Dirty Deeds

by R. J. Blain

  Eli took the small rough stone and tucked it into the chest pocket of his T-shirt before starting back along the pseudo-trail. They crossed a runnel of water. When her foot landed on the other side, the odd itchy feeling of the blood-curse taint hit her. Hard. She stopped, activated her seeing working again, and stared around. Eli didn’t look back, but his hand went to his gun at his right thigh. “What?” he asked, sotto voce.

  “Not something I can explain. Just this itchy feeling I get whenever something evil is close by or is watching me.

  “Evil.”

  “Yeah. I don’t see anything, but something’s not right.”

  “Your dog crystal is glowing.”

  Liz looked down at the crystal, and in her seeing working, it glowed red. In her normal human eyesight it was pale pink.

  “Your dog crystal is glowing,” he repeated, pushing her behind a tree, his eyes still searching for mundane threats, “at the same time you get an itchy feeling about evil. I don’t like coincidences. What do you know about the woman who hired you?”

  Not much, Liz thought, her mind ranging through possibilities she hadn’t considered before. “She was … She claimed to be Golda Ainsworth Holcomb, from the Ainsworth witch family. They’ve been in this country since the eighteen-hundreds, are allied with three covens that I know of, and have a solid rep. She sent an email, referencing my sister who doesn’t remember her, but Moll is well known everywhere, so she might have heard her talking about me and that I supplement my income with the occasional magical investigation.”

  Liz looked at the crystal again, and saw the energies were still pointing well over a half mile away. They had been trekking hard, but mostly downhill, not horizontal. “But… I had a vague feeling at the hospital that something wasn’t right. Never could put my finger on it. Let me think.” Liz slid down the tree she was leaning on and closed her eyes, trying to recall every word, every gesture.

  “Holy crap,” she whispered. “Golda wasn’t wearing— I can’t say wasn’t. But I don’t remember seeing a hospital bracelet on her wrist. And… she smelled wrong.” She looked up at Eli. “Golda had a head wound, broken bones. And she smelled sweet. Vaguely like jelly.”

  Softly, Eli said, “People with wounds don’t smell sweet. Shock and trauma to the body release toxins into the blood and even after the flesh is stitched back up, they sweat out the stink. It can take days for the smell to go away.”

  “She had blood in her hair. It was hours old and it was still reddish, like pinkish red.”

  “Shouldn’t have been. Should have been brownish red. Unless the accident tossed jelly into her hair. Maybe she had groceries in the car.”

  “Could be. That could also account for the sweet smell.” Liz brightened and stood. “That makes a lot of sense, but I think I’ll call the hospital and ask to be put through to her room.”

  “Not likely,” Eli said. “We’ve been out of a service area for an hour.” He pointed down the trail and then up. “Maybe by the time we get to that low peak we’ll have service. Not in this crevice.” He checked his watch and the compass. “We should start climbing soon, and be there in two hours, barring any forced detours.” Without looking back at her he added, “You’re breathing hard.”

  “Exertion. My pulmonologist says I healed up great, but that I have to breathe hard all the time to force my lungs to work. I’ve begun to run and walk, but not on inclines like these. The pulmonologist calls it rehab, but he means torture.”

  “Rehab sucks.”

  “Oh yeah.” She followed him along the trail and toward the peak where they might get cell service. Or not.

  Eli

  He made the trek up and down the terrain as easy as possible, making sure her hands were in place on the next tree or outcropping, her walking stick was properly positioned, and her feet were secure before he moved on. But he didn’t hover. It wasn’t in his nature to take over other people’s jobs and the witch had set this up.

  At the top of the small hill, he made sure she was okay—as in still breathing and not in clinical distress—and took out his binoculars and compass. He took a fix on the surrounding hills, inspecting what he could see of the folds of the land leading down. There was a signal here and so he took another look at the topo maps on his cell. He couldn’t see it from this vantage, but there was a flat place about halfway down that would make a good campsite. Looked like maybe a water feature.

