Pride and Poltergeists

by H. P. Mallory

  Kent flourished an oven-mitted bow and grinned at me with slightly crooked teeth. “We heard ye’ve add ah roof day,” he said, and his smile turned sweet.

  “Rough day” didn’t even begin to cover it. “Thanks,” I said, trying not to think about it.

  “Dinnae worry, Ah’ll clean all o’ this oop.” He gestured to the extremely clean counter. The only mess I could spot was a bag of chocolate kisses that spilled onto the granite, and even that was very small. I quirked a brow at Kent and he offered me an apologetic shrug.

  “Meet my team,” said Casey, gesturing to the motley group. He pointed at them in turn. “This is Marcus,”—the one with the cigar—“Rowena,”—the one radiating wild magic—“and Kent”—the one baking cookies. Marcus nodded at me, and Kent beamed over the tray. Rowena looked up and smiled with half her mouth.

  “Evening,” said Marcus, nodding to me.

  “It’s a pleasure,” Rowena offered. There was a deep sadness in her smile, the fixed expression of someone who’d seen too much tragedy. I tried to smile back and she looked down at her coffee, grimacing before she returned to her private thoughts.

  “This is Sam,” Casey told his team. They all nodded grimly. Kent patted my arm, looking like he felt sorry for me.

  “Sorry ’bout your friend, love,” he said. I stiffened, and suddenly, I could sense their pity as acutely as an icy wind. I felt like a lost child in a room full of adults, scrambling to figure out where she belonged. It was a peculiar sensation, and they weren’t doing anything in particular to instigate it—but it was there all the same. I couldn’t help feeling impossibly small.

  “You’re all FBI?” I asked, stuffing my mouth full of hot dough and chocolate. They were clearly government overseers, but that division spanned half a hundred organizations, official and otherwise. Rowena and Marcus seemed the type, but Kent was the antithesis of a government agent, the kind of man with a thousand unsanctioned secrets. Not to mention the whole baking thing. That didn’t really fit the FBI mold …

  “Rowena and I are,” said Casey. “Marcus is on loan from the CIA.” He didn’t say anything about the other two, and I didn’t ask, although Kent had a mad glint in his eye. A long, painful silence followed in which everyone looked at each other, no one quite sure what to say next.

  Judy eventually shattered it with a single loud clap. “What exactly did you need for bone-fixing, sweetheart?” she asked, pushing Kent out of the way and flinging open the cabinets.

  I swallowed my mouthful of cookie and pushed myself back from the island, standing. I was starting to shake, although I couldn’t say why. Nerves? Shock? Maybe hunger, it had been quite a while since I’d eaten. I tried to remember the last time I’d put anything in my stomach besides coffee—and now, an obscene number of cookies. But I couldn’t remember the last time. Damn, it’s been days, hasn’t it?

  “Sam?” Judy asked, pulling me from my reverie.

  “Right,” I replied. The spirit-stitches Casey had woven through me were fraying like the ropes of an abandoned ship, drawing tautly against a material break they were rapidly losing hold of. I moved slowly around the island and opened a lower cabinet to reach the onyx and silver salad bowl I used for my more volatile potions.

  “There’s a couple of blue canisters in the pantry labeled VS,” I said, “and there’s a Tupperware container in the fridge of portabello mushrooms and freeze-dried glow worms.”

  Judy nodded and disappeared into the walk-in pantry. Marcus raised his brow when I listed off the ingredients, but said nothing as he took a long drag of his cigar. The smoke smelled like sweetgrass and spice.

  I set the bowl on the counter and Judy laid out the materials before me. I rolled up my sleeve and tested the veins in my arm. I was still a little dizzy, but I could manage to lose a quarter cup or two without passing out. Probably.

  “Whatcha got there?” Kent loomed out of nowhere, casting a long shadow over the stone. He clasped his still oven-mitted hands under his chin and grinned at me with unabashed curiosity.

  I smiled at him and turned up the bowl so he could see the inside. A spiral of jagged grooves was carved into it, sloping gently towards the center to carry blood and spit and plasma.

  “Well, that’s somethin’, then, in’t it?” he muttered, craning his neck to get a better look. “What’s it fer?”

