Chapter Three
“Frank here.”
Frank had one of the most dispassionate phone greetings I’d ever heard. At least he sounded awake. “Are you actually up already?” I glanced at the microwave. “It’s only a little after eight.”
“Yeah, but what are you doing up?”
I shrugged and said, “I’m calling to give you your trial run. I have to leave town for a day or two. I need you to watch the shop.”
“Yeah, no problem. When do you want me there?”
“I’ll go down in a bit to forewarn Foster and company. If you want to show up in about an hour and a half, that’d be perfect. Foster can help out if you have any issues with the register.” I paused and then said, “You’ll be alright with the fairies around to help?”
I heard a scratching sound over the phone and a sigh before Frank said, “No problem Damian, I’ll be there.”
“I could get used to help that doesn’t complain about the lack of whiskey and cheese in the store.”
“What?”
“Never mind, long story.” Frank must be desperate for work if he didn’t even mention Cara throwing him out of the store. I grinned. “Thanks Frank, I’ll see you when I get back.” I hung up the phone and headed out to the rental.
* * *
A few minutes later I pulled in and unlocked the shop. I could feel someone watching me, and had a pretty good guess who. “Hey Foster, what’s up?” I turned and found him standing with his sword drawn and a raised eyebrow.
“Apparently you are,” he paused, “which most likely means I’m hallucinating or the world has ended. It’s only nine in the morning, hardly a respectable time for a necromancer to be awake.”
“I have to head south to meet my master.”
“Zola?” His other eyebrow shot up to join the first.
“Yep. She wants me to meet her at our old training ground.”
“Did she say why?”
“Nope, not unless you count evil giggling …”
Foster sheathed his sword and tapped his chin. “Are you going to close the shop while you’re gone?”
“Actually,” I drawled, “I was going to leave Frank in charge; a bit of a test run. You mind babysitting? Make sure he doesn’t give anything away or sell stuff to people I don’t like?”
Foster barked out a laugh and smiled. “No problem. Now he can see me, I can boss him around.”
“Oh, and Foster?” He turned and looked at me. “Try not to let Mom kill the help, okay?”
He laughed and glided into the back room.
I left the store unlocked. With Foster around to keep watch, I wasn’t worried about anything growing legs and walking out before Frank showed up. I passed two young vampires on my way to the rental car. They smiled, waved, and flashed their fangs at me in the late morning sun. I waved back. I recognized the two from Sam’s Pit—her vampire family, as she sometimes calls them—but I couldn’t remember their names. The girl snickered, wrapped her arm around the boy’s waist and they continued on their way.
Some people would be surprised to see vampires out and about in the daylight; well, a lot of people would have been surprised to see vampires, period. It was somewhat unusual to see them out in the sunlight, but it wouldn’t kill them. It was almost always the young ones prowling the daytime streets. Some of their strength was sapped in the sun, but they didn’t burst into flames or turn to ash without some assistance. The kind of assistance I’d given a vampire on more than one occasion. Most vampires avoided daylight because they didn’t trust other vampires not to kill them in their weakened state, never mind the fact they all had the same disadvantage. Ah, the gift of paranoia.
I unlocked the door to the SUV and set off for the country.
It was a two-hour drive south of Saint Louis. The broad highway narrowed into two lanes on either side and eventually turned into a curvy, one lane death trap. Coldwater was a town slowly being lost to history. The old sawmill closed decades ago, homes and buildings collapsed through the years, trails forgotten and lost to time as nature reclaimed its territory. I took a left about thirty minutes later, tires crunching onto a narrow gravel drive. I bounced my head off the ceiling of the rented Chevy Blazer for another fifteen minutes and eventually crossed into an open field with a gentle hill surrounded by an old deciduous forest. The mixture of greens and shadows were a spectacle I always enjoyed, but the winter woods will always be my favorite.
At the top of the hill was a small cabin. I don’t know exactly how old it was, but it was obviously built when people were shorter. I’m around six foot five and have always ducked through the front door and all the doorways inside. Zola claimed the cabin was around before the Civil War. I didn’t doubt it. In fact, I was pretty sure Zola had been around since before the Civil War, though she’d never really come out and said it.
