by David James
I mouthed, “Okay,” but didn’t move.
“Calum?” she touched my arm.
“Let’s go,” I said and started to run.
Chapter Fifteen
Heavy Blood Is Falling
-Calum-
The morning was quiet as death and just as dark. Clouds covered the rising sun in shades of desolate gray and across the sky lay a blanket of shadowed mist that smelled like rain.
“A storm is coming,” Kate said as we ran toward the Jeep and jumped inside. “It’s too quiet.”
“It just seems too easy,” I muttered. “I know Gae said Morphis should be gone until sunset, but where is everyone else? Where are all the Warriors that we heard fighting?”
Nervous chills drizzled down my back.
I thought, Where is my Dad?
“The Orieno can only stand in darkness, but we should still watch for your Dad; he’s something else entirely.” Kate gripped the wheel tighter. “But you’re right. Something’s not right. If all the Warrior’s are gone, I don’t know what we’ll do. And if Morphis has more Orieno on his side, it’ll be just like before. Everyone dead. Gone.”
I caught my reflection in the door’s mirror: Lightly tanned skin, dark hair, eyes like moonlight reflected in a deep sea. Everything about me looked the same as it was days ago, yet I didn’t recognize myself.
I thought of Mom and Tyler and didn’t think they would either.
I turned to face Kate and found her already looking at me with eyes filled with sad memories and grave possibilities.
She said, “It’s really just you and me now, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I said. “For now I think it is.”
Dust clouded behind the Jeep, swirling in our wake like billowing dirt fingers trying to pull us back as we rocketed down the mountain toward Ashfall.
“The sun is already so high in the sky,” Kate said. “We don’t have much time.”
“We’ll find a way, Kate,” I said, gazing up at the darkened, blue-kissed sky. Clouds rolled in from beyond the mountains, hiding the sun so it was mostly gone. “We have to.”
~
The steep road fell past tall trees and sharp cliffs, and slowly began to open onto a town that looked as though ghosts lived in every foreboding crack. Beyond, the mountains rose in uneven peaks, dark silhouettes.
“It’s been like this since my parents betrayed us,” Kate said, slowing as we got closer to the place where green met gray and died in an instant. “Ashfall is where most of that blood was spilled. The Order has tried to restore it but nothing works. No amount of magic can restore something touched by so much death.”
“Then why does the Woman of Prophecy still live here?” I asked.
Kate shrugged. “Witches are wildly different than enchanters, Calum. They are dark, unnaturally wicked creatures who use the blackest of blood magic, and find themselves in the darkest of places. Their magic is like a drug to them; they can’t stop once they start, and eventually it becomes all they are. If they stop using, they die. Besides, the Woman of Prophecy probably likes it here, surrounded by a town unable to live. That, and she’s bound by the Order - by an ancient, unbreakable spell - to stay in Ashfall.”
“She can’t leave?”
“Not unless she has a death wish and there’s another witch to take her place. There always has to be a Woman of Prophecy. The duty is usually passed down through bloodlines from mother to daughter in death, but I don’t think this one has any children.”
“So will the Order find someone else?”
Kate nodded. “They’ll try. If another witch is brought in then the current one will die as soon as the power is passed between them. But if they can’t find another, this witch will be trapped here forever withering to nothing. And even then she’ll be forced to protect our secrets.”
“That’s horrible.”
Kate’s bright, violet eyes glinted in a flash of moonlight. “That’s the price of dark, blood magic.”
Buildings rose before us in the brazen shine of the shy sun, like a handful of tombstones rising from the dirty brown grass of a desolate cemetery. Their windows shattered with tiny, webbed cracks; glass hanging down in sharp shards clinging to twisted vines. Trees, most a lifeless gray or sickly white, broke the deserted streets in two like skeletons dancing around the rusted cars.
Nothing moved.
Nothing lived.
When we reached the edge of the wasteland, past the heaps of broken, sunless images, Kate pulled into the parking lot of an old church.
