“I’m sure she’ll help us. Elizabeth Taylor will serve as the perfect scapegoat when the witches discover the spell over Cael is gone.”
“Will he start decomposing?”
“They’ll recast the spell quickly enough, but that leaves us with an uncomfortably short window of time to talk to him.”
THE COVEN’S underground vault bore no resemblance to the modern high-rise built on top of it. The coven had constructed the vault from a series of long-forgotten tunnels that ran under parts of the city. The supe community had perfected the art of urban exploration, uncovering city secrets not found in official records in the effort to hide their existence.
We took the elevator down to the basement-level garage. Kara led me to a nondescript door with the word “Service” posted on the front. She stepped back to allow the cards to flutter about the door, releasing the spell locking it. I followed them inside and down a flight of stairs to a rounded tunnel lit by vintage C9 Christmas lights.
I laughed. “Who strung these up?”
“Matilda replaced the regular light bulbs with these.”
E.T. paused at the play of red, green, blue and yellow, giving the dank passage an almost festive air. “We need to move,” Kara said, stomping down the tunnel. E.T. followed her by expanding and coming together, like an accordion, occasionally stopping with an exaggerated flourish of impatient flapping. She had such a strong personality, I almost wondered if some spirit hadn’t inhabited her through Matilda’s spell. She’d agreed to our plan with excitement, flipping back and forth in a card shuffling display that would make any Vegas dealer jealous. E.T. played the part of an imperial queen quite well and would scoff at working a Vegas casino, envisioning herself a Monte Carlo, James Bond type of gal. I was glad she was on our side, if anything to avoid a portentous reading.
We turned right, down another tunnel lit only with red lights until we reached a door. Once again, E.T. did her magic absorption thing, and we entered a dark room. Kara flicked on the light, and I gasped. The room resembled a cluttered antique shop specializing in medieval torture.
“Follow me and don’t touch anything,” Kara said.
“No problem. What the heck?” I followed close behind her, grimacing at the implements bearing clamps, hooks and pointy tips. I had no idea how they were supposed to work, but could conjure a painful use or two.
“The coven obsessively collects this stuff. I think it’s a way to reclaim our heritage from the zealots that persecuted us, but also a reminder. To make sure it never happens again.” She gave me an undecipherable look, as if she expected me to dunk her in water until she begged for mercy. One of these days, the supes needed to battle it out in Death Valley and excise their animosity toward each other, because I’d just about had it with the scurvy looks and veiled threats.
“So what was the thought behind storing Cael here? To torture his dead body?”
“No one really likes this room so Cael would lie relatively undisturbed. The coven has been studying the arcane traces on his body.”
I froze. “For what purpose?”
She stopped and sighed. “Fight fire with fire. Create spells to raise the dead.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” I gasped.
“If it’s any consolation, they haven’t come close. I honestly doubt they’ll succeed. If they do, I’ll tell you, I promise.” She met my eyes, and I believed her.
I trailed her to a corner of the room, on the other side of a metal shelf filled with jars containing unnamable gooey things that were probably not as freaky as my mind was currently imagining. I shuddered and tore my gaze from the mesmerizing jars. A wood coffin lay next to my feet. I almost felt sorry for Cael, winding up in a witch storeroom full of snotty jars and torture devices.
“So you going to open the box?” she asked.
“I don’t really want to.” But this was my idea, so I had little choice. I pulled on the lid to reveal Cael, thankfully looking normal, as if he’d just left my class. For once, I was grateful for the witch magic that had held back the decaying process, sparing me from maggots, nasty odors and the sunken pallor of death.
E.T. released one card from her deck and floated it over Cael’s body before jumping over to tap me on the head. “Stop.” I waved the card away.
“She’s giving you a reading. E.T., let me see.” The card floated over to Kara. “The Hanged Man.” Kara glanced at Cael then swiveled her gaze to me. “The Hanged Man card means sacrifice. Giving something up in order to attain something of greater value.”
Tarot cards never provided literal meanings, but sometimes E.T. doled out readings that struck an uncanny understanding. Had Cael traded sanity for power? “Why did she pat me with the card?” I asked.
“It’s hard to know if E.T.’s readings are trustworthy. I mean what is she? What sentient force is at work?” Kara waxed philosophical, an obvious attempt to avoid my question. Finally, she confessed. “Like I said, the card means sacrifice. A sacrifice will have to be made.”
“By me?”
“Who knows? That’s the problem with readings. Don’t worry about it, okay?”
Sure. No worries, except the damn deck of Tarot cards just told me I’d have to make some sacrifice. Like Cael.
“Sometimes these cards are more trouble than they’re worth,” Kara muttered.
E.T. zipped to the vault’s exit in a dramatic spiral. Kara groaned. “Great. E.T., come back. I’m sorry. You are extremely helpful.” She didn’t sound convincing.
The cards hung in midair just in front of the door. Kara glared at them and said through her teeth, “Your readings are valuable and insightful. Please.”
The cards undulated, as if undecided, then swooshed back to surround Cael’s body. I didn’t see anything, but after a few minutes, the cards shook and left his body in a frenzied funnel before settling in a stack on the shelf of gooey jars.
