As soon as the gag left her mouth, Cara shouted, “Who are you people? You have no right to treat me like this!”
Marcella rolled her eyes and responded calmly. “I think you know exactly who I am, and you have a good idea of why you’re here. Now, are you going to calm down, or shall we gag you again?”
Cara glanced at Cyrus, who raised a questioning eyebrow. She shivered again, a reaction that probably wasn’t due only to the room’s chill.
“Can’t you turn on the heat or something?” Cara whined. “It’s freezing in here.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Marcella answered. “In the meantime, I have a few questions for you.”
“But I don’t know anything.”
“Oh, I’m sure that’s not true. For your sake, I hope it’s not true.”
Cara’s eyes widened with fear. “What are you going to do to me?”
“That all depends on you, Cara.”
“What do you want?”
“I want to know everything about your friend Amanda’s exorcism.”
“But I don’t know much about it. I wasn’t there.”
That claim corroborated Rutlinger’s belief that Amanda had not recruited the help of her coven, which was something Marcella had difficulty accepting. It was foolish to attempt such a difficult and powerful spell without enlisting the entire coven.
“Who was there?” Marcella pressed.
“Just Amanda and Noreen. And Kyle, of course.” Cara twisted her arms around to show her bound wrists. “Look, I’m being cooperative, right? Can’t you untie me? My hands are going numb.”
Marcella considered the request. Physically, Cara wasn’t much of a threat. The girl’s magic was her most potent weapon, but Marcella felt certain she could counter anything that might get past the protective charms she and Cyrus wore.
“All right. As long as you continue to answer my questions.”
“Deal,” Cara said without hesitation.
Cyrus opened a folding knife he kept in a sheath on his belt and cut Cara’s bindings. The girl rubbed her wrists while Cyrus took a position in front of the door, his knife still ready in his hand. Cyrus wasn’t a large man, but he had a werewolf’s strength and speed as well as experience with using the knife he carried. Cara wasn’t going anywhere.
Marcella continued her questioning.
“Why didn’t Amanda use the full coven?”
“Noreen—she’s our coven mistress—wouldn’t allow it. We wanted to help, but Noreen said it was too dangerous. She also didn’t think it would work. In fact, no one really did, except Amanda.”
So, Rutlinger hadn’t been the only one to underestimate Amanda. Marcella began to feel a grudging admiration for the young witch who had pursued her goal against the resistance of her peers. Once again she wished it was somehow possible to lure Amanda into the Red Claw coven, but she’d made a deal with Iledaste: Amanda Clark had to die.
“If your coven mistress thought it was dangerous and wouldn’t work, why did she agree to participate?”
“Honestly? I don’t know. I think it had something to do with Order business. There was some big showdown with the Selkirk Pack, and whatever happened really pissed off Noreen. I think she may have decided to help Amanda out of spite.”
The negative undertone Cara had used when she mentioned “Order business” interested Marcella. “I take it you aren’t part of the Order, and you don’t plan on joining them?”
“God, no.” Cara said, making a face. “Too many rules.”
Marcella’s interest in Cara sharpened. She needed new members for her coven, and surprisingly, her young captive was demonstrating some of the characteristics she looked for. However, she also wanted to know more about the Order’s involvement, and Cara probably wasn’t privy to that information.
Perhaps it was time for a broader inquiry. “Who else knows the details of the ritual?”
Cara thought for a moment and then shrugged. “I don’t know. Amanda said she filed a copy of her notes with the Order. It’s possible someone read through them, but I doubt anyone but a witch would learn anything useful.”
The girl was deliberately playing down the potential exposure, but her statement might still be accurate. Marcella’s contact within the Order also doubted that anyone else had read Amanda’s notes. The notes were among a hundred other documents that some underpaid technician was expected to scan and store in the Order’s digital-document archive.
It was sounding like Amanda, Noreen, and Kyle were the only people who could potentially reconstruct the exorcism after all. But Marcella still had trouble believing that everyone else in the coven was ignorant.
Watching Cara’s reactions closely, Marcella said, “Amanda’s unexpected success must have been a moment of celebration for your coven. Surely she shared some of the details about how she managed to save the young man.”
Cara froze and blinked a couple of times. She probably knew her answer to the question might sign her own death warrant. Her eyes darted back and forth as she tried to formulate a response. When she spoke, she chose her words carefully. “We did talk about it in general terms, but nothing specific about how it worked. Noreen wanted to keep it a secret for some reason.”
Marcella was certain that there was more the girl wasn’t revealing. “Why keep it a secret? Amanda managed something that hasn’t been done in over a hundred years. Her pride would demand that she share that accomplishment with her coven sisters. And the rest of you had to be curious about it.”
“Oh, we were,” Cara admitted readily. “I wanted to hear all about it. I wanted to know everything about how Kyle was recovering.” Cara clamped her mouth shut suddenly. She’d apparently said something she hadn’t intended. She hastily continued. “But our mistress wouldn’t let us talk about it even though Amanda obviously wanted to. I got the impression that Noreen was waiting for permission from the Order.”
