them trapped. But against a mongrel like you? The effect would be horrific. Terrible.” I gasped for breath through a slitted mouth as her own lips twisted into a cruel grin. “With you surrounded by all these glyphs, the reaction would be catastrophic. Simply agonizing.”
I forced my head down to look at myself, wondering why it felt like my blood was boiling, my entire body on fire. Nothing had changed, no magical flames trailing across my skin, but I felt just like a lobster thrust into a boiling pot of water. My teeth clenched together so tightly that I thought they would shatter.
Florian banged his fists against the invisible wall. Just behind him, I watched through eyes quickly filling with tears of pain as Quill muttered and incanted to himself, preparing some sort of spell.
Hurry, I thought. I could die here.
Just when I thought that the pain couldn’t get any worse, the proverbial pot burst, dropping my body directly into the fire. I crumpled to the ground. I screamed, and I screamed, the noise from my throat begging wordlessly for the mercy of a swift death.
32
I thrashed wildly on the ground, my limbs wracked with agony, each convulsion of my body causing my joints and my bones to contort with horrible creaks and cracks. I was too weak to scream by then, but scream I did, the sound ripping itself from my lungs. The world was only just visible to me through my tears. My back and my arms were soaked in sweat and blood.
“Don’t be so dramatic,” Monica said. “It gets better over time, as with everything. You’ll develop a greater resistance to the pain – oh, after a few hours, or so.”
“Not unless we kill you first,” said Florian’s voice, his tone brutish and threatening.
Monica laughed again. I twisted my head just far enough to watch as Florian launched himself at her, huge fists thrashing at the air in barbaric fury. The witch’s body seemed to blur as she dodged and weaved away from every last one of his blows.
Then I heard it, the rush of gravel and wind that Quill’s voice turned into each time he unleashed one of his spells.
“Ignis.”
The kitchen flared bright orange as Quilliam released another torrent of flames from his palm. The roar of fire filled the room, but so did Monica’s laughter. She lifted a pot up to her face, its opening absorbing every last tongue and spark of the guttering fire into its recesses. When she slammed the lid on top, Quill’s flames died out completely.
“Try again,” Monica said.
I never knew that brujeria could do that. Even the greatest, most terrible witch I knew had her own weakness
es. Something was off. Completely off.
“Who are you?” I shouted, more at the room than at Monica, my body still twisting and twitching from the pain of the sealing circle. “What are you? You’re not Monica Rodriguez.”
She laughed, her voice coarse and wicked. “I’m really, really not. Did you really think I would squander twenty grand on you? I don’t have that kind of money.” Her eyes flashed green, the color of emeralds. “Or maybe I do.”
Something was wrong here, even more fucked up than it already looked. Those last words that came out of Monica’s lips sounded different, as if spoken by another voice. Even her demeanor seemed changed. Tougher, harsher, and more sadistic.
The door burst open, a terrible wind whipping through the house, the pots and pans in the kitchen dancing in a clattering ruckus. The force of the gale was so strong that it blew Quill, even Florian off his feet, sending them crashing to the ground. And then she came, hovering just off the floor like an apparition, her eyes red, her mouth full of craggy teeth, her skin charred black in places, angry red and raw in others: Leonora.
Hope, I thought. The two witches would duel, and whoever was left over would be weakened, someone the boys and I could more easily deal with. But Monica’s reaction to the sight of her grandmother wasn’t one of anger, or fear. It was welcoming, pleased, expectant.
“Abuela,” Monica cooed, reaching her arms out, kissing the blackened mass of skin and flesh that was once Leonora’s cheek. That part of her face came off, falling to the floor with a wet, crusty squelch.
“What’s happening here?” Quill had pushed his back up against the corner of the kitchen, his eyes huge and confused as they glanced from one witch to the other. “I thought you were enemies. What’s going on?”
“Foolish boy,” said the witches, speaking as one, in the same voice – one that belonged to neither Leonora nor Monica. “You are caught in a trap. That is what has happened. You shouldn’t be blamed for your confusion. This deception has been extensive and fruitful. A worthy investment, indeed.”
