by Ann Charles
“What makes you so certain?” she asked. “A lidérc is a deadly foe. Our family history has proven this.” She shook her head. “I think you should talk to Dominick and tell him you’re not going to catch his damned pet.”
“Absolutely not.” I didn’t even hesitate with that reply.
Doc grunted, leaving my side to go to the refrigerator.
“This is too big for you, baby girl,” she said. “We don’t know how to kill it, let alone catch it.”
“Not yet,” I clarified, “but tonight gave me some things to think about on that front.”
Now that my stomach was full and I had a couple of shots of courage in me thanks to Mexico’s wonderful blue agave plant, I was able to look back at what had happened earlier with less fear and more scrutiny.
“That’s my girl,” Natalie said, her eyes lit up with a take-no-prisoners gleam that I’d seen there many times before, especially when my sister, aka the Bitch from Hell, was in town. “What do you think the lidérc meant when it told you that it had played with your kind before?”
While we’d chowed down some pizza, I’d filled everyone in on what had happened in my wacky world during the séance from when I’d first pictured the candle flame until I’d opened my eyes and found myself back in Jerry’s office. Since I’d started my tale, there’d been a lot of shared frowns and worried brows, except for Natalie, who’d just looked pissed off throughout the story.
“If I were to guess,” I remarked, leaning back against the cupboard door behind me, “I’d say it probably attached to a previous Executioner when her guard was down.”
“And then what?”
Then what? Oh yeah, I’d forgotten that Natalie hadn’t been with us on New Year’s Eve when we’d read in one of my family history volumes how some of my ancestors had tried to take on a lidérc and failed catastrophically.
We’d learned that night how it was impossible for the Hungarian devils to latch onto an Executioner for any length of time—unlike with human hosts—due to some sort of self-destruct wiring in our genetic makeup that spurred a disturbingly speedy and horrifically violent death … for the Executioner, not the lidérc.
Within an hour of the lidérc infestation, one Executioner’s skin had blistered and turned black. By the end of the day, she’d burned alive from the inside out. A second example had told the story of the first Executioner’s twin, who had tracked down and tried to slay the same lidérc that had killed her sister. When she found it, the devil had managed to attach to her, too. Shortly thereafter, she’d stabbed her own eyes out and then tried to claw the skin off her face.
According to Aunt Zoe, who had been reading to us about the demise of the twins that night, there was a happy note at the end of the whole tragic tale. The magistra, who had chronicled the terrible events, explained that the blood of the last Executioner was used to coat her own offspring, which somehow protected them from the lidérc, allowing our family line to continue so more Executioners could be born to fight and slay.
I still wasn’t sure that coating-her-kids-with-her-own-blood detail could be labeled “happy.”
Aunt Zoe beat me to answering Natalie, explaining what had happened when the lidérc in our family’s history had attached to each Executioner. While the two of them had their heads together, I turned to Cooper, who was drying the silverware now. “Natalie told me that right after I went under, the real ghost of Jane showed up in her usual gruesome glory.”
He nodded, frowning at his reflection in the kitchen window. “I fucked up tonight.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I should have known from the start that the first apparition I saw wasn’t the real Jane. The glitching was a dead giveaway.”
“Dead giveaway?” I grinned. “Nice pun, Detective.” When he didn’t crack even a tiny smile in return, I scowled at him. “How could you have known the glitching was a clue ahead of time, Cooper? This was a new experience for all of us.”
He opened the silverware drawer, his movements abrupt as he tossed the utensils into their slots. “This ghost-seeing business is so fucking baffling. I don’t know how Nyce handles it without wanting to shoot something.”
Yeah, me either. Personally, I was feeling the need to let loose my internal juggernaut and beat the living hell out of something—preferably that Hungarian devil, but Rex would do in a pinch.
I focused on Doc, who’d returned with two beers from the fridge. He opened them both, and set one on the counter next to Cooper. “Violet’s right,” Doc told him.
I grinned. “I like the sound of those two words coming from your lips, Candy Cane.”
