Bone Lantern Witch

by Kat Simons

  “Or its partner.”

  “The man who walked into Dana’s? Two demons, then?”

  “What else?”

  “The Molder riding the human host. The man could just be another host. Like the book. Like…anyone. Which is why it could affect you in this realm.”

  “The Molder would be getting around a lot, then. And we still don’t know why.”

  “We could go ask it.”

  She stopped in the street, facing him, forcing the other people coming up behind them to go around. “I thought you were joking about that.”

  “We’d get our answers.”

  “And you’d have to fight it again.”

  He shrugged. “Sooner rather than later.”

  “Is that why you want to go back to Grant’s tonight?”

  “I told him I’d find his daughter. I have. She’s safe.”

  “You’re not telling him where Mara is!”

  He scowled. “You know me better than that.”

  She let her shoulders slouch and started walking again. “Sorry. I’m edgy. I have been all day.”

  “Did you have trouble with your readings?” He fell into step beside her.

  “No. Well, I did get distracted during one. Poor man just needed to talk about his marriage, and I almost missed some of the crucial information he was telling me and gave him the wrong reading.”

  “Wrong reading?” Sebastian’s mouth ticked up.

  She shrugged. “What I do is as much counseling as anything else. I just have a little psychic leg up on most counselors. But I do have to pay attention to what my clients are telling me.”

  “Did you give him the right advice in the end?”

  “We’ll see when he comes back next week. He booked four sessions in all.”

  Sebastian considered her, his gaze on the side of her face. “You enjoy this work, don’t you?”

  “I do. I help people. It feels good. Grounding and solid.” She smiled a little. “I suppose its why I got my psychology degree in college, why I was leaning toward being a regular counselor. But I like my current office hours better.”

  His expression remained thoughtful, but he didn’t smile at her attempt at a joke.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “You helped people when we worked together, too.”

  “But I wasn’t doing what I was meant to do. I’m…better at this. This is what I’m able for.”

  “You underestimate yourself. You always have.”

  “Now who’s acting like a counselor.”

  “We’ve gotten off topic.”

  “Yes.” She gestured toward a subway station half a block up. “Ride or taxi?”

  “You’re ready to face Grant? You could stay away.”

  “I need this demon to know it hasn’t sent me into hiding.” She didn’t meet his gaze when she said, “Even if that’s exactly what I want to do. No, we need to end this. If you have to fight a demon, I’ll be there to have your back.”

  “What happened to this not being your job?”

  She made a face. Then more seriously, “The thing, or things, or whatever it is, knows where I work and came looking for me. It can reach me through my psychic senses. And it won’t just back off and leave me be if I go into hiding. It won’t stop being a danger to my friends and colleagues. I will help you send it back into its realm in any way I can. Because I need to ensure my friends are safe.”

  “And then?”

  “I’ll worry about then…then.”

  He paused, his expression suddenly turning inward, which wasn’t what she’d been expecting. She frowned at him. That was his listening expression.

  Something was happening.

  Her heartbeat kicked up. “What is it?”

  “Change of plans,” he murmured. “We need to get to Ellen and Mara. Now.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Sebastian put a hand out and a yellow cab pulled up to the curb immediately.

  A result of his will because there was no way that happened otherwise.

  Angie wanted desperately to ask what was happening. But the taxi driver was the chatty type and he kept tossing back questions through the plexiglass barrier. Tourists? Locals? Where you going?—that one they had to answer—Where’re you front?—that one to Sebastian with his English accent. He added a recommendation for his favorite Cuban restaurant in the Bronx and a great Greek place in Queens.

  Angie tried to be polite but her gut was a tangle of nerves, her own questions pummeling her—mostly worry for Mara and Ellen’s safety.

  She took her turn talking with the taxi driver whenever Sebastian got that faraway look in his eyes. And when he returned to his surroundings, she questioned him with her gaze. He could have told her more, willed the driver not to listen, but if there was a demon about to break loose into this realm, he was going to need that will for the fight. So she let his hand squeezing hers suffice as explanation for now.

  But she’d never wanted to hurry traffic along so desperately before.

  They reached the road leading up into the apartment complex and Sebastian had the driver let them off at the corner rather than taking them up into the complex. The trip uptown had taken more than forty-five minutes thanks to an accident on the West Side Highway.

  Angie stared up the drive at the collection of buildings and rubbed the pentagram charm on her bracelet. There weren’t any trees she could use to force a demon back into its realm here. Though that meant she couldn’t accidentally let any more out either, which was always good.

  She had a few prepared bottles in her bag, potions from friends and one or two of her own concoctions. She didn’t do a lot of potions, but she did a few protective ones and kept them on hand. Old habits died hard.

  Other than the potions, she was able to set protective binding circles, and do that pretty quickly because that was something she’d been practicing her whole life. And she had a few spells she could call down without having to think about them or worry about getting the words or gestures wrong and fucking up the end results. She’d added a few more of those to her repertoire since the time she’d almost gotten stuck in a demon realm and only had one of those ingrained spells at her fingertips when she’d panicked. She’d practice several more over the last two years, repeatedly so she could cast without having to think.

