Cursed Lines (A Peg Darrow Novel Book 2)

by Camille Douglass

  Michael took a step forward, stepping on the skirt of Lola’s dress. A woman sharply dressed in a skirt suit and heels of all things placed a hand on his chest, pushing him back. She looked to be in her early forties. Frosted blonde hair done up in an elegant twist and tasteful makeup. The sick bitch had dressed like she actually planned to see her son wed and not murder my best friend.

  “You must be mommy dearest.”

  She smiled at me, looking me over as if I were a fly caught in her web. I might be, but I wouldn’t let Lola die without trying to save her.

  “I’ve heard of you. Peg, is it?” She sniffed the air, her smile growing even more perverse. “And a mongrel too. Michael, you didn’t tell me you had found a mutt.”

  Michael’s eyebrows drew together and he sniffed the air, mimicking his mother. “I’m sorry, Mother, She’s always been in the presence of goblins. I didn’t notice the distinction.”

  She reached up and patted his cheek. “It’s of no matter, but what a wonderful treat for us.”

  Goody, my odd family line was considered a delicacy to these psychos. I looked at the other two people that made up the circle. Unlike Michael and the head bitch in charge, they took on the emaciated androgynous look of their other brethren.

  “You gonna share? I don’t mean to question your management style, but this all feels very ‘Let them eat cake.’ So you have these lackeys that you turn from witches into creatures more vile than vampires, and then you have them do your bidding, jonesing for that sweet, sweet life force all while you and your son here take the best pickings?”

  She laughed. It was a high-pitched tinkle of a laugh that made me want to punch her in the face.

  “Do you think to turn my family against me? We always survive—”

  “Tell that to your buddies at the trailer.”

  Her eyes darkened and she literally hissed at me like the serpent she was. “I felt them leave. Are you saying you are the one who harmed our family?”

  “I mean I can’t take all of the credit. It was a group effort. You’ve really pissed off Pammy, and frankly that alone should be enough to have you running for the hills or sewer, ya know, wherever you feel most comfortable.”

  “You are such a child.”

  “Madam, why are we speaking to this one?” one of the minions piped up.

  “Jeffrey, don’t interrupt me. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen one of her kind. You do remember, don’t you? We had one with connections once. We feasted on her for years.”

  “Connections?” I asked before I could stop myself.

  “Of course. Do you think that we, having lived centuries, would not know of the planes. We can’t of course steal the goblin magic. It is but a cousin to our own powers, but mixed with a witch’s blood, it makes for a quite powerful meal. A mule, if you will, with the smooth ride of a horse but the stamina of a jackass.”

  My mouth dropped open. “I’m not sure if I’m more put off by you discussing what a fine meal I’d make or because you just compared your feeding habits to animal husbandry.”

  She waved a hand. “It’s of no matter. My family will feast tonight, and we will all regain our youth. Then we will, as you so aptly put it, run for the hills, not the sewer. We are not a confrontational type, so we will leave your sheriff in peace, and she will forget us once we’ve moved on. They always do.”

  I glanced back behind them and saw that during our little interlude, Deval and Vegard had managed to knock out one of the witches they’d been fighting, but they looked tired. I tried not to worry. I was sure they had plenty of gold to pull from. “Yeah, but you do know who that goblin back there is right?” I said, pointing out Deval.

  She didn’t even bother to look back. “The affairs of goblins do not concern me as long as they keep to their kind. They will die tonight and be nothing but an afterthought.”

  “Yeah, about that. That’s Deval, the crown prince of the goblins. I know you mentioned hiding out between your little parasitic vacations, but you may have heard of his mother, Delmy. Now, I’ve met her, and let me tell you, one scary lady, and she really does love that boy. Also, you know that whole immortal thing. She won’t think twice about spending decades, centuries even, tracking you down to watch you burn.”

  I finally saw a small crack in the matriarch’s face. The smile that she’d held this entire time twitched. She knew I was right. She herself appeared to be a doting mother to a single boy. Mama’s boys weren’t nearly as scary as their mamas.

