Bone Lantern Witch

by Kat Simons

  The opaque water cleared again, revealing an image of Mara. The image was softened at the edges by the water but was clearly the girl in whose room Angie had been earlier. She watched, keeping her mind as still as she was able by chanting the short spell again, a kind of focus point to keep her conscious distracted so she could watch the vision before her play out.

  Mara was talking urgently to someone Angie couldn’t see, gesturing widely and motioning behind her. The girl shook her head hard and stomped her foot, a gesture so full of frustration, so much a sign of her youth, Angie’s heart tightened. She ignored the empathetic reaction, keeping her gaze soft as she watched.

  The image froze as the background came into clearer view, like a movie on pause. Mara was caught mid-action, her hands out in a sort of beseeching gesture, her gaze turned over her shoulder. Her blue eyes were wide and panicked. Behind her, a large red brick apartment building, the lobby door a solid metal with a metal wire-crossed window giving a glimpse inside. The interior of the lobby looked dark, despite the fact that it was night.

  Maybe not a front door, Angie though vaguely. A back door? A door into a basement?

  There was a small security light next to the door, but otherwise, the surroundings seemed dimly lit, too dark to see much beyond the building.

  Without taking her gaze from the image, Angie lifted the chain attacked to the crystal on her left. She held the crystal up over the map and let it spin and move of its own accord, keeping her concentration on the image of Mara and letting the flow of magic move through her without consciously getting in its way.

  She stopped chanting the spell she’d used to hold her concentration and murmured, very quietly, “Where are you, Mara?”

  The crystal dropped suddenly onto the map. Angie blinked and straightened away from the copper bowl, pulling in a deep breath. The image inside dissolved back into crystal clear water with an unimpeded view of the beaten metal at the base.

  A faint scent of something she couldn’t immediately identify lingered even after the image had vanished. A strange reaction given scrying didn’t often give her anything but visuals.

  She held the scent long enough to ensure she’d recognize it if she encountered it again, then let that last bit of the vision go and looked at the map.

  Sebastian came up to study where the crystal had landed as soon as she’d stepped away from the bowl. He was frowning at the location.

  She moved the crystal just enough to see what it had landed on. A part of the upper west side of Manhattan, near Inwood. She took note of the cross streets, then leveled a look at Sebastian.

  “Why are you frowning?” she asked.

  He glanced up. In the dim light, the very faint hint of red in the depths of his brown eyes was easier to see, harder to dismiss as an illusion. All demon hunters, after a time, developed that spark of red in their eyes, a side effect of spending so much time in contact with demons and demon realms. The hunters with brown eyes could hide the effect easier. Most humans convinced themselves the red was just a weird trick of the light against the otherwise ordinary brown. The hunters with lighter eyes had a trickier job of disguising that tell-tale flash of red.

  “This—” he pointed to the map, “—is the location of a previous demon fight I had. Maybe…twelve years ago.”

  Angie didn’t miss the relationship to Mara’s age. “You think the two are related?”

  “Either that, or this building has bad luck built into the bricks.”

  Angie shivered. There were buildings like that in New York, old buildings with nefarious auras. Bad things had happened there, and the very foundations of those buildings had taken in the negative energy. There was a reason ghost tours of New York were so popular.

  “I got the impression Mara was urging someone to leave the building with her. She won’t be there for long. We should go tonight.” So much for her hoped for cup of tea. And Tequila.

  And being done with all this after locating Mara.

  “We?” Sebastian said.

  She sighed. “Until I know she’s safe, I can’t just walk away. You knew that from the beginning. Bastard,” she added, not trying to hide her annoyance and resentment.

  His lips lifted in a faint smile and her heartbeat picked up. He always had that effect on her. Which only motivated her to call him a bastard again.

  “Guess dinner will have to wait,” he said.

  Not that he would eat if he had to fight a demon tonight. Hunters tried not to. The smells could cause involuntary gagging and choke reactions. It was always better to have an empty stomach. They couldn’t throw up what wasn’t there.

  Angie, on the other hand, hated to skip meals. Especially after working magic. Her stomach tightened in protest at the thought of not eating. “I’m stopping in the café on the way out. I need a sandwich at least.”

  “I’ll buy,” Sebastian said. “Least I can do.”

  “Yeah it is,” she said with a snort.

  She cleaned up her work space, ensuring the used water was poured into a disposal bucket. Since she hadn’t needed to include any herbs or salt, the water would be reused to water the plants that filled in most of the second-floor recesses. If she’d used herbs or salt, that leftover water would be used in the fountains on the first floor. The owners of Dana’s Cauldron preferred as little waste as possible, and Angie liked that approach to witchcraft. It had the feeling of balance to it that was all things in her world.

  She realized as she slipped back into her jacket and put her purse strap over hear head, angling it across her chest, that demon hunting had an innate sense of balance to it too. The balance was tipped, broken, when a human tried to summon a demon into this world. The only way to restore that balance was to send the demon packing back to its realm of origin.

