Trail of Dead

by Olson, Melissa F.

  Olivia gave me an approving look. “You have been doing your homework, haven’t you?” She stretched luxuriously in her chair. When I didn’t respond, she pouted a little. It wasn’t as much fun if I didn’t beg for it. “Mallory had help the first time,” she explained. “Another witch worked with her, someone of no consequence. I’m absolutely useless with magic, of course, so this time Mallory decided to get all her ducks in a row before she would make her move: the Transruah, the solstice, and the mandrake root, which she’s using now.” Olivia nodded toward Mallory and her herbs. “She doesn’t even need her golem, with all of that.” She patted my hand, saying warmly, “I’m so pleased that you get to be here for this.” Like we were at a brunch again.

  “But why?” I asked, trying to keep my voice mild. I had to know what was behind all of this. All those deaths. “I mean, does this big spell even do anything?”

  This was meant to taunt her a little, and it worked. She gave me another disapproving look. “Of course it does,” she said severely. She turned her focus back to the pentagram. Mallory was seated now, her cane abandoned outside the ring of candles. An enormous, tattered book sat open in front of her, and she was reading aloud from it. The Book of Mirrors. A good man had died just so that book could be in this room. “There are two parts, now,” Olivia whispered. “First she needs to restore herself, physically and magically. That’s what the mandrake is for, to gather life that she can channel into her own body.”

  “She’s going to heal?” I asked. I don’t know why I was surprised.

  Olivia nodded smugly.

  “Where does it come from? The…life…she uses to heal herself?”

  Olivia waved a hand. “Oh, the air, perhaps, I don’t know. She’s not stealing a whole life for that, so a sacrifice is not necessary, not with the arsenal she’s got.”

  Okay, I thought. So far not so bad. “What’s part two?”

  The smug look again. “When she is whole, I’ll escort her to the hospital, to Kirsten’s bedside.”

  “Kirsten?” I echoed, startled. “What does she have to do with any of this?”

  But Olivia held up a hand. “Shh. This is my favorite part.”

  I felt like we were at an outdoor barbecue, watching the cook flip burgers in the air. Mallory went silent, her eyes closed, and a wind seemed to pick up in the enclosed room. The witch’s long hair whipped around her head, and the lapel on her white lab coat fluttered. I couldn’t feel any sort of draft, though, and the candles weren’t flickering.

  I had to at least try to do something. If I could just get the Transruah in my radius, I could shut it down permanently, and the spell with it. I closed my eyes and concentrated on my radius again, trying to expand it once more, but I couldn’t find the edges. It was still intact, still there, because I could feel Olivia within my radius, but I just couldn’t focus on it.

  “Is there something else in this IV?” I mumbled.

  Olivia smirked. “I wondered if you’d notice.” She patted my hand again. “The chemo can be quite painful, so I had Mallory add a little bit of morphine. Just to help with the first dose.”

  I’d had the drug before, when I had my wisdom teeth out in high school, and the thrown-for-a-loop-de-loop feeling was awfully familiar, now that she mentioned it. I also thought that I might pass out. Olivia had an expectant look on her face, like I should be thanking her, but I couldn’t even collect my thoughts enough to decide if the morphine was a good thing or not. Had she really given it to me to help with pain, or had she figured that morphine would scramble my thoughts enough that I wouldn’t be able to focus on my radius? Was that too paranoid? Could you be too paranoid, on a morphine drip?

  My eyelids slid shut. A few minutes went by, or maybe more, and then I felt Olivia nudge me.

  “Watch this,” she whispered next to me, and I struggled to open my eyes. The wind inside the pentagram was dying down, and Mallory’s hair went still. Her head was slumped over, her chin resting on her chest. As she lifted it, both Olivia and I gasped.

  Mallory’s face was flawless. The scarring was completely gone from her neck and chest too, and the skin looked white and brand-new, which it was. She met Olivia’s eyes and gave her a sharp nod, then stood up swiftly, testing her weight on her right leg. Then Mallory broke into a brilliant, victorious smile, and for just a moment I couldn’t even hold it against her. Almost a decade of those injuries, and now they had been wiped clean.

