Human nature was flawed, seemingly by design, to include temptation toward evil. Starting from that fact, it followed that practitioners could access darkness as a component of magic. Less clear to me was why anyone would access it. That kind of darkness corrupts what it touches. If you wanted to protect yourself from evil, using darkness was counterintuitive. Then again, maybe I lacked sufficient understanding of the high-level theory to properly apply darkness as a component in my own magic. Lacking that knowledge, and being on questionable terms with the holy, I stuck with the basics. Four elements got it done for countless generations of practitioners. I saw no reason to get “creative.”
Methods for accessing the power in those elements were as plentiful as wheat. Everyone had a favorite, and I’d tried dozens of them over the years. I’d settled on a hodgepodge system of my own design that used combinations of runes to stand in for what would otherwise have been primitive pictograms. It was a bit like writing sentences to represent my intentions. I’d entertained the idea of just writing in English. It ought to work, in theory, but I never thought to try it when the stakes were low. Writing with runes was slow and, frankly, childlike when compared to Helena. She didn’t need stand-in symbols and props. She accessed those powers directly.
The very idea made me shudder. I wouldn’t trust myself with that kind of power at my fingertips. I barely trusted Helena with it. My distrust also explained why I couldn’t use magic the way Helena used it. Magic depended on your state of mind. As long as I didn’t believe I could wield power that way, or didn’t trust that I could do so wisely, I never would. In twenty odd years of practice, I’d picked up a handful of things that I could do directly. They were flashy as hell, pretty to look at, and about as dangerous as cotton balls. That was how little I trusted myself with power. For the real stuff, I had to fall back on the slow and steady method. I drew runes.
It took me about forty-five minutes to finish a circle of runes around the bed. There was heavy emphasis on fire and water, and only the tiniest bit of earth and a middling amount of air to provide the necessary counterbalance in the magic. Earth magic did some impressive stuff, but it made me nervous. Get it wrong and you could collapse the building you were standing in or trigger an earthquake. Any of the elements could do catastrophic damage if used improperly, but I’d been through a few earthquakes in California. I’d seen the destruction they could cause. Thanks, but no thanks.
I used earth magic the way most people did, as a way to anchor the magic to the mortal coil. I wanted to keep the offensive elements of the magic strictly physical. Let your magic spill over beyond the edges of the mortal world and it could attract the attention of some nasty things. Let violent, destruction magic spill over and it could lead to those nasty things looking to have a quiet chat with you in some dark and terrible corner of creation. Again, thanks, but no thanks.
The water elements would, in essence, drown the bad vibes and intentions of anyone trying to invade my psyche. Okay, it wasn’t literal drowning. It wasn’t even physical water, but that was the way I conceptualized the protection. I wasn’t clear on the exact nature of the interaction between my magic and the negative energy headed my way. I’d asked someone once and they talked for two solid hours. They tossed around terms like entropy, diffusion factors, and flow dynamics. Then they moved on to metaphysical concepts that gave me a splitting headache. I nodded and smiled in my utter incomprehension. Afterwards, I accepted that it worked because of reasons and left it at that.
The fire was there to make sure that anyone who took a pot-shot at me never wanted to try it again. Assuming they survived. Like I said, I’m not a better person. I like peace and calm negotiation as a first-line approach, but, when I’ve already been sucker punched once, I take off the gloves. In my early days, I’d frequently left out one or more of the elements in my attempts to build magic of one kind or another. The results were often substandard crap. On a few occasions, the results were positively terrifying. Without all four elements interacting and balancing each other, you just couldn’t anticipate the outcome. So, I’d included air to keep things in balance. Plus, fire needs air to burn good and hot. I also used it to help direct and contain the flow of fire. No need to burn down a forest when I just wanted to set some jerk on fire.
