by Brian Harmon
“Mm hm.” He could see not an ounce of remorse in her face.
“Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” he said, rubbing thoughtfully at the stubble on his chin.
She cocked her head, confused. At the same time, from the corners of his eyes, he saw the ogres both scratch their heads. “What?”
“Nothing. I’ve had Macbeth on my mind all night.”
She stared at him, confused, as another lightning bolt flashed overhead and another clap of thunder shook the ground.
“So…what?” continued Eric when the noise died down. “Delphinium took Sylvia from you? She didn’t need you anymore? That’s what this is all about?”
“Del had no right to go around messing everything up. And that old creep had no business saving her. She should’ve died. That’s what happens to the weak. They’re supposed to die.”
This was starting to sound familiar. He’d heard this part of the argument before. This was the reply the messenger gave him when he asked it for a reason.
“Abominations,” he said. “A mistake to put right.”
“Exactly. One bad choice always leads to another. He saved her. She started saving others. There’s a reason the old witches are gone now. They were stupid. Like Del. They made bad choices. They could’ve lived like gods forever, but they wanted to live in peace with the rest of the stupid human race. And look what they got for it. They burned.”
“But you’re different?”
Her eyes flashed dangerously. “Of course I am.” Her left hand began to smolder. Fire dripped from her fingertips and singed the grass at her feet. “I’m the one who’ll be doing the burning.”
The ogres began to huff excitedly.
This wasn’t ideal. He didn’t need to get this girl worked up. He changed the subject: “I don’t get it. You just…hid out inside Sylvia’s head the whole time she was living with Desmond?”
She shrugged. “Whatever I may have thought of them, Sylvia was being well taken care of. And I couldn’t risk letting them know about me. Together, they were too strong for me. So I just retreated. I stayed locked up inside her for four years.” She gave him a cruel smile. “You know, she was actually starting to be happy.”
“Then why? Why come out now?”
Her smile vanished again. “Because Desmond Weizner was a selfish old man and a liar. He promised us power, but gave us nothing but fairy tales and parlor tricks.”
“Parlor tricks?”
He hadn’t realized that she was wearing a backpack until she slipped it off her shoulders. It was black, like the hoodie, and small, discrete. She unzipped it and withdrew a book. It was very old, with a ratty, leather cover emblazoned with the faded image of a coiled snake. “He kept the real magic in here.”
Grandpa’s spell book.
It wasn’t lost in the fire after all. It was stolen.
“Magic strong enough to set me and Sylvia free again and make sure none of those freaks ever bothered us again.”
Eric decided not to press his luck by asking what made Del and the others “freaks” and not her. This chick had even more problems than he’d realized.
“I’d only planed on taking the book that night, but the old fart woke up before I could get it out of his room. Lucky for me, he never expected me to have so much power.”
“So you murdered him. You torched the house. You made up the story of the magic man’s return.”
“I fed a few lies to Sylvia and she took it from there. Easy.”
Eric stared at the book. The image of the snake. He’d seen that before, too. Also in the water. He had no idea what it meant at the time. “So you had the book. Why not leave with it? Why come back?”
“I intended to. Del even made it easy on me by sending us all away. I spent the past six months studying it, teaching myself to read it. But I didn’t find any magic. All I found was nonsense about psychic energy, mythical gateways between worlds and some kind of astrology crap.”
“Bummer,” he said. But that part about mythical gateways sounded interesting. After all, wasn’t that what the fissure was that he explored last year? A gateway of sorts between two worlds?
Thunder crashed overhead again. A hard gust of wind threatened to push him over. The smoke burned his eyes.
“I did manage to learn a few things,” she confessed when the storm eased again. She gestured at the ogres. “Like making new friends.”
Eric glanced at the ogre on his left. It grunted, as if excited to be acknowledged. “I thought he told everyone it was impossible to summon imps and ogres.”
She shrugged. “It might be. These aren’t really ogres. They’re something else. A kind of psychic manifestation. You wouldn’t understand. It’s complicated.”
“Right. I probably wouldn’t.” He didn’t care much for this attitude she was giving him, acting like he was too stupid to keep up with the more complex stuff. Kids these days learned to make an army of monsters to follow their every command and suddenly they thought they were geniuses. “But this stuff wasn’t good enough for you? Making monsters is lame?”
“Compared to the power he was hiding from us? Yes. And it’s all right here.” She lifted the book for him to see. “But it’s locked. The old bastard… I have no idea how he did it, but he somehow tethered this book to the coven. The entire coven. We can only read it if we do it together. And of course my sisters…” She spoke the word like it was vile. “Well, they weren’t likely to do that with me, were they? If they found out I had the book…”
“They probably wouldn’t,” he agreed.
“No, my only choice was to sever the locks. And there was only one way I knew of to do that.”
“You had to kill them.”
“Correct.”
Eric’s shook his head. All of this was about a stupid spell book? She’d murdered four people! “I thought you were doing this because they were abominations.”
“No. That’s why I hated them.” She lifted the book a little higher. “This is why I’m going to kill them.”
