Have Stakes, Will Travel

by Faith Hunter

Big Evan said, “See you around Jane,” and opened my car door for me. I got in. Evan came around to his side and got in, his bulk making the old rattletrap rock. Jane keyed on her used Yamaha motorcycle. And Chauncey caved. “Wait,” he yelled. Jane turned off her bike. We got out of the car. To Evan, he said, “I can’t afford the fee you named. I can go, maybe half that.”

  Evan and he dickered for a few minutes over price and I had to turn away. My services were going to cost a lot more money than I thought they were worth, but they finally settled on a four-figure sum that meant I could get a new refrigerator and put something toward that new car we’ve been saving for.

  “I’ll draw up the contract,” Chauncey said. “I can fax or e-mail it over in two hours.” He looked at me and said, “Can you get rid of the haint today?”

  I almost said yes, but Jane shook her head, very slightly. Right. Negotiation. “By Wednesday,” I said. “Sooner, if possible, but I can make no promises.”

  “Okay.” He stuck his hand out at Jane. “Deal.”

  Jane pointed at me. “Your deal is with the lady and her oversized galumph.”

  * * *

  We spent the rest of the morning flying spells. I write incantations, conjures, spells—which are pretty much, but not always, the same thing—out in longhand on legal pads. When I reach a point where the spell stops working, I fold it into a paper airplane and fly it across the room. Big Evan balls his up and plays trash-can basketball. What we wanted was a spell that would keep us safe in the house, and a totally separate, but overlapping conjure that would allow us to see the moment in time when the warding/keep-away spell transferred to the stethoscope. That transference had caused all the house’s problems. A spell that should have died had instead mutated and found a way to persist long after its creator was gone. It was going to be tricky, and that was even before we tried to dismantle the spell and free the house.

  We spent lunchtime in the Hainbridge Historical Society looking at photos of the people who had lived in the house, and photos of the townspeople, so if we happened to see one or two of them when we went searching for the pivotal, instigating event, we could call them by name. Then Evan and I went home for dinner and explained to Angelina that we’d be going out. She wasn’t happy at being left behind, but when Regan and Amelia showed up carrying an armload of old movies on CDs, a bag of popcorn big enough to feed an entire family for a month, hair color to add blond streaks to their reddish hair, a dozen shades of nail polish, and a bottle of wine, she perked right up. I was jealous of the girls’ night I’d miss, but I was smart enough not to say so. We left the three watching the opening credits of an old black and white version of Cinderella, the scent of popcorn filling the house and the volume on the TV turned up high enough to rattle the walls.

  * * *

  At dusk, Evan and I entered the house, Jane behind us. I knew she had other things to do—tonight was belly-dance class—but here she was, curious as any cat. And she had brought a cooler with colas, iced tea, and sandwiches, two battery-operated lights, a first aid kit, and a bedroll. She was dressed for business in heavyweight denim jeans with stakes and blades strapped on her waist and thighs. When she saw me staring at the pile of supplies and at her silver-plated knives she shrugged. “Insurance, not that I expect to need any of it.”

  Evan, who was carrying a basket filled with candles, a batch of dried herbs, and a small camp stove for heating water, just nodded. “Good thinking. Glad to have you watching our backs.”

  It was the first time Evan had shown open approval of Jane, and she ducked her head to hide a pleased smile. I decided they were going to play nice, letting me concentrate on the seeing spell Evan and I had settled on. The math of any spell was hard—altering physical laws by will and intent was a job fraught with danger and the likelihood of mistakes. A loss of concentration, a stray worry, and everything could fall apart—or blow up, which was rare, but a lot more scary.

  First thing I did was to damp-mop the foyer, concentrating on the area of floor directly in front of the parlor. Then, while the floor dried, I cleansed the house with a stick of burning dried sage. Once the house was cleansed I asked Jane, “Did you remember to bring your shirt?”

  She lifted her brows and handed me a Ziploc bag with her filthy T-shirt from the day before. “You gonna tell me why you need my dirty laundry?”

  “I’m going to shake the dust into a bowl and give it back.”

  “Least you could do is wash it first,” she grumbled. At my expression she lifted a shoulder and added, “Just sayin’.”

