Breathing Fire (Heretic Daughters)

by Rebecca K. Lilley

  “Obviously.” He was silent for a long time. I closed my eyes, feeling weary to the bone. Finally he spoke, “I want in on it. Whatever shit is about to go down with you two, I want a piece.”

  I wasn’t completely surprised. Caleb had seen it all, and he lived for action. I gave him a level stare. “I’ll be sure to call if any shit does.”

  “Not good enough. I’m shadowing one or the other of you until I get action. Things have been too fucking calm lately. I’m ready for a storm.”

  I smiled at him. “You think I’m gonna argue? Great, awesome, hang around all you want. We could use the backup. Happy?”

  He nodded, his face back to it’s usual mask. “Yes. You might not see me, but I’ll be around.”

  “Cool beans. Now get these fucking chains off of me before I decide to take exception to the fact that, the second you saw me weakened, you turned on me.”

  He actually bent to unchain me. It was only then that I breathed a sigh of relief. I had been waiting for the other shoe to drop, as I usually was. Apparently, information gathering had really been the extent of his plan.

  “So, how much damage did I do to Christian’s car?” I asked, rubbing my freed wrists.

  Now he smiled. “You jacked it up good. He’s going to have a conniption. How are you gonna explain his charred Porsche and your charred outfit?”

  I looked down. Sure enough, my T-shirt and jeans were blackened around the edges. “Hell if I know. He thinks I’m a fire sorcerer. Maybe I’ll tell him I had to fry a spider or something.”

  “You up for moving to the mountain retreat yet?” he asked.

  I shook my head slowly. “No. You go ahead without me.”

  He gave me a questioning look. “What are you planning?”

  I stood up, showing him my wrist. Of course he recognized the geas. “Nothing you want in on. Trust me.

  He raised his brows at me. “Try me.”

  I just shook my head at him. “No fighting. No carnage. I need to go try something particularly unpleasant to get this thing off without actually obeying it’s command, but it’s nothing you could help with. Nothing to shoot, sorry. And if that fails,” I sighed, dread curling in my belly, “then I have to go to The Grove, and I know you won’t want anything to do with the druid casino.”

  He inclined his head. “You got me there. I want nothing to do with that fucking place. You wouldn’t, either, if you had a clue what they keep in there.”

  I blinked at him. Caleb kept his hand in many games. It was a fact that he lived his life knee-deep in danger, and he liked it that way. Generally, I didn’t know what all of his motives or schemes were. I could trust him to do exactly what he said but never to tell me more than he thought I absolutely needed to know, and that was all. I knew that was for the best. But him having insider information on the druids was a real shock to me. Had he always been spying on the druids, or was this something new? I didn’t ask him. He wouldn’t be telling me something like that. But his wording more than intrigued me. “What they keep in there? Wanna elaborate?”

  His face went from that eery stillness to downright dead between one breath and the next. It was unnerving to watch, to say the least. It was almost like getting a glimpse of him changing forms. “No. Drop it. Just trust me when I tell you that some things are dangerous to even speak about out loud. Just be careful in that fucking nightmare of a casino. You and Lynn in particular. Your blood is just too tempting.”

  I was no less intrigued, on the contrary, I was dying of curiousity after that little spiel, but I dropped it. Caleb wasn’t one to waste words that didn’t need to be said, so if he said it was dangerous to speak about, I just believed him. He was a walking, talking land-mine of information, but I had learned, over the years, how to navigate his strange depths. So it was a no brainer to drop it when he said drop it, no matter how damned frustrating it was.

  Caleb let me take Christian’s porsche. I didn’t want to know why he was being so helpful, so I just thanked him, nodded stiffly at Luke, and got the hell out of there.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Witch-Hag's Lair

  I was a little startled to realize, as I got settled into Christian’s car, that Caleb’s strange little dungeon of a house was right on the edge of downtown Las Vegas. I shot a disgusted look at the Fremont Street Experience as I dug my phone out of the back of the car. The location was surprising, considering that the house held cages that Caleb must have wanted to keep secret, and the damn place was smack in the middle of a tourist attraction. Surprising, but good, since the nasty little errand I needed to run was less than ten minutes away.