  I opened a drawer in the island, exposing a neat array of thin knives and scalpels. Silver and ironwood and oak, gold and river stone, glass and steel, all reflecting the dull kitchen lights. I ran my hands over them, selecting a needle-thin blade of glass and jade—transparency and truth, the material elements to color my blood and name the potion’s purpose.

  “Pretty,” said Kent. “What’s it do?”

  I held the blade up, turning it between my fingers and watching it refract the light. “It cuts things open,” I said, drawing it across the underside of my forearm. A thin, red line formed in its wake.

  Kent nodded, pursing his lips. “So it does.”

  I turned my arm sideways and bled into the bowl. The red struck the stone with a hissing whisper, and the echoes of old power washed through me like liquid sunlight. The blood rode the spiral to the center and a thousand eyes, stemming from the first Wicca, lent me their wisdom before a cold lethargy overcame me. My confidence returned in full force and I grinned down at the congealing concoction, resisting the ever-present urge to snicker like a mad scientist. This was my element. This is where I could do my good, this was my job. And I was really good at it.

  Kent watched in fascination as I crumbled up a horde of colorful ingredients and added them to the bowl, oohing and aahing while asking every third second what this powder did and where that claw came from, and if I had to use hawk feathers or any old red feathers would work. I didn’t mind. I answered his questions, letting my years of study and full repertoire of knowledge flow out of me as I ground and mixed and pounded. For the first time in weeks, I didn’t feel helpless. And it also wasn’t lost on me that Casey just stood there, leaning against the counter on the opposite side of the kitchen, watching me with a placid expression on his face.

  The resulting potion was a thick, green paste that most closely resembled a sturdy custard, an occasional blue pocket of air bubbling up and popping with a spectacular splash. Kent leaned in and sniffed it, prodding it with his finger.

  “What’s it do?” he asked. He stuck his finger in his mouth and made a face. “Tastes like lemon.”

  “It fixes broken ribs,” I answered, laughing before wincing because laughing hurt.

  Okay, now the hard part.

  Telling myself I wouldn’t be shy, I pulled off my shirt and set it on the counter. Kent sucked in a breath, which didn’t surprise me—I could feel the hot wetness in the gauze sticking to my skin.

  “Here,” said Casey, stepping forward. He found the edge of the bandage and slowly started to peel it away, holding his other hand against my stomach to steady me. I looked at the wall as he undid it, moving his hands around me in circles, some part of him always touching me. I swallowed. Kent coughed.

  “There.” Casey stepped back, a wad of reddish-black fabric between his fingers.

  Judy whistled. “Wow. That’s … damn!”

  I looked down. Now the magic was waning, and I could see the wound coming apart at the seam. The skin around it was the color of a rotten apple, the blue and sandy yellow of a fresh bruise. The broken rib bulged against my skin, tugging plaintively at its restraints.

  “I’m—” Casey started.

  “It’s okay,” I said, with a reassuring smile—or I tried to as a wave of nauseous pain rippled through me. I wasn’t sure how my face looked just then, but it was enough to make everyone around me appear more concerned.

  “I’m fine,” I said, even though it wasn’t true, and I got to work.

  Lathering the wound with the paste as gently as I could, even the slightest pressure was nearly enough to make me vomit, so it was slow going. The more I massaged
it in, the faster it would work, but fucking hell, it hurt. Kent nibbled on a cookie, watching the tonic disappear into my skin, bubbling slightly and turning hot. For a moment, it stung, but thirty seconds later, it had absorbed all the way to the bone, and I could feel it shifting my skeleton, knitting everything back together.

  There was a loud pop and I gasped as the rib was wrenched unceremoniously back into place.

  “Shit,” said Judy, covering her mouth at the sound. “You okay, hon?”

  I leaned on the island and nodded, pressing my lips together. The sharpest pain was gone. All that remained was a vague throbbing, like the pulsation in your gums after pulling a tooth.

  “Okay,” I breathed after a moment. “Okay.” I stood and gave my body an experimental twist. My muscles twinged, and I could feel a cold ache running like ice water through the center of the bone, but at least now, I could move. I took my shirt from the chair and shouldered it back on, buttoning it as I spoke.

