by Bill Bennett
The Hag liked that the girl called her ‘ma’am’. It was kind of quaint; old-fashioned even, at a time when young people ran screaming from anything old-fashioned, such as courtesy and respect. She knew Belt respected her. She was just an initiate, and looked up to a grand witch such as herself. But there were times when the Hag wondered: Who is your master, girl? Me, or the Golden Order? Can I really trust you? Especially if I pit you against them …
CHAPTER 4
In the course of her duties as a detective, Marley had seen some horrific things. She’d attended murder scenes that had turned the stomachs of seasoned professionals many years her senior and she’d witnessed gut-wrenching violence that months and years later still troubled her dreams. But nothing came close to what she experienced on that mountain the previous afternoon – the pure and deliberate viciousness of the frenzied attack on Olivier.
What made it even more disturbing, even more chillingly bizarre, was that it was a massive eagle that had attacked him – a bird unlike any she’d ever seen. It was as if a trained killer had taken on the form of a golden eagle and had set upon her boyfriend with the intent purpose of murdering or maiming him. It had tried to tear open his skull with its razored beak and it was only when she’d intervened by trying to pistol-whip it with her handgun that it had made a last desperate lunge, torn at Olivier’s face and flown off with his eyeball in its talons – an image that would haunt Marley for the rest of her life.
They’d been halfway up a remote mountain north of Albuquerque, in New Mexico. A day earlier, Olivier had flown in from Lyon in France, where he worked for Interpol, and they’d decided to drive up to the Chalk Mountains hoping to find young Lily Lennox. They believed she was staying with her great-aunt in a cottage near the top of the largest mountain.
Marley had been concerned about Lily’s safety after she learned that several witches from Baphomet could have followed her – in particular a sadistic young witch named Kritta Kredlich and her two accomplices, whom Marley believed were connected to the abduction of Lily’s mother. But after the eagle’s attack, they’d had to curtail their efforts and make an emergency dash back to Albuquerque, to admit Olivier to ER.
He was rushed straight into surgery and several hours later Marley was informed by a harried and weary specialist wearing bloodstained scrubs that Olivier fortunately had not suffered any brain damage, but of course he had lost his left eye, and from this time forth he would only ever have monocular vision. They kept him under observation overnight and Marley slept in a makeshift cot by his bedside. Late the next day he was discharged.
Marley helped him out to the parking lot. He had medical gauze wrapped around his head and a thick padding of bandages over his eye. His face was covered in deep scratches from the talons of the eagle – some cuts were orange from an antibiotic wash, others were plastered with surgical tape. He looked like he’d come from a war zone. He walked unsteadily and Marley gently guided him as he tried to get used to life seen from only one eye.
‘You’ll look cute with a black eye-patch,’ she said, trying to lift his spirits as she eased him into the passenger’s seat of her car. She pulled the seatbelt across and went to buckle him in, but he grabbed it off her.
‘I can do it myself,’ he said testily in a thick French accent, fumbling with the belt before latching it in place. He sat staring out the car’s windshield.
‘Interpol will fire me,’ he said. ‘I will not pass the physical now. Didier Beauchamp will use this to get rid of me. He is the one I think is Baphomet. A black witch. He is number three at Lyon. In Interpol. He shut down my unit because I was getting too close to finding out about the Golden Order. He is a snake. A black snake. He will say I am not fit to be an agent anymore with just one eye and he will fire me to keep me from discovering more.’
‘Olivier, you don’t know that –’
‘I know what I know,’ he barked back. ‘But it will not stop me. Job or no job. I have a job, even if it is not with Interpol. It is to expose these people. These witches. They are the biggest danger to our way of life, bigger even than the terrorism.’ He looked across at Marley. ‘Why do you not drive? I want an American hamburger. And a beer. I have forgotten how bad your beer is here. Now, drive.’ Then he added, as if remembering his manners, ‘Please, Marls.’ He smiled, and leaned across and kissed her.
