Bats, for instance.
Despite their association with vampires in popular culture (which was a laugh, because, as Baca knew, vampires had no power to take the form of these creatures), bats are generally harmless to humans, the exception being the rabies virus that they sometimes carry. But rabies takes weeks to incubate before it kills, although its victims' final hours are very painful, indeed.
Disease aside, bats constitute no threat to people. They are generally small creatures, and most species eat nothing but insects or fruit. Even the fabled vampire bat, native to South America, will take less than a fluid ounce of blood from its host, whether animal or human.
But just because bats were harmless by nature didn't mean that they had to remain so.
Baca first sent out his power to call the bats to him, and from the skies for miles around, they came, by the thousands. Soon, they were flapping in the air above Baca in a great, circling cloud. He had them flying high above, lest the squeaking they use to navigate be heard on the ground and give warning of what was to come.
The Summoning was done. That was the easy part of the spell. Now for the Transformation. Baca spread his arms wide apart, summoning the power of the Dark Master he served, directing that power into the great mass of bats above him, causing the creatures to transform.
To grow--the bats began to double in size--some of them, to triple.
To change--even the largest of the bats had fangs less than a half-inch long. But no more. Under the command of Baca's magic, the bats' teeth grew, until they looked like parodies of Halloween decorations. The teeth were long now, and they were pointed, and they were very sharp.
Then, to become savage--bats have little capacity for emotion, but Baca's spell increased that capacity, then filled it with rage and the need to destroy. Any moment now, they would start fighting among themselves. But Baca had better quarry in mind.
Finally, he said a word of power five times and pointed at the motel room where Chastain and her boyfriend were staying. The bats could not see him point, of course; Baca's purpose was to focus the bats' energy and fury on one place.
And so he did.
Thousands of the devil bats dived, almost as one. Their goal was the building down below. Their need was to use their new, razor-sharp fangs to kill the warm-blooded creatures inside.
They descended on the Shady Tree Motel like a great, black tidal wave of death.
Small, powerful flashlights are standard equipment for FBI agents operating out in the field; Colleen and Fenton got good use from theirs as they made their way down a rickety ladder and into the underground chamber that had been Annie Levesque's workroom.
It smelled like old death down there.
The room appeared to be about half as large as the main floor above, which made it about thirty feet by twenty. Several wooden tables, both large and small, were placed about, and something that might have been an altar occupied most of one wall. Fenton noticed that there were thick, partly burned candles all over. Although not a smoker, he usually carried a small plastic lighter for emergencies. Approaching the nearest candle, he flicked the lighter into life, its small flame adding little to the illumination provided by the flashlights.
"Don't do that." It was the first that Colleen had spoken since they'd arrived, and the small space seemed to magnify both her voice and its urgency.
"How come?" Fenton let the lighter go out. "It's not like we couldn't use some extra light in this shithole."
"No--this is her place, her special place, and you never can tell what... look, just don't light any of her candles, okay? I've got a bad feeling about it."
"Okay." Fenton put the lighter away. He had learned to trust Colleen's "feelings." He might make jokes about her being a half-ass psychic, but her intuition had saved their lives twice, in the eight months they'd been partners. Fenton wasn't so dumb as to reject out of hand things he couldn't explain--especially after some of the stuff he'd seen in the last year or so.
For Colleen, the room was pretty much what she would have expected. It was neater than Annie's living space upstairs; but then, what Annie had been doing down here probably mattered to her a lot more than watching TV or masturbating to kinky porn. The sheetrock walls were covered with cabalistic symbols, drawn in some kind of brown substance. Colleen didn't think it was anything made by Sherman-Williams or Glidden; she knew what color blood becomes when it dries. That, like everything else she could see, was pretty standard for practice of the black arts. Then her flashlight beam shone on one of the tables, and Colleen saw something that drew her closer. She played the light over the table's rough surface.
Fenton put down the book he'd been examining and came over. "Something?"
"You recognize the symbol." It wasn't a question.
"Sure, a pentagram. These occultists always have one, or several. Are you surprised?"
"Not by the thing itself, but the construction is interesting," Colleen said. "It's actually been carved into the table, rather than drawn on the surface, the way they usually do."
"Okay, sure, and that's important because..."
"In black magic, pentagrams like that are used for something, not just as decorations. So they have to be constructed very carefully. The length of the sides, the angles, auxiliary symbols, and so on, have to be exact. Get it wrong, and the results could be... unfortunate."
"Or so these people believe."
"Yes, of course, that's what I meant. So, if you carve the pentagram into wood, assuming you do it properly, you don't have to reinvent the wheel--or the star, in this case--every time you want to do a working."
Fenton looked at her oddly, although he was in shadow and Colleen couldn't see him. "All right," he said, "so this proves that Annie was punctilious, or obsessive, or paranoid, or maybe all three. Like I said before, are you surprised?"
"In a way. This technique is uncommon. In fact, I've only seen it once before. There was a woman in Massachusetts, Salem in fact, who had one of these carved in her workroom. This was last year, before you and I started working together. Abernathy, her name was. Christine Abernathy."
