I straightened and winced at the twinge in my knees. “Maybe a little,” I agreed. I nudged the debris on the floor with my toe and found a box of Pop Tarts that hadn’t been too terribly crushed. Pushing the frame of my bed down, I sat on an uncomfortable corner and ripped the box open. They weren’t as good cold, but I didn’t feel like digging through the junk on the floor to look for my spare keys so I could power the toaster oven. I glanced up in mid-chew and managed, “What?”
“You’re sitting down for a snack?”
I swallowed a lump of brown sugar and cinnamon and said, thickly, “Yeah?”
Cassie looked flabbergasted. “They’ll be back as soon as they find the book, right? I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to wait for that or for your mom to show up.”
I froze with the second half of my first Pop Tart halfway to my mouth. My head felt funny, as though the words had jerked me from a lucid dream. I blinked and met Cassie’s eyes. “Find . . . the . . . book?”
The sudden rush of white noise washed away her reply. With a grimace, I dropped the Pop Tart, grabbed my temples, and remembered.
Stiles’ Greenhouse, where dad used to take me to get pumpkins for Halloween, was long-closed by the time I got into town. That was all to the good. I parked the Itasca in a space right in front of the storefront. The bulk of the RV was incongruous in the empty parking lot, but I hoped that no one would notice. If I wasn’t back by morning, it probably wouldn’t matter.
I hesitated after killing the engine, then decided to at least check my phone before heading out. Sure enough, I’d missed three calls from Carlos, but there were also a couple of texts from Karen. Curious, I pulled them up.
Picture kind of sucks, mija. U need a new phone.
Given that this came from someone who upgraded phones at least twice a year, I was uncertain as to the merit of the advice. Whatever. If I could, I’d still be using a flip phone. I read on.
Little capital F looks like it might be “asiru”. Means prisoner of war. Tree with branches on one side, possibly “samsu”, sunlight. The thing that looks like a thermometer, maybe “mudutu”, knowledge. Rest of it is too scratched up to make it out. U owe me big time, you know how many symbols I had to go through? Stuff is like chicken scratches.
I smirked and tapped out a quick “thx”, before I stashed my phone back in the glove box. At the rear, I stuffed my Mossberg and a few other odds and ends into my backpack. After a moment of thought, I added a small LED flashlight to one pocket of my slacks. I balanced it out on the other side with the Taser, slung the backpack over one shoulder, then stopped in my tracks.
I hadn’t spent much time with the grimoire before burning it, but I’d never found the spell that gave mother and I the push. Maybe that hat didn’t mean anything. Considering the way that the book responded to the reader’s thoughts — I was certain I had thought of it several times. If the push was in there, shouldn’t it have shown up?
Prisoner of war, knowledge, and sunlight.
Something had been in the pot, that much was obvious. The prisoner?
All this time I’d thought that my mother had used the grimoire to give us the push, but what if she hadn’t? What if an imprisoned spirit of knowledge had taught it to her? I thought of the dueling voices at the foot of my bed. Had she brought more with her than just the grimoire, that night?
If whatever it was could teach Mother, what could it do now that its assumed prison was no more? What might it be capable of?
I broke out into a cold sweat. I’d been expecting a fairly ordinary trap, but this was starting to look like something far more pernicious, like walking into a minefield with a blindfold.
I wasn’t sure what sunlight meant — perhaps the pot used it as some source of energy, to maintain the prison? The pot was not much the worse for wear before breaking, despite what had to be an ancient age. I considered Mother’s dark office and wondered how long it had been before the prison had weakened enough for something to happen. Had the same thing happened to Mr. Gennaro?
I shook my head. There were too many questions at the moment. I had to proceed with the assumption that not only was this a trap, but my opponent was going to be much more dangerous than just some witch groupie. More than likely, if I was right, I was going to face off against someone with the push.
And if they asked about the grimoire . . .
I swallowed past a dry throat and glanced at the mirror over the sink. Could I . . . ?
My eyes looked at once tired and manic as I stepped up to the mirror. I pushed, just a bit. I felt both light-headed and sluggish, weighed down, as though I were two different people in the same skin. “The grimoire is intact,” I said, and part of me agreed that yes, it certainly was. “I buried it in . . .” I hesitated, trying to figure out somewhere that would be both isolated and close enough for me to get to if I had to.
I smiled. “I buried it in Yoda’s hut. When you need to, you will remember what truly happened.” Licking my lips, I crossed mental fingers and ended the push.
I blinked at myself in the mirror. That was weird. Wasn’t I just . . . ?
With a shrug, I headed out.
I rocked back on my heels as the memories I’d hidden from myself cascaded back in. I cut Cassie off with a raised hand as I tried to process the literal flood of information.
The long sleeves that Melanie wore indoors made all the sense in the world now. The Edimmu was vulnerable to sunlight and hiding under her skin didn’t make it entirely safe, either. For some reason, it couldn’t go deeper inside — that’s what they needed Cassie for, I guessed. A longer-term solution, more ambulatory and free than a prison. The pot must have been some sort of mystical, solar-powered contraption to keep the thing at bay. Who knew why they hadn’t destroyed it, but then the translation of the third rune hit me. Knowledge. They’d kept it prisoner and used it as a resource. Who knew how they’d compelled it to be honest — I certainly wouldn’t have trusted the thing. It would be impossible to guess what the Akkadian line of thinking had been at the time, but if the Edimmu and the grimoire were both from the same collection, I doubted that whoever had possessed them had been a nice guy.