“I remember when I used to follow Gae’s flowers here,” Kate said. “Nothing but lines and lines of red and yellow and blue and purple flowers from the lake all the way here.”
I smiled and, against the church, it felt wrong.
I could see the block of stone that once supported it crumbling to pieces; black and gray bits surrounded the building, slivers of dead faith. On the roof, a large wooden cross tilted forward. Even from here, I could see deep holes decayed through, hollowed places where history spread disease. On the crossed beam of it, someone had spray painted “tonight the heavy earth is falling” in dark, dripping orange that looked like old, dried blood.
Kate said, “Calum, you’re squeezing my hand.”
“Oh, sorry.” I let go but my eyes stay focused on the cross. Something about the church made my head spin. The shattered windows and the dead-looking wood made me want to keep running. “Are you sure this is where she lives?”
Kate leaned forward and pointed a finger at the front door of the church. “Right there is where the flowers always stopped. I never went in, Gae forbade it, but I always touched the black door, always only once and just for a second, before running back.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to see if the stories were true. That if you came too close to the witch’s house her magic would trap you inside so she could lick your bones, cook your flesh over a black-flamed candle, and eat your heart.” Kate’s eyes moved to the cross looming above. “I did it because it was forbidden. But no story is completely true, and here I am just the same as before, flesh and all.”
“I doubt you’re the same person as you were back then, Kate. No one ever stays the same for long.”
“Maybe.” She turned to me. “Ready to go inside?”
Palms against jeans, I rubbed until my hands felt raw and warm. My mouth dry and burning hot, I said, “Oh, yeah. Let’s go. That story didn’t freak me out at all.”
Under our feet the dried gravel lawn crunched like teeth grinding hungrily together, each wooden step to the porch like creaking old bones. Long and winding, the porch was dotted with rusted-red nails and lines of thin silver webbing poked with spiders.
The scent found me quickly: Honey-sweet sulfur and the sickly tangy smell of rotting, burning things.
Death.
Fear punched me hard in the stomach, grinding a strong fist deep inside before pushing up at my heart and squeezing it until I could barely breathe.
Still, the smell of death was ruthless, screaming from the church like a chorus of rotting corpses singing blood songs into the night.
I opened my mouth-
“No!” Kate gasped, her hand covering her mouth. “It’s a spell. Don’t breathe.”
But it was too late. I felt the poisoned air race through my veins like fire. I burned with it. Toxic flames licked inside me growing hotter until I was shivering cold with heat; I was death, frozen and still and lifeless.
I couldn’t move.
Slowly, so that the creak echoed in the night like a hundred children softly crying, the black door opened.
I saw her fingers first; four thin sticks dark as charred wood covered in gilded rings, red and black with shining stones. Poking through the dark slot of shadow, each fell to a hard, slow beat, drumming on the door frame one by one. I heard the scratch of long, crusted nails against decaying wood, soft then harsh, as if clawing through death was like breathing in the mountains for her. The lost han
d pulled up from nowhere and gave the woman’s stained lips a puff from a thin black stick. Her lips opened to cracked yellowed teeth, dotted brown and black, feathering in the wave of her smoky breath like dust in the wind.
In my mind, fearful words exploded.
Her face, half covered by darkness and twisted locks of thick brown hair, I could barely see. Only the light of her dangerously bright eyes shone through the shadows, brushes of gray smoke swirling around them, a savage violet in the wicked dark.
-Kate-
My eyes looked back-
at me-
at her.
Those are my eyes, I thought.
My eyes looked back, and I-
the me that loved Adam-
the one who had two sisters-
the girl who despised her parents-
the child who became a Warrior-
the fighter who wasn’t-
was gone.
Cold and cruel violet killed it all.
Breathe.
Breathe, I told myself.
It means nothing.
And even though my heart choked me, like always-
I breathed.
Breathe.
It meant nothing.