  “All right,” I said, breathing deeply. “That wasn’t fun.” I looked around at Casey’s team. They stared at me with calm expressions, examining me carefully. Marcus looked particularly ponderous. I couldn’t place the expression on his face, but it seemed to be heavily veiled with interest. The look of a man curious to see how I’d fare.

  I swallowed and glanced at Casey, my fingers shaking. I was having trouble keeping myself upright. “What now?”

  “Now,” said Judy, cracking her knuckles, “we start killing bad guys.”

  Kent giggled and muttered, “Boom!” under his breath. Marcus rolled his eyes and inhaled his cigar.

  “Bad guys,” I repeated, electric clouds of fear bubbling up from nowhere under my skin. “Right. And … just how are we going to do that?”

  Rowena and Casey exchanged a look. “We hoped you could tell us,” she said. The energy she gave off brightened when she spoke. I wondered if she knew she had the capacity to cast spells, and whether she would use them if she did. I doubted it—whatever caused the scars in the first place had likely soured her taste for the arcane.

  “Wait, what?” I asked, dragging my attention from her aura to the topic at hand. “Me? Why? I don’t know anything,” I said, adding hastily, “not anything, but I don’t know much. I’m a witch, I do forensics, and paperwork, I …”

  Realization suddenly dawned on me, cold as iron, the liquid bitterness of dread. If they were asking me what we should do next, it meant there was no one else left to ask! It also meant there was so much more to this puzzle that I didn’t know.

  “What happened?” I asked quietly. A breach much like this one, Casey said. Fire and bullets and brimstone, the full wrath of the dark collective coming down on our heads. My vision blurred. Oh, Hades, Caressa … Dia …

  Casey opened his mouth, hesitated, and closed it again, his face turning slightly pink. His muted energy, the barest scrapings of magic I’d missed in him before, shone with the telltale yellow of fear, the purple of regret, or maybe pity.

  “What. Happened?” I said through my teeth. Casey went stiff and said nothing.

  “The ANCs that were not under the control of the Darkness as of yesterday morning were … dealt with,” Rowena told her coffee. She looked up at me, piercing me with her single dark eye. “Same as yours.”

  Yep, I thought. I nodded slowly. “And the ones that weren’t?”

  “Have gone into total lockdown,” Rowena said, “citing a mass security breach.”

  “These ANCs, half o’ them are in highly populated areas,” Kent continued. “We cannae afford ta risk the lives oove our own people.”

  “We also can’t afford to risk a black operation which could become an inter-parallel incident in which we find ourselves going to war with your people either,” said Rowena. She turned to me. “And that’s why we’re here. To dismantle it all from the inside before it comes to that.”

  “Shit,” I whispered, feeling faint. The first and last lines of magical defense were gone. Eaten away by monsters playing the long game into nothing. Every last hero we had was now dead or lost or locked away.

  Leaving me, myself, and a small army of five to save the whole world from an impossible evil, hell-bent on burning the whole planet to the ground. Wonderful. My optimism—whatever was left of it—abandoned me, shriveling up like a feather in a fire. What replaced it was something cold, hard, and really angry.

  “How long do we have?” I asked. My voice took on a gravelly quality all its own.

  Casey shrugged. “President Odyssey told us a month, but now …” He scratched his neck and shook his head. “Now that month might be reduced to no more than days. She’ll be feeling a lot of pressure to retake the ANCs by force.”

  “Lots of superstitious weirdos in the White House,” said Kent.

  “Lots of weirdos in the White House,” Judy amended quietly, throwing a dubious side-glance to Kent.

  I needed a drink. Not coffee or tea, either. I went to a cabinet and pulled out a tall amber bottle, filling a short glass. It was a wildly expensive scotch Bram had given me once when we were … involved. I’d never been a drinker, not even recreationally, and after we broke up, I didn’t even want to look at the damn thing, so it was still full. I resisted the strangely powerful urge to just bottoms-up the whole bottle into my mouth. Instead, I took a long swig from my glass. It burned my throat and scalded my stomach, which felt fan-fucking-tastic.