I parked beneath the giant oak in the middle of the field that shadowed the front of the cabin. I didn’t see Zola in the twilight as I opened the car door, though a faint orange light leaked from the steel-shuttered windows. The humid country air washed over me with the hint of honeysuckle and the nearby pond. It was quite a change from the pollution-choked air of Saint Louis. With a little effort, I was able to stop drumming my fingers on the butt of the pepperbox holstered under my left arm. My gaze shifted to the well off to the side of the cabin, then back to the cabin itself. Zola was there. She hadn’t made a sound. I couldn’t make out more than her silhouette beneath the overhang of the front porch, but I didn’t need more than that. Her braided hair, knobby cane, and lithe outline didn’t leave much room for doubt.
“Chop some firewood, boy.” Her voice carried easily over the quiet sounds of birds and crickets in the shin-high grass. “When you’re done, meet me by the stove.” She stepped toward the front door.
The pile of firewood off to the side of the house seemed to be laughing at me. “Can’t we just use some of the wood that’s already chopped?”
Her silhouette paused and turned. She was silent as she turned away again and stepped inside.
“Take that as a no,” I muttered to myself. I sighed and walked off to the nearby shed where my old friend, a heavy double-bladed axe, still hung by its head. Tool of destruction in hand, I headed to the edge of the woods to gather some fallen logs. The hoot of a barn owl sounded like thunder in the blackening night.
I smiled as I set the axe aside and grabbed the end of a long dead tree trunk. A few grunts pulled it far enough out of the surrounding wood to get to work. It didn’t take long to hack the foot-thick log into more manageable foot-long cylinders. I stacked three of the logs in my left arm, grabbed the axe with my right hand, and headed for the stump just to the east of the cabin.
After butchering the first log to kindling, I got my rhythm back. I hadn’t chopped wood at the cabin in almost ten years. What was I, sixteen or seventeen back then? Zola used to call it punishment. I laughed to myself. I was too stupid at the time to realize she was using it to help me work off some rage and frustration after a few of our training sessions gone wrong.
As the axe came down again and the fourth log split seamlessly down the middle with a satisfying crack, I remembered …
“You see it boy?”
I nodded while my eyes stayed locked on the shimmering ribbon around the body. It was an old hunter. His body was decomposed badly enough I couldn’t even begin to tell what killed him.
The aura was a slow, twining span of black and white, well balanced and lacking the fuel of hatred, or stress, or pain, or love, or any other human emotion the living have. It was an aura of the dead.
“The dead have power. It may not be of great use to most of them, but it will be of great use to you.”
I was only half listening to my master. I could see where bits of the aura should have anchored to the body. More out of boredom than anything else, I focused a tiny needle of power to hook the aura back into place at the root chakra, the base of his spine, and the crown chakra at the top of
his head.
Before I could do anything else, the aura flared blood red and I screamed as the body pulled a knee under itself, pushed off the ground, and leaned back against the tree. It should have fallen apart, but it didn’t. My gaze met those hollow sockets where only decay and maggots should have been. The empty depths of infinity stared back.
“What did you do, boy!” From the corner of my eye I could see Zola scrambling for something in her cloak.
The body screamed, though there was no throat left for the air to pass through. The vacant eye sockets flared with a deep blue light. I couldn’t hear the scream anymore; it was replaced by a slow, dark, laugh. A chill wracked my body to its core.
Zola dove at the abomination. Literally dove. I saw a flash of silver as she rammed something into its right eye socket.
Something escaped from the wound in a red haze. The aura snapped back into the even black and white flow of the dead. It was still anchored to the body, and the body was still standing, staring at nothing.
I, however, stared slack-jawed at my master. She claimed to have been over eighty, but there was obviously something else going on. No one should have been able to move that fast at eighty, or seventy, or thirty for that matter.
Zola’s gaze wandered up and down the body, and then she grimaced. “Well, boy, Ah guess today you’re going to learn how to deal with zombies. Go get the axe.”
