“A dirty trick to be expected from a witch,” he hissed. “That won’t work again.”
He reached out, curled his fingers, and twisted his wrist in an awkward gesture. Influence flowed at her, extending out from his egg-like aura, but the wode sump took the blast and heated up against her skin.
“Why won’t you suffer!” He bounded toward her, carried by tree-root legs.
She swung the wrench at him with both hands, her bruised ribs aching with the force of her blow. He raised an arm to block it, and the metal crunched against bone, but this time the curse had no effect. Margrave pushed her to the floor and kneeled on her chest, immobilizing her.
“The great weakness of witches is that your only advantage is the element of surprise. Once you’re revealed for what you are, all your tricks are merely an annoyance. It takes very little to overcome you. As vermin go, you’re easy to eradicate.”
He laid his palm against her forehead, the rough bark of his skin pressing into her brow.
“I know you’re not in league with your husband. Let’s see which of my enemies you work for.”
Her skull pressed in against her brain as images from her past flashed through her mind, thoughts and emotions emerging and falling away. She tried to speak one of her mother’s spells, but whatever Margrave was doing to her jumbled her thoughts until all her language was gone.
Panic rose within her, her breath coming in ragged sips as she struggled in vain to break free.
“You have no sponsor,” said Margrave. “All this damage because you feel it’s the right thing to do. I’ve never thought a witch could be so moral.”
The word came out of his mouth as an insult.
“There, I see it,” he said. “A perfect prison for you.”
The shattered room around them vanished, the smell of broken wood and plaster replaced by wet loam. The ground to which Margrave pinned her became wet earth at her back. The morning light dimmed to the glow of a feeble gas-lamp suspended by a hook from the ceiling. She recognized instantly where he had brought her: the cellar in her parent’s village.
“And here is your perfect jailer.”
Margrave lifted off her, allowing her to scramble back and press herself against the wall. Behind him stood the witch hunter, the deep blue eyes that she had never forgotten even after twenty years turned the same sickly yellow of Margrave’s remaining good eye.
A single word came to her mind, the dark seductive shape of its syllables called forth by the expanse of terror within her. This time she didn’t resist, didn’t push it into the back of her mind with all the other things she wanted to forget. The spell to call down chaos came easily to her lips. She whispered it softly, with no more effort than a sigh.
“Gorogoltha.”
44
Fueled by the power of the wode sump, the spell’s keyhole tore an opening within her that ripped and spread into a vast shapelessness that threatened to consume her. With the spell came release, but not the release of tension, not the release of the fear she held within her. A sense of order she hadn’t been aware of until now vanished. Reality wrenched sideways, gravity no longer running true as the world tilted. The sunlight pouring in through the windows shifted toward blue. Her limbs became alien appendages that belonged to another creature.
The widow’s weeds vanished. She was back in Margrave’s house, the dark cellar gone. The cold floor returned to wood and debris, but the surrounding air was thick with shifting phantoms, as if her menstrual visions had returned a thousandfold.
“What have you done?” said Margrave.
A great force yanked him back and slammed him to the ground. He fought against it, struggling to get back to his feet, but every time he lifted himself up, it beat him down until he ceased to resist. His useless flailing was the same as her struggle on the village green outside Euphemia Graham’s house. He’d lost his control over Influence. She had to act fast. Who knew how much time she had before the effect faded and she lost her advantage?
As she pressed herself up, the lipstick tube dug into her ribs. She took it out. In the phantom-rich, blue-tinted air, it possessed an aura like the purple flame of a blow torch spewing out of each end. It picked up her thought and turned her fleeting impression into a reality. The air ignited, singeing her palm. She dropped it, and the flames extinguished as it fell to the floor. Using the lipstick to direct the flow of Influence was like driving a car from the back seat, a messy process even with the added force of the wode sump’s stolen power, but now, the wrong thought could bring the house down.
As she stooped to pick the lipstick up, she realized releasing it hadn’t blinded her second sight. The disorienting shift in reality and the layers of ghostly images remained.