  “What day is it?” I asked, staring at my drink.

  “Still Tuesday,” said Casey.

  I nodded. “Well, to hell with Tuesdays,” I said as I looked around. “What’s the plan?”

  They looked between each other.

  “Right,” I said, making a face. “That’s right. Me. I’m the plan.”

  “Sorry,” Judy said, shrugging. “Dulcie was plan A, I promise.”

  Which made me the contingency plan. I took a deep breath and sighed loudly, biting into another cookie. “What exactly do you think I can do?”

  “You’re the last line of reliable contacts in the ANC,” Casey said, and then I understood. No ANC, no database, no intel. The organization they were here to dismantle now had total control over the archives, which meant that any information they’d been given already was totally worthless.

  All that’s left, I thought.

  “Start from the beginning,” said Marcus, putting out his cigar on a saucer and flicking it lazily into the trash. “Tell us everything you know about the Darkness and those who follow him or it or them, whatever the hell this thing is that we’re dealing with.”

  I sighed. Better start from the beginning, the real beginning. “Okay, so … it wasn’t a power outage when all the portals went dark.” I wondered what the penalty was for lying to the government about a rebellion/war that you started. Not that it would matter if Caressa were dead …

  Judy snorted. “Yeah, we know.”

  “Wait … you do?” I couldn’t keep the surprise from my voice.

  Judy shrugged. “’Course we do. Did you think we wouldn’t notice? I mean, it took us a bit to figure it out, but …”

  “When we reconnected with our agents in the Netherworld, they told us what happened,” Casey explained.

  Okay, that about ended all the secrets. Casey had his arms crossed now, and looked every bit the scolding parent. But it didn’t seem like any of them were going to give me the “Why didn’t you tell us? We could have helped you” speech, so that was good. There would be plenty of time to play the blame game later.

  “So …” I cleared my throat and tucked my hair behind my ear. “We, um … deposed Melchior O’Neil.” Deposed. The word felt so archaic.

  Casey nodded.

  “Caressa was second in command,” I said, “on the professional side. I don’t know who Melchior’s second was on the potions side of things. And um …” Suddenly, it felt like I knew nothing about the whole ordeal, like I’d skimmed a history book and could barely recall the names of the players, let alone what they did. “We thought we
were doing okay. Melchior’s people outnumbered us, but they were disorganized.” I almost laughed, shaking my head. “Until the Darkness appeared. Whoever the hell that is.”

  “So you don’t know who the Darkness is?” Judy asked, eyeing me narrowly.

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” I answered honestly. I shot back the rest of the glass and swallowed it hard. I wasn’t normally a scotch girl—Dulcie would have been proud. “Back to what I do know,” I started. “Knight brought in this guy, Jax something. I forget his last name. Actually, I’m not even sure I ever knew it. Anyway, Jax’s presence at the ANC in Splendor was supposed to be temporary, just long enough to find somewhere more secure to hold him. Turns out, coming to Splendor was Jax’s plan all along.” I shook my head, still furious with myself as I replayed the particulars. “I should have felt it! I should have been able to tell something was there.”

  “What something?” asked Marcus, shaking his head. “What are you talking about?”

  “The anchor,” I answered. “Jax had an anchor with him, or maybe he was the anchor, I don’t know. But that kind of spellbinding glows like fire and messes up the air around it, I should have been able to see or sense …”

  Casey laid a hand on my shoulder. I cut myself off and shrugged him away, sighing. “Sorry,” I said. “The whole point is that Jax served as the anchor for a wormhole. It’s what devastated our ANC so bad.”

  “An’ here Ah thought that was all Dulcie,” Kent said, and Judy elbowed him in the ribs. He flinched and glared at her.

  “Not all of it,” I answered. “Half the building got torn away when the wormhole opened up. It left a giant crater in our front yard. I had …” I swallowed as my throat closed and poured myself another shot. Downing it chased the tangled cobwebs from my chest. I let out a quick breath. “I had witches on site, running tests, trying to find out where the wormhole was going. They’re …” They’re all dead, I thought. But that didn’t matter now.

  I cleared my throat. “Knight found Bram—um, a vampire we know.”