“There.” The witch indicated the basement wall opposite my position. “Tie her up where they can see each other.” There was no pipe there, but the two-by-four supports between the floor studs were about the same height. She turned back and gave me a dark look. “Keep quiet, now.”
Outnumbered and without the use of my hands, there wasn’t much I could do other than to obey. I nodded and she withdrew her hand from my mouth. Melanie stepped away and moved to the other woman. Her feet dangled a good six inches off of the floor, held at each wrist by a clone while the last one kept her mouth closed.
Melanie produced a handful of zip-ties — I kicked myself for bringing so many — and secured the girl’s hands to the rafter supports. They were lower than the pipe, thankfully, but even so, the tips of her sneakers just brushed the floor. It was a needlessly cruel gesture, but I doubted that complaining would make any difference. Melanie had already dismembered three members of her immediate family — a couple of strangers would be next to nothing at all. Then I remembered Mother’s voice on the phone and wondered just how far I could push things.
“Unfortunately, this is not your lucky day,” Melanie said in a calm, soothing voice. “You walked into something beyond your comprehension. If you want any chance of walking out of it, you will refrain from screaming when Dos removes his hand. Blink if you understand.”
I couldn’t see through the crowd around the newcomer, but the answer must have been acceptable to Melanie. She nodded to her minion, and he dropped his hand. I’d been half-expecting a verbal torrent of questions, but none came forth. The silence must have surprised Melanie as well, because she cocked her head and said, “Interesting. You don’t scare easy, do you?”
The other girl huffed a derisive chuckle. “Scared of what? You? Not hardly. Your gang of hoodlums, maybe, but not you.”
I like her, the Edimmu crooned. She will serve as an acceptable host.
The new girl jerked in surprise and tried to look in every direction at once. “The hell was that?” she demanded. Melanie giggled.
“You don’t want to know,” I muttered, but that just made her giggle even more. My fellow prisoner gave me a wary glance. Her face was pale, but she pressed her lips together and looked determined. I urged her to stay that way with pleading eyes. It’s generally a good practice to avoid needling psychopaths, particularly when they have you at their mercy. I learned that lesson the hard way a while back.
Melanie turned and marched back across the room toward me. She stopped just out of kicking range and cocked her head. “Now. Where was I? Ah,” she smiled and clasped her hands behind her back. She cocked her head to one side and took a deep breath to puff out her chest. It was such an over the top move that I almost rolled my eyes, but not offending crazy chicks with a muscular posse is also one of my rules to live by. I tried to ignore the hint of cleavage and focused on her eyes. She wrinkled her noise as though disappointed I wasn’t succumbing to her charms. “Fine, to business then. The book. Where is it?”
Unbidden, a clone stepped back up on either side of her and glowered at me. The other one kept close to the new hostage. He needn’t have bothered — she didn’t seem interested in doing much other than trying to keep up on her toes to reduce the pain in her arms. My own shoulders had gone past the burning stage well into numb pins and needles.
“You’ll have to be more specific. I got rid of most of my books. A Kindle is much lighter.” I should have taken my own advice, but sometimes my smart-ass attitude gets the better of me.
Melanie frowned and waved a hand. One of the clones stepped forward to deliver another punch into my stomach. Heck, for all I knew it was the same one who got me before. He certainly hit just as hard.
The punch, at least, distracted me from the pain in my arms and reminded me that my abs were sore, too.
“Man,” I managed and sputtered a laugh. “The library is really stepping up their collection efforts.”
A look of anger flashed across Melanie’s face and she snapped her fingers. This time both of her toadies stepped forward. While one started a high-impact massage of my chest and stomach, the other one landed a solid uppercut on my chin that pounded my head back into the foundation wall. My tongue got in the way of my teeth as they slammed home. The hot, salty taste of blood filled my mouth.
No! Not his face! Helen wished to see it, one last time.
I shook my head and winced as that just made the throbbing worse. One last time, Mother? Gee, that’s not horrifying, at all.
