by Rob Cornell
I laughed. A fake laugh, but I think it sounded good. “Fine until my friend had an unwanted visitor in the hospital.”
“Do you think it was there for him?”
“No,” I said. “It specifically came after me.” It was always good to spread a little truth between lies, like a truth sandwich.
“What do you think it was after?”
“My death.”
“Why?”
“Haven’t a clue.” Another slice of lie. This sandwich could end up a triple-decker if I didn’t get out of there soon.
“Just a random attack,” Strand said slowly, as if taking notes. But she didn’t have a pen or paper, and her hands remained folded in her lap.
“Like you said. I’m a little famous. And there are people who don’t like me.”
“People within the Ministry, for example?”
She said it, not me. “Yeah.”
“Does that explain your reticence?”
Partially. So I had a chance to lay down another layer of truth. Go me. “Yes.”
She frowned. “The Detroit Ministry owes you thanks. So I’m not going to keep you. But if you need help, of any kind, please don’t hesitate to contact me directly.” She drew a business card from a pocket in her blouse, handed it over to me.
She was sharp, no doubt about it.
“I will,” I said and took the card. Of course, I wouldn’t use it, but I knew how to be polite. “Thank you.”
Chapter Sixteen
I wanted to go right back into the hospital to check on Sly, but the Ministry guardians who dropped me off at my car insisted I leave the scene to avoid further “confusion.” They had a good point. Besides, I could better spend my time figuring out what to do with those damn Maidens. I didn’t care so much that they had tried to kill me. What pissed me off most was their blatant disregard for Sly’s welfare.
I guess I should have known better than to think they would care. Despite the help they had given me, it had come at a price—a price higher than I’d first thought. These were black witches we were talking about.
Duh!
And if they could summon and bind something like that centipede-lizard thing, I wouldn’t stand a chance in a straight fight. Maybe I’d have a chance against a single one of them. After all, I didn’t need sacrifices, souls, or chicken droppings to throw down a whole lot of fire. As a group, though? They would see me coming, just like Angelica had. They would have something ready. Or they would send something else after me.
So not only did I have to approach them carefully (understatement), I had to keep moving, too. They had easily found me at the hospital. I had to be ready for another attack at any time.
I had to find a place I could hide from their magic. The new house sat too close to its neighbors to set up any heavy duty wards without frying Gladys and Casey in the process. And I worried more precise wards just wouldn’t do enough. Besides, the Maidens had to know where I lived by now.
Mom and I had to get out of there. I didn’t want to risk losing yet another house to a “paranormal event.” I’d never collect Ministry compensation a second time.
Luckily, I had an idea.
I dropped by the house to get Mom. We packed clothes, but I held off changing and taking my three showers until we got safely to our destination. I hated leaving Odi behind, but for the moment, I didn’t have a choice. I would have to come back for him after dark.
On the way to Ann Arbor, I brought Mom up to speed on the events of the day. She actually muttered like a grumpy old lady. I heard witches and demons and…the C-word!
“Ugh. Mom. Language.”
She grunted and looked out the passenger window.
Now I knew the Maidens of Shadow were a serious threat for sure. They had my mom mumbling sailor words.
The trip took us about an hour to reach the three wooded acres with the log cabin that had belonged to my grandfather, Eldred Light. It had been years since I had set foot inside, not since his funeral, which was barely two weeks after I first got my Ministry license to collect bounties on supernatural bad guys. Grandma had died two years before him. He had bequeathed the house to my parents, but other things had gotten in the way of them doing anything with it.
So it was no surprise to find some of the wood on the outside chewed up by carpenter ants and weather. A shutter on one of the front windows had vanished, probably blown into the woods during a storm. The porch creaked when Mom and I stepped onto it. I couldn’t remember if it had always done that. It felt sturdy enough, though.
Mom got the key out of a false rock mixed in with others that had once lined a flowerbed that had now gone to seed, brown, crinkled fingers that used to be stems sticking out of the frozen ground.
I expected the inside to smell musty and stale. It did a little, but even after all these years, the tiniest hint of cinnamon and ginger lingered in the air. Grandma could bake the pants off of anyone I ever knew, and she never used magic in the kitchen to help. If she had, she probably could have given Elaine a run for her money in the intoxicating foods department.
Despite the rustic cabin look on the outside, indoors the house had all the standard comforts of any home. New appliances (new seven years ago anyway), plenty of fixtures and outlets, heat and running water. A stone fireplace ruled the common area. A cold, blackened log remained within. Grandpa’s rocker was exactly where it had been the last time I was here. In fact, everything was exactly the same, untouched by anything but seven years of dust.
On the mantel sat a picture of Grandma standing on the back porch, squinting against the sun while smiling for the camera. A film of dust blurred the image. I took the photo off the mantle and wiped it clean with the sleeve of my sweater. “Your grandfather loved that picture,” Mom said behind me.
“I know.” I remembered how he would sit in his rocker and watch the picture with sad nostalgia in his moist eyes. I felt a little sad, but mostly content, relieved even. I didn’t pretend to know if there was an afterlife, but even if Grandpa hadn’t finally joined his wife in the next realm, at least he didn’t have to suffer her loss anymore. “He died with it in his hands on the back porch. You remember?”