-Calum-
It was the first time all over again, but different than the last. This time: Eyes purple as dead lips and crazed with the sweetness of sin. Wild, as though reality was imagined through them, not before.
“You’s here,” the woman whispered blowing more wispy gray tendrils up around her eyes. Her coarse voice, like a train going too slow, was a twang of lost letters and reproach. Her lips moved deliberately, and the blackness of them seemed permanent as though only her lips had died and the rest of her was just holding on.
She breathed and I felt it in my chest.
“You’s here and it’s time. Get in.” She snapped her fingers: Two bones breaking, rings grinding in song. The spell vanished. “Hurry, before it’s not time no more. Before you’s gone.” She stepped back in shadow, pulling us forward with the motion of her hands.
The smell inside was worse than death. Hot and sticky with the scent of sulfur, the wet air stuck in my throat. The church was small, closed-in with stacks of thick books and tables riddled with massive white candles, thin black and red ones strewn randomly between, laying dormant against the golden flames. Bowls and tiny, brightly colored bags dotted the floor, spilling beads that looked like teeth in dirty rivers.
“Kate?” I asked. She was still behind me, her chest moving up and down rapidly, so I turned to the woman. “Are you the Woman of Prophecy?”
The woman clutched her throat and began muttering strange words under her breath. “Hush, boy! Yes, that’s who I am for now. My name is Magdaline, but you may call me Magda.”
Kate stepped beside me and shoved her hand forward. “I’m Kate Black and this is Calum Wade. We’re here-”
“Don’t you think I know who you’s all are?” Magda’s eyes turned dark, tempestuous. She waved her hands through the smoke around her. Her voice faded low. She growled, “Coming here like this, who else would you’s be? No’ne else woulda been able to come in through that door. Not without fallin’ dead on the ground there first. No, I know exactly who you’s are, girl and boy, and what you’s came for.”
Magda smoothed her dress, the deep brown folds as dirty as her hair. Her chest was rising and falling so fast it looked like a storm was brewing inside her, and her right hand clutched a small pouch hanging low from a twine rope around her neck.
“Bad,” Magda said, her hand twisting the pouch. Her eyes locked with mine. “Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. Not good. No. Not good at all. You’s brought the evil with you tonight, boy. Let it touch you, lick you so you stuck with it. You brought that devil out to play and they’s comin’ for you. Ain’t no more time to run away.”
“Who?” I whispered. “Who is coming for me?”
Magda’s eyes met mine and I wanted to grip Kate’s hand but she was too far away to reach.
Magda, her tongue against her teeth, said, “Why, they’s all comin’ for you, boy. Every last one.”
Magda smiled.
She shrieked-
and lunged at me, her back arched so I could see the outline of her spine poking against her dress. Both hands grabbed at my face, and I tasted dirt and rubbery flesh over hard bone inside my mouth, bitter and salty-sweet.
“No! My heart can’t breathe no more! I can’t!” Magda shouted. She ripped a crack in my lip.
Blood. I tasted blood.
“Get off him!” Kate ran at Magda.
“Blood,” Magda said in a frenzy, licking her lips. “It’s mine. I need it, I do. Red blood, blood, blood, blood!”
I tried to push Magda away but both her hands were stuck in my mouth, hooked against my teeth.
“Get! Off!” Kate shoved Magda. The witch staggered back looking dazed, shook her head once, and smiled.
“Sorry. Sorry,” Magda said in a violent whisper. “I forgot. My gris-gris must be dead. It helps, but dies as fast as I make the charms inside it. No time for a new one. You...”
She looked up at me, a trace of sadness in her eyes, and when she spoke her voice was quiet, regretful. “You’s him. The one who is more than they think. The one who I bound years ago. The one who makes the sky so lonely without him in it. I forgot. My memory, it ain’t the same as it was. It tricks me every now and then, even when I tell it not to. It don’t listen, my memory, without the blood, and in this dead place there ain’t no more blood to take.”