She drove to a small diner just off Palace Avenue near the main square, a place where she knew they did good burgers and sold craft beer on tap. When their meals came she watched with amusement as Olivier used his fork to carefully take the sliced cheese out of his hamburger and place it delicately on the side of the plate. He was like a bomb disposal expert, she thought, placing a live detonator on the ground after extracting it from an unexploded device.
‘This is not cheese,’ he said, looking up at Marley. ‘It does not come from a cow. It comes from a machine that pretends to be a cow.’
He ate his hamburger with undisguised gusto. His recent operation, and the anaesthetic, had not seemed to dim his appetite. This was a side of Olivier that Marley found disarmingly cute. Olivier would eat anything, except American cheese. And mayo. He hated American mayo. Yet he loved American ketchup. He was comfortably plumpish – not really overweight – and he never worried about his appearance. He was always three days late of a shave and his hair was always in need of a cut and a comb. But he relished life and that’s why Marley relished him.
Having devoured the burger in what seemed to be three bites, he looked up at her and with his one good eye glaring, he said, ‘That was not in nature, what happened to me yesterday. That was not a bird. Birds do not do that. It was a witch.’
‘A witch?’ Marley asked. ‘How could it be a witch, Olivier? I saw it. It was a goddamn eagle.’ She didn’t want to lose her temper with him, given his fragile condition, but she was exhausted and emotionally frayed. Olivier believed in witches. She did not. To her, witches were criminals in fancy dress.
‘How would you know what a witch is?’ Olivier said, almost spitting the words out. ‘You are New World. Your country is young. For you American people, it is only a couple of hundred years old. For the Native Americans who were here long before you, they understand. They have their spirit world, things you people still do not believe in. But in my country and in Europe, we are Old World. We are thousands and thousands of years old, and we know witches. They exist. They know black magic and the powerful ones, they can turn themselves into an eagle or a wolf, just like that.’ He snapped his fingers loudly and Marley jumped.
A couple of diners quickly glanced over at the dishevelled man with the cut face and bandaged eye, then nervously looked away.
Marley leaned into him and kept her voice low. ‘Are you seriously saying you were attacked by a witch?’
‘I am saying if a witch can turn into a dog or a wolf, it can turn into an eagle, yes? What are the chances you get two wolves identical like that in this part of the country?’
Halfway up the Chalk Mountains on their search for the Lennox girl, they’d stopped at an abandoned ranch house and walked inside, only to find two identical wolves. It was shortly after that Olivier was attacked by the eagle.
As far as Marley knew, there were no wolves in New Mexico. But even if there were, Olivier was right – two identical wolves in an abandoned ranch up top of a mountain was just plain weird. And she had to admit, as soon as she saw them, she immediately thought of the Twins – two young men identical in every way, known assassins from Eastern Europe who were reputed to be working for the Golden Order of Baphomet. She and Olivier had seen them arrive in New Mexico at the Albuquerque airport, but they’d disappeared. Had they been sent by Baphomet to kill the girl?
Olivier had said they were elite witches that had the capacity to turn themselves into animal forms, a notion that Marley had scoffed at – but later when she saw the two identical wolves in the ranch house, sleek and silver-haired, she immediately thought of the two slender silver-suited twins at the airp
ort. Could Olivier possibly be correct? That there were people in this world who had the ability to change themselves into wolves or eagles?
‘What about the invisible car?’ Olivier said, his good eye focused fiercely on her. ‘Explain that. You felt it. It was most definitely a vehicle.’
After seeing the wolves, they quickly walked outside and bumped into what, as far as Marley could make out, was an invisible car parked out front of the ranch house. She’d run her hands all over it, and it felt like a car all right, it’s just that they couldn’t see it. It was an invisible car. And she had no explanation for it. Seconds later, the eagle attacked them.
‘I don’t know,’ she said quietly. ‘That was strange, the car. Yeah, I still can’t figure that out.’
‘Marley, here is what happened,’ Olivier said, flatly. ‘The witches put what they call an unseen cone around that car, so it was not able to be seen by the human eye. Then they turned themselves into wolves and an eagle too. They did not want us to investigate any more. They did not want us to go up that mountain and talk to the girl.’