I carried a pile of firewood through the door in both arms, laughing.
“What’s so amusing, boy?” Zola said as she cocked an eyebrow. She stood close to the wood stove.
“I was thinking about the hunter. Do you remember that?”
She raised her eyebrows slowly, her forehead crinkled and her eyes smiled. “Of course Ah do, Damian. How could any teacher forget such stupidity?”
I shrugged and smiled, setting the firewood beside the stove. Well, she did have a point.
“It is odd you should bring up the hunter.”
I added two logs to the black woodstove and shut the creaky stove front.
“You remember the shard Ah thrust into the creature?”
I nodded. “Yeah, the one with the binding ward worked into it.”
“You have a good memory.”
“Well, that kind of thing is hard to forget.”
She nodded and her hand flexed on the head of her knobby cane. “That is much like our new problem.”
We stood in the darkness, only the dim moonlight and the orange flicker of the wood stove giving us light in the small living room. The cabin filled with the smell of burning wood and Zola’s words hung in the air. “Darkness is moving, Damian,” her gnarled hands shifted over the cane, “with you at its center.” I stared at her for a moment. She was still short, but with the presence of someone twice her size. She stood ramrod straight with a pile of thin braids falling past her shoulders. Tiny bits of iron and Magrasnetto, a silver gray metal, tinkled in each of those braids as she cocked her head to one side. Her eyes were intense, appraising me as I did the same. Zola’s gaze was slightly sunken below her forehead, peering out above sallow cheeks. Her body was wrapped in a deep gray cloak and her lips turned up in a smile as she waited for me to respond.
I didn’t take anything my mentor said lightly. “What have you seen?”
Her eyes narrowed. “Something Ah’ve not seen since bourré played more tables than poker.”
A passing smile twitched my lips. We used to play bourré with Sam when she’d visit.
Zola rubbed her right hand against her jaw. “Ah see demons, boy; demons all around you.”
“Why am I afraid you’re not speaking metaphorically?”
She laughed. It was rich and loud and entirely inappropriate. “There are things Ah can show you, ways to deal with demons. And you … you must listen, or you will not survive.”
I put my left fist in my right hand and bowed my head. “Yes, master.” I even managed to keep a straight face.
She laughed and slapped my shoulder hard enough to bruise. “You always were a pain in my ass.” Zola fell silent and reached into the folds of her cloak. When she removed her hand from its depths, it was gripping a small doll. The doll was plain and looked like it was made from a potato sack, stained with some blackened red substance. The Xs that passed for eyes stared at me. Utterly creepy.
“What is that? A voodoo doll?”
A vague smile crossed her face and I shivered. “It is much more than a pincushion, boy.” Her voice ground like a zombie dragged through gravel. Ah, that would be like a slow moving blend of a chain smoker and a deep, hoarse voice if you haven’t heard a zombie dragged through gravel. “Do you not see the aura, Damian?”
It was inanimate. It had never been alive. It shouldn’t have had an aura, but as soon as I focused and looked for it, it was there. A sickly mixture of black and a red so deep it could have been congealed blood. I’d never seen anything like it.
My gaze traveled up to meet Zola’s eyes. “The hell is that?”
Her own eyes flicked down to the burlap figure. I would have sworn the thing was trying to wriggle out of her hand. “You are familiar with a fairy bottle?”
I nodded. “Nasty stuff, they can trap auras and some Fae believe they can trap souls.” Zola raised the doll closer to my face and I realized what she was saying. Her comment about the shard, she’d bound something to it. “You’re telling me something’s trapped in that?” I twisted my head away and grimaced.
“Ah would not say trapped is the best word, but it is bound to it, yes.” She lowered the doll.
I stifled a shiver. “What the hell is it?”
“What do you think it is?”
There was no avoiding it. No matter how much I didn’t want to say it, or believe it, the pulsing red and black aura could only be from one thing. “You bound a demon to it.” My voice was flat.
Her lips curled up just a little. “It is only a bit of a demon’s aura, nothing more.”