The lug wrench lay at her feet, radiating an aura of shadow, ripples of purple darkness pouring off it like a noxious gas. As she hefted its awkward weight in one hand, the metal twisted and reshaped itself into a thick and well-balanced cudgel. The short right-angled socket arm bent around her hand to form a crude hilt.
“Cressida,” said Margrave from where he struggled on the floor, his voice labored. “Come to me. Help me.”
One of the many phantoms drifting around her through the shattered room solidified into the shape of Cressida. Gosha reached into her pocket to find the torc she had taken from George, but it was gone.
“I need you,” he said.
The young woman, as solid and real as she had been the day before, looked confused and frightened, her arms clasped around her.
“Emerson, where am I? What’s happening? I did everything you said, but it all went wrong.”
Gosha’s mother told her there were no ghosts. As a teenager, such a pronouncement would only have strengthened her conviction that they existed and sent her on a quest to prove her mother wrong. She’d learned enough in the past few days to take her mother’s word as gospel truth. If this wasn’t Cressida’s ghost, then it must be a version of Mick’s hant, a distillation of her sprung from the bangle that stole her soul.
“You did as you were meant to.” Margrave reached up to her from the floor. “This is it, my dear. This is our great moment. Come to me, girl.”
“Cressida, wait,” said Gosha as the hant walked toward him, but it took no notice of her.
She sliced at it with the lug wrench, hoping for the same effect the cursed wrench had against Margrave’s shade. She braced herself for the jarring displacement into a vision of Cressida’s past as the curse searched for its mark, but the bar passed through her doing nothing.
“Cressida, stop.”
She pointed the lipstick at the hant and willed Influence at the hant. With no clear intention of what she wanted other than that it disappear, all Cressida did was flicker once as it bent to take Margrave’s offered hand. As he wrapped his hand around the hant’s, it vanished.
Margrave’s body relaxed. He didn’t so much get to his feet as float off the floor, his control over Influence regained. Gosha had squandered whatever advantage she had with her inexperience and indecision.
“The Horned God is gone,” said Margrave. “For the first time in decades I don’t have to listen to his insufferable prurient whispers nagging in my ear. What a gift, Mrs. Armitage.”
His hideous demon form shifted and expanded into something that lost all resemblance to a human being. The horns from his head extended and spread, coiling around him in a jagged crown of thorns as his face elongated. His skin darkening to a glistening midnight blue. His limbs thickened, hands winnowing into sharp claws as his feet broadened into hooves. He changed until all trace of the dapper old gentleman was gone, his clothes reduced to rags that fluttered from his body.
In fury and frustration, despite the horror Margrave had become, she raised the wrench above her head and leaped at him. The lipstick thrumming in her clenched palm read her intent and lifted her off the floor with a burst of Influence that hurled her toward the demon, the oily smoke of the cursed lug wrench’s effluvium trailing behind
her in a dark wake. She struck him across the chest, and the wrench burned into him, charring his skin.
As he clutched his chest and staggered back, he swiped his arm out and struck her. The blow lifted her off her feet and sent her flying across the room to crash against a wall. The wode sump went from cold to burning against her chest in an instant. She aimed the lipstick at him and spoke the breaking spell.
“Kattak!”
A great ragged maw opened up within her that sucked Influence through it and spewed it out in a vast shock wave that shuddered through the house. Foundations cracked beneath them with a might that reverberated up through her legs. The house jolted and sank to the right, tilting the floor.
Margrave ducked and stepped to the side, covering his head with his misshapen arms as a huge chunk of plaster and wood fell to the ground where he had stood.
The spell drew power from the lipstick and not the wode sump, which continued to burn painfully against her skin. She pulled it off her neck and wrapped the chain around the hand holding the lipstick. Whatever Mrs. Dearing had done so that she could bleed power off it no longer worked in this pocket of insanity she had summoned into being.
