by Faith Hunter
“What have you learned so far?” she asked, though it was more command than request.
“That an old Spaniard, a conquistador, was a vamp. He drank down the power of the best warriors of the Tsalagi and then used some of their blood to make amulets, maybe using the iron from the spikes of the crosses to give his magic power.”
“Hah. You not so stupid as I think.”
“At some point,” I went on, “he figured out how to use the amulets to focus enough power to keep the rest of the vamps in the U.S. and Europe at bay, so he could practice Naturaleza, free from interference, for centuries in Atlanta. That was enough for him until he discovered a way to make vampires sick. And then he concocted a plan using the vamp plague to take over the entire U.S. But Leo Pellissier stood in his way. Leo and me.
“I killed Lucas and his heir took over the amulets and added a full witch circle to the mix. The added power created transformational magic. I think the purpose of the magic was to make a super vamp able to be truly immortal, withstand the sun, silver, crosses—every weakness that vamps have. And the magic was tested by creating revenants to see what came back. And what has come back so far is monsters.”
“Not bad.” She patted my knee. “But let’s talk about the Tsalagi warriors from long ago. They not all dead. Are they?”
She means skinwalkers. “Uh, no, ma’am.”
“You killed the other one.”
My eyes whipped to hers, and she smiled in the light of the three candles. “You been here many moon cycles, setting things in motion. Stopped other things. Maybe that other Tsalagi like you was supposed to do something important for this old Spaniard, and you killed him instead. What you think that might be?”
I shook my head in confusion, trying to rearrange my thoughts and the things I thought I had figured out into some new semblance of order. “Maybe Immanuel was supposed to kill Leo, so de Allyon could take over?”
“And so, maybe you the catalyst for his plan, not the plague. Or maybe both together. You showing up in New Orleans caused him a headache, I betcha.” She cackled with laughter. “And he tried to kill you, yes?”
I remembered the attack in a hotel in Asheville. “That was to kill Leo.”
“You not so smart now. Old blood drinkers got plans on top of plans, everything tied together like a big knot”—she held her hands out as if gripping a soccer ball—“like a clock, around and around. He was doing bunch of things at once and you stopped all of them. He had to rethink his plans.”
I felt a chill, like a winter wind over a graveyard. “Everything I’ve done since I got to New Orleans has brought me here, to this moment.”
“Now you see? You getting smart now.”
“If you knew all this, why didn’t you tell me last time?” I ground out, my frustration making my voice loud enough to echo through the old building. Outside, lightning hit the earth close by, lighting the inside of the church in a flickering burst of power. “You gave me a riddle that made no sense.”
“Eh. You figured it out.” She flapped a hand at the unimportance of it all. “Musta made some sense, it did. Besides, what make you think I knew everything last time? What make you think I know them this time? What make you think any of this is real?” She swept an arm around the old church, to include herself. “If none a this is real,” she said, “where it all come from?” She tapped my head with a bony finger. “You knew lots of it already. I just gave you a nudge with my riddle.”
I pushed her finger away and passed my hands over my face, pressing in on my eyeballs. I could smell my own blood soaking into the cloth. My bleeding still hadn’t stopped. “Okay. What do I do next?”
“What you think you do next?”
“I think I have to figure out how to use the quarter witch circles in the old house”—I stopped, remembering another circle, the one in the refrigerator of the other house—“because the witch circles will take me somewhere else. Where the witches are.”
“Now you talking like a smart girl. Get. I got stuff to do.”
“But—”
“Don’t forget to save us. The Acheé witches, we in big trouble.”
Lightning hit the top of the church with a sound like doom. The candles went out. And I was sitting on the ground, in the grass, in the middle of a downpour. My jacket was behind me, the three pocket watches were on the ground in front of me, and I was holding the red iron disc in one hand and a bloody silver coin in the other. I put the watches in separate pockets and the iron coin in the zippered one. And trudged back the way I came. Between one step and the next, I was in the daylight, staring at a shocked Alex. He was only a foot away, his eyes wide and his mouth open.
“You disappeared. And then you came back. Like . . . like magic or something. And why are you all wet?”
I grunted sourly, striding to the truck. “Get in and drive.”
We went back to the old saloon and bar where Eli and I had rescued the three girls chained in a bathroom, where I had shifted into Beast to save my life. As he drove, I loaded my shotgun and the nine millimeter I had emptied into a spidey vamp and weaponed up over the soaked clothing. When the Kid braked at the curb, I found one of Eli’s huge flashlights, got out, and went to the bar. I yelled over my shoulder, “If I’m not out in fifteen minutes, call Eli!”
The door was covered with a piece of plywood and taped over with crime scene tape. There was a gap at the bottom, and I wriggled my fingers under the wood and got a good grip, braced one foot on the doorjamb, and yanked.
The door groaned up and out at an angle, nails pulling out of the wood. When it was high enough to get through, I ducked and went inside, drawing a nine-mil and turning on the flash. My sense of smell told me the place was empty, but I scanned the front room and behind the bar to make sure before I took the long hallway to the back.