Another boom shook the farmhouse. He heard screams from within. When he looked back, he saw that it was on fire.
“Not much time left,” said Sissy.
Eric turned to look at her again and saw that she was grinning.
“You plan on keeping me talking until they’re all dead?”
His heart sank. She was right. He thought he was stalling for time, trying to find the key to defeating her, but it was she who was stalling, keeping him busy while her monsters whittled away at Delphinium’s defenses.
And why not? Her dreams had obviously warned her that he was dangerous, but if she could keep him standing here, listening to her crazy talk while her pets tore down the doors and slaughtered the coven, then she’d still beat him. Even if she didn’t get what she wanted from the book, at least her twisted revenge would be complete.
But he still needed to keep her talking. Somewhere in all this insanity, he was convinced there was a key. He just needed to keep digging through her warped story, searching for that one missing detail. If he could only get her to tell him exactly what he needed to know…
“I guess we have to,” he told her, willing himself to look calm even though he was screaming inside. “Because I still don’t get it.”
She rolled her eyes. Of course you don’t, her expression said.
He really wanted to smack this pompous witch upside her head. She was starting to piss him off. But he didn’t dare let her see it. “Why all the runaround? Why the whole ‘magic man’ business?”
She looked at him as if he were crazy. “You don’t just attack a witch coven. If Del had known it was me, she would’ve stopped me a long time ago. She would’ve made sure I’d never find them, no matter how much I searched. But as long as she thought I was someone else…”
“She’d never know where to look,” Eric realized. “She’d keep hunting for someone who wasn’t there. A ghost.”
She smiled again. “Exactly. And I’d be free to go ou
t and find all the sisters. Holly and Charlotte were easy. I knew exactly where to look for both of them.”
She would have. With no way to know that their enemy knew them so well, both of them had continued to live as they had before they split up. Holly found work in the club and Charlotte had sought a hospital where she could volunteer.
“You put that thing in the hospital basement,” he realized.
“Actually, it was already there. I just…woke it up. You’d be amazed what you’ll find out there in the world if you actually go looking for it.”
Eric shrugged. “You might be surprised how un-amazed I’d be.”
She considered him for a moment. “Maybe I would…”
More screams drifted from the farmhouse. It took everything he had to ignore it.
Sissy continued her story as if nothing was happening: “Marie was even easier. She always trusted me. I’d convinced her to secretly keep in touch. So I knew where she was all along.”
She’d trusted her? That was terrible. Eric felt another hot lump forming in his gut.
“I’d even located Marissa, so I knew where half of them were. But then it all went wrong when I found Regina. She caught me, realized something was wrong. She always was paranoid… I couldn’t risk Del finding out, so I shut her up. It was surprisingly satisfying.”
Eric shivered. “And Marie?”
“I knew Del would be calling us back soon now that one of us had died. She’d immediately assume the magic man had found us. So I had to work fast. And I couldn’t have her blabbing that we’d been in touch.”
Eric shook his head. This was too much. She was talking about it like it was nothing. But it was murder!
“I went to find Holly next. But you were already there.”
“You were there to kill her.”
“Of course. But when I saw you, I knew I was too late. I left and torched the motel room, let her think I’d died. Then I had to change strategies.”
As thunder rolled over them again, he recalled her standing in the upstairs window of the Wordsley House, just watching them. And then again in the forest.
“And the new strategy was to not kill us?”
“An interesting thing, really. I realized it after you’d taken Holly back to her and while you were fighting my imps at that women’s shelter. I’d intended to simply torch the place while everyone was distracted, but then I saw that I was becoming more powerful.”
“More powerful?”
“I can’t believe I didn’t see it sooner. As Del’s flock began to return to her, her spells grew stronger, and since I was still, technically, a part of that flock, my power grew as well.”
Eric stood up straighter, surprised. “She was feeding you energy?”
Now her smile spread. “That was the best part. She had no idea. She just kept pushing, feeding those spells, and the whole time, I was soaking it up, turning it against her.”
More screams. A loud crash. Another barrage of gunfire. Their last stand, for all he knew.
But Eric ignored it all.
Finally, he understood. With no way to know that she was dealing with one of her own sisters, Delphinium couldn’t possibly understand why her spells weren’t working. She thought the magic man was all-powerful, but the truth was that her magic was working against itself. The spells meant to push the magic man away had to work against the spells meant to protect her sisters.
He looked down at the ground, his mind racing. Then he met her green eyes again. “You mean, the more magic energy she pours into her protective spells, the stronger it makes you?”
She looked so smug. “Exactly.”
“Well, that’s all I really need to know, I guess.”
She blinked. The arrogance drained from her face in an instant. “What?”
“Isabelle.”
The girl jerked her head, looking around. “Who?”
“Tell Delphinium the magic man is using her magic against her. Tell her to turn it off. All of it.”
Sissy’s eyes flared. “No! What are you doing? Who are you talking to? Stop that!”
