When Elmer left him hanging, James clapped him on the shoulder, which made Elmer snarl anew. I used the opportunity to scan him. I didn’t pick up any magic, but I still didn’t care for his bloodshot eye, not after what Helga had told us: The being you seek will be half blind.
“Don’t like strange m-men,” he said.
“Don’t you worry about them,” Carla said, pointing past him. “Look, Elmer, your sister’s here. Must be lunch time.”
A white sports car pulled up, and a woman leaned over to unlock the passenger side door. Elmer seemed to forget about us as he handed Carla his grabber and plastic garbage bag.
“P-put back?” he asked.
“I’ll take care of them,” she assured him.
The driver, a bombshell with designer sunglasses and highlights in her blond hair, waved to Carla as Elmer climbed into the passenger seat. “Can I bring you back anything from Micky D’s?” she asked.
Carla shook her head. “Naw, I’ll grab something from the snack machine later.”
“That’s a lot of silicone for Grimstone,” James whispered, his gaze fixed on Elmer’s sister. “But damn, she wears it well.”
“Say that a little louder,” I muttered. “I don’t think her brother heard you.”
Elmer’s sister waited for Elmer to buckle himself in before pulling away. Elmer squinted menacingly at me and James until the car disappeared behind a line of idling rigs.
“How long has his eye been like that?” I asked Carla.
“Few months? Poked it while using the push broom.”
“Must’ve been a helluva poke,” James remarked.
“Well, if that’s all the questions you’ve got…” Carla dropped her cigarette stub on the ground, crushed it out with her heel, and assumed her work face. “My boyfriends are waiting.”
“How long has Elmer worked here?” I asked.
“Five years, and you’re barking up the wrong tree,” she replied as she sashayed toward the concrete bunker that must have served as the girls’ personal area. “That man couldn’t hurt a fly.”
“What now?” James asked me.
“Let’s check in with the sheriff.”
6
Law enforcement budgets were hurting across the country, and the sight of Grimstone’s tiny sheriff’s building, a single squad car in the lot, helped me appreciate the tough job Marge had taken on. It also explained why she had little choice but to allow the trucking district to police itself.
When we entered the brown building, a dispatcher pointed James and me to a small office. We found Marge in her sheriff tans at a crowded desk, phone pinned between ear and shoulder.
“I don’t care if you’ve got cancer from your eyeballs to your asshole. If you’re not here in ten, you can turn in your badge.” She hung up and waved for us to enter. “One of my deputies trying to call out with a sore throat,” she explained. “Told him that’s what lozenges are for.”
“Good point,” I said meekly, taking a seat. James wedged into the chair beside me. Both our knees touched the front of her desk.
She consulted the notes in front of her. “I checked, and you were onto something, Croft. The vics are all natural blondes.” I nodded at the news, not surprised. “So, what do you have for me?” she asked.
“We spoke to Helga this morning, and we learned a few things,” I answered quickly. I’d warned James on the drive over not to say anything about our conversation with Carla, but given that my warnings thus far had fallen on deaf ears, I was determined to beat him to every response.
“She talked to you?” Marge asked.
“It, ah, took a little negotiating, but yeah. The night Dawn disappeared, Helga used an enchanted object to look for her. But whoever or whatever took Dawn attacked Helga through the object. From the way Helga told it, she barely survived. She gouged her attacker’s eye to get away.”
“Did she get a look at her assailant?”
“No, but she says whoever it was will have a wounded right eye.”
“Does she have any idea how the perp made off with Dawn?”
“Well, Dawn was seen wearing a gold bracelet a few days before she disappeared. Given what the boyfriends of those other two girls said, it sounds like that’s how the perp is making first contact with them. The bracelet was old and dull. And there was a design on the top of it.” I opened my notepad and turned it around so Marge could see Carla’s drawing.
She squinted at it. “Haven’t seen that before. Know what it means?”
