The Problem With Witches: An Arcane Shot Series Novel

by Joey W. Hill

  But the hand snapped away and things started cracking, the integrity of the internal body somehow breached, while the skin outside stayed eerily unmarred.

  Then the explosion happened.

  A flash, and a concussion that took away thought and time for an indeterminate period. When she was able to recapture awareness, Marcie felt like she was covered in painfully itchy fiberglass and viscous brain matter, and something else she couldn’t define, until it unraveled in her mind.

  Visions of other people’s lives. Their feelings and emotions. To a level that was… Oh God. To move was painful. To breathe was painful. Something was really, really wrong. She turned her head to her true north, and saw Ben. He was standing on Bonnie’s shoulder, his hand on her, and he was talking to her. Marcie wanted to smile, to cry, because she knew how soothing that voice could be when a female was on the edge of shattering. If he was the one causing the shattering, he could hold her there on that edge with his voice. If he wasn’t the cause, he could draw her back, away from that pain.

  There was a transparent rainbow of color enclosing them, like one of those long, wavering bubbles kids could make in their backyards. A vortex was opening in the air above them, him and Bonnie rising toward it. It was going to swallow them, and he didn’t seem to notice. She felt worse than she’d ever felt in her life, but her fear for him drove those feelings back, all those visions and voices. She tried to struggle weakly toward him, drag herself across the rough gravel roof top. Ben.

  She had to warn him, protect him. Nothing else seemed to matter, and she wasn’t even sure why that mattered, but her will knew why, and it made her body move.

  “No, love, here. Stop…” Raina was with her, trying to hold her. “He’s okay, I promise. He has to go with her. It’s the only way. He’ll come back. Ruby and Ramona will do everything they can to bring him back.”

  She was past listening. All she could see was Ben disappearing, and the things that felt so awful, so wrong, became exponentially worse. She was lost, just so lost…

  Oh God, he was gone. One minute he was there, and then, not. No, no, no…

  “Marcie. Marcie.” The sharp physical blow, a slap, startled her, jolted her attention to Raina. The witch was holding her, halfway across her lap. Marcie had been digging her fingers into her arms, trying to claw away from her, her body arched up over her knees as she’d tried to twist around, see Ben.

  “We have to make sure you’re here when he comes back,” Raina said urgently. “We don’t want to lose you, too. All right?”

  She was already lost. Marcie had never felt anything like this. She thought she knew hopelessness. She’d experienced it more than a few times growing up, and then later, when she’d thought Ben would forever be beyond her grasp. That paled in comparison to this, because then she’d still had her family, herself, her work. This was loss of hope for anything good in life. Anything. It brought indescribable pain that twisted the heart, lungs and stomach, coupled with the knowledge that she was far beyond the point where anything would ever get better. Ever.

  This was what Hell meant.

  Everything that gave her strength disappeared. Her family, her friends, her pride in herself and her own accomplishments, and worst of all, her love for Ben. All of it sucked away through a hole inside her soul, vanishing before she could even grab onto it. Life contained no more value. Only never-ending despair.

  It was a knowledge she’d never wanted to have. That no one wanted to have, because once it possessed the mind, it connected to everyone else in the history of everything who’d ever felt it. It compounded the feeling, over and over again. Every creature in the world forced to suffer, suffer, and suffer some more.

  Much as Ben had been sucked away from her, it was all gone, there was nothing left. She wanted to die and let go. If she could just figure out how to get there… Ben wasn’t coming back. She had a vague knowledge of people who cared about her, but they were so distant, so irrelevant and beyond her grasp. Life would move on without her. That grey world beckoned, and now she knew why that was the color of aged tombstone, the color of peaceful nothingness.

  “Marcie. Damn it. Marcie…” Raina squeezed her hands so hard Marcie was aware of pain. She handled plenty of pain. Broken bones were nothing next to a broken spirit.

  “Your Master will not be pleased with you.”