  I shook my head and drew a circle about five feet across on the wood floor with white chalk and set a cut crystal bowl in the center. I filled it with bottled water and put the empty in my bag. Using a compass, Evan set new, white, pillar candles inside the circle at the cardinal points, and draped silver crosses around each. Outside, it was getting dark, making it very hard to see in the foyer. No electricity would be used tonight. Jane sat on the bottom step out of the way, her knees drawn up and her arms around her ankles, as Evan lit the candles. I stepped into the circle and closed it with the piece of chalk. Evan backed away toward Jane and set the candle at magnetic north, which was to my left side and back a bit, the parlor opening facing east.

  This was to be my ritual tonight, because as an earth witch, my magics were closest to the green magics of the spell we were trying to get a good look at. Evan, an air witch, could only offer support. I gathered my white dress close and sat behind the bowl, cross-legged, the bowl of water between my knees. I opened the plastic bag and held Jane’s shirt over the bowl, shaking it gently, steadily. Dust from the parlor sprinkled onto the still surface of the water. I balled the shirt back up and sealed it into the bag, tucking it under my knee.

  Satisfied, I nodded to Evan. From the bag he had carried, he lifted a silver bell with no clapper and the silver mallet that was used to ring it. He also brought out his father’s old, leather-bound Bible—the book Old Man Trueblood had been holding when he was accepted into the church and baptized, when he married, when each of his children were born, and when he died. I wasn’t much of a religious person—nowhere near as spiritual as Jane—but even I knew this book had power.

  I took a deep breath and exhaled, repeating the clarifying exercise twice more to settle myself. Everything I did tonight would be in threes. I closed my eyes and nodded to Evan. As I opened my mouth he rang the bell, the clear, pure tone and my words overlapping each time I said the word bell. “Bell, book, and candle. Bell, book, and candle. Bell, book, and candle.” The three tones seemed to ring on, echoing through the empty house, and continued, three times more with the first word of the next three lines. “Dust to dust, through time to now. Dust to dust, through time to now. Dust to dust, through time to now.”

  I opened my eyes, and without pausing went on into the next three lines, knowing that Evan had the cadence now and would keep up with me, ringing the bell with each first word, even though the method of lines was changing.

  “Time of warding. Time of blood. Time of attack.

  “Time of betrayal. Time of undead. Time of change.

  “Time of vampire. Time of transference. Time of death.”

  I fell silent, the bell chimes shimmering through the empty house. As the last tone faded, the water between my knees seemed to brighten. And so did the floor of the parlor. In the far corner where the stethoscope had rested for so long, a soft green glow spiraled up, a mist full of light. Close to the opening of the foyer where the stethoscope rested now, a twin, green, featherlike luminosity rose like smoke, twining and twisting. The mist rose from the floor like smoke, meeting the stained ceiling overhead, pooling against the high corners before spreading and reaching slowly toward the center of the room, overhead. Both tendrils reached the center at the same instant and touched, tentative, like delicate green fingers of budding desire.

  A single fixture appeared in the center of the ceiling, an old-fashioned electric ceiling light, bright in the dimness
. The magical light of the spell merged with the old light and with its other half and curled back on itself, undulating across the ceiling, to brighten the room, revealing furnishings as they had once been. Where the milky light fell down, back to the floor, tendrils twirled and danced and revealed a moment out of time.

  But this scene was not like any time-spell I had ever seen. It wasn’t misty or uncertain, no dreamlike underpinnings or unfinished supports. It was crisp and clear and certain, full of sharp edges. This was not the result of a seeing spell. This was something different, something I had never seen before.

  I had been wrong. The spell tied to the stethoscope wasn’t finished. The spell had, instead, created some kind of bizarre bubble universe, a pocket universe, a part of real time, sectioned off, sealed away from the world the rest of us knew, or maybe looping around and around over and over again.

  Light blossomed out, opening like a flower in a segment of high-speed photography, to display the room as it had once been. The walls were wallpapered a deep blood-rose shade. The furniture was from the late nineteen-thirties or forties with a velvet upholstered couch in a vibrant wine shade against the far wall, a wheeled tea tray before it, a teapot wrapped in a quilted cozy. Wing chairs were aligned to catch the heat from the fire burning merrily in the fireplace. A card table stood in one corner and a bookshelf across from it. An old-fashioned phonograph, the windup kind with an ornate brass horn, was on a side table, and a squeaky song came from it, a man’s voice sounding hollow, yet inordinately cheery.

