by Faith Hunter
“Rick finally got around to describing the inking. It was … pretty horrible,” Tandy said.
“Okay,” I said, putting the page down. I didn’t want to see the event of my boss’s torture. First torture. He’d been attacked and tortured by a werewolf pack too. And by Paka. Rick LaFleur had been beaten by life so badly it was hard to comprehend how he got out of bed in the mornings. “Did you see the hand in the video? Did you see the ring it wore?”
FireWind started. Almost in unison he and T. Laine said, “Ring?”
I leaned in to my cell and tapped it on. Hit the play button. FireWind moved to face the computer system and the video appeared on the overhead screen, much larger, though pixelated and grainy. It wasn’t easy to see, but the ring was there, a brownish gold (though gold wasn’t supposed to tarnish) and in the center a brownish red stone was mounted. I didn’t know much about stones. There were shapes incised into the stone, but they were impossible to make out, even with a little computer sleight of hand to enhance it.
FireWind said, “Soul is calling the Vatican. She’s sending their lead investigator all we have on the demon. We hope someone there will know something.”
T. Laine made a sound of breathy laughter. “And I called my experts, the U.S. Council of Witches. Between the two opposing sides, we should learn something. Hopefully not things in total conflict with each other.”
I nodded, feeling like a bobble-head doll, and looked around. Occam wasn’t here, either off for a few hours of rest or away doing things for the investigation. Rick and Margot Racer were in the sleep room, talking softly. I was tired and worried and I had too much to do before I could rest. There was a Shakespeare quote, something about exhaustion, but I was too tired to remember it. I downloaded the video to the main system and left.
• • •
My sister was setting up an agility course in the backyard using found objects. A length of rope, some pointed wooden stakes from the woodpile, a stack of cement bricks, a few two-by-ten boards, and two shovels. Mud and Cherry were racing to and fro in the heat, the silly little dog wearing herself out.
I waved to Mud and carried my pink blanket into the woods, back from the house, deep under the heavy foliage. There was a spring back here and a rill of water. It was dark and cool and silent. I hadn’t been here recently, though I remembered walking here when I was coming back from being a tree.
The rocks were a tumbled mass in the near-vertical hillside and the pool was deeper than I remembered, the bottom clay, lined with a layer of leaves from last fall. The trees around the pool weren’t old growth, though they looked like it. Until I first fed the land with the body and soul of the faceless man who had attacked me, right here, they had been only twenty-five years old. Now it would take several tall people to hold hands around the trunks. The boles were massive. This was home as no other place on the face of the earth would ever be home. This was the heart of Soulwood.
I dropped the blanket to the surface of a flat rock and sank down on it. I laid out the things I had stolen and secreted away. The bits of tissue, stained with Jason’s blood. The gauze, brown with Loriann’s blood. The grains of blue talc. There was also a bit of Rick’s blood that had splattered in his office. No one had seen me take it, either.
I wasn’t a witch. But my magic was, and always had been, blood magic.
By every definition I had ever learned, I was a black-magic practitioner. It was time to test out that theory.
EIGHTEEN
Anywhere else, and I would have been cautious reading the earth. I had learned the hard way not to dive into the land, but to touch it with a fingertip and ease into the ground. But this was Soulwood. This was home. I toed off my shoes and placed my bare feet on the ground. The soil against my soles was dark and rich, composed of organic compounds and minerals; this close to the rill of water and the broken stone of the hillside, it had rock chips throughout in dozens of browns and tans and blacks. I leaned against a boulder, cool and sturdy at my back, and let down my hair. It was sweaty and thick as a tangled ball of tree roots; it curled around my face and shoulders. I worked my fingertips into the soil, scratching with my nails until fingers and palms were below the surface of the earth.
Rootlets coiled up to my flesh as if inspecting me, but they didn’t try to grow into my skin. A simple nudge sent them into place, touching, but not drinking, not damaging me. Oak and poplar and maple, even a Douglas fir, shoved against my flesh, the soil rippling, quivering, and rising as the roots reached for me, dislodging the sediment. When they ran out of room, they rose above the ground and arched over my feet and hands like loose socks and mittens. I sighed in contentment.