The women’s restroom was empty but still smelled of pain and fear. The door in the back of the building was missing, allowing in a lot of light. The refrigerator stood open once again, either because the cops left it that way or because vamps had used it since then. I was betting on vamps. I stood in the doorway, studying the white-painted circle in the center of the fridge. “Flying by the seat of my pants could get me killed this time,” I said to myself.
Beast answered, We are Beast. We are more than Jane and big-cat.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” I pulled the three watch amulets out of my pockets and laid them on the floor of the fridge, inside the white circle. Then I stepped over and into the center of the circle, unzipped the pocket, and took out the thrice-made red iron disc. It was clumsy, but I held the weapon and the flash in one hand, and bent my knees, spread my feet into a modified shooting stance, and with my other hand pressed the disc into the bloody cloth.
The floor fell out from under my feet. My stomach lurched. Vomit rose in my throat.
I landed hard in the dark, dislodging the flashlight. Dropping it. It landed with a hollow thud and rolled, illuminating a place I had never seen before. It was a tiny square room, maybe three feet on a side. It stank of old earth and blood and the dusty reek of spidey vamps.
I’d just been transported through space by a witch spell. Nausea danced a tango up my esophagus again, but I swallowed it down. Kirk and Spock never spewed after a transporter trip, I thought, panicky giggles close on the heels of the thought. That would be totally uncool. I managed a shuddery breath and locked the giggles and the nausea away.
Just beyond the walls, I heard a voice. Eli. Eli?
I put it together fast. I had to be in a hidden room in the house we had raided at dawn. Back where I started from. Well, that was ducky. But it explained the quarter arcs in each room—symbolic of a place to land. Picking up the flash, I inspected the small space. The walls were painted black, with strange symbols all over them in a reddish-brown color. The symbols meant nothing to me, except I thought they were runes, stuff I had seen at Molly’s. I had a feeling these were painted with blood mixed with other stuff. What else would a psycho v
amp paint witch symbols with but blood? My breath came faster and I breathed through my mouth and nose to take in the scent/taste/texture of the air in the coffin-sized place. As there was nothing to shoot, I holstered my weapon. I had no idea why a witch circle would deposit me here, but there had to be a reason.
On the other side of the walls, Bruiser said something and Rick laughed. The two of them being jovial together. It was creepy. Worse, the flashlight showed me that there was no way out except through the walls, which were surely spelled. No door or latch or catch, no window, hidden panel, or bookcase to search for the book that would release the wall. Zip. Nada.
I took a step to pound on the wall and my boot hit something solid. I aimed the flash down. It illuminated a handle in the floor. A trapdoor.
“The one you seek,” Kathyayini had said, “she is bound to the Earth. She didn’t mean to be bound, but she cannot get away now.” The three pocket watches had been transported with me, and were aligned in a semicircle around the handle, all open, all set for twelve noon. Or midnight.
I opened my mouth to call out to the guys, and snapped it closed with a clack of teeth. If I called to the men on the other side of the walls and they broke them down, would that dislodge whatever magics had brought me here? I’d hate to go boom when I’d finally found something that might be useful. I tucked the fatter disc into my pocket, zipped it closed, and gathered up the pocket watches. The minute this thing was over, I was busting the watches and dropping the discs into a bucket of sulfuric acid.
I reached down, grabbing the handle in the trapdoor. And pulled.
CHAPTER 24
That Was Before I Killed Her Sister
It opened silently, not with the hair-raising creak I expected. Nothing jumped out at me. Nothing moved. Nothing made a single sound.
The smell from the crawl space was the fetid stench of a mass grave. I aimed the flash down to see bare, sandy ground and what might have been ankle bones with two leg bones sticking out of it. The angle wasn’t good enough to see anything more, but I was just happy not to see hundreds of rats squealing away. Dead bodies, I was getting used to.
Seven small steps led down, like a ladder, open and rickety. I got a firm grip on the weapon and the flash and paced carefully down them. I stepped onto the ground, finding it firm and dry and sandy. The floor above me was not insulated, just bare boards, and I could hear people up there walking around, muffled voices through the wood and sheets of old linoleum.
I flashed the light around the crawl space. I didn’t know what I was seeing at first. Then I realized it was a head. Human. Witch. Sticking out of the sandy earth. It was also alive. The head was female, upright, and I could see a slow pulse in the neck, maybe forty beats a minute.
I scanned my light to the right and saw another head, this one less buried, with a neck and shoulders and one arm free from the ground. Female. She was wearing clothes over her thin skeleton, skin and bones showing at wrist and collar, and her hair was matted into a slimy mess. She had a chain around her neck and an amulet hung from it, open, set to three o’clock even. A little farther to the right was another woman. Only her face was visible, the rest of her buried, her head tilted back, her mouth open like a drowning victim gasping for a last breath. Witches, all. All glowing with witchy power in swirling, oily, foul shades of energy, like the death energies of everything that had ever been alive.