  A woman sat in a wing chair, a basket of yarn at her feet, a steaming teacup on a side table. She was small with dark-auburn hair, dressed in a robe in a deep shade of navy, over a white nightgown. She was knitting with blue yarn that trailed up from a basket with large skeins, the pile of finished garment on her far side. She seemed to hear a noise and looked up, turning. Her eyes widened, mouth opened. A form fell upon her, the pop of vampiric speed sounding in the room like a gunshot. It was a child, dressed in dark pants and nothing else, his skin the dead-white of the three-day-dead. The vampire child, small but unnaturally strong, leaped, grabbed up the woman and spun her in her chair. She screamed, fear and pain in the harsh note.

  My mouth opened to murmur a rejection, but I stopped before it left my mouth. It might affect the efficacy of . . . of everything. They whirled, caught in the remnants of the vampire child’s attacking speed. His fangs latched upon her neck, tearing. Her scream stopped, even as the two of them fell back. There was none of the tenderness of the vampire wooing his dinner, none of the pleasure I had heard could come from a feeding. A single strong sucking sounded and he started to drink, even as they fell into the far corner.

  The woman lifted her knitting needles. She stabbed the child.

  He screamed, the awful keening note of the undead brought to true death.

  I shuddered, knowing I could do nothing to stop this violence. Terrible, horrible violence. A woman and undead child in mortal combat. No wonder the warding spell had gone horribly wrong. It had never been intended to protect against a child, no matter how feral.

  Tears started in my eyes and trailed down my cheeks. I caught a breath that ached deep inside. But it wasn’t over.

  Another pop sounded. Louder than the first. A man wearing an old-fashioned gray suit and carrying a black medical bag appeared in the room. He dropped the bag and pulled the woman and child apart. Blood pumped from a deep tear in her throat. Scarlet stained her white gown and splattered across the room. The child fell, a wooden knitting needle in his right side, the other in his chest, just to the left of center, a stake, positioned and angled in what looked like a deadly strike.

  The woman’s blood pumped over the man’s chest. A stethoscope hung there—the Kerr Symballophone that now rested in the room. The child’s blood splattered as well, a few small drops hitting the man, his face looking fully human, and full of agony.

  The three fell against the far wall, knocking over a small table. The man roared a single word, “No!”, vamping out so fast I couldn’t follow the action. He fell to the floor beneath the two, cradling the woman and pulling the stakes from the child. He tore his own wrist and dribbled his blood into the child’s mouth. The vampire scooped the woman’s blood into the mouth of the child as well.

  But it was clear the undead child was true-dead. And the woman died as I watched, her pupils growing wide, her face going slack.

  The vampire screamed, his fangs nearly two inches long, lifting to the light. His bellow was powerful. As he sat there, the two bodies embraced on his lap, the stethoscope slid to the floor. And he seemed to look right at me.

  The vision of the spell faded.

  From behind me, Jane said, “Well that sucked.”

  * * *

  “The only thing that makes sense,” I said, “is for it to be a bubble universe. That’s the only way he could see me looking at him.”

  Evan finished chewing before answering. We were sitting in an all-night Taco Bell, and between them, Jane and Evan had devoured a table full of tacos, burritos, gorditos, and chalupas. Crumbs and wadded papers were everywhere. It looked as if a platoon of four-year-olds had had a food fight. “If it’s a bubble universe, then what’s powering it?” Evan asked when he swallowed. “Bubble universes—pocket universes—are theoretical in physics and unheard of in magic since Tomás de Torquemada’s time. And even then they were hearsay as much as heresy. No one’s ever claimed to have made one, or been freed from one, or even found one.” He picked up the last taco. “Bubble universes usually have their own time span, linear but not exactly like ours, like in the fairy tales where time runs differently in Fairy from human Earth. This is more like a time loop, where things happen over and over again, in which case he wouldn’t have seen you unless your viewing the loop disrupted it somehow.” Evan shrugged. “Of course, the vampire could have been looking at something on the floor in his time, not seeing you.”