“I do. I also remember wondering what you were doing here when you found him. You’ve still never told me.”
I laughed softly. “Asking for his advice.”
I set the picture back on the mantel and went out to grab our bags out of the back of my Jetta. While I showered and changed, Mom got to work on the wards. We were lucky. Some of the protective spells Grandpa had put on the house still hummed with power. And one of those worked as magical interference, meant to throw off tracking or vision spells. I felt confident it would keep us hidden from the Maidens.
Once we established what we already had, we went to work on setting up more spells. As usual, when it came to these kinds of things, Mom did most of the work. She had a knack for casting protective wards that I had never seen from her before. Along the way, she taught me a few things. Some of it went in one ear and out the other. Some things actually stuck. By the time she was done, I had devised a trick I couldn’t wait to test.
I ushered Mom outside and about ten yards away from the front porch. “Check this out.” I raised a hand and called on my fire. I focused hard, thinking of Sly in his hospital bed and that disgusting creature on the floor beside him. I gathered enough anger to turn my orange flame blue. Then I threw a bright blue orb of fire at the ground right in front of the steps up to the porch.
But instead of lighting the grass ablaze, the ground absorbed the flame. For an instant, a glowing blue rune marked the place where my fire had struck. Then the rune faded, and the ground looked just as it had.
Mom turned slowly toward me, lifted her eyebrows, and clapped softly. “Huzzah. A fire rune. Well done.”
“Stuff you showed me gave me the idea. Once I could see it in my head, it clicked and I knew I could do it.”
“Yes, but are we going to set it off when he head back ins
ide?”
I gaped at her, hurt. “I told you I was listening to you. Don’t you think…”
I stopped myself when I saw the smirk crop up on her face.
“You’re a mean mom.”
She laughed. “Have to keep my boy on his toes.”
We went back inside…without exploding.
Chapter Seventeen
I lay in the bed in the spare bedroom, the sheets from the closet smelling musty from sitting folded up in a closet for seven years. Could have been worse, though.
The ceiling had a single crack that went from the door to the opposite corner of the room. It looked like a long, jagged fault that might split the entire room with a firm bump. At least, that’s how it looked in my imagination.
This was me letting my mind wander. Letting my thoughts ping senselessly against each other while I tried to think of nothing at all. I wouldn’t call it meditation, exactly, but it came close. I needed the release. Focusing on what to do about the Maidens had only given me a headache.
The headache was finally passing. But I could still feel my pulse in my temples, steady but hard. Honing in on the crack in the ceiling helped steady me, though.
I could hear Mom snoring in the master bedroom across the hall. We both had our doors open. Hers was a soft snore, almost like a kitten’s purr with a wetter tone. I couldn’t remember hearing her snore before, and we lived together. Either I was grossly unobservant, or this was a new thing for her.
Could stress make a person snore?
If so, I’d probably wake Mom with some good honks if I finally dozed. I could have used the rest. I felt tired. My eyes had that crusty, blurry feel. But my thoughts wouldn’t quiet enough to let it happen.
The mattress had a crinkly cover, as if it had showered in starch. While the old person-smelling sheets were soft, all that crinkling underneath made me squidgy every time I shifted. So I stayed as still as possible.
Ping-pong, went my thoughts. There was Sly, mouth hanging open after the respirator was torn loose. There was Fiona, standing before me, naked, right before she shifted into a tiger in front of me for the first time. There was Mom, in her wheelchair at the nursing home, facing the window in the rec room, the sun turning the ends of her hair to shining silver threads, her eyes dull and unfocused.
And, to rival all the woe-is-me thinking I was running through, there was me, first getting bitten by a vampire, then drinking the blood of another, setting in motion a series of events that would win me the moniker “the Unturned.”
This had all happened in about a four month span, but it felt to me like years in the making.
Finally, I couldn’t lay there anymore. I had to move. To act. Even if I didn’t know what to do. I would trust my subconscious, let it work out a solution, or at least a single step. Then I could take the next step. Then the next. Eventually I would end up somewhere, right?
Where? No fucking clue.
But anywhere was better than a crinkly bed that smelled of old person.
I wandered out into the kitchen. The stainless steel refrigerator had a large dent in its door. The wall separating the kitchen and living room had a pretty good patch job from a hole about the size of a person. I could see the slight bubble around parts of the patched hole’s edges from the mesh and mudding underneath the fresh paint. But I knew to look for it. No one else would probably notice.
I smiled at the memory. I’d been there when the hole was made. But that was a another story in itself.
I opened and shut cupboards, and didn’t find anything, of course. My parents had the place cleaned out around the same time they had patched the wall. All the appliances were unplugged. They had kept the electricity going, and the water came from a well, which made it easy for us to set up a temporary home here. We would need things, though, if we planned on staying for long.
I plugged in the fridge and got that going. I could make a run for some groceries later, before I picked up Odi for the night. I felt bad leaving him back at the house in Detroit, but I sure as hell couldn’t drag his coffin upstairs and load it into my little Jetta. We would have to arrange an alternate sleeping arrangement for him before the next morning.