Time passed. I sank into the land. Knew it. Knew everything on it. The coyote family down the hill. The small herd of does and young nibbling grasses. The smaller but more rowdy bachelor herd. Squirrels sleeping in the heat of day. Birds pecking at the ground, several at a small pond of water, bathing, splashing. A feral cat, ready to pounce on them. A bobcat watching them all, curious about the smaller cat but not hungry enough to take its meal. An owl nest with juveniles and two adults. A dozen turkey buzzards perched near the road at the bottom of the hill, ripping at a carcass, a deer hit by a car sometime in the last week.
I reached for the vampire tree, which was enormous now. The biggest part of the tree was at the original site, where I had pulled on the tree to heal me after I was shot and lay dying. The bole of the trunk was massive there, bigger than some houses, more than twenty feet across. The branches twisted and draped, so heavy they had settled to the ground like huge sinuous snakes. The root system covered the entire church land, having sent rootlets out in every direction, poking up a small stem and a few leaves every few yards, as if tasting the air, testing the world in that spot. The tree had formed a twenty-foot-tall hedge behind the chain-link fence at the church’s gates. It had even tested a few places on my own land, but it hadn’t claimed the ground as it had the church lands. The vampire tree was interested in something taking place at God’s Cloud, enough so that I could do what I wanted without attracting it to me.
I reached through the land to the bits of bloody tissue. Rick’s blood was easy to recognize and access because I had claimed him for the land as I healed him. He was a part of Soulwood. Not sure what I was looking for, I studied the blood, the twists and turns and things that didn’t feel human. I studied Loriann’s. I turned my attention to the blood I had collected from Jason, not to claim him, but to find him. I studied the blood, felt the ways it was different from Loriann’s, from Rick’s, and even different from my own. I hadn’t studied much biology beyond Paranormal Physiology 101 at Spook School, and I was curious. After inspecting all the blood samples through the power of Soulwood, and setting aside the ones that belonged to my land, and the one that had come from Loriann, I searched.
The blood guided me through Oliver Springs and Oak Ridge into Knoxville and toward the Tennessee River. And past the city into the countryside on the far side of the city. I didn’t know where I was at first. And then the feeling of the earth, of the soil, hit me, slamming solidly into me like a big fist. The sensation rattled my teeth. Magic. Blood. Death. I had been there today. The stockyard.
Jason Ethier was less than a mile away from his witch circle, sleeping in the arms of a vampire. Sex and magic and darkness. Need and rage. Sickness eating away at his body. Secrets and pain eating away at his soul. Dark and bloody and twisted things in his mind. Things I didn’t want to look at.
The sorcerer was protected by magical hedges so strong they raked along my consciousness like electric cacti, burning, stabbing, cutting. The hedges were tied to the vampires and the moon, the working powered by the blood of humans. I couldn’t touch his blood through them, couldn’t drain him into the earth. I tried. It was like trying to pick up sewer water in an open hand. Jason had tied himself to the thing beneath the stockyard and its foulness had coated Jason’s soul. The smoky fist of filth.
It was lethargic in the
daylight, and from the safety of Soulwood, I studied the ring on its colossal finger. Engraved into the red stone was a stretched-out, flattened-looking X. Below that were the initials B, K, a lowercase u, and an L, like gang signs, except they glowed with what looked like black flame. B’KuL.
I slipped away from the thing in the earth, away from the sickness of Jason Ethier, out of the house where he slept. It was at the end of a long drive less than a mile, as the buzzard flew, from the Knoxville Livestock Center and all that putrefying meat and drying blood. And the wrong thing in the earth.