Permission? Why would the Order want to keep the exorcism ritual a secret? Deep in the recesses of her mind, Iledaste virtually rubbed its hands together with glee. If the Order had locked down access to the ritual, their mission became a lot simpler: destroy Amanda’s notes and eliminate the only three people who could re-create them. Cara’s knowledge had proven to be useful after all.
The rush of excitement didn’t distract Marcella from pursuing Cara’s earlier slip. “What made Kyle so interesting to you?”
Cara blushed and looked down. “He’s cute,” she said with a slight shrug, as if that explained everything.
“And?” Marcella didn’t buy that Cara’s interest was strictly about lust.
Cara looked up. “While he was … possessed … he changed. Physically. I’ve known a lot of guys, but never someone with super strength and speed. Amanda and he were … a couple, and I wondered what that would be like.”
Marcella sighed in disappointment. Perhaps it was all about lust after all. Most air witches were naturally sensual, some more than others. Cara’s femininity was powerful and unmistakable, a sure sign of an air witch who embraced and exploited her nature rather than trying to resist or restrain it.
However, Cara specifically mentioned an interest in Kyle’s “recovery,” and Marcella had wondered about that herself. She had theorized that Kyle would retain his strength, speed, and eye color because those attributes were physical alterations to his body that occurred over time. However, transforming into a wolf was pure demonic magic. When the demon left, so would that ability.
“After the ritual, did Kyle still have the strength and speed he stole?”
“Stole?” Cara said with a mild tone of offense. “I guess you could look at it that way. Not that he asked for it. But, yeah, last I heard, he’s still strong and fast.”
“Anything else?”
Cara’s long pause indicated that she was holding something back. She made a show of remembering something more and said, “His eyes. His eyes are still wolfy.” She leaned forward and stared into Marcella’s eyes fully for the fi
rst time since their conversation started. She gasped and took a step back, bumping into the wall. Marcella was back-lit by the room’s only bare light bulb, so Cara probably hadn’t noticed until that moment that Marcella’s eyes were also “wolfy.”
Marcella smiled at the girl’s reaction. “Yes, I’m more than a witch. I’m pleased to see that you were unaware of that.”
Cara continued to stare in horror until she blinked away tears that tracked down her cheeks. She dropped her gaze to the floor. In a small voice, she asked, “You aren’t going to let me go, are you?”
“Not just yet,” Marcella answered. “But don’t despair. As a reward for your honesty, I’d like to make you an offer.”
Cara looked up with a mixture of hope and wariness in her eyes. “What offer?”
“I’m rebuilding my coven. If you join me, I could teach you things your current mistress never could. Would you rather learn from an independent air adept who has powers you can scarcely imagine or a stodgy fire master restrained by the Order and its ‘too many rules?’”
Cara’s mouth dropped open, but she didn’t answer. The suggestion obviously took her completely by surprise.
“Think about it,” Marcella said as she turned to leave. “You appear to have a clear schedule.”
As Cyrus stepped aside to let her pass, Marcella added, “See if you can make our guest more comfortable. She may be here awhile.”
Chapter 16
Purged
In spite of her agitation, Amanda managed to get a few hours of sleep. She awoke with a slight spacey feeling and a mild headache as reminders of her nocturnal activities. However, trying to sleep past seven o’clock was impossible with the buzz of morning activities filling the farmhouse. Also, the empty space where Kyle should have been spurred her to rise and see how he was doing.
After a quick trip to the bathroom to freshen up, Amanda entered her office where she found Kyle pounding away at the keyboard of the new laptop computer the Order had given her and cursing quietly to himself.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I think we have a problem,” he mumbled, distracted by whatever he was doing.
“Another one?” Amanda stepped around a makeshift bed made from a thick piece of foam. The sheets and blanket were still tossed to the side exactly as Cara had left them. Amanda hoped her coven-mate had escaped to somewhere safe.
Kyle tore himself away from the monitor to glance over his shoulder with a strained smile. “I know. It seems problems are all we have lately.” He punched a few more keys and then pointed at the screen. “Check this out.”
Amanda leaned over his shoulder. Kyle was searching through the Order’s document database. He had brought up a list of all documents bearing an “exorcism” tag. The list wasn’t long: it included perhaps fifteen documents. She scanned the list, but one document was notably absent.
“Where is the lupusdaemon ritual?” she asked.
“Not where it should be.”
Amanda took a deep breath and suppressed a moment of panic. “They must have misfiled it.”
“That’s what I thought too, but I’ve tried searching for it dozens of ways. I’ve searched by your name, by parts of the document title, and now by keyword tag. It’s gone, and so are the backups. Whoever deleted it was thorough.”
But that would mean the dark coven had influence inside the Order. Almost any member could look at the document database, but very few people could update it. With the amount of vetting the Order performed on their intelligence team, Amanda had trouble accepting that they had a spy that deep in the organization. There had to be another explanation.
“They probably haven’t gotten around to scanning the physical copy yet,” she concluded.
Kyle shook his head. “After the break-in, I checked on that. Your notes were already in the database. I should have downloaded a copy right then.”