  A cry broke from her lips, because a ripple tripped her up, brought her up short on that threshold to the tempting place of grey nothingness. Cold fingers slid along her skin, her soul, gripped hard, dug in. Those words meant something to her. They were uttered by one who was a Master himself, who knew how a Master thought, what he expected. A male who, no matter what the world said was proper or right, followed a very different, blood and bone level code about what was his.

  It was a code that she knew, that she’d always known. It applied to her, defined who she was in a way nothing else did. When nothing else could stop her forward motion, that could.

  A Master’s word was everything, and above God, hell and demons and whatever else, would be obeyed. He didn’t care what kind of pain she was in, or that all hope was lost. Service to him was everything.

  “He expects to find you here for him when he returns,” the Master said. “If you are not, you have failed him. Fight for him. Tell me you understand.”

  That nod was the hardest thing she’d ever done in her life. She did it, even though another cry of pain tore from her when she managed the movement. But she would fight for Ben. She would. Even if she lost, she would fight until the last breath. Which would be soon, because that despair whispered to her. Twisted those words.

  You have failed him. You are not stronger than death. Your love, your bond, it is not stronger than death and this kind of evil. It will take him away from you and you from him. You won’t remember what it felt like, except for the sharpness of a loss beyond bearing. You won’t know what it means, which will make it even worse.

  “Ben…” The whisper would have been a wail if she’d had the strength. Then his name was lost to her, like everything else.

  Elagra had been a damned repository of souls, the energies of all those she’d snared in her power. Keeping that energy inside her, she’d used it to galvanize her magic, maintain her allure. What Marcie was feeling was the despair that those boys had felt when they knew, without a doubt or shred of hope for something different, that their souls had been lost to her forever.

  Once the souls realized they’d been freed, Raina knew they would see the light outside their jail cells, and that feeling would become something else. However, though it only took a moment for a bullet to pass through a body, the damage it left could still be fatal.

  She sent a prayer to the Goddess, even as she kept talking to Marcie. It wasn’t the words that were important, except as a focus for her to channel as much healing energy into her as she could. Healing wasn’t Raina’s forte, but she knew how to do the basics. “Hang in there with me. There you are, hold on…”

  This was beyond bad. However, one good thing had happened. Neutralizing Elagra had broken the contract with the entity who’d sent his minions to serve her purpose. They’d disappeared into the night sky as if they’d never been, so Raina could once again see stars above, even a sliver of moonlight.

  Mikhael. Help.

  He was there no more than half a dozen heart beats later. She assumed he’d left Derek to handle mop-up. As he landed, Raina’s concern for the girl was momentary eclipsed by the blood she saw on him, the numerous cuts, a severe burn wound on his abdomen. As he dropped to his heels, the stiffness to his movements suggested his ribs were in less than stellar condition.

  She rarely saw him right after a fight, she realized. The last time had been when he was crushed under a pile of stone and she was sure he was dead. Even knowing now just how resilient he was, her heart turned over to see the wounds. She reached out to touch his shoulder, reassure herself that he was okay.

  He met her gaze, drew her to him wi
th a quick, strong hand behind her nape to brush his lips over hers. He smelled of smoke, blood and raw power, but he was still Mikhael. He squeezed her neck, hard, nodded. “I’m good, malysh,” he said.

  Baby, she remembered. The endearment he called her in some of their most intimate moments. It told her he was glad to see she was in one piece as well, and was likely cataloging every scrape and bruise she bore in the same way.

  But there was someone in far more dire straits. She drew his attention to her, but he was already there, evaluating Marcie’s condition in a blink. Curling his arms around her shuddering form, his broad blood-stained shoulder brushing Raina’s breast, he drew the girl from her lap into his own.

  He cradled Marcie’s face, bringing her wide, pupil-dominated eyes closer to his, holding her to this plane with his sheer force of will, and his words.

  “Your Master will not be pleased with you.”

  Raina knew Marcie had struggled, as even Derek still did, with the nature of the Dark that Mikhael served. But as a succubus, she understood it. Mikhael called on it now, his pure Darkness standing against the evil of Elagra’s.