Him. She had said it as though I was a bad dream come to life. As if I had plagued her life with misery.
“You’re kidding, right?” Kate asked. Her mouth twitched up and to the left. “You’re sick. Are you using too much magic, or are you normally this messed up?”
“Don’t you talk about things you don’t know, girl! Not to me,” Magda hissed at Kate, inches away from her face. Kate’s eyes watered, and it was like looking at two sets of the same violet stones: Sad, dark, angry. “Dark magic does that to you. Makes you forget. Darkness seeps in and gets in the cracks and won’t ever leave you. And I got years with it. I breathe it. I live it. And now, it’s all I am. All I got. This is my burden still, you hear me? Mine until I die.”
A blink. A beat. “You want to talk about death, witch? Look at this.” Kate raised her red-branded finger and let her leviti hang near Magda’s face. Her voice acid, Kate said, “You know what this is? This is death. It’s a mark on my soul, and when I look at it the only thing I can think is that I was the one who took life from these people. I killed. I know death, witch. Know it like the back of my own hand. I am death. So maybe it’s you who shouldn’t talk about things you don’t know.”
Magda stepped closer to Kate and I could smell the fetid odor of her breath like skin burning in the sun. “I know things that would make your pretty hair fall out, girl. Your caramel skin rot sweetly against your skull. I know things that would make your tongue fall back in your throat and your eyes ooze out your head slow like honey.”
“If you know so much, tell us what we need to know about the prophecy. We were told to come find you; Gae sent us. Help us and we won’t hurt you.”
“Hurt me?” She laughed: Nails dragging down a headstone. “Oh, child, I ain’t worried about that. Not when neither of you’s know the truth. None in the Order ever did. None but four who weren’t.”
I asked, “What do you mean?”
Magda turned her head slowly, tilting it to the right and back so her eyes were more white than anything. “The truth, boy, is everything. There’s power in truth, and power in keeping it secret. I know the truth and I hold the secrets. Your secrets.”
I swallowed back the acrid air and said, “Tell me.”
“There’s a price.”
“Name it,” I said.
Kate said, “No, Calum. Wait-”
“Blood.” Magda clasped both hands around her gris-gris. “Always, the price is blood. For anything. T
he question is this: How much blood will satisfy the heavy price for the answers you seek?”
I needed this. “Name the price and I’ll pay it.”
“Calum,” Kate said grabbing my arm. “Seriously, don’t. I don’t think we should be bargaining with a witch. Gae wouldn’t have wanted this.”
“I don’t care,” I said turning to Kate. “We have to do this. It’s the only way to find the real prophecy and the only chance at breaking the binding spell on me; the only chance we have at saving everyone. You know we need to do this.”
I turned to Magda and held out my arm. “Name it.”
“Truth or secrets?”
I turned to Kate, asking with my eyes.
“Truth,” Kate said.
Magda grinned. “About you, girl? Or the boy?”
-Kate-
“What about me?” I asked against the swift undercurrent of doubt sweeping me away; those words betrayed me, washed away my confidence so all that was left was a desperate need for an answer.
“I know all truths, girl,” Magda said. “Yours especially.” She was so close I couldn’t see anything else, just the black crust of her lips and the familiar violet of her eyes that meant nothing. “I can tell you the truth you seek. I can give you what you want most in this world, all in an instant. Just pay the price, and the truth will be yours.”
“How can you know something like that?” I whispered, “You don’t even know me. What do you think I want most?”
“Our blood holds our stories, our secrets.” Magda said, her black tongue running across her lips. “It is with us always, our blood, and it flows wherever we go, soaking up everything we are. I don’t have to know you to understand who you are and what you want. Give me your blood and I’ll tell you what it says, girl.”
I started, “I don’t want-”
“Don’t you?” Magda’s voice was a shadow of what it once was, like a black, placid lake before a storm. “Don’t you want to know about your parents? About why they betrayed what you believe in? About you? Pay the price in blood and I’ll tell you its truth.”
