by Butcher, Jim
“Yep,” I said.
“Where my dad got . . .”
I tried not to remember how badly Michael Carpenter had suffered when he had gone there with me. “Crippled,” I said. “Yeah.”
She frowned quietly. “I heard him talking to my mom about the island. But when I tried to go look it up, I couldn’t find it on any of the maps. Not even in the libraries.”
“Yeah,” I said. “From what I hear, bad things happened to everyone who went out there. There used to be some kind of port facility for fishing and merchant traffic, big as a small town, but it was abandoned. Sometime in the nineteenth century, the city completely expunged the place from its records.”
“Why?”
“Didn’t want anyone to go out there,” I said. “If they merely passed a law, they knew that sooner or later some moron would go there out of sheer contrariness. So they pretty much unmade the place, at least officially.”
“And in more than a century, no one’s ever seen it?”
“That dark ley line puts off a big field of energy,” I said. “It makes people nervous. Not insane or anything, but it’s enough to make them subconsciously avoid the place, if they aren’t making a specific effort to get there. Plus, there are stone reefs around a big portion of the island, and people tend to swing wide around it.”
She frowned. “Couldn’t that be a problem for us?”
“I’m pretty sure I know where to get through them.”
“Pretty sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
Maybe she looked a little paler. “Oh,” she said. “Good. And we’re going there why?”
“The sanctum invocation,” I said. “The island has a kind of spirit to it, an awareness.”
“A genius loci,” she said.
I nodded approval. “Exactly that. And fed by that ley line, it’s a big, strong one. It doesn’t much care for visitors, either. It’s arranged to kill a bunch of them.”
Molly blinked. “And you want to do a sanctum invocation? There?”
“Oh, hell no,” I said. “I don’t want to. But I’ve got to find some way to give myself an edge tomorrow, or it’s all over but the crying.”
She shook her head slowly. Then she fell silent until we actually reached the island a little while later. It was dark, but I had enough moonlight and starlight to find the buoy Thomas and I had placed at the entry through the reef. I swung the Water Beetle through it, and began following the coastline of the island until I passed a second buoy and guided the boat into the small floating dock we’d constructed. I managed to get the vessel next to the dock without breaking anything, and hopped off with lines in hand to tie it off.
I looked up to find Molly holding my ritual box. She passed it to me and I nodded to her. “If this works, it should take me an hour or so,” I told her. “Stay with Morgan. If I’m not back by dawn, untie the boat, start the engine, and drive it back to the marina. It’s not too different from a car, for what you’ll be doing.”
She bit her lip and nodded. “What then?” she asked.
“Get to your dad. Tell him I said that you need to disappear. He’ll know what to do.”
“What about you?” she asked. “What will you be doing?”
I slipped the strap to the ritual box over one shoulder, took up my staff, and started toward the interior of the island.
“Not much,” I said over my shoulder. “I’ll be dead.”
Chapter Thirty-six
Grimm’s fairy tales, a compilation of the most widely known scary stories of Western Europe, darn near always feature a forest as the setting. Monstrous and terrifying things live there. When the hero of a given story sets out, the forest is a place of danger, a stronghold of darkness—and there’s a good reason for it.
It can be freaking frightening to be walking a forest in the dark. And if that isn’t enough, it’s dangerous, to boot.
You can’t see much. There are sounds around you, from the sigh of wind in the trees to the rustle of brush caused by a moving animal. Invisible things touch you suddenly and without warning—tree branches, spiderwebs, leaves, brush. The ground shifts and changes constantly, forcing you to compensate with every step as the earth below you rises or dips suddenly. Stones trip up your feet. So do ground-hugging vines, thorns, branches, and roots. The dark conceals sinkholes, embankments, and the edges of rock shelves that might drop you six inches or six feet.
In stories, you read about characters running through a forest at night. It’s a load of crap. Oh, maybe it’s feasible in really ancient pine forests, where the ground is mostly clear, or in those vast oak forests where they love to shoot Robin Hood movies and adaptations of Shakespeare’s work. But if you get into the thick native brush in the U.S., you’re better off finding a big stick and breaking your own ankle than you are trying to sprint through it blind.
I made my way cautiously uphill, passing through the ramshackle, decaying old buildings of what had been a tiny town, just up the slope from the dock. The trees had reclaimed it long since, growing up through floors and out broken old windows.
There were deer on the island, though God knows how they got there. It’s big enough to support quite a few of the beautiful animals. I’d found signs of foxes, raccoons, skunks, and wildcats, plus the usual complement of rabbits, squirrels, and groundhogs. There were a few wild goats there as well, probably descendants of escapees from the former human residents of the island.
I began to sense the hostile presence of the island before I’d gone twenty steps. It began as a low, sourceless anxiety, one I barely noticed against the backdrop of all the perfectly rational anxiety I was carrying. But as I continued up the hill, it got worse, maturing into a fluttery panic that made my heart beat faster and dried out my mouth.
I steeled myself against the psychic pressure, and continued at the same steady pace. If I let it get to me, if I wound up panicking and bolted, I could end up a victim of the normal threats of a forest at night. In fact, that was probably what the island had in mind, so to speak.