I started to tug myself completely free, back to my body, but contact with Soulwood had jarred something loose in my brain. I paused and tried to bring it to my conscious mind. Some little something. Some tiny inconsistency. A single question unanswered. What did Jason really want? He could have killed Rick at a calling circle. In the office with the gun. And he hadn’t.
I eased my hands free of the plant mittens and the leafy socks. We were missing something. Interpreting something incorrectly.
I stood and shook out my faded pink blanket. Yummy and Ming and the vamps didn’t give us an address because they wanted the op all to themselves. They didn’t want their hands tied when they killed everyone on the premises. They wanted medic primed to go into action just in case. But. If they killed Jason Ethier, that might set the demon free. How did one stop an almost-free demon?
I put on my shoes and stood, carrying my blanket to the house, thinking as I walked, carrying with me the peace I always felt when I communed with my land. Before I reached the edge of the trees and the grassy acres where my home and garden were, I stopped and found my cell phone and accessed a map. Located the land and house where Jason slept. It was a house on Roseberry Road. Dialed T. Laine.
She didn’t answer hello. She answered with a sleepy, grouchy, “This better be good, Ingram.” Clearly I had waked her.
“Two things. One, the demon hand was wearing a ring.”
“Already established, Ingram.”
“I just figured out what it looked like. It was an X, squished, so the sides were longer than it was tall.”
“Gebo, merkstave,” she said, coming awake, “well, not merkstave. Gebo can’t truly lie in merkstave, but it can lie in opposition. Gebo properly indicates balance in all matters like exchanges, contracts, personal relationships and partnerships.” She fell silent.
“What happens when Gebo is in opposition?”
“Greed, privation, obligation, dependence.” She added, “Bribery, loneliness, oversacrifice unto death.”
I described the other initials and said, “Bukul?”
T. Laine said, “Son of a witch on a switch. Don’t ever say that out loud.”
“Why?”
“That’s its summoning name,” she said. “We can use B, K, L—just the initials. And I can use the summoning name to … do something. Good. Yeah.” She was fully awake, lit by excitement. “I’ve been reporting to the U.S. witch council, and they’ve been trying to adapt a to shoot to kill working for this situation.” Her mouth clicked closed on the words as she heard them. Shoot to kill a kid with cancer. T. Laine took a slow breath, her excitement dissipating. She cursed softly. “Attempting to summon a demon is a death sentence.”
“Will they be here to help?” I asked.
“No. They can’t fight demons. They told me to evacuate. They say me killing Jason is the best they can do.”
“Why? I don’t understand.”
Lainie took a slow breath. “My species tends to run from demons. With good reason. A demon can run through a family blood line like lightning, using us all.”
I hesitated, thinking about what I had sensed when I found Jason in the arms of a vampire. He had been broken as a child. He had taken that brokenness and built a house of hate and fury around it. He had shaped himself into a creature of utter darkness. The brokenness had not been a choice. What he did with that brokenness was. And Jason was legally an adult now. Giving Lainie the address assured Jason’s death, and Lainie might have to carry out the death sentence herself. Alone. Not giving it meant a vampire war and Jason might get away in the battle and also free the demon. Or share his sister with it by accident. Like me, Lainie might have to learn to live as a killer. And then I remembered that one master vampire would be awake, the daywalker, Godfrey.
T. Laine could not take on a blood-witch and a master vampire alone.
I said, “The other reason I called? I know where Jason is. A house on Roseberry Road, under a hedge of protection, with a lot of vampires. Probably the rogue vampires and Godfrey. We know what he’s calling. He has to be stopped—now. We can storm the place while most of the vampires are asleep. Call the witch council and get your permission.”
Not that we needed it. If I could get close to Jason, inside his magical defenses, I could feed him to the earth. I had his blood.
“Later,” T. Laine said, disconnecting.
I still didn’t have an answer to my question What did Jason really want? Another possibility, half-seen from my communion with the land, crawled up from the dark and rooty recesses of my mind. I dialed Ayatas FireWind. He sounded alert and reserved, as always. “What can I do for you, Ingram?”