  In that moment, if Mallory had announced she was planning to stop right there, retire from witchcraft, and move to Flagstaff to raise purebred French bulldogs, I would probably have wished her luck and offered her some gas money. Then I remembered Eli and Caroline, not to mention Erin and Denise and the rabbi in San Diego. And Denise’s daughter, Gracie.

  And Kirsten. She wants to hurt Kirsten, I reminded myself.

  But you’re kind of mad at Kirsten right now, my inner monologue said. For Jesse?

  Yeah, not that mad.

  Goddamned morphine.

  Mallory took the Transruah off and set it carefully on the Book of Mirrors. She left both of them in the center of the pentagram and came over to us. When she hit my radius it felt blinding, like when you walk out of a dark movie theater into bright sunlight. If my arms had been free, I might even have shielded my eyes from it. As strong as she had felt before, now she was supercharged.

  And yet…my radius still made her human again. She was strong, but my ability to neutralize her was stronger. I would have felt a teensy bit smug about that if I hadn’t been receiving unnecessary chemotherapy in the arms of an invulnerable clay robot man at the moment.

  “Are you ready to get moving?” Mallory asked Olivia, still smiling her joyful smile. “I’m feeling very energized. The time is right.”

  Olivia rose from the wheelchair in one graceful move and looked doubtfully at me. “Will she be okay?” she asked Mallory. “I don’t want anything to happen to her.” She eyed me speculatively, like a valuable painting she had purchased and now had to store.

  “She’ll be fine,” Mallory assured her. “The golem will keep her in position. I’ll switch the IV bag before we leave.” She came up to Olivia and put one hand on her shoulder. “Everything we’ve worked for is finally happening, Liv.” Olivia patted Mallory’s hand on her shoulder.

  I blinked with surprise at that. I’d never seen Olivia sincerely accept a comforting gesture before. Hell, I’d never seen her treat anyone like an equal, ever. I wasn’t getting any kind of romantic vibes between them or anything, but was it actually possible that Olivia had found…a friend?

  Maybe it was the morphine, but I almost giggled. The psychopathic monster vampire had a friend. Then I remembered what they were about to do.

  “Why go after Kirsten?” I asked Mallory bluntly. Way to form a question, Scarlett! Keep going! “You’ve got all this power, why waste your time on another witch? Why not just…do what you’ve been wanting to do?”

  Mallory raised her eyebrows at Olivia, who shrugged like I was a puppy that just wouldn’t stop begging. Might as well just give her the treat. Mallory advanced on me until our faces were inches apart. “Stupid girl,” she said. “Killing Kirsten is what I’ve been wanting to do.” She glared at me. “Years ago I wanted to kill her with magic, to prove that she was nothing special. And I thought it would be elegant to force the Old World to take care of the cleanup for me.” She tilted her head at Olivia. “But now I’ll be able to not just kill her, but take what she has for my own.” The witch turned away from me.

  Her power. Mallory was going to use the Transruah to steal Kirsten’s power. “But why?” I blurted. “What did she ever do to you?”

  Mallory stopped and spun on her heel. “You people,” she hissed with frustration, glaring at me. Olivia was tense beside her, looking from me to Mallory and back again, but she stayed silent. “You think you’re—what, a government? With your rules and your procedures? You think you can regulate magic, tell witches what they can and can’t do?” Sh
e spat at my feet. Which could probably only help my boots at this point, I figured. Olivia twitched, like she was ready to get between us. “We are better than all of you. We have fought longer and harder for what we can do, and Kirsten dares to call herself a leader to us. When all she really does is hand out muzzles and teach the other witches to be grateful for them.”

  I only had one move here, I decided. I had to stall the two of them, to buy Kirsten as much time as I could to get her strength back, and to try to push Mallory’s timetable so that she wouldn’t have the solstice to aid her. It wasn’t much, but it was the only play I had left. The only problem was that I was having a little trouble holding my head up at this point. It kept threatening to loll forward, which probably wouldn’t look very dignified. I decided it was time to bring out my personal superpower: insolence.

  No more Meek Scarlett. Fuck Meek Scarlett.

  But by the time I had put that string of thoughts together, Mallory had turned away again. “So wait,” I said in a thoughtful, conversational tone. “You’re saying it’s not just because she’s prettier than you?”