Cooper glanced at Doc. “Do I want to know why she calls you that?”
“Nope.” Doc leaned against the counter next to me, and met my smile with a lined brow. “I agree with your aunt. You need to talk to Dominick.”
Sighing, I shook my head. “He’s not going to let me back out of our deal and you know it. Not unless I find someone of equal worth to Aunt Zoe I can offer in her place.” Based on my past conversations with Dominick, there was nobody else who could fill my aunt’s shoes at the moment.
“Give the bastard your sister,” Natalie threw out, her forehead furrowed. Aunt Zoe’s tales of old appeared to have agitated her some. Heck, they’d sure made me squirm.
“He doesn’t want my sister any more than I do,” I told her.
Besides, Susan was still down on some Caribbean island trying to untangle me from a fake marriage to a dead guy. I sort of needed Satan’s concubine to live long enough to fix her fuckup so that I was free to marry somebody else eventually. I looked at Doc. If the option ever surfaced, of course.
When he returned my stare, I glanced down at my hands. Then again, I could be dead before that happened and none of this marriage business would matter anymore.
Why me? Why the hell did I have to be the one to do this killing crap?
“I didn’t say anything about backing out of your deal,” Doc said, taking a long draw from his beer.
“Then why would I need to talk to Dominick?”
“To tell him you need more time. This devil of his is tricky. We need to plan how to catch it without losing another Executioner in the process.” His mouth tightened as he searched my face. “You came too close to the cliff’s edge tonight, Killer.”
“But I made it back.”
“With help,” Aunt Zoe clarified.
“Exactly. We’re a team, remember?” I looked from my aunt, to Natalie, to Cooper, and then Doc, holding the longest on him because that “team” idea was something he’d been trying to drill into me for months. “Together, we will persevere.”
Aunt Zoe scoffed. “Perseverance in this case is just the courage to ignore the obvious wisdom of turning back.”
“Past a certain point, it’s really just self-delusion,” Cooper added.
Natalie scowled at both of them. “Come on, you two. Perseverance is the ability to climb out of bed every day knowing a surefire ass-kicking awaits you.” She pointed at me. “Vi does that, which takes cojones made of titanium, right, Doc?”
He chuckled. It was the first time he’d cracked a smile since I’d come back from the Hellhole. “Don’t get me started talking about Killer’s cojones. I could pen many sonnets about them, especially after hearing about the devils she faced at the other end of that tunnel.”
From what Natalie told me earlier while we waited in my SUV for the guys to close up Calamity Jane Realty and join us in the parking lot—well, not Cornelius, who was still worn out from his post-Prudence high and had wanted to go back to bed instead of joining us at my aunt’s—shit had gone haywire in Jerry’s office as soon as I’d gone into the dark, starting with the closet door slamming shut.
Doc had come out of his medium trance almost immediately after the door closed and rushed over to me. He’d told the rest of them that I’d gone completely off radar, cursing up a storm about the fact, and then he’d tried to get me to come back.
>
Officially, I was still sitting in the chair in the center of the floor lost somehow in my own head, but Natalie said that from their side of my “thick skull,” it was like I was in a coma. No amount of calling my name or prodding me to return could lure me back.
Cornelius had rushed upstairs to his apartment at that point to see if he had some sort of paranormal tool in his voodoo toolbox that might help Doc find me in the dark and bring me back. As a side note, I wasn’t surprised that Cornelius had a voodoo toolbox. It had probably been handed down to him from his grandmother, who was a renowned seer from Louisiana, and I suspected a voodoo priestess of some sort, or something even scarier.
While Cornelius was gone, Jane had shown up out in the hallway. This time when Cooper saw her it was the real Jane—the bloody mess version that he was used to seeing. She motioned for him to follow her out front, which he did along with Natalie. Once there, they found a new message written on the whiteboard in big red letters: The pretender will kill her!