Margrave vanished and reappeared behind her, close enough to whisper into her ear.
“This is delicious,” he said. “I’ve never felt so much Influence. I can read every thought, every desire in your body. You are a powerfully sensual woman.”
Long fingers wrapped around her neck, and he dug his nails into her flesh. A sharp, cold jolt of pain lanced down her body into her gut, forcing her to gasp. The growing heat of the wode sump spread through the chain around her fingers.
She couldn’t twist out of his clutches. His grip was too firm to push him away, so she swung the lug wrench up and over her shoulder, striking him across his back. The blow was weak, a feeble swipe that glanced off him, but the contact was enough for the curse-tempered iron to sear into his flesh and force him to release her.
He vanished and rematerialized a few yards away, screaming with frustration and pain.
“What is that mace of the fucking damned!”
With a swipe of his hand, the lug wrench ripped from her grasp and embedded itself in the staircase, cleaving through the wood of the steps up to the hilt.
She spoke the curse, aiming at him with the end of her lipstick, and regretted it at once. The puzzle box within her opened and opened and opened, each layer dredging up parts of herself she had fought for years to keep buried. Terror exploded deep within her. Her limbs shook with competing compulsions: to put her head down and run, or to curl up into a ball and blot out the world.
Influence passed through the spell’s opening and shaped itself into a creature from her nightmares: the sizer of a man, half bird, half skeletal, with skin the color of ash. It skittered forward on spindly legs to bear down on Margrave, who met it head on, arms and legs wrapping around it as they tumbled to the floor.
The struggle was brief and fierce, the curse-creature screeching as it snapped at Margrave with its beak and claws. Branches and spears grew from Margrave’s body, piercing the creature and running it through until it ceased fighting and collapsed, limp. Margrave flexed his body and tore it into pieces.
Before she could reach the lug wrench, Margrave rematerialized to block her path.
“No.” He wrapped his thorned fingers around her arms. “I have no time for these games.”
Branches lanced out of his body and pierced her chest to wrap around her heart and lungs and suck the Influence from her. The wode sump in her hand glowed with the brightness of a Klieg light and the chain seared her flesh. With her last ounce of strength, she thrust the amulet against Margrave’s arm and spoke the binding spell.
“Barzhed!”
As the spell’s keyhole opened into another painful, ragged shape that ripped its way through her insides, the surge of Influence shattered the tendrils that invaded her body on its path to Margrave and fused the wode sump to him. Veins of gold spread throughout his body that glowed with the overloading power surging through him.
She wrenched her arms out of his, backed away, and pointed the lipstick at him. Not daring to speak another of her mother’s spells for fear of the damage it might do to her, she willed every ounce of Influence at him she could. A torrent of blue sparks spewed out of the lipstick’s tip to be absorbed by the wode sump.
He keened a high-pitched wail of surprise and fear as the glowing of his golden veins grew stronger and stronger. It became so bright she couldn’t look at him.
The ground shuddered once in a great jolt that knocked her down. All at once, the air cracked with the force of lightning, and the house grew dark. The glow vanished to leave her blind in darkness.
When her vision cleared, Margrave stood before her, was once again the epitome of the dapper gentleman in his suit and cravat, all trace of his monstrous self gone. He looked around, confused and disoriented. He opened his mouth to speak, and extended a hand toward her, his brow furrowing, but no sound came out. His eyes rolled back into his head and he collapsed on the floor, unmoving.
“This is why they sent me for you, little witchlet,” a familiar voice behind her said in Polish.
The witch hunter.
45
The apparition of the witch hunter, identical to the man who held her hostage when she was a child but for its pustulant, cloven yellow eyes, stood over her. Margrave’s Influence lingered on even though the wode sump’s explosion had overcome him.
“Your kind meddle in things that are not your business. Witches are a force of evil. You undermine men of Influence with no thought of consequence and have no care for the custodians that guide humanity and seek to make it better. You only care about yourselves.”