  Mallory whipped back around, seething, and slapped my face. I tasted blood in my mouth, but didn’t feel any actual pain. I had no idea what the usual chemo treatments felt like, but I was beginning to think someone could make a killing selling a Domincydactl and morphine cocktail on the street. Olivia shot me a glare but stepped in between the two of us. “I can’t have that,” she warned Mallory. “She is mine to protect, mine to strike.”

  “I meant now, by the way,” I interjected. “Obviously you were a total dog an hour ago, but at least your face had some character. Now you look like plastic that melted and got re-formed all wrong.”

  Mallory looked from me to Olivia, incredulous. “You heard what she—”

  “She is trying to annoy you,” Olivia cut in smoothly. “She wants you to focus on her so you’ll stay away from Kirsten. Don’t fall for it.” Damn. I had forgotten that as well as I knew Olivia, she knew me too. “Change the IV bag, and let’s go collect our witch,” Olivia said to Mallory. To me, she said, “I must thank you, by the way. My intention was to wound Kirsten and bring her with me, but I got overzealous. If you hadn’t stepped in front of that second shot, I might have accidentally killed her.” I stared at her. “Of course, my poor heart almost stopped again when I saw you get hit,” she added, as an afterthought. “I’m so glad you had the vest.”

  She poked me in the stomach, provoking a surprised little grunt from me. “Not wearing it now, I see. Good to know.” I felt my IV line swaying as Mallory disconnected the now-empty first bag of fluid. She tossed it to the floor and hung the next bag in its place.

  Before she could connect the tubing, however, every lamp in the room went out. The generator had ceased its buzz. The only light was from the candles that still burned around Mallory’s pentagram. “What was that?” Mallory asked, annoyed. I felt her drop the IV tubing in disgust. “I can’t see a damned thing,” she snapped.

  “The generator went out,” Olivia said. “It’s probably nothing.”

  But Mallory’s voice was suddenly in front of me again, her breath hot on my face. “Who did you tell?” she growled at me. “Who knows we’re here?”

  “Calm down, Mal. She didn’t tell anyone.”

  “How do you know that? How can you know for sure?”

  I felt a familiar hand begin to caress my hair. “Because her greatest fear is that someone else will die for her. I threatened her loved ones. And attacked her favorite, the werewolf. She wouldn’t take any risks that I might hurt one of them here.”

  That was it. I wanted to maintain control, but I couldn’t help myself. I turned my head and bit Olivia’s hand and hard as I could, drawing blood. She gasped with surprise, tearing it out of my teeth, and I felt my face getting slapped again, and for a moment I saw stars.

  And then something happened. Maybe it was getting hit, or the morphine, or the chemo, but inside my head I felt something just shift. It wasn’t like something had changed in me, not exactly. It was more like a door sliding open on oiled hinges. I felt the edges of my radius again, instantly, and more strongly than I’d ever felt them before. The circle—no, the sphere—was defined perfectly, and I felt what I could do, the nullness, flood in to fill it, like pouring a can of paint into an aquarium. For the first time in my life, I understood it. I could call to it. I just wasn’t sure what I could get it to do. Not yet.

  But I lost the thread of that thought pretty quickly, as more pressing matters required my attention. Olivia had been saying something, like she was announcing some sort of a plan. “I’ll go restart the generator,” she said to Mallory. “Then we—”

  “Quiet!” Mallory hissed suddenly. “I heard something.” All three of us froze, listening to the dark, but there wasn’t anything to hear.

  “Let me get away from her,” Olivia whispered. “I can’t do anything if I can’t see.” She moved away from my side, presumably to get out of my radius, where she would have excellent night vision.

  “Neither can I,” Mallory grumbled. “I’ll restart the generator.” She patted the golem’s arm, almost affectionately. And then every candle in the room went out at once.

  Chapter 30

  Let them be by her, Jesse prayed as he crept down the hallway. He’d seen Eli’s truck parked outside the clinic building—if they all survived this, it was going to take a ridiculous amount of driving to get everyone’s cars back to the right owner—and driven right past it, parking on the complete opposite side of the building, near the main clinic entrance. The door, when he came up to it, was wired with a serious-looking alarm. Not knowing what else to do, Jesse had called Dashiell on his cell phone and explained the problem.

