I knew nothing. Azrael didn't educate me nearly enough. It was almost as though he wanted me to fail.
Not for the first time, I felt a flash of irritation toward the angel. I told myself that if I managed to take down this incubus, when he came to collect the dregs of its nasty energy, I'd plow my head into his stomach and knock him on his ass.
"Ayla," Callum said.
I realized they were all still looking at me.
"Okay," I said. "We'll wait."
Sarah let go a sigh as though she had been waiting with bated breath for me to say those words, but was afraid I wouldn't.
"We'll figure it all out over a stack," she said. "Nothing says face-a-demon like a belly full of pancakes. Besides," she said looking at Callum. "You look like you could use a belly full of something. Maybe a little food will fix you right up."
I secretly believed the only thing that could fix him up was another visit from the incubus. He looked drawn and haggard. Even that glossy black hair of his seemed a little less lustrous. He almost looked like he was pining for something, and yet that thing that had attacked us both was not something I'd ever want to think about again, let alone have visit, and I knew he felt the same. Compulsion was a strange thing. Like addiction, you could both loathe and want it at the same time.
Sarah pushed herself to her feet and was walking toward the porch when she halted and looked over her shoulder at us. "Bring those things in," she said. "I don't feel right leaving them there without being able to keep an eye on them."
We trooped into the house and sat at the table as Sarah rustled up pancakes and cocoa. She plopped a platter full of blueberry flapjacks in the centre of the table and partnered it with a jug of maple syrup that felt like it was warmed up when I reached for the handle.
Gramp was strangely quiet so I pushed a plate toward him.
"One or two?" I asked him with a pancake speared on the end of my fork.
"I'm not hungry," he said.
"Me either," Callum said. He pushed his plate away.
Sarah sent a glare at each one of us. "Starving yourselves is not going to help."
The anxious girl from the crypt had disappeared and in her place spawned a Boudicca-esque warrior who seemed to forget the danger to herself in the midst of all the chaos. This was the girl I had met those years ago in the foster home, and it felt familiar and comforting to have her back.
"Don't look at me," I said, dropping a pancake onto my plate. "I'm famished."
"We'll open the pots in the cellar," Gramp said, seeming to take his authoritarian tone from a cue in Sarah's voice. "One corner of it is built over an underground stream that should offer a bit of warding." He checked his watch. "3:33 pm to oppose devil's hour."
Surprisingly, Sarah nodded as though she understood exactly what he was getting at. Callum and I exchanged looks of confusion.
"And here I thought you were some spritely old druid," I said, staring at him as though seeing him for the first time. "Not Gandalf the Grey."
Gramp gave me a look that shut me up immediately. I guessed joking about his religion wasn't cool. I drew a line in my syrup with the tines of my fork.
"What are you planning to do?" Callum said.
Sarah fiddled with her braid, pulling it forward and tapping the tip of it against her nose.
"Protection?" she said, and she looked at Gramp for confirmation. He nodded and she continued slowly.
"Each of us will weave a spell of warding to keep the magics of the jars contained."
Gramp leaned back in his chair. "I'll take care of one and you take care of the other."
She nodded. "It will only take me a little while to get my things together."
By things, I imagined the kinds of soppy red and slimy Ziploc baggies she had stored in her cooler in the crypt. I shuddered at the memory.
"Not sure where we're going to get livers and hearts," I started and she shrugged as though I hadn't just made light of it all.
"Easy stuff," she said. "Although I'll need you to collect it for me."
I laid my palms on the table and stared her down. "You don't seriously think I'm going to do out and rip out someone's liver?"
"The butcher," she said with a steely face. "You go to the butcher and you ask for innards. Easy enough."
Gramp reached for his mug of cocoa. He seemed rejuvenated with a purpose at hand. I didn't have the heart to remind them all that they were probably wasting their time. There was no way these ugly little jars were responsible for an incubus slipping between Gramp's safety nets.
"You open yours first and I'll open my next," he said. "That way if anything goes wrong, we won't have doubled down on the danger."