  “It matters not, Mother. We have invested too much of our power in Lola. If that goblin chose to interfere, it’s his own undoing, and we will be gone before she feels the death collapse of her son’s plane.”

  She nodded once, broken from her introspection. “You’re right of course, my darling boy.”

  Our chat had come to an end. I let loose the power I’d been building, hitting her and Michael in one jolt. They took a step back. Even with the element of surprise there were four witches juiced up on death magic. Dark magic began to coalesce around me, and I had nowhere to run.

  “Don’t spell her. We will feast on her as well as her friend,” Mommy dearest screeched.

  The dark magic made a hasty retreat and was replaced by fists and feet as I was struck over and over. I held my own despite being pummeled. I knocked my head back and felt the satisfaction of cartilage breaking in a nose. I kicked and punched and clawed in my determination to save my friend. But then a sharp pain hit the back of my head, and my world went dark.

  Waking up next to my best friend wasn’t the worst thing in the world. It usually meant that a night out on the town had gotten rowdy and we would giggle and groan about the antics from the night before after ordering pizza and taking enough ibuprofen to aid in our recovery. Waking up to your best friend on a hard wood pulpit, her still knocked out, you tied up, while you watched her life force leaving her body for a dark ritual–not as much fun.

  The circle had formed again and the chant resumed. I strained to see if I could locate my goblin comrades, but I couldn’t see past the circle. The dark melodious chant left my skin crawling. Thank the gods, I hadn’t eaten in hours as my stomach did its best to crawl into my throat. I swallowed, calming the wave of nausea and did a little self-evaluation.

  I didn’t need to search long. My magic in its entirety had wrapped itself tight within me in an act of self-preservation. The dark magic licked at my skin, but it was either focused on Lola or I needed to write an editorial to Witch Weekly singing the praises of magical vaccines. Something to dwell on later.

  The number of witches surrounding me was a problem. I strained to hear above the chant, hoping the telltale sound of grunts, thuds, and air crackling that surrounded magical fights. The chant added a white noise cloaking the room, but a sinking feeling in my gut told me the fight had ended, and given that I was lying beaten in the middle of the circle, watching Lola get drained, that didn’t bode well for Deval or Vegard.

  Tears wanted to form at concern for my friends, but if I was the only one left, I needed to go out fighting and take a few of the bitches with me. My body ached, and I knew from very recent experience that I was not a skilled enough fighter to take on this many people. So I pulled on my magic. Kingpin first. They hadn’t realized I’d woken.

  The thing about surprises was that they only worked once. I needed to blast the woman with everything and pray that I had enough for her son once she was down. After that I didn’t really have a plan, but I knew I needed to follow my order of operations, but instead of Please excuse my dear aunt Sally, I’d go Please kill Mommy dearest, her sniveling son, and all the bitches.

  I laughed internally at my own terrible joke. It probably meant that I’d reached the appropriate level of crazy necessary to pull this off. On the count of three, I sat up fast. Some cracked ribs seemed to grind in protest, but I’d rather die of a punctured lung than have my soul stolen by this lot. My power rushed forward, hitting the matriarch dead on because she’d been too
busy murdering to notice me.

  She shrieked. Her people looked down and started toward me, but they stopped when after a shuddering gasp, she called out. “Do not break the circle, you fools. We have too much invested in this one. If we stop the ritual, we all die anyway.”

  My mind struggled to wrap itself around the fact that as I poured everything that I had into this incredibly powerful witch, and she didn’t even bother to lift a finger in retaliation. What did she mean invested? I gritted my teeth and kept pushing magic into her. I saw sweat form on her forehead as her body gave an involuntary shudder, but she kept on chanting.

  A minute passed, and my arms began to burn from holding them in front of me as conduits. With all of my training, I’d never had or expected to use a magical attack for such a long period. Short bursts of magic were enough to knock out another caster, and there was no reason for them, but she held on to her cronies’ hands for dear life and just kept on trucking while I slowly exhausted myself.