“Not specifically, but we might be looking at a ritual. The victims are in their early twenties, an age of fecundity. And blond hair carries a specific charge, sometimes used in magic. Add to that the fact they’re disappearing on the full moon, a time of power, and yeah … More than enticing the victims, the jewelry could be enthralling them, getting them to cooperate in the ritual.” I thought about Dawn’s distractedness the night before she’d disappeared.
“What kind of ritual?”
“I hate to say it, but probably the sacrificial kind.”
Marge nodded grimly. “Go on.”
“Ritual sacrifice is as old as civilization,” I said, slipping into professor mode. “The ancient Canaanites sacrificed infants to the god Moloch. China’s second oldest dynasty dismembered prisoners of war, offering the parts to Shang-Di, ‘lord from above.’ There are scores of other examples, but in almost every case, the ritual sacrifices are used to curry favor with a god—”
“Or demon,” James interrupted.
“Thank you, I was getting to that. Or demon, with the hope of some gain. That explains not only the power Helga felt, but the overwhelming sense of greed.”
“What does the perp want?” Marge asked.
“Depends on who it is,” I answered. “If we’re talking about a warlock or sorcerer, maybe nothing more complicated than power.”
“And how would we stop someone like that?”
“First we have to find them.” Though I’d sensed no magic around the janitor who had accosted us in Lot C, I kept seeing his red, weeping eye. “Do you happen to know a guy with a hunched back named Elmer? Does odd jobs around the trucking lots?”
“Elmer Fratelli. What about him?”
“He seems to have a strange relationship with the girls working the lot. Protective of them, but overly so. He would have known Dawn, and—”
“‘We begin by coveting what we see every day’?” Marge interrupted with an eye roll. “Silence of the Lambs wins Best Picture, and suddenly everyone’s an FBI profiler,” she muttered.
“Well, she was the first victim,” I pointed out. “And Elmer has an injury to his right eye.”
But like Carla, Marge dismissed the idea. “Elmer doesn’t have it here or here to sacrifice anyone,” she said, tapping her temple and heart. “And he’s never been in any trouble. Only time we ever had a call to his place was because he’d walked out of the house and forgotten to pull on some pants. He’s got a sister who looks after him. She’s a social worker, so he has the services he needs. If he’s not working at the lot, he’s at home being looked after.”
“Doesn’t sound like our man, then,” I said, though without complete conviction.
She narrowed her salty blue eyes at me. “What were you doing in the lot to begin with?”
Damn. In my peripheral vision, I could see James leaning away from me. “A reading,” I lied.
“A reading of what?” she demanded.
“Just a general, you know … reading.” I swallowed dryly. “The lot was Dawn’s last known whereabouts, so I wanted to see if I could pick up anything that might be useful. Energies, auras, that sort of thing.”
“Sounds like a load of horseshit,” Marge said. “You talked to one of the girls, didn’t you? That’s how you came face to face with Elmer. Or more likely, how he came face to face with you.”
Rather than dig my hole any deeper, I mumbled, “Something like that.”
“What did I tell you last night?”
“That w
e weren’t to do anything investigation-wise without your say-so.” I felt like I was back in the grade school principal’s office.
“And here I thought you were going to be the responsible one.”
The guilt at having disappointed her pulled on my gut. “It’s just that Helga gave us permission, and I was afraid that if we brought the sheriff’s department back in, she’d rescind the offer—or worse. It wasn’t my intention to subvert your authority. Honestly.”
But Marge wasn’t in the mood for an explanation. Planting her hands on her desk, she leaned toward me until I could see the tiny veins on her nose. “You check in with me from now on. Got it, mister?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“If I have to tell you again, I’ll run you out of Grimstone myself.” I had no doubt she would. Her eyes cut back and forth over mine for several tense beats. At last, she pushed herself from her desk and limped around it and out the door. “You two coming?” she called back.
James elbowed me in the side as we stood.
“Told you so,” he whispered.