  Outside of those spells and her few backup potions, though, she wasn’t exactly a sword-wielding Amazon jumping into this fight. She wasn’t the hunter here.

  Sebastian ensured the taxi had disappeared around a corner before stalking up the drive into the complex. She followed without a word. He was in hunter mode now and his attention was on his inner voice, telling him where to go, where the danger was…

  To her surprise, it wasn’t at the building where Ellen and Mara lived.

  He led her into the center of the complex, then turned right, moving toward the building two over from Ellen’s. Angie frowned but followed, trusting Seb’s instincts. The air was crisp and sharp, a biting edge of cold from a wind blowing in off the river. The faint scents of trash she’d gotten the last time she was here were gone. All she could smell now was the cold in the air, and barely that. She pulled her jacket tighter around her. She wasn’t dressed for the temperature drop—the weather report hadn’t predicted this.

  They neared the building cautiously and Sebastian paused to study the lights inside the lobby, the windows overhead. Like the last time they’d been here, there were plenty of lights on inside, signs of life, faint noises from a few apartments, but the area outside was eerily quiet. From another building, Angie heard a dog bark.

  She raised her brows at Sebastian, without speaking because in the quiet any sound seemed too loud, and motioned toward the building. He shook his head, paused, then shook his head again.

  Something was strange and wrong.

  Finally, his expression cleared and he took off at a loping run around the building. She took her purse in one hand so it wouldn’t slap against her leg an
d trotted after him. Behind the building was a surprising copse of trees—from inside the complex that bit of nature wasn’t in view from any place they’d been. Although since they’d only been here at night so far, getting a good view of the place hadn’t been possible.

  The trees were oak, solid and tall.

  But oaks could have split trunks.

  She skidded to a halt, staring at the dark clump of trees, her heart pounding.

  She shouldn’t go in there. She shouldn’t risk it. How could she risk it?

  Sebastian didn’t wait for her, or even check behind him to see if she was still following. He charged into the trees, the copse thick enough that he vanished inside the darkness under the branches.

  Faintly, beyond those deep shadows, Angie saw a red glow.

  She squeezed her eyes shut. She had to do this. It wasn’t her job to fight the demon, but there was a human in there. Someone who might be desperate like Ellen had been. Or Mara. Someone who’d need her protection while Sebastian fought the demon.

  Around her rapidly thumping heartbeat, she pulled in a deep breath, opened her eyes, and kept her focus on the ground and base of the trees as she moved into the shadows.

  Inside the clump of trees, darkness was almost complete. For a heartbeat, Angie could forget they were still in the middle of the city. None of the normal light pollution leaked into the blackness under the branch canopy, and she couldn’t see but a few inches in front of her face.

  When her night vision finally adjusted, darker shadows emerged from the background, separating into tree trunks against the night. She blinked a few times, ensuring she could see well enough not to knock herself out running into a tree, then followed the red glow deeper into the woods.

  The clump of trees turned out to be larger than she’d assumed from the outside. She should have encountered a road after a few hundred yards. But the darkness and trees continued to spread out in front of her.

  She made an effort not to look up too high, to keep her gaze at the base of the trees and only look up enough to follow the glowing red light. Even in the dark—especially in the dark—she could get caught by that natural tree shape that allowed her to open a portal into a demon realm.

  Sometimes she wished her ordinary magic worked that easily. Her psychic senses had when she was younger and still in need of training. All she’d had to do was touch someone or something and all this information would come pouring in. She didn’t have that often these days and it was a relief. But her other magic, the spells and castings, the occasional potion, she had to practice those, study and learn and train. Invest energy and effort to make things work the way she wanted them to. Magic didn’t just fall out of her finger tips.

  Or rip open a doorway into a demon realm when she wasn’t ready.

  There was something there… The ease of opening demon realms. The ease of her touch psychic skills. But the glow ahead of her intensified as she neared and she lost the tentative connection between the two ideas even as her heartbeat tripled.

  She clung to a tree when she finally spotted the source of the glow.

  Another circle, this one faintly white in the dark dirt, but not a circle of fire. This was almost a moon’s luminescence, the glow of cleaned bones against a black background. The red light came from inside the circle, from the demon standing there engulfed in a red mist.

  A Molder demon.

  Chapter Twenty

  The Molder demon looked so much like the image from the book, Angie couldn’t breathe. Long tentacle hair hanging limply against a skeletal gray face. Tattered clothes hanging off a bone frame. Black eyes with glowing red pupils. Sharp sharp teeth. And a smile to haunt nightmares. The overly long arms of the creature hung at its sides as it grinned at Sebastian.

  “I’m glad you came, hunter,” it said, the sibilant hiss in its voice like nails on a chalkboard in Angie’s brain. It glanced up, its smile growing to grossly exaggerated proportions at odds with the size of its face. “And you brought the witch, I see. That’s good, too.”

  No, Angie thought. No, it’s not. Not even a little bit good.

  “You should be more worried about yourself,” Sebastian said.

  His voice was deep, his will a living thing in the clearing.

  “Why should I worry about you hunter? I’ve killed your kind before.”