Kyle’s news brought Amanda’s feelings of futility back full force. The dark coven was closing in on them, and they were helpless to stop it. She sat heavily in a chair next to her desk, feeling Kyle’s sympathetic eyes on her.
“There’s still a chance the physical copy is filed somewhere,” he said.
“If they had access to the database and the backups, they had access to the physical file as well, right?”
Kyle nodded. “We should verify that, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up.”
“I’ll try to control myself,” she said with a sigh. Then something else occurred to her. “What made you decide to check again?”
Kyle glanced toward the open door and lowered his voice. “We may still get an opportunity to use it.” Letting his voice return to normal, he added, “Besides, I’m getting a little paranoid. Even though the document archive is supposed to be secure, I wanted to download a copy for my own peace of mind.”
It heartened Amanda to know that Kyle hadn’t lost sight of her goal, and in spite of his annoyance with her, he’d continued to work on it. She needed those notes. If she ever had a chance to exorcise Reggie, she’d have to be ready. But now all of that work was probably gone forever.
“What are we going to do?”
“About what?” came Blackstone’s voice from the doorway. The man seemed to have a sixth-sense about when something interesting was happening. How long had he been listening?
Kyle explained what they’d discovered. Blackstone frowned and stood motionless for a moment. He moved to the desk and picked up the telephone handset, punching the buttons so quickly that Kyle couldn’t tell what number he’d dialed.
“It’s Blackstone. Someone has removed Amanda Clark’s lupusdaemon exorcism from the archive … yes, I understand the implications … right. Feel free to check, but I’ll wager the paper copy is missing as well. Let me know immediately if you find anything, but at the moment, I’m more concerned with who than how.”
Blackstone hung up and turned his eyes to Amanda. “We must assume the exorcism ritual has been lost. I want you, Kyle, and Noreen to reassemble as much as you can remember about the ritual itself and any research that helped you design it.”
Amanda resisted sharing a triumphant smile with Kyle. Rebuilding the ritual was exactly what she wanted to do, and having Noreen’s help would be invaluable. Rather than having to work in secret with Kyle when she could find the time, Blackstone had suddenly made it their top priority. The question was, why did he want it to be their top priority?
“Are you worried that the dark coven will finally succeed in offing me?” she asked with a wry tone.
“That’s a consideration, but it’s not my primary concern.”
Amanda was taken aback, but Blackstone seemed unaware of her reaction. “What is your primary concern?”
Blackstone blinked at her in a way that said the answer was obvious. “Why, the security breach, of course. If you are able to put together a credible replacement, we may be able to lay a trap for whoever is responsible for deleting the first set of documents. The ritual also has great value to the Order, so you would be killing two birds with one stone, so to speak.”
Amanda had a private third purpose for the reconstituted ritual, but Blackstone didn’t need to know about that. Whatever the rationale, his priorities and hers coincided nicely. “I’ll be happy to be of service,” she said sincerely.
“Good. I’ll inform Noreen.” He strode purposefully out of the office.
After Blackstone had left the room, Kyle’s gaze met hers. “Have faith,” he said, echoing what he’d been telling her since the beginning. His look and his tone admonished her for her actions the previous evening. “As Henry Ford said, ‘Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.’”
Amanda reached out and put her hand on his arm, squeezing gently and silently thanking him for his support. He laid his free hand over hers, rubbing his thumb softly over the back of her hand.
“Okay, I get it,” she said. “We’re in this together, no matter what.”
; Kyle simply smiled back at her.
Amanda typed Kyle’s comments into her new laptop. Across the table, Noreen waited impatiently for the chance to rattle off another of her own recollections.
Kyle sat to Amanda’s right, his face scrunched in concentration as he tried to add more memories to the summary she was putting together.
The three of them were seated at a folding card table that had been set up in the moon shrine. Amanda would have preferred to work in her office, but it was too small to be comfortable for three people trying to work together.
Kyle had suggested that they start the process of rebuilding the exorcism ritual by brainstorming everything they could remember about it, regardless of what order they thought of things. He didn’t want to restrict their memories by imposing any kind of structure on the process. Coming from Mr. Rational, the idea was unexpected. Noreen had approved the suggestion with as much surprise as Amanda.
Their session had been as chaotic as it had been productive. Tasked with being the scribe, Amanda had more than five pages of notes, and they were still adding ideas to the list as fast as she could type them.
Blackstone had been right to put the three of them together on the project. Noreen tended to remember the technical details of the exorcism ritual, not only because she was most familiar with that part, but because she had contributed to the ritual’s design. For his part, Kyle remembered a startling amount of detail relating to the research they’d done into the Navajo shamanistic ritual that had inspired Amanda’s exorcism. Amanda added her own memories as well as a full perspective on her decision process.
Amanda also came up with ideas for improving the ritual. Noreen didn’t see the point since odds were low that they would have an opportunity to use it again. Amanda didn’t share that her improvements were made with an eye toward using the ritual on Reggie, but Kyle knew what she was thinking. She had to be careful not to arouse Noreen’s suspicions. Her coven mistress could be just as irritatingly perceptive as Blackstone.
Demon Witch (The Ternion Order Book 2) Page 12