“Shut it,” I whispered back.
We followed Marge into an adjoining file room. Stacks of boxes lined the floor and sat on metal shelves. “You asked for some of the victims’ belongings,” she said, directing our attention to a small table. “Will these do?”
I looked over the items she’d laid out: a smartphone, a fork, a purple scrunchie, and what looked like a folded-up note.
“These are actually really good. This one in particular,” I said, indicating the scrunchie. A few blond strands of hair had gotten snagged in the elastic. “Should hold a lot of essence.”
“Well, don’t let me stop you. I’ll be in my office if you need anything.”
As she limped back out, closing the door behind her, James regarded the items dubiously. “Are you really thinking of casting a hunting spell after what happened to the witch?”
It was something I’d been worrying about, too. If the perp could get to Helga through the Eye of Baba, they could almost certainly get to me through a hunting spell. But for a solid lead, we needed the location of the disappeared girls. “Ever heard of a Hadrian Circle?” I asked him.
“You’re gonna summon this thing?”
If we were more powerful, that might have been an option—calling up the god or demon, compelling it to tell us who it was working for, and then banishing it. But we weren’t that powerful.
“That’s how Hadrian Circles are most often used, yes, as a container for a summoned being. But I’ve also read of practitioners reversing the circle’s polarity and turning it into a powerful protective barrier. It takes considerably less energy to bar something than to contain it.”
But my partner continued to look at the girls’ personal items warily. “Witches and werewolves are one thing,” he said. “I can see and touch and shoot them, you know? I’m even cool with shallow demons. But these things coming up from deeper down… I don’t know, man.”
“Does this have anything to do with your possession as a kid?”
When James was thirteen, a demon had attached itself to him, no doubt attracted to his latent power. Through him, the demon had performed several heinous acts before being banished by a member of the Order.
“Probably,” James admitted.
“I get it, man. I’ve been there too. Hell, my demon’s still with me.” I was referring to Thelonious, a boozing, womanizing incubus with whom I’d struck a deal back in grad school. Since then, I’d developed enough capacity to keep him away. Not so much when my powers were depleted, though.
“Yeah, but yours is a partier,” James said. “This one sounds like a total freak.”
“I’ll be the one casting the hunting spell. I’ll just need your help to reverse and sustain the circle, to protect me long enough to establish a connection to the girl. Shouldn’t take more than a minute.”
“And then you’re out?”
“And then I’m out,” I assured him.
James chewed on that for a minute.
“It’s nice to see this more prudent side of you, by the way.”
He nodded and sighed. “All right. Let’s do this.”
I cleared the table of everything but the scrunchie. I then pulled a tall vial of copper filings from my pocket and sprinkled a basic casting circle around the item with its snagged strands of hair. The Hadrian Circle took more time to build, a pattern of concentric rings and sigils that encircled the entire table.
When I finished, I grasped my cane and stepped inside the circle’s outer ring.
“Okay, here’s how this is going to go. I’ll activate the Hadrian Circle. Once it’s up, I want you to imbue this sigil here.” I pointed at the symbol that protruded from the circle like a single atom from a molecular diagram. “That will reverse the polarity. You’ll then need to sustain it. It’s going to take a good deal of power, but I’ll work as fast as I can. No matter what happens, keep your focus on the sigil.”
James nodded and pulled his wand from his vest pocket. He still looked uneasy.
“We’ve got this,” I said, nudging him with my cane.
“Hope so, man.”
Training my focus on the circle around my feet, I said, “Cerrare.”
The pressure in my ears changed as the circle snapped closed. I opened my mental prism, allowing energy to course through me and into the circle. The curving lines and symbols began to glow. Outside, James’s image warped and wavered as a column of air hardened around the table and me.
I tapped the column with the end of my cane to tell him it was time.
He aimed his wand at the sigil and, lips moving, released a stream of silver light. It took a minute for the sigil to activate, but when it did, it felt like a switch being thrown. The pressure that had enclosed me in silence underwent an inversion, filling my ears with a sudden roaring.