  There was no sympathy or compassion in Mikhael’s words, his touch or gaze. Only sheer, ruthless command, his tone and energy promising far worse to Marcie if she didn’t obey, dig deep and find the will to hold on.

  One didn’t disappoint the Master. There was no forgiveness for failure there.

  Raina fucking hated the kind of Dark Soul Magic Elagra had tapped. It was the most twisted, detestable form of magic, and whoever used it deserved to have it turned on themselves. So Raina had once thought, until she discovered Ruby had resorted to it in a moment of utter despair. And Mikhael had used his Darkness in a way uncomfortably close to this to hold Ruby back from the fiery edge of eternal damnation.

  Well, all things happened for a reason, right? As she watched Mikhael hold Marcie here by that tentative thread, a flicker of his gaze, a tightening of his jaw, told her it wasn’t enough. They needed something else.

  Might as well pile one inadvisable thing on top of another, make a damn wedding cake out of it. Raina left them to run to the edge of the roof. She drew Ruby’s attention with an arrow of mental intent, but underscored it with urgent body language, waving her arms at her sister witch, in an unmistakable “get your ass down here now” kind of way.

  Though the demon’s army was gone, Raina knew Ruby and Ramona still had their own struggle going on. They were twisting the threads of magic that had followed Ben and the sea creature through the portal. They’d intended to let that line go when the monster was all the way through. But now that line was the only tether they had to bring Ben back. And since the plan hadn’t been for Ben to accompany her, those threads were far too tenuous.

  But that was the good thing about having magic users powerful enough to tag team one another. Those bonded the way Ruby and Derek were meant one could pick up the magic of the other without a catastrophic disruption. Especially if one of them was a Light Guardian.

  Derek appeared next to Ramona. There was a melding of energies, Ruby’s unique aura color wrapping around his, and then his taking over, fusing to Ramona’s. Derek shifted over as Ruby backed out of the mix, so he and Ramona were shoulder to shoulder.

  As smooth as that appeared, Raina knew it was a risk. Even a momentary transition could lose Ben to the alternate world forever. But it was a judgment call. While they might have a slim-as-hell chance of pulling Ben back into this reality after sending him off with a one-way spell to another world, she had zero chance of saving Marcie without Ruby.

  And, truth? If they lost Marcie, it was better for Ben to be stuck in another world, thinking she was still alive.

  Ruby thankfully chose to utilize the transport magic Derek had been teaching her. She still wasn’t entirely sure of it, but this time, probably because she wasn’t overthinking it, she managed the quick, shimmering transition from one roof to another without a hitch, avoiding the delays of getting here on foot.

  “What? Raina, what—”

  The exclamation came as Raina dragged Ruby down to her knees next to Marcie. She didn’t take time to explain, just put Ruby’s hand on the girl’s leg.

  Ruby was one of the best intuitive magic users in existence. It had taken her most of her life to understand that about herself. One of the ways she’d come to that knowledge was a path no witch with any sense walked. She’d worked with Dark Soul magic, and nearly lost herself to it. Though Mikhael had held her from the edge, it had been Derek’s love and the strength of their combined magic that had brought her back. It left Ruby with a knowledge of both sides of the broom most witches didn’t have.

  Now, her brow furrowed. The look she shot to Raina was not the one she wanted to see.

  “No,” Raina said decisively. “There’s a way to fix it. Here.”

  She grabbed Ruby’s other hand, and muttered the spell that would show her what she had in mind.

  In surgery operating rooms, they used blacklights to see if they’d cleaned up all the blood. This was like that, only what Raina was illuminating was far more disturbing.

  Those souls that had infected Marcie should be letting her go, taking flight as they discovered they were free. But the damage to them had been too all-encompassing. They were spun into knots, tangled with her essence, down so deep in a well of despair they had no idea they’d been liberated. They had to be shown the way.

  But several had a different structure to them. They were the very small percentage of Elagra’s victims who’d escaped her still alive.

