There was a pain as deep as a canyon residing in him.
If the storm was any indication, Brinke was arriving late to the game already. Ember Hollow, not to mention her witch colleagues, needed help. This man could not be her problem right now.
Brinke hurried to the rental-car area, not overly surprised to find that the offices were all immobilized by computer issues from the storm. The lights flickered and died throughout the airport for nearly a minute; time enough for a moderate panic to set in.
She stepped outside to check for waiting taxis or driver services. There were none in sight.
Back inside, she saw the covered man again, issuing a shy wave, like a toddler, as a middle-aged woman approached. The woman hugged him and spoke animatedly for a few seconds. He raised a tracheal amplifier to his throat and responded, then they went to the luggage conveyer.
Brinke found herself striding toward the couple, perhaps more determinedly than was prudent, for the covered man visibly recoiled as she came within a few feet.
Undaunted, and desperate, Brinke shone her blazing smile. “Pardon me, folks…”
The lady turned, also wary, yet receptive. “Yes?”
“Are you going to Ember Hollow?”
“Hmm, I’d better, I suppose,” said the woman. “I’m the mayor. Would you like a ride?”
The covered man tugged at Doris’s sleeve, as if imploring her to withdraw the invitation.
Chapter 21
The Sky’s Gone Out
The Stuyvesants led Brinke to a light brown Audi A8 with heavily tinted windows—the “Mayor Mobile.”
Kerwin, incapable of whispering or subtle speech, continued to tug at Doris’s sleeve every few yards.
“Kerwin, stop it!” answered Doris. “What kind of mayor would I be if I didn’t help our visitors?”
Brinke got in the back seat, impressed by the immaculate new-car smell and showroom interior.
Once they were all seated, Doris gave her brother a look of rebuke tempered with love. “This is my brother, Kerwin. Please forgive him; he’s very self-conscious.”
“Hi, Kerwin! I’m Brinke.”
Taking off his sunglasses, Kerwin merely stared out the darkened glass as Doris started the Audi.
Stopping at the exit gate, Doris looked at Brinke in the rearview. “Where can we take you, young lady?”
“The Blue Moon Inn, please.”
“You’ve come at a less than optimal time, I’m afraid,” said the mayor. “Our town, and my brother…we’ve had some recent downturns. But you’ll find we’re a friendly and optimistic bunch.”
“I’m sure.”
Though it seemed to get darker and more oppressive by the minute, Brinke felt sad to see the stark confirmation of the reason her fellow witches had come here.
In about half of the fields to either side, beautiful plump specimens of the hearty Jericho’s Wall Super-squash breed, unique to Cronus County’s famed pumpkin fields, still grew, yet most of them would never be harvested. They were untended this season, save for those of a handful of stubborn, or optionless, farmers.
“What brings you to Ember Hollow, if I may ask?”
Brinke sensed wariness in the question, which was perfectly understandable given there was little reason for anyone to visit Ember Hollow anymore, unless you were into murder sites.
“I have friends here.” There was no point in sidetracking the issue. The mayor should know if she didn’t already. “We’re going to try and help your town heal.”
A minute head movement showed that Kerwin’s interest had been piqued.
“Oh?” Doris said.
“Something’s wrong here. We want to help.”
“Are you with the, uh…” Doris wound her hand, as if drawing out the appropriate word from Brinke.
Brinke smiled. “The word I like is ‘co-creators.’ But ‘witches’ is fine too.”
Kerwin looked at her. Remembering that he meant to be hiding, he sharply spun his face away. In that moment of eye contact, Brinke saw to the core of his deep regret, shame and self-loathing.
Doris explained that, in addition to being mayor, she owned a good deal of Ember Hollow’s real estate, along with Kerwin. She was sincere in expressing that her stake went deeper than political responsibility.
“I have to admit,” said Doris, “that we don’t know quite what to think of this witch business.”
Brinke’s laugh was genuine, though she knew how very charming and disarming it was. “I don’t either, if it helps.”