  Witch-hags were generally something I tried to stay far away from. Best-case scenario, I kept tabs on where they liked to be, and stayed the hell away from those places. They were, by far, the most unpleasant kind of witch, and they tended to all go rogue eventually, if they lived long enough, which drove the law-loving druids bonkers, since they couldn’t kill them before that happened. A rogue witch-hag wasn’t always that easy to tell apart from a law-abiding one, though the stories always told it differently. They could disguise the blood-red of their eyes when they weren’t actively using their powers, and their fingertips weren’t dipped in blood unless they just happened to be in the middle of sacrificing someone or something. But rogue or not, it was all just semantics, in my jaded mind, when it came to witch-hags. If they knew what I was, it would change even the most law-abiding hag in a heartbeat.

  I was broke half of the time, though I usually worked a lot, whatever that work happened to be. Most of my money went swiftly towards my deep devotion to paranoia, and my need to stay constantly on the run. Yes, I was broke, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t worth anything. If harvested for parts, I was priceless. I was many lifetime’s worth of fortunes, if used properly. And to the hags in particular, I was limitless power. Even a good hag, if there was such a thing, wouldn’t be able to resist such an opportunity. So avoiding hags was usually a gimme.

  Today, however, I was desperate. I didn’t get to be picky, or smart, today. I couldn’t count on both hands all of the reasons why it was a bad idea for me to see Dom. He was a domineering son of a bitch. He hated my guts. He had the power to mess up my life in all kinds of ways, and I tended to think he would use those powers. But the reason I was really desperate was more complex than any of that. Some bad shit was about to go down in this town. All signs pointed to a disaster headed our way on swift feet, and with our names on it’s smiling lips. Letting Dom find me at this point would be as good as dragging him right in the middle of it, domineering bastard that he was. He would turn Lynn and my issues from an ugly family skirmish into an outright World War, with himself right in the thick of it. I would go through some pretty unpleasant stuff to see that that didn’t happen, so I was desperate enough to attempt just about any other way to get the cursed geas off my wrist, and stay a step ahead and away from my Ex. And as ever, my head start would take it’s pound of flesh.

  It was actually Caleb who had given me the crazy idea, months ago. Though it had hardly been relevant at the time, I’d taken note. He had mentioned, in an offhanded kind of way, that there was another way to deal with a geas, aside from just obeying it’s purpose. Lynn and I had scoffed at the time, though he wasn’t one to throw out misinformation. I remembered his words clearly, though. “A witch-hag could do it. It wouldn’t be pretty, but a powerful one has the ability. It doesn’t even take a human sacrifice, or at least, it doesn’t have to. I don’t know the specifics of the spell they use, but I do know what they charge for that sort of thing. A pound of flesh and a favor, bound by blood-oath. A steep price or a cheap one, I guess, depending on the geas.”

  I parked several blocks away from the hag’s house, as though approaching it slowly would somehow make going into a viper’s den less idiotic. It was set up as one of the strange business/houses that were popular in the area. It was a particularly shabby little house, the yellowish stucco of the outside walls missing chunks, t
he faded red tiled roof missing half of the shingles. Business must not have been booming for the hag. The little sign out front read ‘Holistic Healing and Herbal Cures by Ethel’. Yeah, right. Ethel was well-known as the most powerful non-rogue witch-hag in the state, but even the legal hags had no talent for healing or curing. I had a very justified sick feeling in my gut as I opened her front door.

  Ethel’s place was set up with a small waiting area attached to a tiny window, like a doctor’s office. If a doctor’s office looked and smelled like garbage, that is. The carpets were stained and ancient, the walls dirty and yellowed. One other ‘patient’ waited in the surprisingly large antechamber. From the outside, the house hadn’t looked as though it could hold even one room this large, and this was obviously only the waiting area, so I guessed there had to be several other rooms. The other patient was a dark-haired girl. She could have been anywhere from eighteen to twenty-five. She had stringy, dirty hair that trailed into her face as she read a gossip mag. She was small and mousy, buried in dark baggy clothes, and she didn’t glance up once from her magazine as I passed by her to reach the little window.