  “He saw me,” I said. “Totally, totally saw me. That electric eye-contact thing.”

  Jane was sitting across from us, lounging back, one jeans-clad leg up on the seat beside her, her weapons stowed in our trunk. “He saw Molly,” she said. “No doubt. I was sitting behind her and I felt it too. Vamp zingers. When they vamp out, you can feel their gazes.” She sucked Pepsi through a straw and made a face. Jane liked Coke; Evan liked Pepsi better. The two had spent a friendly ten minutes arguing about the brands before the first part of the meal came. There had followed the silence of carnivores eating—the chomp of strong teeth and the crunch of bones—I mean tacos.

  “So if we figure out how to break the spell,” I said, “and reintegrate the bubble of time with our universe . . . can we save the witch?”

  “Molly,” Jane said gently. “She’s dead. She’s been dead since the little vamp tore her carotids out and the big vamp tried to save him instead of the witch.” When I looked confused, she explained, “The bigger vamp’s blood might have saved the witch, if he’d been fast enough. He made the wrong choice, and by not saving her, and by adding her blood and his son’s blood into the mix while the spell was trying to save her, he warped the spell and trapped himself in the bubble universe.”

  “Holy crap. That makes sense,” Evan said through a mouthful of taco.

  Jane and Evan shared a look that had volumes in it. “What?” I demanded. “No, don’t look at each other. Look at me. I do not need protecting. Tell me. What makes sense?”

  “The vamp isn’t dead,” Jane said, her brows drawing down as she thought it through.

  “Yeah,” Evan said, gesturing with the last bite of taco. “What she said. I’m guessing that his undead life is keeping the looped spell going, and if you break the spell, he’ll attack.”

  “And because his undead life force has been powering the spell, he’ll be hungry,” Jane said. “Like hungry for seventy years. That kinda hungry. He’ll be insane with hunger. He’ll have to be put down.” She shrugged by making a tossing gesture with the Pepsi cup. �
�I’ll do it, if needed. Gratis. Consider it my way of saying thanks for all the dinners.”

  “You bring the food half the time,” I said, putting asperity into my tone, feeling guilt worm under my skin. I knew how much Jane got paid to kill a vampire. I understood, logically, how dangerous it was. But unless we went back to Chauncey for money—which might look like a shakedown—that kind of money was not in the budget. Jane had to know that. And I really wanted to put the extra into savings for the new car. Hence the guilt.

  “Whatever. Gratis,” she said. “That’s my deal. Take it or leave it. And if you leave it, you can either find another vampire hunter or appeal to the vamp clan up in Asheville. I hear sane vamps are real sweeties.”

  “We’ll take it, Jane,” Evan said. “Thanks. So who was the witch?”

  “Beats me,” Jane said. “Molly?”

  I knew they were working together to protect me, and if I hadn’t been feeling like a thief, I’d have been gratified that they were working together on something. On anything. “Monique Ravencroft,” I said. “She disappeared in the early 1940s. No one has seen or heard of her since.”

  “Ahhh,” Jane said. “Her, yeah. Makes sense. Her house was treated as a crime scene, with signs of a struggle and blood at the scene. But there was no body and no one was ever charged for her murder,” Jane said. When I raised my brows at her, she shrugged with the cup again and said, “I did a little research on the house. Found a cold case, a suspended investigation, at that address. No leads, and the principle investigator has been dead nearly fifty years.”

  Evan and she locked gazes again and I said, “So?”

  “Up to you, galumph,” Jane said.

  Evan heaved a breath and said, “If it’s a bubble universe, and if we release the vampire, and if Jane kills him, and if we leave a woman’s dead body from forty years ago, and a dead child vampire—”

  Jane interrupted, “If we close this, it could leave a mess. Unless we film it, it’ll be our word against, well, nothing. And whether we film it or not, I’ll have to report the killing of a supposedly sane vamp to the MOC of Asheville. And you’ll be called in to give witness.” Jane looked at Evan. “And you’ll be out of the closet. He’ll smell you’re a witch.”