“Book,” Melanie demanded.
I gathered up my spit and hawked a bloody loogie at her. The witch danced out of the way and it splattered on the floor. That was too bad. I’d thought it a pretty good shot.
“I’m thinking.” I snapped my fingers in mock remembrance. “Oh, that book. Everyday Magic, by Mary Sue McGuffin. Sorry, the fines were piling up, I took it back.” I favored Melanie with my most charming smile. “Maybe you should check with one of the other librarians.”
This time, her rage was more composed. She whispered, “Cut him down. Work him over. Anything but the face.”
When they cut the zip-ties I hit the concrete of the basement floor and grunted. That hurt, but the returning sensation to my fingers and arms was even worse. I rubbed at the hot, red bands on my wrists and realized that this might be a pretty good time to try and make a fight of it.
I looked up just in time to see Uno and Dos looming overhead.
And then they proceeded to beat the ever-loving crap out of me.
I’m not exactly a connoisseur of beatings. But as far as ass-kickings went, this one seemed pretty solid. The clones may have been stupid, but they were good soldiers and they followed orders to a T. Everything below the neck was a legitimate target. I didn’t realize that I’d blacked out from the pain until I returned to a slow, throbbing awareness.
You know when you take a nap and sleep in a funky position only to wake up with a real banger of a headache? Multiply that by, oh, a factor of twenty and you’d be getting close to how lousy I felt.
Getting knocked out twice in one day will do that, I guess.
I instinctively brought my hand up to rub at my eyes but screamed involuntarily as I brushed my fingers against my face. I had to blink a few times to clear my vision before I could see what the issue was.
You ever see those pictures of those old-school football players with the jacked-up hands?
Yeah. It was kind of like that. I could give someone directions in about sixteen different ways at once.
“Hey,” someone whispered. I lifted my head off of the concrete and looked around. They’d cut down the new arrival too, but thankfully they hadn’t done anything to her. She huddled against the opposite wall, legs up in her chest, with her arms wrapped around her ankles. I tried to grin, but it turned into a grimace as my slight shift elicited a fresh ripple of pain.
“Hey yourself.” I turned my head and scanned the rest of the basement. We were alone except for one of the clones, who stood like a statue at the base of the stairs. There were a couple of small windows near the ceiling against the back wall, but no way could I get one open in my current state. “Where’d they go?”
“When you passed out, they dug around in your pockets and found a set of keys.”
“Shit,” I muttered, as I tried to figure out how to get into a sitting position without using my hands. I levered up on an elbow, but as I shifted my legs for leverage, fresh agony burst into life. “Ah!” I screamed, forcing myself to resist the urge to grab at my right leg with my mangled hands. I looked down and cringed. My leg was apparently looking to join the screwy directions club, though it wasn’t nearly as out of kilter as my fingers.
“Yeah,” the girl said. “I think they got tired of leaning over to punch, so they started stomping.” She went pale, then brought both hands up to cover her mouth and made a gulping sound.
“Please,” I managed through gritted teeth. “Don’t hurl. Because then I’m going to want t
o hurl, and dry heaves are going to hurt even more than what I’m feeling right now.” I forced a smile onto my face, though it felt more rictus than reassuring. “Paxton Locke.”
“Cassie,” she replied after she composed herself and brought her hands back down to her feet. “Cassie Hatcher. And I know who you are.”
Of course. “Mike’s daughter, okay. I recognize you now. You were a freshman when . . .” My dad died. “. . . I was a sophomore,” I finished, after the internal hiccup. Of course, if she knew who I was, she knew all about my dad. Small towns are great if you want everyone up in your business. The fact that dad was a teacher just doubled-down on that.
“Right,” she nodded. “Dad’s heading to Waukesha to run some errands in the morning, so he asked me to check the mail.” Cassie gave a high-pitched laugh that seemed about two inches shy of hysteria. “And then I stumbled onto whatever this is.”