  Sebastian’s life was dedicated to maintaining this balance, a fact that might have been part of her attraction to him.

  He held up the plastic bag he still held, the bag with the dangerous demon books in it that she’d somehow managed to forgot about.

  “I need to store these,” he said. “Not a good idea to bring them into a hunt.”

  She shivered. She had no idea what a demon might want or do with these books, but Sebastian was right, better not to tempt fate. “We can store them in my locker here,” she said, gesturing vaguely to the storage room across the hall. “But only until tomorrow. I don’t want that energy in this place for long.”

  Dana’s Cauldron didn’t deal in much demon-centered stuff, and what they did have here was mostly esoteric, related to creation myths, or fictitious and therefore harmless. The owners well knew that demons existed. They just didn’t want real demon stuff in their witch store. That was yet another reason Angie loved this place.

  Sebastian held back the curtain for her as she proceeded him from the room, and his scent wrapped around her, a deep spice of masculinity that was part aftershave and part earthy male. And all Sebastian.

  She sighed. Balance wasn’t the only thing that had attracted her to the man. His scent alone could keep her ensorcelled for a lifetime.

  If it hadn’t done already.

  Chapter Nine

  The apartment building was one of five, each maybe fifteen stories high, all surrounding an inner courtyard of cracked sidewalks crossing between sections of dirt that had probably been intended for grass or landscaping. In between two of the buildings was a surprisingly well-maintained little playground for kids, with a tall metal fence separating it from its surroundings to keep the kids inside safe and from running out into traffic. The complex was surrounded by a circular driveway that accessed all the buildings from the outside, and led back out to a busy cross street.

  There were a few lamps with soft yellow lights illuminating the courtyard, but the ones with unbroken bulbs were scattered far enough apart to leave a lot of the area in dark shadows.

  A cold autumn breeze brought with it the faint scent of uncollected garbage, though Angie couldn’t see where that garbage wa
s stored. Her nose twitched as she caught the even fainter scent of tobacco smoke. She studied her surroundings, and the doorways into the buildings. She couldn’t see anyone standing around smoking, so she assumed she was catching the smell of someone’s leftover butt.

  In fact, the area was incredibly quiet. Lights were on in windows throughout the complex, and from nearby she could just hear someone’s television through their closed window, but other than that sign of life, the complex felt eerily still.

  A skittering sound to her right made her pause. She glanced in the direction of the noise. If it was a rat, she didn’t want to know. She wasn’t a rat person. Her brothers made fun of her for it, but rats and mice creeped her out. Given she could see into demon realms, her brothers found this fact pretty hilarious.

  Memories of her brothers, and their familial teasing, actually settled her jumping nerves more than she would have expected. She was probably due a visit home soon. Except everything that had happened, all the reasons she’d moved to New York, all of that had happened in New Mexico. Going home brought it up even as being with her family settled her soul.

  It was a terrible, tricky dichotomy.

  “Any idea where we should start?” she murmured to Sebastian. There was no one around to overhear them that she could see or sense, but the strangely quiet night seemed to call for quiet voices.

  “This way,” he said.

  A strange note in his voice made her look more closely at him. He was focused on a building across the courtyard. She studied it as they moved through the open space toward its metal front door. The image of that door, the window with wire cross-hatching… It was similar to her vision, though all the doors looked alike so it was impossible to tell if that was the door she’d seen Mara in front of.

  Sebastian went directly to that door, though, without looking around, without studying his surroundings. Like he’d been there before.

  “You haven’t told me something,” she said, worry crawling into her stomach.

  “I told you I had a hunt here,” he answered without looking away from the door.

  His voice was even deeper than normal but distant, his concentration elsewhere.

  “You didn’t tell me what happened,” she said.

  He didn’t comment.

  “Did you win or lose that fight?”

  “I’m alive.”

  She supposed that was an answer. Rare for a hunter to lose a fight with a demon and survive. Losing typically meant death. Almost always in fact.

  “This particular location, not a coincidence,” she said.

  “Not a coincidence I think.”

  “Is there a demon coming now?” She reached under her jacket sleeve to grip the silver pentagram charm.

  When he didn’t answer, her heartbeat jumped. She wasn’t here to fight demons. She was here to find a child. But, as usual, whenever she got involved with the demon hunters, accomplishing one goal would mean doing the thing she wasn’t here to do.

  She really hated this world.

  Sebastian paused a hundred yards from the door, then turned slightly to the left. Angie followed his gaze and realized there was another door there, at the bottom of a ramp, a door into the basement. Without a word, Sebastian headed that direction.

  Angie hesitated, her grip on the pentagram imprinting it into her fingers. The cold breeze shifted through her hair, making her moon earrings tinkle. Her heart hammered so hard all she could hear for a moment was the blood rushing through her body. Adrenaline slammed into her, overwhelming her. And her flight instinct kicked in hard. She wanted to run, fast and far.

