Plague Cult

by Jenny Schwartz

  He stopped behind two cars parked—or abandoned, they were askew—in front of the wide garage. Everything was level, designed for Mason’s wheelchair.

  “Wait.” As much as she wanted to rush into the house to help her aunt and cousin, she had to make the heart-breaking decision to save the most lives. “I phoned William with news of the plague. He’ll be sending support. I need to contain it till they get here.”

  She was grateful when Shawn didn’t question if she could.

  “Do what you have to.” He opened the driver’s door. “If it’s Zach who triggered this, I need to deal with him. Don’t worry, I’ll keep you safe.”

  She smiled, sad and worried, yet amused. It was she who had to keep Shawn safe. This plague…

  Years ago, training at the Collegium, she’d been exposed to the bubonic plague. It had felt like this. The texture of its magical origins and the devastation of its symptoms resonated through its aura.

  She gathered her magic. It coiled at her center, but it wouldn’t be enough on its own. It would be the spark to draw in more power from the world around her: from the freshness of the wind, the photosynthesis of the trees and grass, the very pulse of the earth. She sank deeper into herself, plunged through her own magical center and tapped the healing energy, the life force, of the land. Then she threw up a containment shield, sealing in the plague.

  The rolling fog of the magical plague smashed into her shield.

  She shuddered. She was one person and she had to channel the immense power needed to contain the pressure of the plague pushing at the shield.

  The passenger door of the truck opened and Shawn reached in and grasped her shoulders.

  She recognized his energy and the feel of his hold, but it took seconds for her eyes to bring him into focus.

  “Take my energy.” His eyes were stormy with his hollerider nature.

  “Zach?” One word, all she could manage.

  But Shawn understood her question: the worry that he’d need his magic to handle the enchanter. “Dead.”

  Ruth’s relief wasn’t for news of the man’s death, but because it meant she could share this burden, the need to maintain the containment ward, with Shawn—if his hollerider nature would accept it.

  She visualized her control of the shield coalescing in the palm of her right hand. She felt it strengthen, even burn, with energy. She held it out to Shawn.

  His hand and his magic locked around it. Energy blazed up, ran through and interwove with her magic, and claimed the containment ward.

  As healer, she’d need to maintain it, but Shawn’s magic, his connection to the world, would sustain it.

  “Got it,” he said. “Now, you’re needed in the house.” He helped her down from the truck.

  For an instant she leaned into him. “How bad is it?” she whispered.

  “Whitney is seated on the floor in the living room by Zach’s body, cradling a gun and rocking back and forward. Mason is on a sofa, collapsed. Peggy’s on the floor beside him. They look sick.”

  Ruth had been in Mason’s house twice. Walking in the front door, straight into the living room, she felt a stranger. She disregarded the gun Whitney held, confident that Shawn would handle any violent danger, even as he fed the containment ward.

  Whitney turned bloodshot eyes in Ruth’s direction.

  They were so haunted, so damaged, that despite her aunt and cousin burning up with fever, Ruth went to the witch.

  Shawn took the gun from her.

  Whitney seemed not to notice. She looked at Ruth. Dying people had that fixed look, that desperate yet condemned gaze. “I had to kill him.”

  To Ruth’s right, Mason groaned on the sofa. Love for family, and old guilt, would have sent her to him, but her healer’s instincts knew she needed to be with Whitney. “Why?” she clasped Whitney’s hands. Death magic, like an oil slick, coated her fingers and palms. Ruth swallowed nausea. “Why did you kill Zach?”

  “I didn’t sleep. I lay in that hospital bed and everything he’d done to me, everything he was, I saw it all. He’d bespelled me. He’d used my wedding ring.” Agony in her hoarse whisper. “He told me things. He gloated over things. And then he’d order me to forget. But I remembered. I remembered last night. He had to die. And now, look what I have done. Kill me.”

  “Whitney, death is never the answer.”

  “Look at your aunt, your cousin. I did this to them by killing Zach. He had to die.” Finally, tears appeared in her bloodshot eyes. “I didn’t know it would restart the curse.”