“It’s going to be all right,” I promised, though my tone revealed the lie. She gave me another nervous laugh, but in the end, gave me a slow now.
Moving my hips a little at a time, I managed to shift closer to the wall so I could lean back against it. I managed to make the move without twisting my leg too much, but every little shift made it feel as though the bones were grinding together. For all I knew, they probably were. My calf had already swelled enough to draw the leg of my pants tight. I didn’t know if that was a sign of internal bleeding or not, but it probably wasn’t a good indicator for my long-term prospects. I sighed and closed my eyes, trying with little luck to push the pain away. “So, what have you been up to? Since high school, I mean,” I murmured.
She was silent for long enough that I opened my eyes and looked back over at her. Cassie had a quizzical expression on her face. She twitched her head slightly. “You’re joking, right?”
“Hey, it beats talking about our current situation. Fine. You pick a topic.” I sighed and worked my jaw. A couple of teeth felt a little loose, which was just icing on the cake of this particular crapfest.
“Umm — how about the mongo triplets and the crazy chick with the built-in voice-over?”
“Melanie? Yeah, she’s a dandy, ain’t she?” I tried to crack a smile, but Cassie’s face was set in stone. Tough room. “Haven’t had much of an opportunity for conversation, but she’s a wanna-be witch, one of my mom’s groupies I suppose, and she found a magic pot with some sort of ancient spirit imprisoned inside. There’s your voice-over.” After a moment, I added, “Oh, and the rest of her coven or whatever they call it just busted my Mother out of prison and are heading this way.”
“You’re serious.”
“Afraid so.”
“I mean . . . I know what your mom said in court, but everyone around here just laughed it off, said she went bonkers. Sorry if it’s a bit hard to believe.” She shrugged. “It wasn’t like you stuck around after the trial for anyone to ask you.”
“Well, it wasn’t like I had much left to stick around for,” I pointed out. “I know it’s a lot to take in.”
“That’s the understatement of the year.”
I couldn’t help it — I laughed. “Sorry,” I said. “It’s just, I don’t talk to that many people that don’t have experience with the weirdness in my life.”
“Sure.” She lowered her head to stare at the floor. “You think of any weirdness that’ll get us out of here, let me know, huh?”
Silence returned, though it was a little strained, now. Understandable. Most people don’t have to worry about potential death in a basement at any point in their lives. Thankfully, this wasn’t my first rodeo. Our current predicament may have seemed hopeless, but I wasn’t ready to give up just yet.
It hurt to even try to move my hands, so I just let them lie on the concrete. The coolness helped little, if at all, but I needed something to focus on other than the pain. My head was still throbbing, but I was getting used to it. The fuzziness that had come over me was starting to clear.
“Acne,” I mused, “is just an infection, right?”
Cassie looked up from her knees and stared at me. “What?”
“Zits. Pimples.”
“I know what acne is, I’m just trying to decide if you’ve blown a gasket or something upstairs.”
“If I did, it happened before my dad died.” I met her eyes. “All the stuff my Mother said in court? Totally true. She was trying to cast a magic spell. Well, a ritual, actually. Human sacrifice. Evil with a capital-E shit. I stopped it.”
“So, your mom knows magic. Sure. Did she go to wizarding school, perhaps?” Her tone was flat, but the sarcasm was obvious and compounded as she finished, “Did she ride a broom and have a pet owl to bring her letters?”
I ignored the jibe. “Nope. Like I said, she had this ancient entity. I think she learned some from it. The Edimmu, it calls itself. But she also had a book of spells, a grimoire. After she went to jail, I found it and put it somewhere safe before the cops realized that they missed it when they cleaned up all the stuff she stole from the museum. So yeah, magic is real. I’m pretty sure they’re after the book. Which I studied just a bit, and learned a few things.” Triumphantly, now, “and one of the things I taught myself was a way to fix pimples.”