  A soul was strong and fragile both. Pieces could be broken off and lost, sacrificed so the rest of the soul survived, though it weakened the overall spiritual matter. It made the person who carried that broken soul more susceptible to the call of darkness throughout his or her life. However, the very fact the person had found the strength to break away suggested a will stronger than average. Particularly those souls who’d escaped Elagra with their earthly form still breathing.

  Marcie was a Pure Light. If one of those pieces could be burrowed into Marcie, where her core of light and hope still existed, even beyond where she could feel it now, it would recognize the call of the Light, and have the strength to reach through the Dark for it. It would spread that energy to the others, a connected network. It would become the key that turned in the lock, opening the door to let the others go.

  The downside of that was they’d have to integrate that piece of soul with Marcie’s, and removal after embedment was a complicated issue. The upside was there was one soul fragment in particular that had the very best chance of doing what Raina hoped would work.

  Ruby’s gaze shot to Raina. “We have no right to do that,” she said. “You know what that could do. Will do.”

  “Then we let her die, and these souls are lost in the ether, where their energy fuels monsters like what Derek and Mikhael just fought.” Raina set her jaw. “I don’t really give a damn about the rules.”

  Her gaze shifted to Mikhael. He still held Marcie, who was muttering incoherently, rocking in his grasp like a mental patient. Tears were on her face, and her curled fingers jerked against his forearms, her nails creating bloody furrows in his flesh.

  He didn’t seem to notice it. He and Derek weighed right and wrong on a daily basis, made decisions and passed judgment on others. In the short timespan when this decision needed to be made, she fully expected he’d weigh hundreds if not thousands of potential variables.

  Someone else had joined them on the roof. Knowing who it was, Raina shifted to block Marcie from him, her hand out in a menacing gesture of warding. He wasn’t taking her.

  “Raina,” Mikhael said. He lifted a hand from Marcie, closed it on her wrist. He was probably the only one other than Ruby who’d dare such a maneuver when she was coiled to strike. Her fingers had already lengthened into claws, and she was reaching for that power within her that could lay most entities low, take life when she chose. Not that it would have any impact on a
Grim Reaper, but she’d die making her point.

  “No,” she said. “No, we’re not there.”

  With the dense energy of intent around him, Silas drew close, dropped to his heels a step away from Marcie’s twitching feet. After he pushed the hood of his cowled cloak to his shoulders, he didn’t touch her, his attention on her face. Her eyes opened briefly, but she didn’t see him. Her staring eyes said she saw only the horrors written in her mind, unleashed from Elagra’s consciousness.

  “It is written that her soul should be taken now,” Silas said.

  Like hell, Raina was going to say, but Mikhael tightened his grip, giving Silas a chance to continue.

  “However, these are unusual circumstances. There is time for…a pause. For things to change.”

  Giving Raina an even look that said Be still, Mikhael leaned over Marcie’s twitching body, laid his hand on her brow.

  “Marcie,” Mikhael said. “Can you see them? The souls?”

  “Yes,” she moaned. “Oh, God. Help them. Please…help them. They’re so lost.”

  “There is your answer,” Mikhael said, looking at Silas. “You take her now, more than one soul is lost. How much time does that give us?”

  Silas studied the restless form in Mikhael’s grasp again. While his eyes held a timeless, chilling wisdom, they also showed compassion. “A few moments,” he said. “No more.”

  Ruby’s jaw firmed. “Move back,” she said to Raina, and then surprisingly, also to Mikhael and Silas. “All of you.”

  They complied immediately. However, the terrified whimper Marcie made, as if she were buried alive and they were abandoning her to her fate, nearly tore Raina’s heart in two. Mikhael drew her back, holding her by the shoulders, standing behind her. Seeing Marcie left there alone, the way she curled into a ball, that keening, terrible noise coming from her, made Raina doubt herself. Mikhael’s grip tightened once more.

  “Even when you’re wrong, you are willing to be wrong at full, breathtaking power, my witch,” he murmured. “Don’t doubt the effectiveness of that.”