  I looked around, confused at what was happening. Then my eyes locked on Lola’s magic. It surrounded me, slowly siphoning out of her into the parasites, but I already knew that. The surprise was in the quantity. A cloud of her magic filled the circle the amount and potency ten times that of the average witch, and where Lola had certainly been blessed in many areas, this level of magic was not what she’d ever displayed.

  My arms now visibly shook and my T-shirt stuck to my body from the sweat pouring from me. My order of operations was not working as I’d planned. My attack seemed to be hurting me more than them. I dropped my hands, letting my magic sputter out. I saw a triumphant smile on the woman’s face. Don’t get too excited, you old crone. I studied the cloud of magic around me, a soft pink with hints of purple. The pink I’d recognized. Lola had always given off that shade in her spellwork. The purple added a nice touch, very sparkle princess, but not Lola. It poured from her along with the pink, so using my witch sight I took in the purple and followed it back to its source.

  If Lola hadn’t been unconscious and open magically from the ritual, I never would have seen what they’d done. Deep in the essence of Lola, in her soul home, a seed had been planted. A weed meant to grow with the witch, harvesting her magic as she grew. These seeds were rare even for dark practitioners because they harvested not only from the victim but also from the caster to keep a seed alive for however long it sat. Given Lola’s history with the McAllisters, the weed had been there for over a decade, and now it was time to harvest, or their own field would go fallow.

  It’s always nice when you can identify obscure spells. Now there was just the teensy problem of figuring out what to do about it. What I’d read hadn’t been such a long-standing spell, and even if the weed had only been planted a week ago, I didn’t have the equipment or the time let alone the physical capability at the moment to brew a potion to kill it.

  I started to despair at losing Lola when a key seemed to turn in my mind, allowing me to think outside of my comfort zone. Lola’s power was being pulled out, tethered to the weed. What if just the weed was pulled? Goblins used their planes as magical storage facilities to hold their power for them. Lola obviously wasn’t a plane and not my property, but as her best friend for over a decade, I definitely had a claim to her. A click in my own magic home reverberated through me as a door opened in my mind’s eye.

  Instinctively I reached for the magic cloud shaky from my own attempt to stop these witches. The minute I touched the magic, the door that had opened became a vacuum, wanting to suck up all of the magic in the air. I pulled back on the door a little, only allowing the purple to enter. I had no problem taking in the weed’s power, but I would not take from Lola. My goblin instincts got the hint and began to pull exclusively purple magic from the air.

  Initially, it was just a trickle, but as I got the hang of it, it quickly became a wind tunnel of power pouring into me. Apparently a decade of carefully placed magic was even more of a pick-me-up than George. Not that I’d tell him, and I hoped there would never be a repeat. The pain I’d been in moments ago seemed to disappear, replaced by a warm tingling sensation and a heady dose of giddiness. I rose to my feet and let out an elated laugh that sounded as manic as mommy dearest’s had earlier. That should have been disconcerting. It wasn’t. Neither were the shrieks that began to sound around me.

  Instead I stood in the middle of it all, arms raised in exultation, my head thrown back as I spun around in a circle slowly, never wanting the feeling to end.

  “Peg, they’re gone. You need to close the door now before it’s too late.” Deval’s steady timbre filled the room.

  I didn’t want to listen, so I just kept on spinning.

  “You are a resilient woman, Peg, and I believe you would survive almost any situation, but I would bet all of my gold that you would not survive the guilt of murdering Lola.”

  I kept spinning as the words sank in, and just as suddenly my head jerked forward, and I started seeing what Deval spoke of. Sure enough the purple was gone. The McAllisters lay in the circle around me, their bodies husks, drained of magic, and that cottony pink magic of Lola’s came toward me. The door slammed shut at my will, a deadbolt locking in place, and a bar dropped down on the door as I picked up my witch magic, forcing the loose magic again into a cyclone, not for my own hunger this time but to return it to its home. I pushed the magic back into the place the weed had been planted taking the time to search out any residual malignant magic that could have been left inside of Lola.