When they’d returned to Doc with that message, he decided to go back “inside” immediately and keep searching for me. Before Doc worked his Oracle magic, Cornelius returned with some special “paranormal” magnet that had been blessed by a voodoo doctor. He claimed it would help Doc find the black tourmaline stone I had and, therefore, me.
At that point I’d cut in on Nat’s rehash with, “A freaking magnet? What the hell? Did he hit his head somewhere between Jerry’s office and the upstairs apartment?”
She’d laughed and explained that per Cornelius the opaque black tourmalines, like the one he’d given me before the séance started, belonged to the Schorl species. This particular species of gems owed its coloring to high concentrations of iron along with two other metals she couldn’t remember. Measurements of the gem had shown that the opaque black ones were the most magnetic of all varieties of tourmalines.
In short, Cornelius had tethered me, as he’d mentioned earlier. Only he’d hitched me to a magnet instead of himself.
After that, Natalie said that Cornelius had started doing his humming thing. Then he and Doc had both gone back under to search for me, leaving her and Cooper to keep trying to pull me out via verbal persuasion.
Doc had filled me in on the rest of what had happened while he was driving me to Aunt Zoe’s place, opting to leave the Picklemobile parked behind Calamity Jane Realty for the night.
Apparently, until I crawled out of that hole in the wall, I had been completely hidden from him and Cornelius’s voodoo magnet. Doc wondered if maybe the rock-lined tunnel I’d told him about had run an effective interference, but he couldn’t be sure about his theory until he saw it for himself. Whether or not the lidérc had known the underground tunnel would hide me from anyone searching the dark for me was an unknown. Doc thought it might be possible, but that suggested there was pre-planning involved by the lidérc. If that were the case, it would mean the damned devil had been figuring out a way to trap and remove me from the equation for a while now.
As soon as Doc felt the pull from the tourmaline, he was able to find me and quickly realized how deep in shit I was. He had to act quickly and make a path for me to escape, which he did, but according to Doc, he’d taken too long and almost lost me. He was also taking responsibility for us having the séance in the first place, claiming that he should have listened to his gut and had us wait.
At that point, I’d gaped at him for several seconds and then told him to quit hogging all of the blame. We each had a part in the event—well, maybe not Natalie, who’d only come to the office to celebrate spurring Rex’s allergy attack.
I pointed out that none of us had suspected the lidérc would hunt me down rather than the reverse. I added that as far as I was concerned, this whole ordeal had been a necessary evil in order to help us understand how dangerous the damned devil was and learn more about it firsthand to prepare for the next hunt—this time with me hounding it. Besides, Doc had been key to me escaping in the end.
Tonight’s adventure and some good tequila had certainly changed my attitude about the lidérc. My reason for catching it now had little to do with Dominick’s threat regarding Aunt Zoe. I wanted to nab that smoky sucker because I was pissed at the trick it had played on me. Even more, I didn’t like how it had ganged up on me down in that basement with those other two fiends.
I was an Executioner, and it was time I acted like it. I opened my mouth to tell my “teammates” this very thing, but Layne strolled into the kitchen before I could get a word out.
“Hey, Mom,” he said, heading for the Betty Boop cookie jar sitting on the table. He lifted the lid. “I was thinking about—”
“No more cookies tonight, Layne,” I said, interrupting him before he stuck his hand in the cookie jar. “After the pizza and ice cream, you’ll be up all night with an upset stomach.”
He sighed with all of the drama of a teenage girl and replaced the lid. He started to turn toward me and then stopped, looking at the rough drawing I’d made earlier while telling the others about the arches I’d seen in that tunnel between the Hellhole and the other building’s basement.
“Hey!” He held up the paper. “Are you guys talking about Uncle Quint?”
I tilted my head, wondering what had given him that idea. “No. Why would you ask that?”
He pointed at the drawing. “Because this is a corbel vault.” When I frowned at him in response, he added, “The corbel vault is an arch used by several ancient civilizations to support the roofs of temples, including the Maya people.”