“Too late. Message sent.” In fact, the message had been sent the moment it occurred to him what he needed to do. He hadn’t needed to actually tell Isabelle anything. Chances were good that she’d already called Delphinium and begun to explain what she needed to do.
He only said it aloud because he wanted the satisfaction of letting Sissy know precisely how he had beaten her.
Of course, now he had to deal with a really pissed-off witch.
She actually growled at him. “Tear his face off!” she demanded.
The two ogres closed in on him.
He turned and plunged the dagger into the chest of the nearest of the two, but it seized his arms and lifted him off the ground as if he weighed nothing at all. A second later, the other monster’s huge hand closed around his face.
Chapter Forty-Three
Dangling four feet off the ground with one ogre’s fists clenched like vices around his arms while the other closed its meaty fingers around his face, Eric thought for sure he was dead this time. The dagger was still buried in one ogre’s chest, but it wasn’t going to do him any good. He felt his head being pulled backward, the bones in his neck popping. He kicked at the monsters, but it was useless. He was at their mercy now.
But his message for Delphinium must have made it through because the ogres abruptly dropped him and then staggered backward and fell to the ground, where they immediately began to smoke.
The thunder and lightning stopped. The wind died down. The smoke began to clear.
The yard grew quiet.
Sissy stood there, staring at the countless, smoldering corpses of her once powerful army, her green eyes wide with disbelief. “What did you do?”
Eric rose to his feet. “I’m pretty sure I just checkmated you.”
She turned her eyes on him now and they filled with rage. “You… How did you…?”
“My little secret,” he told her. “Just like the ones in that book, you’ll never learn it.”
She dropped the book and screamed. An imp erupted from the ground at her feet and launched itself at Eric.
He seized its enormous ears with both hands, prepared for a fight, but the creature burst into smoke and ash as soon as he pulled on them. He took a step back, surprised, then looked up at Sissy. “Projections,” he said. Like the ones the cowboy had attacked him with last month. “Nothing but fragile thought forms. It was only Delphinium’s spells that gave them enough power to remain solid.” It made sense. No wonder they’d only grown stronger as the night went on. With each witch he brought home, Delphinium increased the power of her spells, increasing the flow of energy into the blanket and in turn feeding it to Sissy, who funneled it into these things. After he brought Poppy home, she could create an ogre. After adding Cierra, she could create swarms of them. She could even create a giant. And when all the witches had returned, she obtained the power to create an endless army of horrors.
No wonder she kept letting them escape. The monsters were only supposed to scare the girls into rushing home to Delphinium so they could whip her up a little more power.
Although he suspected that they might have been serious about trying to kill him.
“Pitiful,” he told her. “I’ve seen much better.”
Who’s the stupid one now? he thought.
She threw her hands toward him and fire erupted from her palms.
It occurred to him now, far too late, that not all of her powers depended on the energy of the coven’s spells. He should’ve known better. After all, she hadn’t been feeding off Delphinium’s blankets when she murdered Desmond and torched the coven’s house.
Eric turned away, shielding his face, sure that he’d finally pushed his luck too far. But nothing happened. The flames parted harmlessly around him, as if something were standing between him and her.
When the fire died and he dared to look, he found her perplexed eyes staring at him, trying
to understand why he wasn’t a smoldering corpse. Then her gaze shifted to something behind them, and vile hatred filled her face.
“Hi, Del,” she said.
Eric turned. Delphinium was standing behind him, her arms outstretched, her cell phone still clutched in one hand. Now that the “magic man’s” plug had been pulled, Isabelle had sent her to save him from the crazy witch. Clearly, it was one of her spells that had just saved him from being turned into a fire-roasted English teacher.
The expression on her face was hard to read. She looked like she was cycling through a dozen different emotions, trying to find the one that was most appropriate.
“Careful,” Eric warned her. “She’s not who you think she is. She’s crazy.”
Behind her, Holly, Cierra and Alicia emerged from the house and ran toward them.
“Stay back,” Delphinium ordered.
“What?” said Sissy. “No hugs?”
“What have you done?” Delphinium demanded. “Why?”
“Why?” She sounded as if the question were utterly stupid. “Because it’s all a lie. Grandpa went on and on about magic, but he kept all the real magic to himself.” She gestured toward the dropped book. “It’s all right there in his notes. Our ‘gifts’ were never real magic. ‘Psychic energy manipulation.’ That’s what he called it. It’s all in our heads.”
“It was never a lie!” argued Delphinium. “He told us as much. There’s a difference between the old magic and our gifts. We all knew that.”
But Sissy shook her head. “No! He made us believe in magic, but his magic was nothing but a lie!”
Charlotte and Marissa rushed out onto the porch. Norval’s Dirty Bunny army crowded behind them. They’d already managed to douse the fires, saving the farmhouse.
“Sylvia…” pleaded Delphinium.
“Sylvia isn’t here!” snapped Sissy. “She’s dead!” She lifted her arms again and a fireball erupted between them.
Delphinium wasn’t impressed. The flames melted away before they reached her. But the fire was only a distraction. Two imps materialized on either side of her and leapt onto her.