I gritted my teeth and continued, while my eyes slowly adjusted to the night, revealing the shapes of trees and rocks and brush, and making it a little easier to move safely.
It was a short hike to the mountain’s summit. The final bit of hill was at an angle better than forty-five degrees, and the only way one could climb it safely was to use the old steps that had been carved into the rock face. They had felt weirdly familiar and comfortable the first time I went up them. That hadn’t changed noticeably in subsequent visits. Even now, I could go up them in the dark, my legs and feet automatically adjusting to the slightly irregular spacing of the steps, without needing to consult my eyes.
Once at the top of the stairs, I found myself on a bald crown of a hilltop. A tower stood there, an old lighthouse made of stone. Well, about three-quarters of it stood there, anyway. Some of it had collapsed, and the stones had been cannibalized and used to construct a small cottage at the foot of the tower.
The silent presence of the island was stronger here, a brooding and dangerous thing that did not care for visitors.
I looked around the moonlit hilltop, nodded once, marched over to the flat area in front of the cottage and planted my ritual box firmly on the ground.
What I was about to attempt had its beginnings in ancient shamanic practice. A given tribe’s shaman or wise one or spirit caller or whatever would set out into the wild near home and seek out a place of presence and power, such as this one. Depending on the culture involved, the practitioner would then invoke the spirit of the place and draw its full attention. The ritual that happened next wasn’t quite an introduction, or a challenge, or a staking of a claim on the land, or a battle of wills, but it incorporated elements of all of those things. If the ritual was successful, it would form a sort of partnership or peerage between the shaman and the genius loci in question.
If it wasn’t successful, well . . . It’s a bad thing to have the full attention of a dangerous spirit that c
an exert control over the environment around you. This spirit, bolstered by the dark energy of the ley line that ran beneath the tower, was more than capable of driving me insane or recycling me into food for its animals and trees.
“And yet here I am about to pop you in the nose,” I muttered. “Am I daring or what?”
I set my staff down and opened the box.
First, the circle. Using a short whisk broom, I quickly cleared dirt and dust from the rock shelf beneath me in an area about three feet across. Then I used a wooden-armed chalk compass, like those used in geometry classrooms, to draw out a perfect circle on the stone in faintly luminescent, glow-in-the-dark chalk. The circle didn’t have to be perfectly round in order to work, but it was a little bit more efficient, and I wanted every advantage I could get.
Next, I got five white candles out of the box, and checked a magnetic compass so that I could align them properly. The compass needle spun wildly and aimlessly. The turbulence of the nearby ley line must have been throwing it off. I put the thing away and sighted on the North Star, setting the candles out at the five points of a pentagram, its tip aligned with due north.
After that, I got out an old and genuine KA-BAR U.S. Marine combat knife, along with a plain silver chalice and a silver former Salvation Army bell with a black wooden handle.
I double-checked each of the objects and the circle, then stepped a few feet away and undressed completely, losing my rings, bracelet, and all my other magical gear except for the silver pentacle amulet around my neck. I didn’t have to do the ritual sky clad, but it reduced the chances of any of the enchantments on my gear causing interference by a small if significant amount.
All the while, the pressure from the island’s awareness kept doubling and redoubling. My head started pounding, which was just lovely in combination with the fresh bumps on it. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Mosquitoes began to whine and buzz around me, and I shuddered to think of the places that were going to get bitten while I did this.
I went to the circle, checked everything again, got a box of matches out of the ritual box, and then knelt down in the circle. Yes, I could have lit them with a spell—but again, that would have left an energy signature on the candles that could potentially interfere. So I did it the old-fashioned way. As I struck the first match and leaned down to light the northernmost candle, a screech owl let out an absolutely alien-sounding cry from so nearby that I almost jumped out of my skin. I barely kept from losing my balance and smudging the circle.
“Cheap shot,” I muttered. Then I lit a fresh match and began again. I lit the five candles, then turned to face the north and reached out to gently touch the chalk circle. A mild effort of will closed it, and the psychic pressure I’d been feeling for the last half hour or more abruptly vanished.
I closed my eyes and began to regulate my breathing, relaxing my muscles group by group, focusing my thoughts on the task at hand. I felt my will begin to gather. Outside my circle, the owl shrieked again. A wildcat let out an earsplitting yowl. A pair of foxes set up a yipping, howling chorale in the brush.
I ignored them until I felt that I had gathered all the strength I could. Then I opened my eyes and picked up the bell. I rang it sharply once, and filled my voice with the power of my will. “I am not some clueless mortal you can frighten away,” I said to the hilltop. “I am magi, one of the Wise, and I am worthy of your respect.”
A wind came rushing up from the lake. The trees muttered and sighed with the force of it, a sound like angry surf, enormous and omnipresent.
I rang the bell again. “Hear me!” I called. “I am magi, one of the Wise, and I know your nature and your strength.”
The wind continued to rise around me, making the candles flicker. With an effort of will, I steadied their flames, and felt the temperature of my body drop a couple of degrees in reaction.
I set the bell down, took up the knife, and drew it along the knuckles of my left hand, opening a thin line in my flesh. Blood welled up immediately. I put the knife down, took up the chalice, and let my blood trickle into the cup.