Did Kerwin chuckle to himself a little?
“This must be disconcerting.” Doris put a loving hand on her brother’s shoulder.
“I just hope I’m not imposing,” Brinke said.
“I trick Kerwin into coming out however I can.” Doris looked over at Kerwin. “Like picking me up at the airport.”
He stared out the window.
“He was disfigured by Everett Geelens two years ago.”
Kerwin trembled at the name.
“But he’s getting better. One of these days, he’ll let someone besides me see how he looks. He’ll realize it’s not as bad as he thinks. And he won’t be so withdrawn anymore.”
Kerwin pushed his sister’s hand away.
Doris drove in silence for a full minute. Then, as if prompted by a rumble of thunder, she softly apologized to her sibling. He did not respond.
Brinke gathered her courage, not a difficult task, and leaned forward. “Would it be all right for me to take a look?”
Kerwin spun toward her, his reddened eyes filled with shock and anger.
Brinke smiled. “I’m mixed race and six-foot-two, with a giant afro. I’ve been stared at a few times too.”
Kerwin raised his voice device halfway, then set it back down and returned to staring out the window.
“Would you pull over please, Doris?” Brinke asked.
The pelting rain seemed to slow with the Audi. The mayor maneuvered onto a tractor road at the edge of a pumpkin field. Kerwin glowered at his sister as though she had betrayed him.
Brinke reached up to pat him on the back, then opened her door. “Come on.”
She stretched her arms and took several splashy steps into the darkened, muddy field, raising her face to the pouring sky. Behind her, Kerwin opened his door.
As she walked to him, she brushed back the thick curls already plastered to her face. Four inches shorter than she was, Kerwin shivered worse than ever, looking at her with the frightened eyes of a feral kitten.
Standing up from the driver’s side, Doris popped open her umbrella and offered Brinke an expression that was meant to be reassuring but was closer to doubtful.
Brinke reached up to take Kerwin’s scarf. His hand shot to her wrist, clutching with a painful tightness. Brinke did not express fear or anger. She simply drew her hand away.
A moment later, Kerwin reached for the scarf and balled it in his fists as he pulled it away from his face, closing his eyes tight as a submarine hatch, squeezing out tears. He yanked it all the way off. He opened his eyes to see Brinke’s reaction.
Brinke put her hands on the prosthesis, a heavy plastic lower jawbone that was screwed into his skull just under his ears. Brinke thought of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon Frankenstein Jr., a pleasant childhood memory of lazy Saturday mornings.
“Oh, honey,” she put both hands on the dripping, cold prosthesis. In the Audi’s interior light, its flesh tone was darker than Kerwin’s face, no doubt due to months of miserable indoor isolation. “A lot of dudes would kill for a jaw that square.”
Doris beamed. Kerwin gingerly touched her hand to be sure Brinke was really touching him, as his eyes made the smile his mouth could not.
* * * *
Though he knew Violina held total power over his body, Steve was no less ashamed of his ow
n actions.
Dressed in a purple, hooded robe, tailored to fit her waist and bust, Violina set about casting her circle.
Steve could only watch, feeling the odd stress of paralysis, as she placed red votives inside pentacle-etched sconces to protect their flames from the steadily rising wind. The ritual made Steve’s skin crawl, yet another involuntary action.
Finished, she went to the body that lay across a mossy grave. “Wakey!” she sang, and Dennis sat up like a plank, shocked and confused.
“Hi, there, cutie,” she mocked. “Thank you for joining my team.”
“What the hell…?” Dennis stared at the flask shaking in Steve’s hand.
“This evil piss makes your body do what she says,” explained the tortured trucker, pointing his eyes toward the flask. “Sorry.”
“Lady,” Dennis tried to raise his voice but could only manage a strained monotone like Steve’s. “Whatever you did to me, you better undo it right-the-fuck-now.”
“My dear puerile poet,” Violina began, “threats are the luxury of those who hold power.”