  Ruth’s hands tightened. Whitney didn’t know it was so much more than the old curse. This was a virulent plague, born of her hatred and the abuse Zach had put her through. Because he’d channeled death magic through Whitney—and used it—when she killed him it hadn’t needed a specific spell to generate the plague. Vengeance had created this horror.

  “We’ll fix this, Whitney. We’ll contain the plague.” Ruth stopped as the other woman’s near-catatonic state shattered.

  “Plague?”

  Shawn crouched beside Ruth. “Whitney, Ruth needs to help Peggy and Mason, and see how to undo the plague you unleashed.” Whitney flinched, but he continued steadily. “You and I are going to stay with her. If we can help, we will. But let’s get you up off the floor.”

  Whitney stared at Shawn.

  Ruth wondered if the stern justice of his expression and the leashed power of his hollerider nature that vibrated through the containment ward, would send the witch fleeing or into unconsciousness. But Whitney surprised her.

  With Shawn’s help, Whitney stood. While Ruth bent over first Peggy, then Mason, checking their condition, Shawn seated Whitney in a chair turned away from Zach’s shotgun-blasted body.

  Ruth concentrated on her aunt and cousin, finding similarities to the bubonic plague’s high fever and delirium, and also the unhealthy growth of malignancy inside them, converging on their hearts. The lonely hearts plague.

  But she’d not let Aunt Peggy or Mason’s hearts rupture.

  In the corner, Whitney poured out her confession to Shawn, a background murmur that drifted in and out of Ruth’s awareness. “I stole a nurse’s car keys. Beeped locks till I found the car that opened…Jared had guns at his house. I drove there. He wasn’t home. If he had been, maybe he could have stopped me. I took the shotgun.”

  “How did you know Zach was at Mason’s house?”

  “I know him. Knew him.” Whitney’s voice was so bitter it soured the already plague-laden air. “Zach would hide where someone was vulnerable. Someone alone, who couldn’t fight back. Mason in his wheelchair…victim.”

  On the sofa, Mason muttered in some feverish nightmare.

  Ruth chanted, using words to help her concentrate, attempting to drive down the fever in her two patients even as she maintained her and Shawn’s personal wards and the vital containment shield. Her magic seemed to shred at the edges. She kept chanting.

  “Why would you think Zach was still in the area?” Shawn was directing Whitney’s confession into a low key interrogation.

  “He had to stay!” She sounded surprised at the question. “The men were coming.”

  Ruth stopped chanting. She turned her head, but kept her hands over Mason and Peggy’s chests. Her gaze met Shawn’s. The men were coming?

  “Who were coming? For what purpose?”

  “The Pinkie Ring Brigade. Zach told me to forget. Everything was planned to bring them here. Bideer is sited at a nexus. It increases the power of spells and enchantments.”

  The nexus was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it had given the plague virulence. On the other, it helped her and Shawn channel sufficient power to currently contain it. She just had to keep Mason and Peggy alive till help arrived. But Collegium guardians, even travelling via the portal to San Antonio and then by helicopter to Bideer were at least an hour away.

  Mason and Peggy didn’t have an hour. Their lungs were laboring to breathe. So near the unleashing point, the plague was ins
anely virulent. Their hearts were filling with fluid.

  “Lobbyists and businessmen,” Whitney said. Her voice was drifting. She was tired to the point of collapse, no longer driven by her emotions. “Zach promised them enchanted rings. They were to gather at Lynx Look-out. He said the nexus erupted there. They are fools.” She laughed, harsh like a banshee. “They thought the rings would grant them the power to influence those around them, to dance them like puppets on the string. But they would have been Zach’s puppets, like I was. That was why I knew he wouldn’t leave. The pinkie rings were to be enchanted today.”

  “But you killed him. You stopped it.”

  “I stopped him.” She was sliding off her chair, sliding into unconsciousness.

  Shawn grabbed her, easing her off the chair onto the floor as she collapsed. “What do you mean?”

  Her eyelids fluttered open. Closed. “The spell is in place. The men just need to shed their blood on their own rings. Zach had it all set up.” She fainted.

  Shawn stretched her out on the floor and looked across at Ruth. “Men?”