And as it did, I used the one thing that made me think it was possible—just possible—to pull this thing off.
Soulfire.
During a case a little more than a year ago, an archangel had decided to invest in my future. Uriel had replaced the power I’d lost when I resisted the temptations offered me by one of the Fallen. The demon’s Hellfire had been literal hell on wheels for destructive purposes. Soulfire was apparently the angelic equivalent of the same force, the flip side of the coin—fires of creation rather than those of destruction. I hadn’t experimented with it much. Soulfire used my own life force as its source of energy. If I poured too much into any given working, it could kill me.
As the blood dripped down into the chalice, I reached out to the place in my mind where the archangel’s gift resided, and poured soulfire into my blood. Silver-white sparks began to stream from the cuts and accompanied the blood down into the chalice, filling it with supernatural power far in excess of what my blood, a common source of magical energy, contained on its own.
I lifted the chalice in my right hand and the silver bell in my left. Droplets of blood and flickering sparks of soulfire fell on the silver, and when it rang again, the sound was piercing, the tone so perfect and pure that it could have shattered glass.
“Hear me!” I called, and my soulfire-enhanced voice rang out in a similar fashion, sharp and precise, strong and resonant. Small stones fell from a broken section of the tower wall. “I am magi, one of the Wise! I make of my blood this gift to you, to honor your strength and to show my respect! Come forth!” I set the bell down and prepared to break the circle and release the spell. “Come forth!” I bellowed, even louder. “COME FORTH!”
Chapter Thirty-seven
I didn’t return to the dock by the same route I’d taken to the tower. There was a much shorter, easier way, down what looked like a sheer rock wall. It proved to have an ancient narrow gully worn into the stone, almost completely hidden by brush. The gully’s floor had a thin layer of silt in it, leaving little room for plants to grow, and was as easy to traverse as a sidewalk, even in the dark. Following it brought me back to the island’s shoreline in half the time it had taken to go up.
I didn’t wonder how I’d known about the path until I stepped out of the woods and saw the dock again. I hadn’t been that way before. I hadn’t known it existed. Yet when I decided to take that trail, the knowledge had come to me as completely and immediately as if I had lived there for years: pure information.
I paused and looked around me. I knew not to walk directly to the dock from where I stood. There was a large hornet’s nest in the earth at the base of a fallen tree, and I would risk arousing their anger if I accidentally crushed it while walking by. I also knew that a grumpy old skunk was trundling its way back to its den, thirty yards in the other direction, and that it would happily douse me with musk if I came anywhere close.
I glanced over my shoulder, back toward the tower, casting out my supernatural senses. The island’s awareness continued being that same constant presence I’d felt ever since leaving the tower. I considered going back, taking the old stairs this time, to see what would happen, and immediately I understood that there was a cottonmouth that made its home in a large crack on the twenty-sixth step. If I delayed the trip until later in the morning, the snake would be out on the stones, sun-bathing to build up its body heat for the day.
The dawn was approaching, and the sky had begun to lighten from black to blue. I could see the tower standing, lonely and wounded, but unbowed, a black shape against the sky. Demonreach began to awaken to the first trills of songbirds.
I walked down to the dock, thoughtfully, and walked out to where the Water Beetle was moored. “Molly,” I called.
Feet pounded on the deck, and Molly burst up out of the ship’s cabin. She flew across the distance between us, and nearly tackled me into the water on the far side of the dock w
ith the enthusiasm of her hug. Molly, the daughter of two ferocious warriors, was no wilting violet. My ribs creaked.
“You came back,” she said. “I was so worried. You came back.”
“Hey, hey. I need my rib cage, kid,” I said, but I hugged her in return for a quiet moment, before straightening.
“Did it work?” she asked.
“I’m not exactly sure. God, I need something to drink.” We both boarded the Water Beetle, and I went below and removed a can of Coke from a cabinet. It was warm, but it was liquid, and more important, it was Coke. I guzzled the can’s contents and tossed it into the trash bin.
“How’s Morgan?” I asked.
“Awake,” Morgan rumbled. “Where are we?”
“Demonreach,” I said. “It’s an island in Lake Michigan.”
Morgan grunted without emphasis. “Luccio told me about it.”
“Oh,” I said. “Oh, good.”
“Miss Carpenter says you were attempting a sanctum invocation.”
“Yeah.”
Morgan grunted. “You’re here. It worked.”
“I think so,” I said. “I’m not sure.”
“Why not?”
I shook my head. “I thought that when a bond was formed with the land in question, it gave you access to its latent energy.”
“Yes.”
Which meant that my magic would be subsidized by the island, whenever I was here. I’d get a lot more bang for my buck, so to speak. “I thought that was all it did.”
“Generally,” Morgan said. I saw him turn his head toward me in the dim cabin. “Why? What else has happened?”
I took a deep breath and told him about the hidden trail, the hornets, and the skunk.
Morgan sat up in his bunk by the time I got to the end. He leaned forward intently. “You’re sure you aren’t mistaken? Confrontations with a genius loci can leave odd aftereffects behind.”
“Hang on,” I said.