The sustained concentration and effort did what I hoped it would do. It pushed me over into the land of exhaustion. If I was lucky, I’d skip straight past dreaming and into the black nothingness of the deepest levels of sleep. I grabbed the hard case and slid it back under the bed, dropped the nylon bag on the floor, and collapsed face-down on the bed. Before I drifted off to sleep, I felt the pillow shift. Then a warm fuzzy body curled up against the back of my head. Lil’s purr rumbled against my head like a vibration, rather than a sound. It put me under in less than five seconds.
“Ah, Hartworth and Lil. I’m so glad you could rejoin us,” said a voice.
I blinked a few times and took in my surroundings. I was back in the auditorium. The small man on the stage gave me a brief nod and turned his attention to the rest of the audience. He looked to be gearing up to give another lecture or maybe to make a student feel stupid. I looked around the auditorium and experienced a flickering double-vision. One moment, every seat was filled, the next there were just the cold, smooth, marble walls of a very small room. Before he could open his mouth, I spoke.
“Enough, Cavanaugh. I know who you are.”
Cavanaugh closed his mouth and lowered his head. The illusion he’d crafted vanished. We faced each other from about two feet apart. He met my eyes for a brief moment and looked away. I caught of a flicker of shame that ran bone deep.
“How did you know?” he asked.
“I pieced it together. A church on Midnight Ground. Thirteen suicides right before construction finished on it. The dreams. Even someone as slow as me was bound to figure it out eventually.”
“I suppose so. I expected you to interpret the dreams as your undermind trying to convey information.”
“Undermind?”
“Oh, yes, you call it something else. Your subconscious, is it?”
“Yeah.”
He frowned. “Undermind is more accurate. Subconscious suggests it’s subordinate to the waking mind. That is an obviously false, if popular, axiom. I’m rather surprised your companion didn’t alert you to the deception.”
I glanced at Dream Lil. She watched Cavanaugh with her blood ruby eyes for a moment, and then turned her head toward me. I knew it wasn’t actually possible for a cat to shrug, even one the size of a large van, but that was the exact impression she gave me. She lay down on the floor with her legs curled under her and her head up. It put her uninjured ear about on face level with me. Jesus, she was big in the dream world.
“She probably figured as long as I was getting good information, there was no need,” I guessed. “I like your bomb shelter. Too bad you couldn’t be bothered to make one for everybody.”
He shook his head. “I didn’t know until very nearly the end of my life. It was too late by then for most of those poor lost souls already trapped in the smoke bindings. I warned the others. I begged them to flee this accursed place before my vanity doomed them as well.”
“Did they?”
“Many did. Others stayed. It didn’t matter in the long run. I underestimated what we faced. I had no conception of its power. Our order had battled demons, locked them away forever, but what lives in the Midnight Ground is beyond anything we’d ever seen before. So many died for my mistake and it was all for nothing.”
“You said it didn’t matter in the long run. Why didn’t it matter if they scattered?”
“It killed them anyway. Or it called them back. Or it tricked them into coming back. One by one, they all came back. Or their children and grandchildren came back in total ignorance of what waited for them here. You should take the woman and leave. It won’t let Abby go. She’s the last link.”
“And when she’s dead?”
He gave
me a look like I was pretending to be an ignorant child. “You’ve been on Midnight Ground before. Twice. I can see it on you. You know what it is. It is hatred, agony, and power. It will do what those things always do. It will rend and destroy anything in its domain.”
I needed to ask Cavanaugh something. I knew it. I just didn’t know what. There was some piece of things that didn’t fit together. Some element in the timeline of events that didn’t mesh up.
“It will rend and destroy anything in its domain, you said.”
“Yes?”
“Then,” I held up a hand for silence, the question congealing in my mind. “Then how did you ever manage to build the church, let alone the town, in the first place?”
Cavanaugh gave me a smile as empty as Death’s heart. “How? It let us build. It was biding its time. I expect it planned to wait until the numbers in town had grown sufficiently large to suit its appetite. It just hadn’t anticipated the binding. You are familiar with the power of blood bindings?”