"Sounds solid," Sarah said. "Do you have backup for a recoil?"
Gramp nodded. "I have all of my things I need right here in the house, and out in the yard. If anything recoils, the earth will swallow it up."
I stared them down mutely. As peculiar as it was to listen to my grandfather spouting stuff that sounded like it came straight from a Dungeons & Dragons game, it was even stranger to hear him and my best friend discussing it as though they were going over a recipe for cookies.
"Do you put sugar in that?" I said with a laugh and Sarah swung a carefully patient eye to me.
"This isn't funny," she said. This is very particular magic. He will use his creed and dogma and I'll use mine, but neither one of you should be anywhere near our circles. If we need you to run, you need to be far enough away from whatever comes out of those things that you can get to safety."
"I won't be running," I said.
Callum snorted.
"I'm serious," Sarah said. "We have no idea what's inside of those jars, and worse, we have no idea what they were put there for or what they're going to troll in. We're going to have to put you behind a barrier of some sort." She put her fingers to her lips thinking. Gramp snapped his fingers.
"They should be plenty safe if we open our jars inside of the circles," he said.
"Yes," Sarah said. "That would work. That way if there's anything nasty, it will stay within the circle with us."
I didn't like the sound of that, but even as I reached for Gramp's hand to dissuade him, he pushed away from the table as though he had just come to a momentous decision.
"We only have a couple of hours. Ayla, you and Callum go to the butcher and get Sarah what she needs."
Sarah gave me a timid smile. "Make sure it's calf liver," she said sweetly. "Or Lamb. Preferably something young."
I clutched my stomach to quell the nausea but did as she bid. By the time we returned, the cellar held a distinctly macabre feel to it. Sarah was on one side of a back corner and Gramp was on the other. I could see that they had done plenty of preparation. The jars were at each of their feet.
"Sarah will open hers first," Gramp said. "Her magic is a little stronger than mine."
"I'll be drawing on some pretty potent magic," she said. "So if anything goes wrong when we open them, I'll be able to contain it."
Gramp looked at her with a sort of pride and she squirmed beneath his gaze.
Not one to feed a squishy moment, I pushed the paper bag of innards at her.
"I'm not so sure what asking for this might have done to my reputation around here," I said. "But they gave them to me for free. Well, not free. I had to take a little bit of scolding over the church."
"Doesn't matter," Sarah said. She looked down at the floor as though she were inspecting it. I had the feeling she was dying to check inside the bag to check if I had got the right things but didn't want to embarrass me.
Several objects were laid out in a pattern on one end of the corner.
"My magic takes some pretty physical objects," Gramp said noticing my gaze. "Celtic Sea salt," he said pointing to the section he had drawn out. I crossed to stand over the assortment of items. There was a fairly broad circle drawn out in the salt he'd mentioned. An X joined the circle at four points in the middle. The jug sat in the apex of the cross
. The concrete around it was littered with objects that I recognized from his hallway table, outlining the circle at odd intervals.
"A chalice of water," Gramp said coming up behind me. "A forked branch with living leaves from the sacred Oak," he said, pointing, "volcanic glass and a candle. Over there, a feather from that turkey vulture and a piece of quartz."
"Strange array," I said.
He smiled thinly. "All four elements."
I looked at Sarah. "Where's your circle?"
As far as I could see, she'd done nothing to prepare except wait for her innards to arrive. I jerked my chin to the section Gramp had obviously been responsible for. I couldn't help teasing her.
"Looks like he's done more work than you."
She crossed her arms over her chest and arched a blonde brow. I'd touched a nerve but she didn't say anything. Instead, she reached behind her back and dug out something from the waistband of her jeans. She brandished it in front of me. It was a thin, greyish thing that looked like it had been buried in a mud puddle.
"Bone," she said. Then she leaned over and drew a circle on the basement floor with it. The scraping sound coming from the floor as she moved ebbed in concert with a chalky substance leaving a trail as she moved. I got queasy as I realized it was probably fragments of bone dust marking the cement. She peered up at me from beneath her bangs still fringed with the bottled black dye she had used to disguise her hair. Those blue eyes of hers seemed lit from within.