Dennis intended to lunge at her but only stood still and helpless, his muscles and nerves bypassed by Violina’s will and the poisoned whiskey.
“Don’t make it worse for yourself, man,” said Steve.
To emphasize her point, Violina went to Dennis and stroked his hair. “Kiss me.”
“Hell no!” But he did, wishing and hoping to bite, or retch, or at least scream.
Violina released him and went to the towering obelisk gravestone of Wilcott Bennington that pierced a leaf-blown sky going black as midnight because of the wool-dense blanket of clouds she had summoned. “I think it would be fitting to start here.”
“Start what?” Dennis asked.
“The annihilation of your sweet little town.” She stooped to dig through her bag, coming up with the athame.
“Steve, come stand on this platform.” She pointed to the base of the massive tombstone with the athame.
As Steve strode briskly to the grave, his expression of constant dread morphed into one of utter terror.
“Dennis, my dear”—Violina extended the knife toward him—“take this, please.”
“Come on, lady. Please don’t do this.” Steve begged.
Dennis grunted with fruitless exertion as he obeyed.
Violina held up the photograph of the gateway sigil. “See this?”
Dennis tried to close his eyes.
“Damn you, boy. Stab yourself in the eye,” ordered Violina.
Dennis beheld the knife point that flew up in his hand—
“Stop!”
—and halted a mere centimeter from his eye. “Jesus!” he murmured.
Violina theatrically addressed the obelisk. “Or Saturn, right, Mr. Bennington?”
“Lady, let me go right now, or…I’ll haunt you for the rest of your life!” Steve threatened.
Violina cackled like an alpha coyote. “That’s not for you to decide, I’m afraid, little man.”
She went to Dennis. “Cut Steve open. Then paint this on the face of the beloved town father’s monument with his blood.”
“No way!” shouted Dennis, but his arm yanked the blade away from his face and pointed it at Steve.
“Don’t do it, man!” cried Steve.
“I won’t!” His right foot took a step toward Steve.
“You will,” said Violina.
Dennis’s left foot moved—and stumble-stopped halfway. “Lady, you gotta stop this now.”
His right foot rose and stepped.
“Fight it, man!” Steve’s face squeezed in on itself so tight he appeared to age twenty years, as premature night filled his wrinkles.
“So help me, bitch, I will kill you.” Dennis held himself still for a full second.
But Violina did not show her alarm at his strength “Obey me, boy.”
Dennis lurched forward.
Steve squeaked and grunted.
Dennis’s stiff arm suddenly arced around toward Violina. Stunned, she took a step back.
“You kill him now, Dennis Barcroft!” she ordered.
Dennis’s muscles ached as his arm rotated back toward the doomed trucker.
“You can beat this, dude!” Steve whispered.
“Hush, Steve,” Violina ordered.
The truck driver’s mouth obeyed, and Dennis took another unsteady step, despair replacing anger on his face. “Goddammit. I’m…sorry…”
Steve shook his head minutely, as tears streamed from his eyes.
Dennis closed his, as his body lunged behind his arm. Steve didn’t even have the pitiable release of a death cry.
For some reason, Violina allowed Dennis to make it for him.
* * * *
“That was not the kind of magic I expected,” Doris said, “though I’m not complaining.”
Kerwin had pulled down his collar and removed his hat. He even glanced at himself occasionally in the visor mirror, still unsure, but well on the other side of his immobilization. Every few minutes, he used his scarf to wipe his eyes.
“He once managed a rock band, you know,” Doris bragged. “Mister Personality—and I do believe he’s back!”
Kerwin looked almost panicked as he raised the larynx speaker. “I was a dick.”
Both women laughed at the strange abruptness of the statement as filtered through the prosthesis. Kerwin’s body rocked. He too realized the humor.
“Maybe you should fix that next,” asserted Brinke.
Kerwin looked needfully to Doris, as he had done for two years now, finding a spark of courage and inspiration to ignite his own. “I can try.”