Like making myself invisible, healing doesn’t take nearly as much out of me as the push. It’s just a matter of hitting the right mental buttons. The small part of the grimoire that I read wasn’t big on theory, but it described the basic focus methods required to enact certain effects. The healing spell, mentally-speaking, is the equivalent of crossing your eyes, standing on tip-toe, touching your tongue to your nose and trying to taste the flavor blue — in your head, while remaining calm and perfectly still externally. This is probably why, much to my chagrin, there is no such thing as Hogwart’s in the real world.
Just remembering the spell is the easy part, especially since they’re imprinted on my brain like a tattoo from a drunken bender. The focus aspect is much, much harder. On the bright side, once you’ve got it the first time, it’s just a matter of flipping the right switch. In my head, I see it as a control panel not unlike a computer terminal. I stared into space and pushed the button that engaged the healing spell, all the while focusing on my mangled fingers.
It hurt, but the pain was brief, swept away by euphoria as shattered bones clumped together and joints realigned. The crescendo of clicking and popping proceeded from pinkie to thumb on my right hand. I wiggled my fingers in delight as I reveled in the sudden absence of pain.
And to think I used it on zits. Eat your heart out, Wolverine.
Across the basement, Cassie’s jaw hung open with her eyes locked on my restored hand. “Holy . . . shit,” she whispered.
I didn’t respond because I needed to keep my focus intact. The fingers on my left hand jerked straight. I was in the zone now. I couldn’t even feel the pain anymore. I wiggled my fingers as though I were playing an invisible piano and concentrated on my leg. I’ve got more bruises, contusions, and there’s a slight tinge in my side every time I take a breath, but I’ve got to maximize my effort here. The rest can wait — being able to move is going to be the line between survival and death.
Even with magic, there are limitations. It takes energy — the magic just speeds along the process. I emptied my stomach upstairs, but it’s grumbling with hunger now. I broke out into a sweat as my body began consuming fat reserves to fuel the repair.
Say what you will about how I got the magic, it at least lets me indulge my sweet tooth without worrying about excess pounds. A bit of metaphysical effort once or twice a week burns more calories than hours spent on the treadmill.
The blast of pain as my leg bones reassembled and straightened knocked me out of my trance, but that’s a good thing. My hands were shaking from hunger and exhaustion. My leg was probably strong enough to hold me up now, but I was too tired to do anything about it at the moment.
Woozy, I shook my head and tried to focus back on Cassie.
“All right,” she drew out. “
I’m convinced. Now it’s time to tell me what the hell is going on here.”
“It’s a long story.” I glanced over at the clone, but he remained impassive, on guard and uncaring of us so long as we made no attempt to escape. “But hey, it doesn’t look like we’re going anywhere soon, right? This is how it started.”
Chapter 11
A few moments after I finished catching Cassie up, a familiar-sounding engine pulled into the driveway. Above and outside, doors slammed as whoever had driven my Itasca — surely the clones were too stupid to operate a vehicle? — shut off the engine.
“Damn,” I muttered under my breath. I’d hoped we’d have more time before they found it.
Note to self — park further away, next time.
I conducted a frantic study of the basement. It had been, quite literally, years since I’d been down here, but little had changed. They’d stashed Cassie and me in the unfinished half. Dad and Mother had once kept boxes of odds and ends down here. Between the evidence the police had collected and the things I had donated to charity or thrown away, it was empty save for the furnace and water heater. The other half was just as bare save for the sofa. There was little on the shelves that could be used as a weapon unless I managed to heft the old-school tube television and brain someone with it.
As for items not native to the basement, my Mossberg leaned tantalizingly close against one arm of the sofa. Despite the fact that the clone stood a handful of steps away at the foot of the stairs, I pushed down my desire to go after the weapon. The demonstration of speed and agility when they’d rushed upstairs to capture Cassie told me that I was nowhere near recovered enough to attempt that move.
Fade (Paxton Locke Book 1) Page 8