“In theory.”
“It wasn’t prepared for that. It’s had better than a century to make up for that error. Once its full power is unleashed, this bomb shelter, as you call it, won’t mean anything. I merely forestalled my fate. I had hoped that, perhaps, you might know or stumble onto a solution. From what I have gleaned, the situation has not changed since my day. There are but one, perhaps two, in all of humankind who might overcome the Midnight Ground.”
“Three, but yes.”
“All otherwise engaged, I assume.”
“So it seems.”
“It is as though the hand of Providence itself shields this evil from destruction.”
I blinked. “Providence? You believe in God? Last I checked, he frowns on suicide.”
“We,” he started. “No, I believed that death in this cause, even by our own hands, would be viewed as sacrifice, not suicide. Vanity. My vanity damned us all. As I said, you must take the woman and leave this place while you can. Time grows short.”
“We are leaving. Helena and I are going to talk to Paul. Try to convince him to take Abby away from here. Then we’re going.”
Cavanaugh tilted his head at me. “No, not the healer. She has a divine purpose to fulfill. She will survive regardless.”
“Then who are you talking about?”
“The dark-haired one. Your lover, I suppose. You call her Marcy.”
Chapter 38
One second I was staring at Cavanaugh in stunned disbelief. The next I was slamming him against the wall. His little round glasses spun across the room as his head smacked against the marble with a dull thunk. I shook him by the tweed lapels.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” He didn’t answer immediately. I shook him again, hard. “Answer me, God damn it! What the fuck are you talking about?”
Cavanaugh looked up at me in surprise. He shook his head, grabbed my wrists, and pulled my hands away from his lapels as if I were no stronger than a child.
“Come now, Mr. Hartworth. Violence is hardly becoming of a gentleman, even as dubious a gentleman as you. It is also utterly pointless against me. I don’t have a body. What you see before you is merely a façade devised by your own mind to facilitate communication. I am a soul. You can no more cause me physical harm than you can drink the ocean.”
Cavanaugh’s glasses simply appeared on his nose again, as pristine as the day they were made. He patted me on the shoulder.
“I suppose,” he offered, “that I handled that rather badly.”
“You said I needed to take Marcy and go. If she’s in danger, why doesn’t she just leave?”
“Because she can’t, as you well know. Unless,” Cavanaugh’s eyes went rather wide, “you don’t understand the nature of your relationship with her.”
“What are you talking about?”
Cavanaugh’s eyes moved back and forth, like he was speed-reading something. His lips turned down and he squinted at me. He took a deep breath.
“You must understand that I’m not an expert on such matters. Your own lack of knowledge is, in itself, telling. I don’t think I can explain it to you.”
“The hell you can’t,” I said.
“Let me append my statement. I don’t believe I am permitted to explain it to you. What I can say is that she is, for the time being, connected to you. So long as you remain here, she is compelled to remain nearby. If you remain here, if you die here, she will be subject to the same fate as the rest of us. You must go, for her sake and your own. Once you leave the town limits, you’ll be safe.”
“If I can leave. I tried a couple of times already and got derailed both times. Your handiwork?”
“You give me too much credit. Even in this form and from the comparative safety of my tomb, my actual power is limited. I wasn’t powerful that way in life and death has not altered that fact. Now, for God’s sake man, get away from here. Take Abby, if her grandfather will allow it, but don’t let yourself become a victim of my mistakes.”
Cavanaugh put a hand on my chest and pushed. Where he had crashed against the marble walls and stopped, I passed through them. I tumbled through the air, light and dark whirling around me in kaleidoscopic fury. I felt something seize the back of my shirt and haul me back down to hard earth. I hung a good four or five feet off the ground. I craned my neck around and saw Lil. The back of my shirt was in her powerful jaws.
“I don’t suppose you know where Marcy is?” I asked.