“I’m going to wait in the next room. Will you be all right?” Kara asked.
“In the witches’ torture chamber?”
I didn’t want to be left alone, but Kara seemed antsy, and I didn’t need that energy for Cael to feed on. I waved her off, and she seemed relieved. She left with E.T. and closed the door behind her. Here goes nothing. I blocked out any nagging thoughts and bled my power into Cael. I braced for the cold water shock, the painful slap or sensation that translated to this is a bad, bad thing you’re doing. Stop now.
What I felt was worse, much worse because it was blissful. My body trembled in pure orgasmic pleasure. Tears ran down my cheeks at the corrupt purity of reanimating someone I’d killed.
Cael woke in a drowsy stupor before some twinge of consciousness caught up to his body, and he jumped up. This was the part of reanimation I hated the most. Watching someone wake from their peaceful, comatose state, their faces contorting in confusion, then horror, which always transformed to rage. The trick was to calm them before they reached the rage stage because that could definitely lead to a messy, messy outcome.
“What is this? Flesh. My flesh, whose flesh? I died?” His voice came out in a dry rasp, and he stared at his arm as if it were an alien appendage.
“You’re Cael. You are dead,” I told him.
“Dead? How can I be dead?” He groped his head with his fingers, twisting them through his brown, well-preserved waves of hair.
“I called you to answer some questions.”
“You. Who are you?”
I didn’t answer, worried that in his schizophrenic state, he’d remember that I’d killed him and freak out on me. Good thing the witches had located his casket away from the nasty implements.
“Ah, flesh. This is flesh.” He tore at his arm, scraped the skin with his dirty nails. “Weighing me down, so heavy, so inefficient. Why are you here?”
“I have questions.”
“You. Who are you?” Up to this point, he’d shifted his eyes around the vault, unable to settle on one thing, and when his gaze finally lit on me, I shivered at the soulless depths of his eyes. “Montagne. Montagne. Beware of necromancers. Where are we?”
“In a storage room.”
“Why?”
“Because you are dead.”
“Dead? But I rule the dead. Taint. I’m tainted.” His face twisted with despair. “I never meant to hurt them. I just wanted to prove . . . weak, weak—” The final “weak” came out in a whine.
This was going nowhere. Just as I’d feared. Raising the dead could sometimes help, but more often than not, it was a frustrating exercise in talking to what’s left of a person’s decayed spirit.
“Ahhhh. Pain. I feel. This flesh, it hurts me.” He resumed scratching his forearm until he drew blood. “So heavy. Heavy. The master said he could help me. I would have power. Transform into something greater. Souls. Need souls. I pledged my soul. My father pledged my soul.” He ripped out a chunk of hair in a paroxysm of rage.
I flinched and tried once again to focus on my questions and not on his self-inflicted wounds. “Who? Cael, who is the Master?”
“But he didn’t want me anymore. He mocked me. My father mocked me. Weak. Like this flesh. Weak.” I tore my gaze from the gash he continuously scratched and dug at, turning the preserved, pink flesh raw and meaty. I couldn’t take much more of this.
“Who mocked you?”
“He said he’d teach me to take the souls, make me stronger. I should have killed him. Instead, that bitch got involved. She was stronger,” he whined.
My heart pounded frantically. So close, but I had to proceed carefully. If I overwhelmed him, he’d break a circuit. “Who should you have killed?”
“The demon. Demon. Demon. Evil.”
“Which demon? What’s his name?”
“I can see the blood flowing through your veins.” He reached his finger, bloody from clawing at his arm, toward my neck, and I swatted it away. He squeezed his eyes shut and clamped his hands on his head. “Excessive. Sights. Sounds. The spider. Stop!” His agonized shout echoed off the walls. When he opened his eyes, his glare was frightening. “You killed me. It’s not over, and you will suffer most of all, bitch.” He lunged at me, and I pulled the arcane cord from his socket. He collapsed, one arm landing on my lap. The bloody one, of course. I carefully picked up his pinkie and tossed his arm off me. Well, that was a horrible experience.
Poor Cael. He’d obviously been used and abused, promised something he’d never receive. I called Kara, and she reappeared with E.T. circling my head.
“What happened to his arm?” Kara asked, giving a quick shake to her shoulders. “They’ll notice.”
“Give me a rag, something to clean it.”
She poked around on the shelves and came up with a stained rag. I cleaned the area he’d gouged and carefully tugged the long sleeve Cael had shoved up his arm in his frenzied scratching back down to cover the wound. If no one bothered to examine his body, they probably wouldn’t notice the torn flesh. And when they finally did notice, hopefully, they’d blow it off.
“Let’s get out of here.” Kara turned toward the cards. “E.T., you should leave now. Go back to the coven.”
The deck expanded and fanned past our heads and out of the vault. We repositioned Cael’s body in the box, closed the lid, and sped out of the room, down a different corridor. Our plan was to take the tunnels to one of the BART stations where the witches had created an exit.
“So how did it go?” Kara asked.