  Sebastian reached the basement door, another solid metal barrier with a smaller window reinforced with wire cross-hatching. She glanced to her right, into the lobby. It was dark but for a single security light at the back of the large, open space. Inside, there was a wall of mailboxes to the right and two elevators to the left. The stairs at the back of the lobby got most of the light from the single bulb, but the space under the stairs was shadowed and impenetrable.

  Another skittering sound behind her had her spinning, searching for the source. She was both disgusted and a little relieved to see the dark beady eyes of a rat as it glanced at her before scurrying off around the building.

  Shivering, she pulled in a deep breath, and made her choice. She followed Sebastian down the ramp to the basement door.

  He had his hand on the knob, turning. She’d have expected the door to be locked, and it might well have been, but locks weren’t an issue to hunters. At least not conventional locks. He paused before pushing the door inward, waiting and listening. Angie listened too, but her nerves were too jumpy, and she couldn’t seem to hear beyond her own heartbeat.

  Damn it, she wasn’t going to do anyone any good this way. She made an attempt to settle her pulse and focused on the feel of the pentagram pressing against her fingers. She mentally started a shielding spell.

  Most of her magic work consisted of spells, some potions, and occasionally working with charms. She didn’t actually do much work in setting charms—the pentagram had been a gift from her earliest mentor—but she could manage it in a pinch. She was best with actual spell work. And spell work took time, and concentration. Say a word wrong, use the wrong hand gesture, and the unpredictable results could get someone killed.

  The shielding spell was one she knew so well at this point, she almost didn’t have to think about it. She could run through the words in one part of her mind and initiate the shield while another part of her mind was panicking or just moving too slowly to react to a situation. But given what they might be walking into, she didn’t want to take chances. Initiating the spell, getting it started and built to a point where all she’d need to do is say one last word and combine it with the appropriate hand gesture, would ensure she could react fast and not get sucked into a demon realm.

  She hated when that happened.

  Sebastian finally pushed the basement door inward. It was pitch dark inside. Too dark to see into the interior even though her night vision was pretty good. Sebastian went in first. She checked behind them, watching for movement, or signs of someone coming from that direction to trap them. No one was around.

  She followed Sebastian into the basement, her heart still hammering so hard she was nearly panting.

  This was the worst part. The not knowing what they would face, what horror they’d encounter. Until the very moment when the awfulness unfolded in front of her, she had to imagine what it might be. And Angie had a very very good imagination.

  She allowed the door to click closed behind her. In the silence, the noise of the settling door was loud, and it echoed. So much for any element of surprise they might have had.

  “Do you mind light?” she murmured close to Sebastian’s ear. He was only a few inches in front of her, staying close enough she didn’t panic. But the darkness, the solid wall of it, was more than her jumping nerves could take.

  “I think the motion sensor lights are broken,” he said.

  “That wasn’t the kind of light I was thinking about.” She reached into her purse and pulled out a small flask.

  “Magic?” he murmured.

  “This is Tequila.” She took a gulp and handed the flask to him. Then she pulled out a small flashlight and clicked it on. The little beam was just enough to illuminate the corridor before them out to about three feet. “I come prepared,” she said.

  She caught his grin from the corner of her eyes. He sipped the Tequila—not much but a sip—and handed the flask back to her. She slipped it into her purse with one hand while sweeping her little flashlight around the corridor with the other.

  She actually could make a little ball of light from magic. It was a simple spell that required no extras, just the words and a very specific hand gesture. But it took magic and that wasn’t an unlimited resource for any witch. Once depleted, it took time to build up again. Like muscle strength. Even the strongest people could only push their muscles so far before they had to re
st and let their bodies recover. Magic took practice, training, proper fuel, and rest. And every use drained a little bit away that had to be replaced.

  Since she didn’t know what they were getting into, she wanted to reserve as much power as possible. Just in case.

  The corridor they stood in was all concrete, the stone floors painted blue, the walls she was pretty sure were white. There was a line of lights overhead, but either the bulbs were out or they’d been removed. She couldn’t tell through the light covers. A series of white pipes ran the length of the ceiling as well, making the space feel a little shorter than it actually was.

  There was a closed door to the left a few feet ahead, the metal sign at eye height proclaiming it the compactor. Farther ahead and to the left, another door stood open, the interior dark. Beyond that door, the corridor turned to the right and disappeared into more darkness.

  “You lead,” she murmured to Sebastian.

  He didn’t argue with her.

  She kept her beam of light on the ground in front of them a few feet ahead and they moved slowly toward the opened door. The compactor made a noise as they moved past it, a chunk and crunch that made Angie jump. She cursed at her own edginess. Sebastian reached back and squeezed her wrist once, then released his hold so they’d both have their hands free.

  Beyond the compactor, the corridor was an echo of silence, the only noise their breathing and soft footsteps. Weirdly silent, actually. Most buildings made a lot of noise. Pipes clunking, elevators moving, things settling or turning on. It wasn’t so late at night that there wouldn’t be any people about. Yet it felt like three in the morning and even the building itself had gone to sleep.

  The air was warm, the pipes overhead issuing more than enough heat. Almost too much. She was sweating under her jacket now. Although, that could have been anxiety.