I wrote down a shopping list in a pocket-sized spiral notebook I’d brought from home. I probably didn’t need to. Wasn’t like I was making a big trip. Some cold cuts from the deli. Bread. Milk. Toilet paper. A set of new sheets for the guest bed.
Once I had that down, I clapped my hands, brushed them together, then looked around me as if expecting applause for my amazing progress.
“Now what?”
My headache wriggled its way up the back of my skull and threatened to wrap around to my temples again.
I added ibuprofen to the shopping list. After that, I started pacing in the living room. I was moving. That’s what I’d wanted, right? All sorts of movement. And look how productive I’d become.
Floorboards in the hallway creaked. Mom came out, sweater wrapped around her, shivering. “What’s the heat set at?”
She was cold. I had sweat on my brow and felt like I had a furnace in my chest, blowing hot air into every limb.
I turned up the thermostat a couple degrees.
Another thing I could do.
When I turned away from the thermostat, I caught Mom staring at me.
“What’s going on?”
“You have to ask?”
“What do you think revving yourself up will accomplish?”
“More than sitting idle.”
She strolled to the wing backed chair facing the fireplace next to Grandpa’s rocker, sat down, and gazed into the dead fireplace. The chair had been Grandma’s favorite, and it carried memories from all the way back to my childhood. I could still see the two of them sitting side-by-side, Grandpa rocking, Grandma working a needlepoint or reading a book.
Despite everything, I smiled. I took Grandpa’s chair and rocked gently. “You want me to start a fire? I think there’s still some wood out back.”
“That would be nice, but not right now.”
“You sure?”
“I need to talk to you.”
“Okay.”
She didn’t say anything for a moment. Her posture suggested she had dozed sitting up, but her eyes remained open, and I could see the fire of thought within them. I waited for her to continue without prodding.
Finally she said, “When those witches used their magic on me, to make my memories come back, there was something I didn’t tell you.”
My skin seemed to shrink, like I’d grown out of it, and it might split down the length of my spine at any moment. I had made my peace with not trusting anyone for a while, expecting betrayal from everywhere except…well, except Sly and Mom. But here I learn she was keeping a secret from me? About the Maidens of Shadow, no less?
I forced myself to take a deep breath. I needed to give her the benefit of the doubt, give her a chance to explain her reasoning. But I still couldn’t help feel the sting.
“They were adamant I not tell you,” she said, and the sting turned to a sharp pain in the center of my back.
“You kept a secret from me because a group of black witches told you to?” My voice rose a decibel with each word. I heard it happening, but couldn’t stop myself. “Are you serious?”
“Don’t you judge me, son. Don’t you dare.”
I stood. The rocker tilted back, almost tipped, then swung back into a wild see-saw. “I can’t believe you’d keep something like that from me.”
She snapped to her feet as well, pointed a finger in my face. “Do not judge me. You don’t even know what it is. Would you like to know before you hand down your sentence?”
I pinched my lips shut. My breath poured hot from my nostrils.
Mom looked down her nose at me for a few seconds, waiting for a reply. When I kept my mouth shut, she gave a satisfied nod. “Good. Sit down.”
I kept thinking of Fiona. Why couldn’t I stop thinking about Fiona? Traitor. Breaker of hearts. My firs
t love in a long time. My last love for who knew how long. Mom wasn’t Fiona. Mom was Mom. Family. She wouldn’t betray me. She wouldn’t.
Slowly, I eased down onto the rocker. I kept my feet planted on the floor to keep the chair steady.
Mom sat, too.
She took a deep, shaky breath. When she spoke, she looked toward the fireplace instead of me. “The ritual they performed… They…they said it would be stronger, work faster…if…”
My knuckles hurt. I looked down and found my fist clenched tightly enough to turn my whole hand white. “Faster if what?”
“If they powered it with Sly’s soul.”
I literally slipped off the edge of the rocker, dropped to my knees, and gaped at my mother with the kind of wonder you would a monster. Right then she might as well have been the centipede-lizard thing. Anything but my mother.
“Sebastian, please understand—”
“Understand?” I didn’t shout. I grinded the word out in a low growl. “Understand?”
“You don’t have to like it,” she said. “But you have to listen. Now you have to listen. You can condemn me later.”
A sulfuric taste filled my mouth as if I’d licked brimstone. I looked down at my knees on the floor. Vertigo sloshed through my skull. Made me glad I was kneeling, otherwise I probably would have fallen over. I wanted to puke, but I hadn’t eaten recently enough to cough up anything more than bile.
“After the ritual, Sly didn’t suffer any ill effects.”
I looked up at her. So fucking what? I thought, but couldn’t get my mouth working enough to say. She seemed to hear the question anyway.
“What if it isn’t the Maidens?”
I finally got the old jaw and tongue to flap and form some words. They weren’t very nice words, though.
“Are you fucking delirious? Angelica all but admitted they were using his soul for some week long ritual. What was it she said? ‘What’s begun can’t be undone.’ Or something stupid like that.”
“Yes, but—”
“And why would they send that hell beast after me if they didn’t think I was a threat to their plans?”