Lil stood stock-still for a moment. Her damaged ear twitched, one, two, three times. She gathered herself and bounded into the air. Light and dark swirled around me again, but without the nauseating feeling of spinning out of control. Lil landed as gently as a shadow falling on water. She lowered her head until my feet touched down and I could stand on my own. I smiled up at her and rubbed the spot above her nose. She let loose with one of those earth-trembling purrs.
I looked around to get my bearings and found myself, once again, in pure whiteness. It was broken only by the form of a golden cage. Marcy was inside the cage, seated at a table and playing chess with someone.
“What the hell?” I said.
I started walking toward the cage, anger building inside of me at the sight of Marcy trapped that way. I broke into a jog. I didn’t have a plan, just a goal. Get her out of that cage.
“Marcy!”
Her head whipped toward me. Something like panic swept across her face.
“Adrian, no! Don’t touch the bars!”
I skidded to a halt and nearly fell into the bars. I only avoided it by falling backwards, painfully, onto my ass. Marcy sagged down into the chair.
“Ow,” I grumbled. “Care to explain?”
“The bars are there for my protection. The angel brought me here,” she said, then gave me a quizzical look. “How did you find me?”
I hiked a finger over my shoulder. “She brought me.”
The person across from Marcy bolted out his chair. “Mother of God, what is that?”
I turned my head and peered at the man. He was young, lean, and bearded. He looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place him.
“That’s Lil,” I said and stood up.
“Adrian,” whispered Marcy. “She’s— That’s—do you know who she is?”
“Um,” I said. “Lil?”
“She’s—” started Marcy.
Lil made a noise so low that it barely registered in my ears, but I felt it behind my eyes. That noise frightened me more than anything I’d ever heard before. I looked over my shoulder at the enormous, black, feline shape. Lil’s gaze was fixed on Marcy. The message was clear. Keep your mouth shut, or I’ll shut it for you.
“Alright,” said Marcy in quiet voice. “Your secret to tell, if you wish.”
I turned my eyes back to Marcy.
She shrugged at me. “We all play by some set of rules. Be careful, Adrian. She’s powerful and dangerous.”
I glanced back at Lil to see how this information would be met. The enormous fi
gure sat on her haunches and began to lick a paw. God, I didn’t even understand female cats. No wonder I was such a disaster with human women. I rubbed at my forehead.
“She adopted me. Honestly, the whole thing is sort of complicated. I’m still trying to figure out the details. I guess that doesn’t matter now. Are you safe here?”
Marcy averted her eyes. “Yes.”
Dammit, I thought. “But?”
“It won’t protect me if the demon breaks free.”
“You mean, as long as I’m in town.”
“What makes you say that?” She asked, all cautious hesitance.
“Cavanaugh let it slip. Something about you being connected to me. You can’t get clear if I stick around?”
She sighed. “Yes, but that doesn’t matter. Abby is what matters. You have to help her or she’s as good as dead.”
“I can’t help her. I can help you. I can leave.”
Marcy stood with great care and purpose before she fixed me with the hardest look I’d ever seen on her face.
“I swear to God, abandon that girl in my name and you will never see me again.”
She meant it.
“Marcy, I don’t know what else to do. I can’t beat this thing in a fight. I can’t break her connection to this awful town. I’m not even sure I can get Abby away from here short of kidnapping her, and I’m pretty damn sure that won’t end well for anyone. What else can I do that helps anyone, except leave?”
Her expression softened a little. “You’ll think of something.”
I hung my head. “I’m pretty sure I won’t. I haven’t so far and according to Everett Jackass Cavanaugh, this is all coming down very soon. I’m out of my league here.”
“You’ll think of something,” said Marcy with an utter confidence that I knew had no basis in fact.
“Sure,” I said. “Yeah. I’ll think of something.”
Marcy tipped her head to one side and seemed to listen to something. She gave me a little smile. “I love you, you know.”
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