Ah, that was why he’d brought up my brother. Quint was heading down to the Yucatan soon to do some photojournalist-related work at one of the archaeological dig sites down there. Layne, who wanted to be like his uncle when he grew up, had been studying the Maya people ever since he’d learned about Quint’s next adventure.
“Ancient civilizations,” I said, exchanging raised eyebrows with Aunt Zoe.
Why would a tunnel with ancient arches be connected to a Hellhole underneath Calamity Jane Realty? I knew that Masterson and his ilk had been around for a long time, but was he “ancient”? Or was this something left over from even before his time?
“Where are your sister and Kelly?” I asked, distracting Layne for now.
“They’re upstairs practicing squealing.”
“Why would they be practicing that?” Natalie asked.
“Because they’re crazy girls whose screws have come loose,” he said, as if the answer were as plain as the nose on her face.
Doc laughed and held out his hand for a fist bump, which Layne gave with a proud grin in return.
“I like the way you shoot square, Layne,” Cooper said, eyeing Natalie with a grin.
She pointed at him. “Watch it, hot cop, or I’ll shoot you square in the derrière.”
“Why did she call you ‘hot cop,’ Coop?” Layne asked. “Did you get burned or something?”
“What were you going to tell me earlier?” I asked, changing the subject before Natalie answered that. “You said you were thinking about something. What was it?”
“I was thinking about that lidérc we talked about on New Year’s Eve.”
The blood drained from my face. I thought he’d been too engrossed in his television show to hear my whispered tale in between bites of pizza.
“Why would you be thinking about that right now?” Doc asked, wearing a poker face.
“Because I overheard somebody say its name during a commercial.”
Oh. Damn.
“What about the lidérc?” Aunt Zoe asked Layne.
He shrugged. “I just wondered what would happen if it looked at itself in a mirror.”
Aunt Zoe and I locked wide eyes.
The mirror! The old one with weird symbols on its frame in her workshop that had been handed down through our family for generations. The same one Mr. Black had seen last month and called a “special mirror,” saying something about it being a gateway. The very one Aunt Zoe had warned him not to t
ouch, saying that the time hadn’t seemed right to teach me how to use it yet.
Maybe, just maybe, Layne was onto something with that mirror idea.
“I saw a movie about a demon once,” Layne continued, oblivious that he’d stumbled onto a possible solution to a very big and dangerous problem. “When the demon looked in the mirror, it got distracted staring at itself. The hero was able to catch it inside the mirror and then drop it out a window where it shattered, and the demon died.”
Cooper shot me a hard glare. “You let him watch that movie Constantine?”
I raised my hands in defense. “Not knowingly.” I pointed toward the living room. “Aunt Zoe gets all sorts of channels. I’m a single parent. I can’t patrol him every waking moment.” I turned to Layne. “Why in the world are you watching shows about demons?”
He shrugged. “Harvey and I watched it together. He said there were no naked girls in it, so I could see it if I wanted to, and I did.” He grinned at Cooper and Doc. “It was really cool! There was this kid in it who was training to be just like …”
I spaced out on Layne’s movie highlights while finishing my drink in a couple of gulps. The tequila burned on the way down, making my chest warm.
Tomorrow morning Aunt Zoe and I were going to have a talk about that mirror. The time had come for her to teach me about that family heirloom so we could determine if it might help me catch the damned lidérc.
* * *
Later that night, I stood looking at the bruised face staring back at me in the bathroom mirror. The tequila’s liquid bravado had worn off mostly, leaving me bouncing back and forth between nail biting and swaggering. With the makeup all washed away, my black eye shined in the light. The purple, dark red, green, and yellow looked like a kaleidoscope tattooed on my skin. “Eat your heart out, Mona Lisa,” I joked and grabbed the dental floss from the drawer.
Layne and the girls were in bed, the latter still giggling off and on while the former had his nose buried in a new book he got from the library on medieval sorcerers. I swear, if I had not been there to witness that boy popping out of my birth canal, I’d think he was switched in the hospital nursery with someone else’s kid. Although his obsession with creatures and weapons did ring true for our family line.