Thunder, only an insinuation before now, sounded low, loud and close, an instant after the lightning.
It was red, just as it had been behind the thick cloud cover. But seeing these sharp, jagged bolts only a few dozen yards away was far more alarming.
* * * *
It only took about three minutes of watching the witches, piled around Ysabella’s bed and deep in whispering trance, for the males—McGlazer, Bernard, Stuart and DeShaun—to realize they were nonessential personnel.
“Perhaps we should drop by the party at the Community Center.”
Stuart and DeShaun perked up at McGlazer’s suggestion, then Stuart glanced forlornly at Candace.
“Maybe she’ll make it later, dude,” said DeShaun. “She won’t be mad at you for going without her.”
Stuart looked at his friend, inviting further encouragement.
“It’ll be us two Halloween hell-raisers one more time.” DeShaun extended a fist for Stuart to bump. “The life and death of the party.”
Stuart smiled and knuckled up. Both gestures carried a note of sadness.
“We need costumes,” Bernard said.
McGlazer looked at Bernard like he was a stranger. “Who possessed you?”
“Come on, I can be fun.”
McGlazer led the way to the door. “I suppose we can thank Candace and Emera for that.”
“Yeah.” Bernard smiled at his womenfolk.
“Keep an eye on her, boy,” Stuart told Bravo.
Chapter 22
(Stop Me) At The Edge
Dennis dragged Steve’s hitching, pulsing body out of the way, looking at the dying trucker with all the sorrow and regret his enslaved face muscles would allow, refusing to close his eyes.
“That wasn’t so hard, was it?” Violina inspected the dripping blood sigil Dennis had just completed, dabbing a droplet with her pinkie.
Dennis stood a couple of feet away. Close enough to kill her—if only he could—and sobbed. He wanted a drink of Diamante’s more desperately than he had in nearly a year.
Violina took a roll of duct tape and a folded sheet of clear plastic from her bag. “Tape
this over your beautiful work of art there.” She looked up at the sky. “It’s going to rain.”
As Dennis performed the task, Violina drew the robe over her head and laid it across the nearest gravestone. She stepped to the center of her circle and raised her hands to the sky.
Still in control of his eyes, at least, Dennis could have looked at her shapely naked form but didn’t.
Violina spoke magic words, projecting her voice like a seasoned stage actor. Instantly, the wind whipped up, blowing the plastic cover of the sigil wildly, along with Dennis and Violina’s hair.
Violina slowly spun to the left, repeating the words.
Thunder rumbled. The lightning came in prolonged crescendos, diffused by the thick clouds that enveloped it.
Violina thrust her left hand toward the bloody symbol. Its edges began to brim with a sinister, scarlet glow.
Dennis closed his eyes and thought of McGlazer’s account of being possessed, how it felt and how he had fought it, to no avail.
Violina screamed the old words at the sky, then balled herself up in a kneeling fetal position, rocking and whispering.
“You’re a shitty interpretive dancer,” said Dennis.
Violina’s concentration did not waver. She lifted the wooden bowl in one hand, its phallic pestle in the other. “Conal O’Herlihy, I open for you and your followers a gateway to this world!”
She spat in the bowl and squatted to pour Steve’s blood in it from the goblet, then stirred in the powdered pumpkin seeds and mushroom. “Come as flesh. Come as death. Come as demon.”
She thrust the bowl toward the sky to meet the rain.
The lightning behind the clouds formed a sky-wide face of gleeful wickedness. Its rumble was a laugh of triumph.
“Come now!” Violina lifted the bowl again in her left hand, while extending her palm toward the sigil. “Come through me!”
On Bennington’s monument, the sigil’s glow flared, then shrunk to a million bright pinpoints that made Dennis’s eyes hurt. Intertwining streams of void-black and crimson-red lightning shot forth, entering Violina’s palm. The witch herself radiated pulses of blackness, her eyes like red spotlights.
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