  Looking at the nearby hills again, he spotted a cellular tower or three, and took another reading on the compass. He set his kit down and removed a battery powered, solar backup, wifi system. He figured about eight feet up on the tree would work. He handed Lizzie a bottle of water. “When you get your breath back, we have a signal,” he said.

  Liz

  Liz was fit and in good shape for a woman with leftover lung damage but at the top of the peak she dropped the backpack, fell flat on the ground, drank another bottle of water, and poured the last drizzles over her face through the netting of her hat. Her chest was heaving, her heart was pounding, she was wet with sweat, and if she didn’t have Toto to find, she might just lay there and die, toes curling up like the Wicked Witch of the East.

  Most witches hated it, but early on, before she understood the social impact of the film, the Wizard of Oz had been one of her favorite childhood movies, especially the flying monkeys. At age four, she’d wanted a flying monkey as a pet so bad she’d cried when her mother brought her a puppy. She pulled off the hot sweaty hat and searched out Eli.

  He was staring out over the surrounding area with a pair of good quality binoculars. A full minute or three later, her breathing finally settled into an even pattern, one without the rasp of extreme exertion, and Liz sat up. Her jacket was full of twigs, seeds, leaves, and forest floor junk. Her hands were blistered even through the gloves from grabbing tree trunks to ease her way down and pull herself uphill, and her fingernails were grubby from all of the above. Her walking stick was dark from dirt.

  Eli handed her a bottle of water and she drank it down fast with a murmured word of thanks. He made a little grunting sound of acknowledgement and told her they had a cell signal. When her mouth wasn’t so dry, Liz dialed the hospital and put her cell on speaker so Eli could hear. He was getting ready to do something with some kind of gizmo, but he stopped to listen.

  It was a newsworthy and unsurprising conversation with the hospital operator. The woman informed her that she could not be put through to Golda. Either confidentiality concerns had kicked in or there was no such patient as Golda Ainsworth Holcomb.

  When she ended the call, Eli asked, “Shall I get Alex to do some digging on her?” Alex was Eli’s brother, the younger Younger, a kid with a police record for hacking, a degree on the way from Tulane, and a job as the number one IT guy for the Dark Queen. If anyone could find where Golda was, what she wanted, and anything she might be hiding, it was Alex. He could probably dig up dirt on Saint Peter.

  “Please,” she said. “Molly will have all the info on the Ainsworth clan. Make sure Golda is really Golda.”

  “You didn’t check before you took the job?”

  There was no censure in his tone, but she wanted to bristle anyway. “I had a photo from last year on a witch website. I compared when I saw her in the hospital. She had put on a few pounds, but then so have I.”

  Eli grunted again and called his brother. The phone call was just like the man: efficient, spare, and devoid all but the most basic of details.

  When all the phone calls were done, Eli, moving with grace and ease of breath that she envied right now, sat beside her. After a while, he asked, “Why would someone give you two K cash, up front, and a magical thingamabob, and send you out into the wild? Where’s the dog now? Assuming there is a dog? Assuming we’re actually on its trail. We’ve seen no tracks, no dog scat.”

  Liz reached to her waist and unclipped the carabiner, holding the crystal up to the light. There was hardly any magic in the quartz anymore, which was surprising, since it
was supposed to have a twenty-four hour charge, but the little power still present indicated a location down the far side of the ridge they had just climbed, into a ravine that led to the bottom of the gorge.

  She pointed downhill and said, “It’s moved toward us a bit. Maybe half a mile away as the crow flies, but way back down the mountain, on the other side of the ridge.”

  “And your evil-sense?”

  “I’m not feeling anything now,” she said, “except a case of sore muscles.”

  He nodded and stood, grabbing the gizmo he had been fiddling with. She watched as Eli climbed a low tree, attaching the device to it at about eight feet off the ground. It had black wand that he pointed down the hill, and other parts that he was careful to align according to his compass.

  While he worked, so did she. Sliding the backpack straps free, Liz retrieved her battery stone—what she called the chunk of granite that carried stored energy like a battery—and placed the crystal on it to recharge. The dog was still in the same general area, so she put the quartz back in the silver box to preserve the refurbished energy levels.