  “I don’t suppose you would wait until I arrived to go in?” Dashiell had asked.

  “Not a chance.” Kirsten’s house was at least half an hour away, and if he’d returned to Pasadena, Dashiell was even farther.

  “Fine. Give me two minutes, and then break whatever you have to,” Dashiell said. “I’ll be on my way.”

  Jesse had actually timed out the two minutes on his watch, and then used the minicrowbar to shatter one of the waist-high windows near the entrance. He had thought the window would cause less of a racket than the full-length glass doors, but the shattering glass still seemed terrifically loud. If they were in the heart of the building, and Scarlett was close enough to neutralize Olivia and Mallory, they might not have noticed. Maybe. At any rate, there hadn’t been any sort of alarm. Dashiell really was scary like that.

  Jesse crept through a big lobby area, grateful for the emergency lighting that gave him some sort of path to follow. He’d brought a flashlight, but the second he turned it on he’d give himself away, so he kept it off until he finally came upon a small wall map for the clinic’s interior. Holding the flashlight close to the map, he’d studied the exits and building interior and taken a guess at where Mallory and Olivia might be holed up. Then he did his best to follow the bright red pulse of the exit signs down the right hallways.

  At last, Jesse heard voices. He froze, holding his breath as though that might give him away. The voices didn’t pause, however, and he figured Olivia, at least, must be inside Scarlett’s circle. He used the toe of one shoe against the heel of the other, working his shoes off, then crept forward silently in his socks.

  When he peeked around the corner of the doorway, he could see them: Scarlett and two dark-haired women, on the opposite side of a large, open area where there must once have been desks for nurses. On the wall closest to Jesse, there was a small generator humming. Beyond that, an enormous pentacle had been painted on the floor, with a book and amulet left in the middle of it. Beyond that, he could just make out the women. Scarlett was talking but not moving, and it took a second of staring for Jesse to make out the shadow behind her, holding her wrists tight against her body. The golem.

  He pulled his head back into the hall and thought for a moment. A direct assa
ult wouldn’t work—Olivia might still have her gun. If he burst in there with his own weapon drawn, she could just step behind Scarlett and lift the gun to her temple, creating a classic hostage standoff. Instead, Jesse got down on his hands and knees and crawled into the room, toward the generator. He was grateful for his dark clothes and for the very dim candle lighting on this side of the room. If he stayed low, he had to be pretty much invisible to them.

  Now he could make out the conversation on the far side of the room. They were talking about Kirsten, about going to her hospital room. One of the women was nearly shaking with anger as she talked about Kirsten, and Jesse figured this must be Mallory. She and Olivia were focused on Scarlett, their backs to the rest of the room. Scarlett said something in a low voice he couldn’t make out, and Mallory slapped her in the face. Jesse flinched, but a slap wouldn’t kill her, and he needed to stay focused. Then he heard something about an IV bag and squinted in the darkness again. Sure enough, there was a long silver pole standing next to Scarlett and the shadowy golem. Whatever they were giving her, it couldn’t be good: Scarlett’s head was lolling, and her words had a slight slur. Shit. He’d been counting on her to be able to help him fight as soon as she was free. Now he needed a new idea. Unconsciously, he reached up to touch the little bag around his neck. Runa was right: he knew what Olivia wanted, and she’d stay close to Scarlett. Mallory was the wild card. He needed to draw her out first.

  Jesse looked around quickly and crawled to the nearest candle on the pentagram, a thick four-inch-tall votive in a simple glass jar. He slid it to the side very carefully and slowly, inch by inch, so that he could slide his upper body forward in the pentagram. He was holding his breath, not daring to look up at the women in front of him. Scarlett was talking again, so hopefully the other two still had their backs to him. He leaned farther and farther until his fingers touched the edges of the large spellbook. Jesse wanted both the amulet and the book, but when he lifted the book to slide it toward him the Transruah rolled soundlessly off the page and onto the carpet. He hesitated, but it was too much of a risk. The book would have to do.