I rolled my eyes. “Oh, nothing more, just a bit of demon. Would you like a towel to wipe up that bit of demon?”
She laughed and turned her head. The orange glow of the fireplace cast her face into shadows.
“So why do you have it?” I asked, indicating the doll.
“Ah have learned much in the past two years, boy. There are evils beyond anything Ah ever imagined still walking this earth.” Her eyes closed for a moment. When she opened them, they dilated in the dim light, swallowing shadows. “This,” she said as she raised the doll, “is a portion of the demon you released into our plane almost ten years ago.”
I stared at the small figure in her hand. The demon I released?
She nodded. “The hunter, Damian. Ah am still uncertain why you were able to do it, but that was no mere spirit you stitched into its body. You didn’t just bind an aura of the dead to the body, but opened a gateway. Maybe because of the chakras you used. Ah do not know.”
“Great,” I said.
“This doll will also be training, for you and for me.”
I stared at the lifeless, squirm-inducing doll. “Training for me?”
“Yes, someone has to help banish the demons.” She smiled again, covering her face in fine, and some not so fine, laugh lines.
My stomach dropped into my shoes and my eyes locked on the doll again. “I don’t think it’s going to fight back.”
“Ah, you may be surprised.”
“Even better. Demons weren’t surprise enough?”
“If you can learn to use the aura of something tied to a demon, on purpose instead of by … accident …” she paused, her eyes shifting to the doll in her hand. “You can follow the bond back. Use that sympathetic power as an entry point. Use it as the demon’s weakness. You can learn with these.” Zola tossed the demon doll at me as she pulled another one out of her cloak.
I grimaced and caught the thing. Instead of just looking like it was trying to wriggle out of Zola’s grip, now it actually felt like it was trying to get out of mine. Like a fist-size
d nightcrawler. Nasty. “Sympathetic power, huh? Kind of an odd word for demon-speak.”
She glared at me. I shut up. “The other doll is from another demon. A demon one of our brothers helped me bind last week.”
“Who?”
“His name is Zachariah.”
I raised an eyebrow. “As in, Zachariah the assassin guy?”
“Yes, the assassin that worked for Philip. We don’t know how many demons are loose, and we need help.”
“Where there’s one …” I said.
Zola laughed. It was empty, but we’d learned a long time ago you could laugh, smile, and shrug it off, or let someone clean your brains off the ceiling in the morning. She took a step toward the old green couch and sat down. “Yes, Damian, where there is one.” She slumped back, ran her hand over her eyes, and squeezed the bridge of her nose. I’d never seen a defeated look on Zola’s face before, and it scared the hell out of me.
I sat down on a dynamic orange chair from the 1960s. It had the texture of a pilled sweater, and my hand started picking off little orange puffballs while I watched my master. The fire crackled in the stove, doing nothing but emphasizing the silence of the room.
Within minutes, my unspoken questions burned more than the flames in the old iron stove. “Where have you been, Zola? I haven’t seen you, haven’t even heard from you in two years.” I shook my head and leaned forward. “Now you come back with stories of demons?” I half expected a sharp rebuttal from her, but none came.
She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and sat up straight. The confidence I’d come to expect from my master returned to her posture and her voice. “Ah’ve been traveling to the hiding places of the war. There were demons, Damian, and not just the men who fought in wars. They walked our plane with abandon. Ah know you’ve heard me speak of Philip Pinkerton. With his help, and others on rare occasions, we banished or buried almost twenty demons through the years.”
She closed her eyes for a moment and wrapped a hand around her pale, knobby cane. “We were able to banish five from our plane. The rest were too powerful to be banished by our group. We bound them to various vessels and hid them. No one but Philip and Ah knew the location for the stranded demons. Neither of us knew where they all were. Philip was going to go back and destroy the vessels after learning more about the demons. At the end of the Civil War, he left for Rome. He was alive then, at the end of it all.” She stared at the embers in the wood stove as she said, “He is dead now. Ah found his body two years ago.”
Modern Magic Page 69