"That's it?" I said. "You know it wasn't fun asking the butcher for viscera."
She sucked the back of her teeth as though to say just watch me. She dug into her jeans pocket and extracted a tiny pocket knife she flipped open. She jabbed the point into the tip of her finger, making me wince. When she squeezed the tip with her opposite thumb, a burble of blood rose glistening and red. She shook her hand over the circle to disperse the drops.
I heard Callum hissing out a curse from the other side of the room.
When she was done, she sat cross-legged in front of the jug and dug her hands into the Ziploc bag I'd given her, pulling out the liver in one hand and the heart in the other. She clenched them so tightly, the tips of her fingers disappeared into the muscle.
I gagged. I was pretty sure that Callum was retching over in the corner. Babies, both of us.
Gramp jerked his chin at me.
"Go over there with him," he said and then he moved into the middle of his circle. He nodded at Sarah and then the two of them began chanting, neither one of them using words that were from English, and neither one of them using the same language. I wasn't sure how long we stood there, with that haunting sound of foreign language and hum of chanting raising hairs on our arms, but at some point, Callum's hand slipped into mine and I squeezed it.
I could feel the hair standing on the back of my neck as I listened to them chanting. I had to stare at Gramp's red wool socks stuffed into his Birkenstocks to remind myself that I was still in this world. Things were normal. They hadn't gone all crazy. We weren't about to unleash some demon from the pits of hell just by opening these containers. I felt as though my lungs were burning and realized I wasn't taking sufficient enough breaths.
It was almost anticlimactic when I heard them both stop chanting at nearly the exact same moment. They eyed each other and then gave short nods. Sarah went first. She snicked the lashings free with the pocket knife she had used to cut her finger. I could have sworn I heard Callum's sharp intake of breath.
The room was eerily silent for an agonizing moment.
Sarah touched the top of the lid with trembling fingers and a quiet, almost hushed scrape of lid against collar whispered across the space. She lifted it and peered inside.
Callum squeezed my hand and pulled me close to his side.
I watched as Sarah's shoulders sagged and she blew out a long gust of air. She reached inside and pulled out what looked like a thick piece of parchment paper. Old and fraying at the edges, a little bit brown, but otherwise just a piece of paper.
Callum's breath came out in a whistle and while I expected him to let me go, he sort of shifted sideways and peered down at me. There was a glint in his eye that looked almost playful.
"There goes the blue wire," he said and his grin went all crooked and heart-stoppingly giddy.
Sarah's gaze flicked up at us in warning, and I felt a lump in my throat dislodge. Didn't matter what she thought, we'd come miles already.
I waggled my eyebrows at her and she turned her attention again to the parchment. I watched as she unrolled it.
"Hieroglyphs," she said casting a victorious look my way. "Definitely something Egyptian even though you were right about it not being a canopic jar, Ayla."
I wasn't sure why I found that so relieving. Something about imagining more viscera inside those jars gave me the creeps.
"So," I said. "What's on it?"
She smirked at me and I read in her expression a bit of an I told you so.
"A spell from the book of the dead I think," she said. "I'm not sure which one yet. I'd have to look this over a little more."
A piece of paper. A little bit of writing. A spell, yes, and probably powerful but at least not another heart or lung. I heard my wind exhale in a hiss. I dared to look at Callum.
"What comes after blue?" I said.
He squeezed my hand. "A glass of champagne."
It wasn't hard to tell that he was as relieved as I was. So far so good. I was banking on having that celebratory glass by suppertime.
Gramp coughed from his side of the corner. "My turn," he said.
He rubbed his hands together as though he were warming them up. He shook them loose and rubbed them on his pants. When his fingers went to the top of the jar to pull the lashings free, he sent a quick look my way.
I smiled at him, encouraging.