  She exhaled, trying to control her stress. She couldn’t handle any more revelations, and she shared Shawn’s suspicions expressed in that one question.

  “Men aware of magic? Mages, perhaps, in their own right.” He flexed his large hands. People in positions of power, or jockeying for power, preparing themselves to abuse that position, were his usual target. Collegium guardians protected the magical population and mundanes from those who would abuse them. But today, he couldn’t. He had to stay and hold the containment shield.

  Unless Ruth could undo the plague.

  She trembled. A plague once unleashed could be recalled, but not easily. Not without intense suffering. However, the longer a plague existed, the stronger it established itself. “Shawn, the containment ward I set up, can you hold it even without me?”

  His gaze pierced her. The awesome instinct to protect ruled his life. The muscles of his shoulders and chest strained. He so obviously fought not to question her, to give her what she needed—as he’d promised outside—even if her decision placed her in danger. He took a deep breath. “Yes.”

  “Then hold it.” She released the containment ward to him, but warily, ready to resume maintenance of it if his non-healer nature couldn’t hold it alone.

  The shield vibrated. Shawn’s jaw clenched. He inhaled and steadied. The shield held. The plague remained contained. But it was a precarious, temporary victory.

  “All right.” Ruth reluctantly removed her hands from Peggy and Mason. Hold on, she pleaded with them silently. She crossed to Shawn and to Whitney, who lay at his feet. “William’s sending reinforcements. Whatever happens to me, they’ll be here, soon.”

  “Ruth?”

  “I can call the plague back, now.” She wouldn’t tell him the cost. Knowing that the longer the plague existed, the harder recalling it would be, she had to try. Given its virulence, in an hour, it might be beyond removal. Then, she and the other healers would be fighting it.

  “How? Whitney couldn’t destroy it, and she’s its creator.”

  Last night, Ruth had broken Zach’s enchantment of Whitney’s ring by possessing it by shedding her blood. That was a mild form of what she intended to attempt, now. “I’ll explain later. If I survive.” It was meant to be a macabre joke, a whistling-in-the-wind challenge to fate, but the anguish that swept across Shawn’s face, the galvanic jerk of his body, removed all humor and left their emotions naked. “I have to, Shawn.”

  He cupped the back of her head. “Come back to me.”

  She smiled waveringly because he’d guessed what she intended. In a sense, she was leaving him. Forever, if she failed. She sank down, sitting cross-legged beside Whitney’s unconscious body, and put both hands five inches above the woman’s solar plexus.

  Centuries ago the medieval Christian world had known a practice called sin-eating. The most abject of the poor and outcast had scrabbled for survival by taking on the eternal punishment, the damnation, of people who’d died unexpectedly. The families of the dead had paid for this non-atoning transfer of guilt with food and perhaps a coin. Ruth intended something similar to the legend of sin-eating. She would transfer the death magic that ran through Whitney and had created the lonely hearts plague to herself.

  Once she owned the death magic, she had one chance to recall it.

  She would have to surrender her own soul and body to death, and return.

  Chapter 14

  Ruth entered the trance state that was half-magic and half-spirit. This was the realm of shamanism, where illogic revealed the deepest truths. She’d been here before. Three times. She recognized herself as the sunflower in the middle of an empty field. An empty field where the earth was tilled and ready for planting. Not desolate, but full of promise. Her flower face was turned to the sun and she absorbed its energy, floated in it.

  It was a wrench, a major struggle that felt as if her roots were being pulled out of the ground, but she turned her face from the sun to face the darkness. And then her vision was sucked into a spiraling black hole.

  In the real world, her palms froze as, extended over Whitney’s solar plexus, the death magic reached up and coiled around her hands. More. She had to absorb all of it.

  She plunged fully into the trance state and walked in the dark night of the soul where despair howled. Her body was racked by invisible forces, the bones seeming to pull apart, the muscles to twist and writhe away from each other. Agony. It rattled through her, the pain that was death.

  The darkness blazed red. Blood torrented down, bowing her sunflower self and flooding the earth. The ground washed away, and her roots sucked up blood, pumping it through the stem of the sunflower, discoloring her leaves and turning the flower face crimson. The death magic owned her, but she owned it.