Olivier put his fork down with a clatter, pushed his plate away, jutted out his bottom lip, folded his arms and looked out the door in his particularly French way, as if the argument was settled and there was no point talking any further.
‘Then why didn’t it, or they, kill us?’ Marley asked.
‘One thing I learned at Interpol is that Baphomet does not like to kill cops. It brings them too much attention. The attack was to get us out of there. If they kill us, then there would be investigations, which the Inner Sanctum of the Golden Order would not like.’
The violence of the eagle’s attack had shocked Marley, but it was the unlikeliness of that ferocious act that had really freaked her out. There seemed no logical reason why an eagle would strike like that, unless … unless Olivier was right and it was a shapeshifting witch trying to keep them away from the girl.
But that was crazy, she thought. Not possible.
Growing up as she had in a nuts-and-bolts household with her father a builder and her mother a nurse, Marley couldn’t wrap her head around the notion that such things could happen in the real world. Her father and mother were devoutly religious and yet they both resolutely dismissed anything of a supernatural or metaphysical nature. They believed in Heaven and Hell, and God and the Devil, but only as concepts once you died. Marley had grown up to believe that all there was to this world was only what you could see and measure, and what science could explain. Nothing more. All the rest was fantasy and imagination. And sometimes, madness.
Marley knew witches existed. She knew that they attended ceremonies and worshipped Satan, and sometimes they killed people too – horrifically, as Kritta Kredlich had done several times. But Kredlich was flesh-and-blood. She was human. Cut her, she’d bleed. Shoot her, she’d die – that is, if you managed a head shot and you blew her brains out. She was a psychopath and a cold-blooded killer, and she also happened to be a worshipper of Satan. But Marley felt sure she couldn’t turn herself into a wolf or an eagle. It just wasn’t possible.
She put her hand on Olivier’s arm. ‘Honey, maybe we should go back to the motel, get some sleep. All those drugs –’
He jerked his arm away angrily. ‘Do not treat me like a child. I have pain, yes, but I am clear in my mind. I know there are people who can do these things. Why would this eagle attack me like that? These birds do not attack unprovoked. I was not threatening a nest, or a food source. You saw it. It was like a drone, manipulated by the hand of someone human. Or it was a human itself, but in the form of a bird of prey, who wanted to force us away.’
Marley took a deep breath, held it, then exhaled slowly. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Let’s say you’re right and those twins were shapeshifters or whatever. What then? We’re both meant to be on vacation, remember? And we both have zero authority here. You can’t go to Didier Beauchamp because you’ve been barred from investigating Baphomet. Plus you think he’s a black witch anyway. And if I take this to my lieutenant and tell him we’re chasing a bunch of bad guys that can turn themselves into eagles and wolves, he’d put me up for immediate psychiatric assessment. You know how it works.’
Olivier considered this, then he nodded. He took out a packet of cigarettes, tapped one out, lit up and blew the smoke carelessly out over the adjacent table. One of the diners looked across at him to complain, saw his bandages, then thought better of it.
‘Maybe I will never convince you, Marls,’ he said, ‘but I want you to be aware that we are dealing with people who have powers you do not understand. Believe or not believe, that is up to you, but we have to be very careful, because we are not equipped to handle what they will throw at us. We have guns, they have magic. That is not a fair match. So we have to use our brains. Only then will we win, if we out-smart them.’
‘Give me a gun any day,’ Marley said curtly. ‘Fuck magic. A couple of rounds in that eagle’s head would have killed the sucker, I swear to God.’
Olivier smiled. ‘Okay, so we need to find the mother. This Angela woman. But right at this moment we have no clue as to her whereabouts. But maybe her daughter does. And maybe she can lead us to her. So the daughter is the key. We need to find her.’
‘What? Are you suggesting we go back up that mountain? Are you serious?’ Marley asked.
‘I don’t think we need to. She will not stay there long. She has to find her mother.’ He looked off, thinking, then asked, ‘This Native American boy – what do you know of him? Where does he come from?’
‘He does errands for the doctor. He works as a ranger in a national park in Northern California, but his village is not that far from the Chalk Mountains.’