He pulled the little ropes free of the jar and then lifted the lid. It clattered to the basement floor as he dropped it. Sarah lurched forward but checked herself just in time before she stepped outside of her circle.
For one moment, there was a complete hush in the room as though something from a funeral crypt had breezed through. The hair on my arms stood and the markings on my skin tingled almost as though something had whispered across them. I felt almost euphoric for a second and then I realized that Gramp's face had gone completely flat. He was struggling to pull a stoic mask down over a look of alarm.
For a moment I thought he would speak since his mouth gaped open and closed again. And then his hands tightened into little balls and something in his expression went blank. The next I knew he fainted backward, striking his head on the basement floor. Not thinking about what sort of danger might have been waiting for me, I rushed for him.
I landed next to him with a skid and pulled his head onto my lap. I heard myself calling his name.
I was aware of Callum next to me, crouching, the perfect fireman remaining calm and collected.
He tested for a pulse.
"He's okay," he said, peeling open and eyelid. "Just fainted.
Gramp's eyes fluttered open and he looked at me with a faraway look in his eyes.
"It's me, Gramp," I said. "It's Ayla. You're alright."
Of course he was alright. He couldn't be anything else. There wasn't anything here that could hurt him. Just two little jars made of pottery. A piece of paper. Three friends. Family. Everything was just fine.
I let go a manic little laugh that made Callum glance at me sharply.
"Nerves," I said.
Sarah called out from her side of the corner. "Is he okay?"
"Pretty sure," Callum said and peered up beneath Gramp's eyelids. "Can you talk to me, Mr. Tully?"
Gramp nodded and croaked out something that sounded like, "Get off me."
I helped Gramp move to a sitting position, letting him rest against my chest as I sat cross-legged on the floor propping him up. I murmured a few words to him, helping him come all the way around.
When his hand gripped mi
ne, I realized it was still warm and dry. Nothing but a faint, then. The color was washing back into his face.
I gave him a timid smile.
"I guess we dodged a bullet there," I said but Gramp didn't answer to that. Instead his gaze went to the container and I watched as he licked his lips nervously. I followed his gaze to see Callum peering down into its depths.
His face was too rigid. Too emotionless.
"What's wrong?" I said.
"I guess we cut the red wire," he said and tilted the jar toward me so that I could see inside. I felt Gramp clutch my forearm.
"Don't look, Ayla," he said. "Don't look."
But it was too late. I had already seen the contents. A tiny mummified body with a red amulet wrapped around its neck.
A baby, then. A tiny almost perfect baby with miniature wings sprouting from its back.
CHAPTER 11:
"I'm glad I didn't get that thing," Sarah said.
We were in the living room. Gramp was sitting in his armchair looking sullen and anxious with his fingers clenching the armrests and a cup of cocoa Sarah had made him sitting on the little table beside him. Sarah was sitting cross-legged on the floor and Callum and I were both sitting on the sofa. I couldn't help glaring at her, even though I knew all she was doing was trying to break the tension in the room.
I nudged her with my toe.
"Well I am," she said. "If I had got that thing instead of the one with the paper in it, there's no telling what might've happened. It could be walking around and talking for all we know." She snorted and crossed her arms over her chest.
Callum's leg spasmed next to mine. Of all of us, he seemed to find the events of the day the most disturbing. I imagined a lifetime of necromancy and druidism might desensitize a person to things like that, but Callum still thought he was human. This had to be tough for him.
We had left the basement without saying a word to each other. Simply collected up the containers and lids as well as the parchment paper and brought it up stairs without so much as looking at each other either.
Typical of Sarah, she had gone straight to the kitchen and pulled out a plate of lemon meringue pie. When she offered a piece to me to me, I declined with a shake of my head. I didn't know how she could eat after that. I still couldn't bring myself to look into that second container and imagine that tiny body again. Just envisioning someone stuffing it in there made my gallbladder twitch. I felt as though I was trying to catch hold of the last thread of a vivid dream but it unravelling even as I grabbed for the end.
Dire (Reaper's Redemption Book 2) Page 10