I took a moment to assess the Hadrian Circle—it felt potent, like a living force—before moving my cane over the scrunchie on the tabletop. My mouth moved with an incantation. White light swelled from the opal in my cane, inhaling the threads of smoke drifting up from the hairs.
Now to connect to the target.
I peeked over at James. He was maintaining the sigil, but the silver light revealed a sheen of sweat over his trembling face. I would have to hurry. I incanted the Words, and seconds later, my cane jiggled.
“I have her,” I called to James, giving him a thumb’s up.
The most dangerous phase of a hunting spell was establishing the connection. That initial burst of energy had made me highly visible—and thus highly vulnerable. But now that I had the connection, I was safe again. It was just a matter now of following the thread to its—
I choked as a violent force crunched my throat closed.
Outside the circle, James’s lips were moving: Hey, man, you all right?
I dropped my cane and collapsed to my knees.
Prof! he shouted. What’s going on?
My partner’s face clenched as more silver energy poured from his wand and into the sigil, but it was no good. Whatever had me was past the defenses, strangling off my air. I moved my hands to my throat, but I couldn’t feel anything. The attack was coming from another plane.
Tell me what to do, dammit! James shouted.
Can’t exactly breathe here, pal, I thought desperately.
I pawed for my cane, which had landed beside me. But as my fingers closed around the shaft, darkness closed over my vision, and I was no longer in the sheriff’s department.
7
One of my hands continued to paw at my throat, but I’d stopped choking. Lowering the arm slowly, I turned in a circle. The space around me was pitch black. When I inhaled, I smelled the stink of death.
“James?” I called.
The fading echoes warped my partner’s name until it sounded like something alien. Need some light. I patted my chest, but my coin pendant was gone. Neither was my cane in hand. With nothing to cast through, I began f
eeling my way forward. I needed to find a way out of here.
Wherever here was.
I thought back to my attempt to cast on the scrunchie. Something had come through the hunting spell, gotten past the Hadrian Circle, and seized my throat, pulling me into … a parallel realm?
If you’re lucky, I thought with a shaky snort. You could just as well be dead.
A cold draft slipped past. I pivoted toward it, hoping it marked an opening back to the sheriff’s department. Arms outstretched, I sped my pace. But now I felt something following me.
Wheeling around, I stared into the blackness. Marge had brought up The Silence of the Lambs earlier, and I suddenly felt like I was in the scene at the end when Agent Starling was in the killer’s basement, the killer tracking her with night-vision goggles.
A low moan sounded.
“Who are you?” I demanded.
The being didn’t respond. Or perhaps it did, because in the next moment I felt the greed Helga had described oozing around me like a tide of tar. The stink of death grew stronger, as though something long buried were breaking the surface, filling the air with its decaying gases.
I pushed power into my wizard’s voice. “Let me out of here.”
The moaning became a single, hungry word: “Soon…”
It took me a moment to realize what the being meant. I might not be choking down here, but back on the physical plane, the force around my throat was still strangling me. My body would be oxygen starved, undergoing slow brain death, fluids seeping into my lungs…
Hot panic broke through me. “Respingere!” I cried.
I threw my mental prism open, but the invocation that typically resulted in an explosive release of power only let off the reserve already inside me, which wasn’t much. It was like attempting to throw a punch in water. The being didn’t react to the feeble manifestation.
Think, Everson. Think, dammit.
Madam Helga had repelled the being, but she had been anchored in her world, with local power to cast from. I was in a plane devoid of ley energy. My mind grasped for alternate currents of power.
Right now, a thread of energy was running from my cane to one of the missing girls. If she had been sacrificed, then the thread would connect the cane to the being, explaining how it had attacked me. I may not have had my cane, but I could access that thread.
Grimstone: A Croft and Wesson Adventure Page 5