  He swung down from the tree and alighted in a bent-kneed, soft landing. All he needed was the red cape.

  “There’s a runnel of water and a good campsite about two hours away,” Eli said. “I just installed a portable wifi system pointing downhill and up toward the towers behind us and the other side of the gorge. It might give us some access to the outside world. You up for another couple hours of Rehab?” He grinned suddenly and it was blinding, lighting his entire face.

  Her heart skipped a beat or seven at the sight.

  He added, “I’ll see if I can massage the soreness out of your muscles after we get camp set up.”

  For the first time since she got sick, she saw a wicked little twinkle in his dark eyes. He just had to wait until she was slick with sweat, smelled like a dockhand, and was so tired she could barely move. The man was an idiot.

  Chapter Four

  Eli

  There was no trail. He checked all around, even up into the trees for overhead threats. The tree canopy was both too high and too low to allow him a direct line of sight down, but this was no different from a hundred other ops or training exercises where he’d been dropped in, given an objective, and expected to find his way out.

  Except for Lizzie. She had been athletic enough before the battle that had nearly killed her, but not being able to breathe deeply put definite restrictions on the amount and type of exercise she could do. She should probably be lifting weights and stretching, maybe some MMA, and swimming for her cardio. Not running, not yet. No matter what her pulmonologist said.

  He wondered how insulted she would be if he suggested a workout regimen for her. That might be one of the things that civilian women got pissy about, thinking he was talking about weight or being out of shape. He thought she looked good with the few extra pounds she’d put on. All in the right places. But again—not something he could say to a woman. A buddy would get it without all the angst. But a woman? He blew out a breath. Best to keep his mouth shut.

  Just ahead and down, between them and the campsite, was a stand of laurel, thick and impenetrable. Too wide to go around. Laurel was a low-growing plant, most never getting more than fifteen feet in height, with big leaves and twisted branches. They grew in stands so dense they were a bugger to get around and through. But they provided good cover from airborne predators, which meant animals liked them. All sorts of critters denned and slept in the cover and there were often trails down to water. He was optimistic he could find an animal trail that led in the general direction of the campsite. Again, he checked everything around and over them. He checked his cell. They still had a signal thanks to the wifi in the tree. He had a feeling it would disappear as he traversed the downward ridge covered with the laurel.

  He hated to break up the buddy system they had going, but looking at the alternatives, that might be the best bet, short term.

  “Stay here a bit,” he said, dropping his pack and detaching the daypack to secure around his waist. He repositioned the thigh rig for ease of movement, left the vamp-killer behind, pulled the machete for left hand use, and positioned the shotgun on its tactical sling with an extended mag of standard ammo. Nothing beat the Origin-12 semi-automatic shotgun for these conditions. He texted her Chewy’s number and said, “I’ll scout ahead and see if I can find an animal trail to widen.”

  “You don’t have to tell me twice.” She sat down and leaned back against the backpack and bedrolls. “I’ll just take a nap, right here.” She closed her eyes and sighed.

  He studied her for a moment, her eyes closed, not breathing quite so hard, and a slight smile on her face. Yeah. She looked good. She looked healthy. And she smelled like vanilla and stone.

  God help him. He did not need another red-head in his life. “If for some reason I don’t come back, or you hear a lot of gunfire, open a ward over yourself and call the number on the text you just got. Chewy’ll find you and get you out.”

  She opened one eye, rolled a little to her side, and scooted her bottom against the dirt to sit up and remove her backpack all at once. “And why would there be gunfire or why would you not come back?”

  “You’re the one with a sense of evil and a bad feeling. I’m just prepping for your worst case scenario.”

  She waved a hand in the air and said, “Everything feels fine now. These hills are full of magical hotspots. I’ll set a short term hedge of thorns to be safe. Go whack some weeds, Captain America. I need a nap.”