"Yeah, I remember hearing about that case from somebody at Quantico. Didn't they find her dead, in that 'workroom' you were talking about? There was something weird about her death, but I forget what."
"Weird is a good word for it," Colleen told him. "The M.E. determined that she'd died of a massive infusion of snake venom. Made sense, since there were fang marks all over her."
"Nasty way to go."
"Yeah, but here's the weird part: no snakes were ever found on the premises, or any kind of cage where they might have been kept. And most of the venom that killed her wasn't from any of the poisonous snakes native to North America. She had cobra venom in her, Dale. Not to mention several other kinds that were never identified."
Fenton sent his flashlight beam to join Colleen's, which was focused on the pentagram. "So you think these two dead ladies are connected."
"That's what I'm starting to believe. The fact that both were black witches, okay, that could be coincidence. But carving a pentagram like this is an unusual technique. It suggests--no, make that strongly suggests--that they were trained by the same person."
"I think I've caught up with you, finally, "Fenton said. "If they were trained by the same person then..."
"It means they could both have been working for the same person now."
"Fuck," Fenton said softly.
"Yeah," Colleen said. "Fuck."
It was Sergio Leone who saved them.
If the Spaghetti Westerns he had made back in the 1960s weren't so damn good, Morris would have shooed Libby back to her own room hours earlier, and then gone to bed himself. The two of them would almost certainly have been sound asleep right this minute.
As it was, they were both wide awake, listening intently--to something. Eyes narrowed, Libby said, "It sounds almost like a big flock of--"
Then the world ended.
Or so it seemed, at
first, when that great squeaking, flapping wave of devil bats hit the outside of the Shady Tree Motel. Baca had directed a good portion of them to attack the corner room, since that's where his witch sense detected Libby's scent. Morris, by the greatest good luck, happened to be looking through the connecting door toward Libby's room when both of her windows exploded under the assault of thousands of Baca's creations.
Quick reactions ran in Morris's family, and he was off the bed in an instant. With a kick that would have made his old sensei proud, he slammed the connecting door shut before the devil bats in Libby's room could come streaming through into his own.
Except for two of them.
The two monstrous creatures flew madly around the room for a few seconds, making high-pitched squeaking sounds. Then one launched itself right at Morris's face.
He was able to get a forearm up in time to save his eyes, and so the bat contented itself, for the moment, with savaging his arm with its unnaturally sharp fangs.
He tried to wrench it free, but the thing's claws were dug deeply into his arm, and Morris realized he could only rip the bat clear at the expense of his own flesh. Behind him, he could hear Libby screaming and he knew he had to do something right now. After a brief mental flash of the legendary British rocker Ozzy Osbourne, Morris did the only thing he could think of.
He brought his arm up to his face, and with one desperate snap of his teeth bit the damn thing's head off.
The bat's claws tightened around Morris' arm for a second, then released as the creature fell to the floor, blood spurting from the stump where its head had been. Morris spat the head out, trying not to vomit, and turned to see Libby crouched in a corner, screaming and swatting madly at the other bat, which was fluttering around her head, trying to get at her neck and face.
Morris was quick enough to pick flies out of the air, even in summer, when they were frisky. A bat was no problem at all. He snapped a hand out and grabbed the thing around its oversized, furry body, pivoted, and swung his arm down hard--in an arc that passed only a couple of inches away from the wooden back of the room's desk chair. Even Henry VIII's headsman could not have done a better, or quicker, job of decapitation.
Morris saw that the creatures were at the room's window now, so thick against the glass that the bright lights of the parking lot could not be seen beyond them. He could also hear them scratching and battering insanely at the other side of the connecting door that led to Libby's room.
Libby was still in the corner, covering her head with her hands, and sobbing. Morris wanted to go to her, but if he didn't do something about the window fast, they were going to have a lot more than two bats to worry about. In the distance, he could hear screams and yells as, he assumed, the bats paid calls on the motel's other guests.
Morris looked around the room desperately. There wasn't much to work with, since the Shady Tree did not go in for luxurious furnishings. Desk, chair, bureau, TV, bed...
Bed with... mattress.
Morris tore the bed linen away, then grabbed the queen-size mattress, and heaved it up and over, to jam as much as he could against the window. That would stop any bats that got though the glass--for a while. In the meantime, though, Morris was stuck bracing the damn thing. If he let go, it would fall away and their protection would go with it. He looked over his shoulder toward the far corner.
"Libby! Libby!"
She looked up at him slowly, her face white and tear-streaked.
"What can you work up? Come on, Libby, magic. You need to shore up the room, or drive off the fucking bats, or something!"
Libby shook her head slowly, like someone very drunk. "My gear... all in my room. Even my purse. Nothing... nothing here."
"There's gotta be something! Can't you improvise? I've seen you do it before. Jesus, I can't keep the fucking things out forever with this mattress. Come on, Libby!"
"I hate those things, Quincy, always have. Ever since I was a little girl when some of them... goddamn fucking bats..." She began sobbing again.
Morris could hear glass breaking on the other side of the mattress.