  She floated with it. Agonizingly slowly, her trance self shifted form. From blood-soaked sunflower, she became bacteria. A whole colony, a growing, spreading, microscopically beautiful construct of twisting patterns and replicating structure.

  Oh, thank God. It meant the she was one with the plague. She had followed the link to it that Whitney had forged, and now, it was hers. She felt it press against the containment ward Shawn held. The plague—she, as plague—was so hungry. Ravenous. She needed to eat, to consume, to claim the vengeance of her origin.

  Her own magic surged, and punched the containment ward.

  She screamed silently, tasting energy and recognizing Shawn’s. No!

  The plague’s hunger fought the spark of Ruth that survived. She clung to a vanishing sense of self. And it wasn’t enough. Again the plague struck the containment ward. A third strike and it would be through. Ruth couldn’t form the thought. She was emotion and instinct.

  But strip away everything civilized and trained. Pare her back to her primitive self, and one truth shone silver against the dark blood of the plague. She loved Shawn. They had still to test and learn their relationship, but she already loved him.

  She locked her last sense of self to the silver pool glimmering at the edge of her vision state. Silver for her hollerider, the huntsman of evil. She sent her energy into it and saw the silver pool widen and lengthen, and suddenly enclose the bacteria colony. Silver gleamed between the blood and the containment ward.

  Shawn was safe.

  But the pressure built.

  The silver—the truth of her love for Shawn—helped Ruth return to herself. She was still within the plague, but she could think again. She could reason and remember.

  The plague, her other self now, roiled within its cage. It would kill Mason and Peggy. It was too strong. Tightening the silver pool in this trance state, pulling it inwards, might strangle the plague, but not before the press of it claimed two of her family’s lives. She had to destroy the lonely hearts plague some other way.

  When Shawn had masked her magic with his, they’d meshed.

  She needed to mesh the silver energy of her love with the blood of the p
lague, and so crumble the plague from within. She concentrated and a million silver threads pierced the plague. The bacteria colony frayed, blotched and disintegrated. And she felt its dying. She was its dying.

  Her heart stopped.

  Ruth fell out of her trance state.

  Her heart thumped.

  Shawn was holding her. He was seated on the floor and she was in his arms, her back against his chest, completely wrapped in him. “Ruth?” His mouth was against her ear, his voice nearly soundless.

  She turned her head, and they kissed. Her cold lips warmed. The flavor of him brought her fully back to consciousness. His energy returned vitality to her limbs gone cold. She scrambled around, onto her knees to hold him and hug him and be grateful she was alive. The pulse at the base of his throat was beautiful. Life.

  “I have to help Mason and Aunt Peggy.” She wanted to stay in his arms. Did he love her? Did she love him in the forever kind of way? Who knew the future, but here and now, he’d been her lifeline. Her instinct said he always would be.

  She sniffed unromantically, fighting tears of relief and exhaustion.

  “Ruth?” Peggy’s voice. “I called you.”

  For an instant, Shawn wouldn’t let her go. “Is the plague gone?” he asked too quietly for Peggy to hear.

  “Yes.” She braced a hand on his shoulder to stand.

  He was up an instant later and supporting her across to her aunt and cousin. Mason was still unconscious, but the flush of fever had faded and the sweat was drying on his face.

  “Dear heaven. She really shot Zach.” Peggy hauled herself up by gripping the edge of the sofa and then its arm. “And I fainted like a ninny.” Embarrassment crumpled her face before she focused on Mason, who opened his eyes. Peggy patted his leg. “Are you okay?”

  Shawn interrupted. “Ruth and I need to go. Don’t mention us when you call this into the sheriff,” he added.

  Mason stared at him muzzily.

  Peggy looked from Mason to Ruth. “There was a problem. Whitney was raving, so I phoned you.”

  “There was a problem, but it’s fixed.” Ruth’s magic was exhausted, all she could do was check Peggy and Mason’s auras and relax to find them whole. They’d recover on their own, or the healers William sent could help them.