  Without another word, he crouched and entered the laurel grove. Within seconds she was lost to sight. It was another world under here, the ground oddly powdery dry, with micro-runnels of erosion everywhere. When it rained, the laurel leaves and the plants’ natural shape acted like overlapping umbrellas, directing the rain down onto the roots, but also blocked the sun, which meant little to no undergrowth, just the twisted limbs. He whacked a path toward a likely spot, about a hundred feet away. Hot, sweaty, miserable work. But he found an animal trail, just as he had expected. He explored down and down and then climbed back to Lizzie. There was one section where she might need a belaying rope, just in case, but overall, it wasn’t a terrible descent.

  Liz

  The laurel thicket was torturous simply because she couldn’t stand upright much, and her thighs and back were not in shape for the crouched posture Eli seemed to find so easy. The belay rope down had given her sense of security, and the one time she did slip, her walking stick stopped her downward progression before the rope did, which increased her confidence a lot.

  They reached the holler with the little runnel of water faster than expected, and since it was mostly downhill, and since the day had cooled off as the sun dropped behind the ridges, Liz was a lot less sweaty, and a lot more comfortable. Eli picked out a flat space for camping, strung their food in a tree so bears couldn’t get it, and disappeared upstream into the brush for a “little recon,” as he put it, his shotgun at the ready. His last words to her were, “If I don’t come back—”

  “Stop,” she interrupted, this time holding up a hand. “I know. If you disappear or I hear gunfire, call Chewy, open a ward, and sit tight until the helpless little woman can be saved. Got it. Now go do your recon before I throw a rock at you and it explodes.”

  “You have exploding rocks?”

  “Not with me but I know how to make ’em. Meanwhile,” she hefted a small stone in mock threat, “this stone witch has really good aim. So stop hovering.”

  “I don’t hover,” Eli said with a grin. He turned and slid into the trees.

  “Yes, you do,” Liz muttered to herself. She studied the campsite and spotted a half-buried ring of stones with about a ten foot diameter, maybe the remains of a firepit seating area. Or maybe a witch circle. She walked to the stones and touched one. No latent magic was present, just normal ambient magic in the stones. The stones were worn and smoothed; it had been campfire seating, but it had been ages, maybe
a century, since it had been used even for that. She scuffed debris away and discovered that with a little work there was a depression in the center for the ancient firepit. Using a little mixed-tool on Eli’s pack that was part small shovel, she dug a narrow circular trench around the small depression, carried smaller weather worn and broken rocks to line the trench. She was sweating again, but voila, she had a multi-use firepit. She made sure the rocks were all touching in both rings, not that she expected to need two witch circles, but one never knew, and Liz was always prepared. She wedged smaller rocks into the crevices between the larger rocks and placed her hands on the largest stone, testing the circles for power connection. Her magic slide around both rings and back to her. Perfect.

  She gathered firewood and arranged a campfire, kindling piled properly, ready to ignite. She then cleared all the brush in the camping area away to contain any sparks from the fire and tossed the bedrolls to the side. Before Eli got back, she relieved herself in the bushes. But she really, really needed a bath.

  When Eli returned, he was wearing a fresh T-shirt and his buzz cut looked suspiciously damp. He eyeballed the campsite, gave it a scant nod, and said, “There’s a pool of water upstream about fifty yards. Deep as sin, cold enough to puck—make you feel better.”

  She grinned at his word choice alteration and asked, “Bath deep?”

  “No bottom I felt. Clean and cold. I scouted around and it seems safe enough, if you can open a ward over the pool.”

  A bath would be perfect. She tossed him his gloves with a casual, “Can do. Thanks.”

  “Shout ‘A-Okay,’ when you get there.”

  “A-Okay. I can do that.” She grabbed her travel bag and battery stone and headed upstream. Liz reached the small trickle of water splashing over mossy rocks; a tree canopy high overhead cut out the heat. The temps dropped dramatically, and a cool mist filled the air. Using her walking stick, Liz began to trudge upstream. Which was uphill. Of course. Everything seemed to be uphill or vertically downhill today. Her thighs were burning, and her calves were like rocks.