  I checked the window and found that the little desk and messy office were vacant. I rang the little bell. It barely made a sound. I studied the other patient as I waited several minutes for a response.

  Something was off about her, and my suspicious mind quickly started trying to piece together what it was. She was very still, and turned the magazine’s pages as though on a timer. I actually began to time her, and found that, sure enough, I was right. She studied each page for exactly one minute before turning the page rather absentmindedly. It was as though she had been placed there as a prop, which did nothing positive to my peace of mind.

  I had nearly talked myself into leaving when an ancient looking woman hobbled into the small office space on the other side of the glass window. She smiled at me, a toothless grin. “Sorry for the wait, my dear. My secretary had to step out. I’m Ethel. How can I help you?”

  I studied her for a moment before I spoke. She looked ancient, though that didn’t mean a damn thing. And her tone was kind, almost maternal. She made a very convincing grandmother type, which was unusual. Hag’s were typically as unpleasant as you’d have expected of women who’d sacrificed literally everything in their lives for some magical power.

  I met her pale blue eyes as I answered. “I need something removed,” I told her frankly. I raised my wrist just enough to show her what I meant, hiding the object from the patient behind me.

  Ethel’s eyes widened in surprised. “Oh, my, my. You’re in luck, my dear. I’m one of the few who can actually help you with that little nuisance. One moment, my dear.” Her tone was reassuring, but unsurprisingly, I was far from reassured.

  I fidgeted and fought the urge not to bolt as I waited for a solid ten minutes. A door to the left of the windowed office opened to reveal the short hag. She beamed at me, a hideous sight. “This way, my dear. We’ll discuss your…difficulty in one of the healing rooms.”

  I followed her hobbling form down the dingy hallway, studying her back as I trailed her. She was missing a foot, using some kind of prosthetic, I observed. On a witch-hag, that was a bad sign. It may have been missing from an accident, or countless other things, but it still made me antsy. If she had sacrificed body parts for power, it just made it more likely that she had done worse things, evil things, for the same purposes.

  She led me into a shabby room that vaguely resembled an examination room at a doctor’s office. She waved for me to sit on a hard bench of an examination table. I did so, though every instinct that I had told me to get the fuck out of there. Following my instincts was a luxury on a week like this one.

  She sat in a mock doctor’s chair, giving me her attention, a kindly look on her face. “As I said, I can help you with the geas, but I’ll need some information about it. And the price for such a task can be…difficult.”

  I met her gaze steadily. “I figured as much. What do you need to know about the geas?”

  She brightened. “So cooperative. I like you, my dear. I need to know the nature of the geas, the rank of the druid that placed it on you, and the nature of your own powers, of course. I’m well aware that you’re not human.”

  I stiffened. I hadn’t anticipated that she would ask me outright what I was. It was common courtesy, among magic-users not to ask things like that. I supposed that coming to her for something so illegal sort of trumped the whole idea of courtesy. Double-fuck.

  I plunged further into the mess. “It’s a geas to meet with a specific person within a set amount of hours. One of the druid lieutenants placed it on me.”

  She blanched. “One of the seven?”

  I nodded.

  She moaned pitifully, and her voice was suddenly higher in pitch. It made the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. “That will be tricky. The time constraint is particularly troublesome, but I should still be able to do it. My price is non-negotiable, though. I need a pound of flesh and a favor, blood-oathed.”

  I schooled my features into passivity. “What is the favor? And what exactly do you mean by a pound of flesh?” I asked, absolutely certain that I wouldn’t like the answer.

  Her eyes twinkled at me, as though we were sharing some funny joke. It made me want to reach for a weapon. “A pound of flesh is exactly how it sounds, my dear. I answer to a master, as everyone does, and he will take a bite of your flesh and blood to seal our bargain. Think of it as a down payment. The favor, on the other hand, is more complicated. You will have to owe me for that. I will call on you, at my convenience, to do me a service.”