I told him what I had learned about Jason’s location and magical protections, and asked, “Do you know a lot about demons?”
“Too much.” The words sounded tired and beaten.
“In Spook School, I learned that when a witch calls a demon, they contact the demon, make a bargain, and slit the throat of the sacrifice. The blood frees the demon into the circle with the sacrifice and seals the bargain with the blood. When the demon drinks or absorbs the blood, the demon is then free. And that gives the witch rule over the demon and his powers for a specified time period. Yes?”
“More or less. Though the bargain Jason negotiated required a blood sacrifice to even contact the demon,” Ayatas said, his tone pedantic, impassive. “That contact and bargain was what you saw in the review working cast by Kent.”
“Who will be the sacrifice that gives the demon freedom?”
“Vampire prisoners dedicated to that purpose and Rick LaFleur.”
“What happens if Jason dies now? Before he frees the demon?”
“It would be a half finished summoning. Anyone could take over and free him, and the agreed upon bargain would no longer be in play. It’s what demons hope for in the first place—getting free, having access to the earth and the humans in it, unrestricted by bargains.”
“And if Jason is dead and the demon is still trapped in the circle?” I asked.
He hesitated, a slight hitch in tone. “There may be those in our government and military who think they can control a demon, can rewrite the bargain if Jason is gone and the demon is still trapped in the circle.”
“So we have to finish this in the next twenty-four hours, and tie up all the loose ends.”
“I fear so.”
“And if we take Jason out after the possession?” I asked.
“It will be difficult to kill Jason with the tools we have on hand once he’s possessed by the demon. That’s usually part of the bargain. Magical protection from attack for the duration of the contract.”
Tools we have on hand. That was an interesting phrase. I took a slow breath and said, “I know where Jason is. And our timeline window is small. We have to take him out today. In the ninety minutes between new-moonset and sunset. Do containment vessels have a size maximum?”
There was a short, sharp silence on the other end of the connection as FireWind processed my question. “You think it’s a Major Power.”
“Yes. When I read the land, I got a good look at the ring on the demon’s hand. The red stone was embossed with a rune. T. Laine says it’s Gebo in opposition.”
The reserved, unemotional FireWind took a hissing breath.
“We have its calling name, based on the initials B.K.L. I think it’s huge and powerful and tied to the magma working its way up through the earth’s c
rust,” I said.
“Hmmm. There are hot springs and other signs of geological activity in the Appalachians. In answer to your question, yes, containment vessels do have a maximum suppression and restraint assessment, but no one knows how to measure demonic energy, so PsyLED labs haven’t tried the systems with anything larger than your garden-variety flesh-eating imp.”
“So we can’t contain it, and we can’t kill it, and Jason is under the magical protection of a powerful hedge of thorns until he lets it drop to free the demon. And we have to act before sunset and the vamps rise.”
“Yes. But until the bargain is completed, the demon’s power is fundamentally and effectively limited.” I could almost hear the frown in his voice when he added, “We thought Rick was being called for two reasons: revenge, and to power the working to call the demon. But something is off.”
“Right,” I said. “Why shoot Rick? Why try to turn himself into a werecat?”
“Best guess is blood spatter for the calling, and were-taint to heal his cancer. Jones found a diagnosis of leukemia in his history.” He made a ruminative sound. “Tonight is the total dark of the moon. The new moon rose around dawn. It is up but invisible all day, and will set around seven p.m., before sunset in Knoxville in summer.” He made the pensive sound again. “Since nothing magic happened when it rose, the curse must be timed for the interval between moonset and sunset. Thank you, Ingram. This is invaluable information. We have a great many logistics to work out, and our timeline to stop Jason may be a very narrow window.”
“From the time Jason starts the spell and drops the hedge, to the moment he’s killed enough sleeping vampires to free the demon, but before the demon is actually set free. And then we have to figure out a way to send the demon back,” I clarified.
“I suppose that’s correct. Anything else, Ingram?” FireWind asked.