  “You remember me. You didn’t kill me.”

  “An oversight on my part.”

  Sebastian’s chuckle showed no signs of the terror clutching at Angie’s throat. She swallowed. This was the demon in the book. The one who’d come to Dana’s Cauldron looking for her. She knew it. Knew it in her bones.

  But it was contained! It was inside a circle. The red mist swirling around its body didn’t disguise its physical shape. It was solid inside that mist, inside that circle. It was not fully in this realm.

  “A failure, perhaps,” Sebastian said. “You’ll fail again.”

  The mist flickered around the demon, like a breeze had moved through it.

  Angie hunted the surroundings for the person who’d called the demon, expecting to see Grant somewhere.

  When she did spot the human who’d summoned the demon, laying in a crumpled heap beside the circle, she gasped.

  “Carmen?” The housekeeper from Grant’s home?

  Sebastian started to chant in Spanish, though with an accent that made the language difficult for Angie to understand. Her Spanish was rudimentary, fed mostly by her knowledge of Latin and her Spanish-speaking friends growing up, but it was the Spanish of Mexico, Columbia, and Cuba. The words, the accent Sebastian used made her frown. She’d have to concentrate hard to understand even a little of what he was saying.

  But she could guess what he was doing. He was using whatever Carmen had used to call this demon. An old incantation from the feel of it.

  A spell. With actual magic in it.

  The Molder demon hissed and swatted in the direction of Sebastian. Sebastian leaned to one side a little before straightening to his full height again. He widened his stance, and the chant grew deeper, louder.

  The demon charged the edge of the circle. “You can’t stop me,” it whispered, that grating noise piercing Angie again. It reached down into the mist tightening around its lower half. “I will have this world. And you won’t stop me, hunter.”

  From the mist it pulled a shape that didn’t at first make sense to Angie. It was an illusion of some sort, ephemeral, transparent, a shadow of a real thing. She had to stare at it for a long moment before…

  Recognition made her gasp again.

  The image of the altar Mara had seen in that dark room, the same image echoed inside one of her demon books. The stage set to look absolutely identical to the image in the book—but for one small detail. In the real-life setting, there’d been a lantern, similar in shape and size to a camping storm lantern, but the edges of the thing, the covering top, all looked like whitened bones.

  The demon held that bone lantern in its clawed hand.

  Or at least an illusion of that lantern. Not the real one.

  From the corner of her eye, Angie spotted movement. Carmen was crouching, her gaze on Sebastian. In her hand, she also held a lantern just like the one the demon held. Only this one was a real, solid object. Not an illusion. She raised it a little. The light inside illuminated Carmen’s face with strange, sinister shadows.

  The woman smiled. The demon, still looking at Sebastian, also smiled.

  Angie moved before she thought, before she knew what she was going to do. She didn’t even take the time to shout Sebastian’s name.

  She wrapped her arms around Carmen, spun in a circle and hit the lantern away at the same time. Carmen lost her grip and the lantern went flying. She screamed something, but Angie ignored the curse and drew a magic circle around her and Carmen, a solid blue line forming in her head encompassing them, flaring brightly in her mind’s eye as she connected the ends.

  When she opened her eyes, Carmen was struggling against her g
rip. The woman was smaller than Angie, but strong as all hell, and she succeeded in breaking out of Angie’s hold. She reared back to punch Angie in the face. Angie dropped to her knees, putting herself under the woman’s lunge—she’d learned that trick from her oldest brother—and reached forward to set a hand against Carmen’s thigh.

  The shock spell was as innate as any spell she ever called on because she’d used it a lot as a kid to get her brothers to back off when they were teasing her or picking on her. The intensity of the spell could vary, which made it very handy when she wanted to warn off a brother, or in this case, incapacitate a person who may or may not be in the control of a demon.

  The flare of power she sent into the spell pulsed against Carmen’s leg, and Carmen’s muscles tightened beneath Angie’s hand. Carmen gasped, then she dropped to the ground, her eyes rolled back in her head. Angie made sure her pulse was still beating—strong and steady—checked her eyes—no dilation—assuring herself Carmen was just knocked out.

  Then she turned to face Sebastian and the demon, keeping Carmen within easy sight as she did. Turning her back on someone working with a demon was always a bad idea. Another lesson she’d learned a long time ago. The hard way.

  The Molder demon howled. Angie winced. She stayed in a crouch so she could protect Carmen, or lay her out again, depending on what was called for. But it was very tempting to cover her ears.

  Sebastian said something Angie couldn’t hear over the demon’s shriek, but the demon must have because it stopped yelling, the sound cut off with an unnatural abruptness that left Angie’s ears ringing.

  Sebastian continued chanting in Spanish under his breath, his English accent giving the words a unique twist and emphasis. This time, though, she understood the words better. At least enough of them that the general meaning was clear. He was chanting a banishment spell, a reverse of the spell he must have suspected Carmen used to call the demon.

  The beast snarled at him. “I will be back for you hunter. And your witch.” It smiled at Angie, revealing its row of pointed teeth. “I will own you too, witch. Your mind is mine.”