  I gave her my hardest, coldest stare, letting her see the resolve in my eyes. “There have to be conditions to that favor. I won’t kill for you, or do anything that helps you take a life.”

  Her eyes hardened, as well. “I don’t need help for that. Not from you.”

  I didn’t believe her, but I didn’t need to trust her. I just had to make her agree to a blood-oath, and make the conditions of it airtight, so I plunged on. “And I need to know what your master is. And who. I need a name and specifics, before I agree to anything.”

  She stiffened, her entire body going rigid suddenly. I began to bolt the instant I saw her eyes go red, but I was already too late. Who knew how long old Ethel had been rogue? It could have happened yesterday, or she may have been fooling everyone for years. Gods only knew. But I had no excuse for falling into such an obvious trap. It was a fact that I was old enough to know better.

  Invisible ropes seemed to pull my arms above my head, even as some force pushed me flat onto my back. They held me easily, in my weakened state. I cursed. Ethel was keening like a madwoman. I didn’t know if she was casting a spell or calling for backup, but I wanted badly to shut her up permanently.

  As she keened, a dark shadow began to materialize beside her. The hair on my body stood on end, and then my skin began to creep. It had been awhile, but I knew the awful feeling. Something demonic this way came. I couldn’t believe that I’d never made the connection between witch-hags and demons before it was literally in front of my face. It all made perfect sense. Making deals and sacrifices for power. The pieces were all there but I’d never bothered to connect them. I struggled and cursed futilely as the dark shape turned into a glossy black nightmare before my eyes. The tall, horrifying thing seemed to grin at me through pointed teeth. That could very well just have been it’s face, though.

  It sniffed the air, clicking slick black claws reflexively. It’s teeth snapped, and something rustled like wet cloth behind it. Wings. Of course. It shuddered, which made me shudder with fear. I beat it back. If something was going to take me down, my fear was not going to help it.

  It spoke, and I was shocked when it was English that came out of it’s horrible mouth. “This one is good, slave. You will gain much from this offering. I feel that she is powerful, but still, we must know what she is. It will determine whether we should keep her, or drain her now. Bring m
e the cypher!”

  I cursed louder. A cypher was bad. They weren’t much of a threat, as far as magical powers went. They were basically just humans who could tell the Other races apart from each other. No one worried about them much, except to find them useful. Except, of course, a fugitive dragon in a witch-hags hands, who’d just watched a demon being summoned to drink their blood. Then they were bad, bad, bad. My only hope was that the cypher had never seen a dragon, which was a good possibility, and that they were just baffled by my abilities in general. I avoided cypher’s like I did hag’s, because it was the sane thing to do, so I wasn’t sure that my hopes were real feasible, but hey, a girl had to hold onto something.

  Ethel hobbled from the room rather swiftly to obey her nightmarish master.

  The demon continued to sniff at the air and shudder, as though in pleasure. It was disconcerting and worrisome, to put it lightly. I tried not to shake with fear. “A feast,” it’s dark voice rasped. “You are a feast to all of my senses.”

  It approached me very slowly, claws and jaws snapping with every step. Ethel burst back through the door, a middle-aged, terrified looking man on her heels, long graying brown hair covering nearly his entire face as he bowed low. He was shorter than the hag, and skeletal thin.

  “Here he is, master. Yours to command, master,” Ethel screeched, sounding terrified herself.

  The demon turned it’s terrible regard to the man, and he instantly fell to his knees before it. I saw that the cypher also had a prosthetic leg from the thigh down. It was no coincidence that they were both missing limbs, I now knew. I wondered if there was any way that the man’s leg had been a voluntary sacrifice.

  “Tell me what she is, slave,” the demon said, in that insidiously terrifying voice.

  The cypher stumbled to me, awkward with fear. I blinked as he came closer and I got a good look at his face. His nose was missing, along with all of his teeth. His face was a gruesome sight. He pushed his hair out of his face, an instinctive gesture, as though to hook it back behind his ears, but those were missing as well.