  Finding nothing, I pushed in the last of the loose magic. I knelt over my friend and gently shook her shoulder. When that didn’t work, I began to lightly slap her face. I didn’t want to hurt her, but she needed to wake up and close her soul home. Right now she was easy pickings for a dark practitioner. The longer she stayed open, the more vulnerable she’d become, and the more difficult it would be for her to rebuild her walls.

  Deval came and stood behind me. His hand rested on my shoulder for comfort or reassurance or whatever it was he intended. Whatever it was, it felt nice.

  Lola finally came to. Sputtering on the floor before curling into fetal position. Heaving sobs came out of her. “Why does it hurt so bad?” she sobbed.

  I got down on my knees and rubbed her back. “Lo, love, I know it hurts, but you need to focus. You need to put up your borders. You probably feel like you’ve been magically gutted, and you sort of were, but you’ll feel better once you have it secure again. Can you do that, Lola?”

  She whimpered and shook her head. “Can’t you do it, Peg? It burns and feels empty at the same time. I don’t even know what to do at this point.”

  I knew that she felt weak in that moment, and she had dangerously low power reserves. I grabbed her hand and began to push my magic into her. It was the least I could do, given that I’d unwittingly taken from her in my desperation to stop our enemies.

  A gasp sounded from Lola. “That feels so much better. Peg, why does your magic feel different? I’d know yours anywhere, but it feels even more familiar.”

  “Get your barriers up again, and I’ll tell you. You’re not gonna like it, but rest assured neither do I. I just hope you’ll forgive me at the end of this,” I muttered the last sentence because I wasn’t sure how Lola would feel about my accidental cannibalization of her magic or my intentional cannibalization of the McAllisters.

  Slowly, I fed more and more of my power into Lola, hoping to replace any I’d taken, or at least give her a strong enough boost, so she’d start producing on her own. Through our connection, her magic became more and more distant from me, in a good way. Lola had been breathing in pained gasps until finally the last magical brick had been placed. She took a deep and steady breath before exhaling and falling from fetal position flat on her back.

  She looked up at me. “You were right.” Her face held no humor just utter defeat and that worried me.

  I forced a smile. “There’s a first time for everything. You’re always saving me. I needed to return the f
avor. Just two months ago, you talked the vampire lord out of eating me. So really you were due a little assistance.”

  I’d hoped for a small smile, but all I got was a solemn nod before Lola closed her eyes. “I’m so tired, Peg.”

  “Then sleep. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

  22

  Lola didn’t need any more encouragement and went to sleep as though the hard chapel floor was the most luxurious feather bed. Not sure of the injuries she’d sustained magically or otherwise, I frowned, looking down at her fragile form as I stood up. She needed a healer, but that needed to wait. I reached in my pocket, and above all odds, I pulled out my phone still in one piece thanks to an overpriced case.

  The battery flashed at me, letting me know that even though I’d managed to save my best friend, my phone’s power wasn’t long for this world, and just like that, the screen went blank as the phone sang the forlorn death song of its kind, also know as a series of beeps. I let out a soft chuckle. I’d probably have been able to keep it in if I wasn’t coming down from a magic high. I shoved the phone back in my pocket and turned to Deval, who’d stayed quietly behind me.

  “Any chance you have Pammy’s number on speed dial? I almost have her number memorized, but I keep screwing up the last two numbers and calling a Chinese takeout place, and whereas I’m starving, there are a lot of hours left in the night before we are going to get to rest again.”

  We surveyed the scene around us again before he looked at me. “I’d say that’s an accurate assessment. I didn’t want to leave you.”

  I looked up at him, surprised by the emotion coating his voice, and raised a brow. “Getting your ass kicked, too, huh?” I asked trying to make him smile. It didn’t work.