"Libby! Libby!! What would your Sisters do, Libby? Would they be proud of you now Libby? Would they? Would they?"
For the first time since he had known her, Libby Chastain stared at him with loathing. That look hurt Morris worse than the bat's fangs had, but then he saw Libby Chastain wipe her hand across her face, sweep her hair out of her eyes, then start scanning the room. After a quick look around, she got to her feet and went into the bathroom. Morris had a moment's anxiety that she was going to break down again, but then she came back out, holding his toilet kit. She knelt, dumped the contents onto the floor, and started sifting through them--slowly at first, then more rapidly.
She looked up at Morris. "Have you got a lighter with you, matches, anything?"
"No, I don't, damn it--wait, on the bureau over there. Look in the ashtray."
The Shady Tree's management was still old fashioned enough to provide its guests with ashtrays and complimentary books of matches featuring the motel logo--old-fashioned, or they had an unusually large amount of fire insurance.
Libby dashed over to the bureau, found the cheap glass ashtray, and grabbed the two books of matches.
Morris could hear the bats tearing at the mattress from the other side. And this was a cheap mattress, which meant it was fairly thin.
"Your aftershave's got alcohol in it, and this deodorant..." Libby's voice was so soft, he could barely hear her over the noise from the bats. She quickly scanned the ingredient list on Morris's Mennen Speed Stick. "Aluminum hydroxide, close enough. All right."
Libby used Morris's toothpaste tube to draw an eight-inch circle on the rug, reciting the words of something that Morris couldn't hear as she did so. Then she poured the contents of his bottle of aftershave inside the circle, with more inaudible incantations.
Morris could hear some of the bats--they were inside the mattress, now.
Using her fingernails, Libby scraped small flakes of Morris's solid deodorant into the circle. Then, grasping one book of matches in the thumb and forefinger of both hands, she slowly raised it toward the ceiling, then lowered it, opened it, and placed it inside the circle.
Then she took the other book of matches, said a word three times, then lit one match, touched off the others with it, and dropped the blazing matchbook into the circle she had drawn. The other matches, and the alcohol-soaked section of carpet, caught fire immediately. A thin column of smoke began to rise. Libby spread her hands apart, closed her eyes, and began to chant something in what Morris suspected was ancient Aramaic.
And nothing happened.
The carpet smoldered within the circle, the matches and aftershave burned brightly for a few seconds before receding, and nothing happened.
After another ten or fifteen seconds of chanting, Libby stopped and opened her eyes. The screeching, flapping, and clawing of the crazed bats continued unabated, and might even be louder now. She stared at the remnants of her failed spell. Then she looked up at Morris, a stricken expression on her face. "Fuck," she said.
Roderico Baca continued to pour his power into the mass of devil bats. Somehow, Chastain was alive--he could still sense her life force. Well, that would not last much longer. If need be, he could really exert himself, calling thousands more bats, to be transformed into winged nightmares that would do his bidding. Hundreds of thousands, could be summoned--millions, even. Roderico Baca had studied the black arts for many years, and knew their secrets well. His magic was powerful--certainly stronger than anything that Wiccan bitch below would be able to muster against him.
Baca was devoting most his concentration to sustaining the spell he had cast, and the rest in planning how to extend it. He was unable to give attention to anything else.
Such as someone who might be quietly coming up behind him.
The first indication Roderico Baca had that something was amiss was also the last thing he ever knew, as his consciousness exploded in
a blood-red flash, bright as the sun, before being extinguished forever.
As she came closer, Hannah Widmark racked another round of triple-ought buckshot into the shotgun's firing chamber. But that was just habit--she knew that no follow-up shot would be necessary.
Most of Roderico Baca's head was splattered over the downslope of the hill where he had been standing as he looked upon his victims.
Hannah knew that a magical spell, whether of the black or the white variety, ceases with the death of its originator. She could see that the great mass of bats, which had virtually covered the Shady Tree Motel, was already rapidly dispersing. The creatures, back in their natural forms and inclinations, would be returning to the mundane little lives they had led before a black magician had made them instruments of terror and death.
Hannah stood looking down at the body of Roderico Baca. Suddenly, one steel-capped boot delivered a vicious kick that shattered three of Baca's ribs--not that he was in any condition to care.
The kick had turned the corpse over, onto its back, displaying what was left of Baca's face. Hannah stared into it, feeling whatever it was she felt on such occasions. Then she knelt and started going through his pockets.
IV
WISDOM
Chapter 15
In a U.S. Government warehouse outside Boston, Special Agent Colleen O'Donnell wrote her Federal ID number, FBI shield number, and signature at the bottom of the form she had just filled out, and handed it to one of the clerks working the front counter.
Then she walked over to the nearby waiting area and took the chair next to Fenton. "Shouldn't be too long." she said. "He's going to jump us over a few people in the queue."
"How'd you manage that?"
"Guess he must've liked my smile."
"Um. If I was to say something like 'Or maybe it was your tits,' that'd probably be sexual harassment wouldn't it?"
Evil Ways (Morris and Chastain Investigations) Page 16