Olivier looked across at her and smiled. ‘Is that so?’
CHAPTER 5
This was a leadership role he’d never wanted to step into – running the worldwide network of the Sacred Order of the White Swan, commonly known as Cygnet. Dr Frederick Maguire, one of America’s most renowned thoracic surgeons, had dreaded the thought of ever taking over from his sister Angela, because that would mean she was either dead or missing. Right now he hoped she was just missing, not dead. But if they didn’t find her soon, before Unholy, then she would most definitely be dead. And that thought, of losing his sister and having her soul snuffed out like a spent penny candle, stabbed at his heart constantly.
He kicked back – let his tall leather chair roll him away from his cluttered desk. These days he did most of his work from home and his office, the one visible to the few visitors he allowed into his home, was a jumble of books and files and papers. He got up and walked out along a corridor lined with collectable modern art into his gleaming kitchen. He made himself some coffee.
He lived in a huge and architecturally stunning mansion that overlooked a desert gully full of cacti and wild flowers, just off the Sante Fe Trail. He was a tall gangling man with a handsome, good-humoured face, long silver hair and the air of an Oxford don, which is where he’d studied medicine. His skill and prowess in surgery hadn’t brought him his wealth, though. His fortune had come from something he’d invented. From a young age he’d liked to tinker and create things, and as a financially strapped medical student he’d stumbled upon a way of keeping blood plasma refrigerated out in the field, harnessing Gaia energy and using the latest nanotechnology. It helped that he’d used a little witchcraft too. He patented the process and soon it had become standard issue for the Red Cross, Médecins Sans Frontières and other humanitarian and medical organisations around the world.
The royalties kept him regularly on Forbes Richest 500 list and allowed him to give liberally and anonymously to charities and philanthropic enterprises. It also allowed him to fund the operations of Cygnet. Despite his enormous wealth he still kept working as a surgeon, donating his annual salary to the Albuquerque Hospital building fund. He was on call at all hours to help those that needed his expert care, but who couldn’t necessarily afford it.
That’s how he’d
met Skyhawk, when he presented to the hospital with a point-blank-range gunshot wound to the chest. The boy now believed he owed his life to Freddie, a claim that Freddie resolutely refused to accept. Irrespective, they’d since become staunch friends. Freddie admired Skyhawk’s unique connection to, and understanding of, the natural world. They would often go camping in the national parks and Skyhawk would explain the spiritual significance of various plants and trees and rock formations and mountains – and in the evenings he would talk for hours about the stars and cosmology from his perspective. Freddie liked his honesty, his directness and his fearlessness.
He had tried to enlist him into Cygnet, sensing the boy had nascent shamanic skills that could become very useful as he got older, but Skyhawk had politely insisted on remaining a free agent, helping Freddie and Cygnet at times, but keeping his own unique cultural identity as a Native American spirit worker. This only increased Freddie’s regard for the young man.
He took his coffee out onto the long wide terrace that overlooked the desert gully. It was dark, the moon a silvered thumbnail suspended above. Down below, in the underbrush of the gully, he saw two coyotes on the prowl, hunting prey. On the wind he could smell barbeque mixed with the fragrance of wild flowers. An uneasy mix. Somewhere distant, he could hear the thudding pulse of music. A party on this balmy evening. People having fun. Drinking. Laughing. Flirting. Oblivious to how close true evil lay.
He was anxious. He hadn’t heard from Skyhawk and it wasn’t like him to go more than twenty-four hours without calling in. The last he’d heard, he was on his way up to the cave at the top of Chalk Mountain to fetch Lily. She’d completed her initiation with Luna, she was now a fully-fledged white witch and he was going to bring her back home to Santa Fe. But Freddie hadn’t heard anything since.
He was anxious because he knew that the Golden Order was determined to capture Lily so they could take her soul, along with her mother’s, on the night of Unholy – less than a week away now. Skyhawk didn’t yet possess sufficient shamanic powers to fight off a Baphomet witch attack, and Freddie hoped that his niece and the boy were simply making their way back to Santa Fe and hadn’t called because they weren’t yet within range.