He squatted before her and laid a fingertip on her forehead as if to brush a hair away from her face. She struggled to clamber away from him, but her body refused to obey.
“There is a saying in the bible: ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’”
He placed his hands on her neck and squeezed, blocking her windpipe, cutting off the flow of blood to her head. The lipstick still thrummed in her hand, but she couldn’t speak to cast one of her mother’s spells and, no matter how much she willed it, Influence would not obey her.
Her vision darkened and her thoughts became cloudy. She felt herself slip away.
* * *
“Not today, shade,” said a voice at the edge of her consciousness.
The witch hunter’s hands released her neck. She collapsed back to the floor, able to move again, and clutched at her throat, gulping down air in great breaths that filled her lungs to bursting. Above her, electricity sparked and crackled across the witch hunter’s body as a rush of wind blew him across the room.
“Ojej.” Her mother stood above her, rolling her acorn pendant between her fingers, her eyes bright with astonishment. “You do nothing by halves, do you, Goga?”
Her mother kneeled at her side as Shreya and Mei ran past behind her.
“Are you all right?”
Gosha nodded, unable to speak, and tried to lift herself up, but her mother eased her back.
“Just stay there. Don’t move. I’m here now. We left as soon as the shade fell and we could track you. Elsie,” her mother called over her shoulder. “Can you take care of her, please?”
Mrs. Dearing kneeled beside her, hairbrush in one hand, handbag tucked under her arm, and elbowed her mother out of the way to lay a hand on Gosha’s brow.
“Ooh, that’s nasty,” she twittered. “Not to worry. I’ll have you good as garters in no time.”
“Be right back.” Her mother cupped Gosha’s cheek. She rose and Eleanor stepped up beside her.
“Let’s have you up against the wall here so I can get a proper look at you,” said Mrs. Dearing as she helped Gosha lever herself up to sit.
Shreya, Mei, and Eleanor each held before them the objects that Gosha now realized served as their talismans: Shreya’s long, thin rolling pin,
Mei’s porcelain thimble perched on one index finger, and Eleanor’s leafy twig. Each had the same aura of Influence rushing around them as her lipstick, made visible by the strange chaos of her mother’s final spell.
“Watch yourselves.” Her mother edged toward the fallen shade of the witch hunter as he lurched back to his feet. “Małgorzata is her mother’s daughter. Never a sprinkle when a shower could do.”
Mrs. Dearing removed from her handbag a bundle of herbs and flowers tied up with twine. A strong and cloying fragrance of lavender filled Gosha’s nostrils as a thick cloud of pollen wafted out.
“Heavens!” Mrs. Dearing held the bundle against Gosha’s chest. “Breathe in deep. You’ll be tickety-boo in no time.”
The pain and wheezing in Gosha’s throat and the agonizing grinding in her gut receded.
“A whole coven,” said the shade of the witch hunter as Gosha’s mother and her friends spread out around him. “I have never felt more needed.”
“I put an end to you before,” said Gosha’s mother. “It will give me great joy to do so again.”
Behind the shade, Eleanor touched the twig to her temple and mouthed a word. Gosha recognized the startled look on her face as the spell in whatever secret language she used opened its keyhole within her in violent and unexpected ways. The air around Eleanor ignited and burst forward in a wave of flame.
Mrs. Dearing yelped and held her brush in front of her as she uttered one of her strange Gaelic words and the wavefront blew past them, leaving them unharmed.
Flames flickered out on the shade’s clothing, singeing Eleanor’s hair, but otherwise everyone was unharmed.
“Ladies,” said her mother, “a little more control, please. I would like to be there for my grandsons’ next birthdays.”
The witches didn’t wait for the shade to react, each of them muttering to themselves and unleashing a chaotic barrage against it. A flock of ravens descended upon its head, pecking at its eyes. Rats the size of small dogs swarmed up its legs as a flurry of crescent moons made of solid light slashed at its skin and tore its clothes.
Waking the Witch (The Witch of Cheyne Heath Book 1) Page 30