I moved the light again. And again. The seventh woman was Misha. She was sitting up, her legs partially buried in the sandy soil, her hands free. She still wore traces of lipstick, mascara smeared below her eyes in the bruised hollows. She had put up a fight. She had a black eye and a puffy lip. That was not like the passive Misha I had known as a child. “Good for you,” I whispered.
The light caught the gleam of metal. A cell phone rested on her lap. The amulet on her chest was open, the clock set at ten even. I wanted to rush to her, but I had no idea what to do for her and no idea if I would kill her if I tried to pull her from the dirt. I moved the flash around the rest of the circle. All of the women were buried to some extent or another. None of them were the Acheé women.
The floor was low and I bent, studying the witches. All of them were alive except the ones at my feet. I shone the light down and saw a skull with some connective tissue left, some hair, her teeth showing the black of old fillings and metal dental work.
Beside her was another skull, less preserved. They appeared to be laid out in the beginnings of some pattern I didn’t yet understand.
I moved the light around the witch circle and realized that the witches and dirt they were buried in looked . . . wrong. As I watched, something moved over Misha’s knee. And I realized that the women hadn’t been deliberately buried. The earth of the circle was instead swallowing them. I picked out the women who had been buried the least amount of time. And I studied the witch who was the most buried. She didn’t have long. The dead witches at my feet were probably the ones who had died in service and been replaced, though I didn’t know if someone had dug up the dead and dragged them here or if the earth spit them out when it was done with them. I figured the Acheé witches were hidden elsewhere, intended as replacements for the ones nearly buried.
I had no idea how to get the witches out of the ground. No idea how to stop the spell they were powering. No idea what would happen if I interrupted a working full circle and pulled a witch to safety. But I knew who might know.
I nearly jumped out of my skin when my private cell buzzed in my pocket. I flipped it open to see Eli’s icon. “Jane,” I said.
“Where are you? Alex said you disappeared inside the vamp bar.”
I looked at the low boards over my head. I could almost make out his words through the floor as well as through the cell. “Would you believe about twenty feet from you? And down a level?”
“How?”
“The black arcs painted on the floor in each room are a witch circle. Don’t ask me how they go through the walls. I don’t know. But in the center of the house is a small square place without a door, like a tiny hidden room. I think the walls are spelled, so don’t try to break in when you find it. Whoever is accessing the witches belowground is using the circles to zip from other places to this tiny space.”
“So no one sees them coming or going,” he said. “And you, being so smart and all, stepped into the witch circle in the refrigerator in the bar. Just to test it out, right? Without a witch with you to tell you where you might end up.”
“Pretty much.”
“You’re an idiot.”
I felt the tension ease away from my shoulder and spine. “I love you too. Our witches are sitting down here, under the house, directly under the circle on the floor, half-buried in the ground. Misha’s here too. They’re locked into whatever working they’re being forced to do. I have no idea how to stop the working or save them, and one witch looks like she may be near death.”
“So, how do we get you out of there?”
“I don’t know that either. If you break through the walls, you may trigger a latent defensive spell and blow yourselves up. If you come through the floor, you may trigger a spell. I don’t know how we blew up the roof without blowing up all the witches.”
“What do you know?”
“You can try to send Soul through the witch circle at the bar. Maybe she can figure out something. Meanwhile tell Rick to call Evan Trueblood and tell him to take my call.”
“Okay. Done. Five on the call to Trueblood, ten on getting Soul to the bar.”
I hung up and checked the time. I had a few minutes, so I climbed the steps and pulled the trapdoor closed, sealing me in with Misha and her new pals. I didn’t want to be stuck down here with the stink and the decomposing bodies and the silent, half-buried witches, but I didn’t want Soul to materialize halfway inside me either. I also didn’t want Soul coming through the witch circle and falling through to the ground.
I walked around the circle again as I waited for time to go by, my light settling on
each witch as I passed. The pocket watches were all open, each set at an even hour. I realized that each witch was buried at a point on a clock, and the position of the witch was the time on the clock. So far so good. The dead bodies in the center, near the stairs, were also laid out in a pattern, like spokes on a wheel. I had a feeling that the patterns made by living and dead witches were intended to increase the magical working, adding a layer of complication, another part of the outcome, whatever that outcome might be intended to accomplish.
I found the woman who had the magical number 12 on her amulet. She was elderly, with sagging skin and gaunt features. She had been here long enough to be sitting up to her waist in the soil. I wondered if the parts of her that were hidden belowground were dead already.
Misha hadn’t been here for long. I held the light over her legs, watching for a hint of human movement—a skin twitch, anything—but I could detect nothing. I wanted to feel for a pulse on the top of her foot, but touching her seemed dangerous for us both.
Dissatisfied, I returned to the steps and sat. When my five minutes were up, I hit speed dial for Evan Trueblood, husband to Molly Everhart Trueblood, once my best friend. Of course, that was before I killed her sister.
“This better be good,” Evan growled into my ear.
I almost smiled. “I’m in Natchez, Mississippi, standing below a witch circle painted in black on the floor of a single-story home. On my level are twelve witches, all buried to some extent in the earth, involved in a working that is sucking them down into the ground and killing them. Is that good enough?”