“Ugh.” I felt a crawling sensation all over my body, like hundreds of disgusting parasites were camping out in all my nooks and crannies. “He mangled his arm in front of me and told me I’d suffer most of all.” Not to mention my power had gotten all hot and bothered. The experience had given me a taste of the forbidden, proving devastatingly addictive. No wonder Cael had lost it.
“Are you okay?” Kara stopped me with a hand on my arm. “You’re sweating, and your eyes . . . they’re doing that strange, glowing orb thing. What happened in there?”
My heart trembled. “It’s weird bringing back a person you killed.” Weird? How did I explain the truth? That it was incredible, and I want more?
Chapter Twenty-Two
IN AN EFFORT TO settle my fervor and expel the shroud that had settled over us after reanimating Cael, I dragged Kara to see a late-night horror flick. It seemed contradictory given what I’d just experienced, but generally, horror movies amused me more than they scared me. Kara and I often found ourselves stifling our laughter so we wouldn’t annoy the patrons who thought they were watching a scary movie. There were rare times, however, when the movie displayed an uncanny understanding of vamps or ghosts, like the film, Near Dark.
Holy shit. That one scared the crap out of me because true vamps could be that bloodthirsty, making me think the director was a supe. It chilled me to the bone watching art imitate a fantastic life. Fantasy made real. Those were the times I walked out because I was living the real and didn’t need the fantasy. Fortunately, this was not one of those movies, and Kara and I enjoyed a good laugh at the ridiculous vampires that would have given Lysander seizures.
We left the movie theater, and by some strange coincidence, found ourselves in the vicinity of Adam’s old apartment.
“You think about him much?” Kara asked.
“Almost every day. He was a good person, funny. He hid behind a cynical exterior, but he cared, a lot. I miss him.”
Adam had been my first supernatural revenant, and, although I’d mastered the bond with him and managed to muzzle him, it wasn’t an experience I wished to repeat. Nor Brandon. Zombies ran around and focused what little mental capacity they had on finding flesh and were relatively easy to control. But Adam and Brandon had been smart and strong, their personalities vivid, as was their pain at being undead. An excruciating anguish had poured into me through the bond like a hot, searing liquid.
“I miss him too. And I miss Matilda,” Kara said, her voice strangled. I squeezed her arm. The street was unusually quiet and calm, not the usual bustle of the Mission at night. I took a detour down one of the side streets, wanting to escape the memories.
The twilight sky swirled with deep maroons and oranges, combining in a baroque gaudiness. The clouds appeared like a thick velvet covering the sky, blocking out any streams of moonlight. The street lamps cast weak beams on the sidewalks, giving the block a funereal glow.
“Figure you’d bring us on this dead street,” Kara said with a smirk.
“There’s a light in that house.” I pointed to the attic window of a three-story Victorian, its peeling paint and battered wood frames crying out for some serious renovation.
“The scary Amityville horror red light? No thanks.”
We laughed, but increased our strides until coming to within a few feet of the next cross street, brightly lit, and humming with the welcome sound of car engines.
Kara stopped.
I passed her, halted, and turned.
“You hear that?” she asked in a whisper.
“No.” I hadn’t heard anything above the car engines, which had now completely dissipated, restoring the block back to the eerie quiet of before. Then something stirred in the silence.
A soft susurration, the swish of tree leaves that quickly turned into an alarming whistling and thrashing. Neither of us moved. The freight train-like sound increased in ferocity, and the wind kicked up around us until a small but fierce churning mass of air veered down our street. My eyes widened.
“Run!” Kara shouted.
I unstuck my frozen legs and chased Kara back down the street we’d come from. “What is it?” I yelled, but my voice competed with the loud scream of hell’s tornado bearing down on us, churning, zigza
gging, and sucking up and spitting out the small trees, trash cans, whatever items on the street it could consume and eject with terrifying force.
“If it catches us, we’re dead,” Kara screamed. “Witchcraft,” she huffed out between breaths. “I can’t cast a counter spell while running.”
I shared her frustration, but in a different way entirely. I had no ability to draw on supernatural energy to lash back in defense. It would be a different story altogether if this thing had blown our way in a graveyard, although it’d result in a whirling tornado of human body parts. I forced more breath down my cramped lungs and sped up, but the thing gained on us, swatting at us with stinging gusts of wind, trying to knock us down. We almost reached the end of the street.
“Turn right!” Kara screamed while she ran left. The tornado zinged straight ahead onto the main street and stopped, causing cars to swerve out of the path of the rampaging behemoth. We’d confused it, giving Kara a precious moment to concoct some kind of spell, but what? The whirring Tazmanian Devil tornado took off after Kara, and she faced it, her hands raised, mouth occupied with a spell. Kara’s hair flew and whipped around her face from the fierce gusts the thing spat at her. I halted my breath. She was lifted off the ground, and I sprinted toward her, reaching her just in time to catch her feet before the tornado tossed her into the air. I tightened my grip on her ankles, trying to pull her down, but my feet soon lost touch with the ground as well. The gusts slapped me with the ferocity of a whip, but I held on. Her face was scrunched in concentration, eyes closed. What could she do to squash this thing? And as if in response, the mass of frenetic air split in two, as if she’d summoned a barometric pressure hammer.
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