I looked up at Cassie and laughed.
A look of panic crossed her face, but then she composed herself and snapped, “What? What’s the joke?”
“They can dig,” I managed, then guffawed. “They can dig all damn night, and they aren’t going to find a thing. I burned it years ago.” I massaged my forehead with my palm in an attempt to stave off a headache. “Before I got captured, I put the whammy on myself.”
“Wait, what? So, you lied to her?”
“No, no. It doesn’t work like that. For all intents and purposes, I lied to myself, but in such a way that I thought it was the truth. So, when they pushed me to answer, I fully believed I was telling them the truth. I was even freaking out about it, to be honest.” Popping the rest of the pastry in my mouth, I chewed, then continued, “But man, I don’t want to ever do that again. It feels weird as hell, like both things are true, even though I know that that’s not the case.”
She stood there, blinking, but finally shrugged. “All right. We’ve got time, then. What’s our move?”
I opened another Pop Tart. “I get some calories in me, I fix myself up some more, then I hike across the way and finish this.” I dug in the pocket of my slacks and fished out a set of keys. “I think we lucked out — the guy downstairs had these. Head home, please. I’ll take care of calling the cops. Just, I don’t know, try to forget this, I guess.”
Cassie frowned. “You’re joking, right? You’re going three against one, beaten half to death, with just a couple of shotguns? Even if that did work, what’s to stop her from laying another ‘whammy’ on you?”
I chewed for a bit longer than was absolutely necessary to give myself a few moments to mull it over. “It’s hard to use unless you’re calm. I’ve got a pretty good feeling that when I show up and tell her that she’s been digging in
the dirt for squat, she’ll lose her mind.”
“And Tweedledum and Tweedledee?”
I patted the barrel of the Super Shorty and grinned. “Slugs are faster than fists.”
She snorted and rolled her eyes. Picking her way through the debris, Cassie stepped forward and picked up the Mossberg from where I’d left it. “I’ve been hunting with my dad since I was eleven years old, Snowflake.” She turned the Mossberg on its side with the barrel pointed to the floor. She flipped the action lock, pulled the slide back a marginal amount, and nodded to herself as she saw the brass of the loaded cartridge in the chamber. Returning the slide to home, Cassie plucked a cartridge out of the side saddle and fed it in.
As I sat there with my jaw open, she repeated the motion and fully reloaded the shotgun. I was already feeling out of sorts with the revelation of what I’d done to myself. The unveiling of Cassie Hatcher, warrior princess, was just the icing on the cake.
“This isn’t your fight,” I murmured.
“Sorry, but I’m not going to go crawl into my safe space for a good cry. It’s pretty obvious this is a fight against capital-E evil. What happens if you lose?”
“Nothing good,” I admitted.
“Then get yourself fixed and tell me the plan.”
“Well. All right, then.”
Chapter 14
Growing up, my best friend was Jimmy Latham. He and his parents moved the summer after freshman year, but before that he and I were a package deal. I always got the sense that Mother didn’t care much for him, but as long as we didn’t track mud or dirt into the house after a hard day of play, she ignored the situation.
The scrub land next to our neighborhood was a perfect place for a couple of kids to disappear for hours at a time. There were hills and hollows that made for great sledding in the winter. In the summer, the varying terrain features went well with any number of pretend scenarios.
For whatever reason, the scrub land tended to attract a lot of illegal dumping. For the most part, the stuff was junk that we left for the county to take care of, but every so often there was something that qualified as a treasure to our juvenile eyes. Broken boards, discarded doors, and the like made us particularly excited.
The clubhouse that we called Yoda’s hut was a natural depression in the earth that we would have called a cave if there had been anything solid overhead. It was a rough, dome-shaped cutout in the earth almost entirely surrounded by stunted trees. The dwarf growth threatened to topple over the edge down into the bottom at the strongest wind.
We’d built a pseudo-shed on one side of the depression using contractor cast-offs, driftwood, and other scrap lumber. It had no walls and was just barely big enough at the time for a couple of growing preteen boys, but it didn’t offer much in terms of a ‘secret hideout’.
The summer before Jimmy moved away we made one of our best discoveries yet — a rolled up section of chain-link fence. We lacked the necessary amount of lumber, not to mention the construction know-how, to assemble any sort of roof over our clubhouse. After we dragged the fencing to the hut and cut it down into manageable sections, we had enough to overlay a bit more than half of the depression’s roof.
We had to, err, borrow, some fence wire and tools from Jimmy’s dad’s garage. We also pooled our allowances to buy enough ground stakes to secure the edges of the fencing. Once we finished that project, we spent most of the rest of the summer looking for tarps and plastic. By the time that we started high school we had the base foundation to shovel a thin layer of soil over our new roof. It was pretty solid on the edges, though it tended to sag in the middle. Jimmy and I remedied that with a few central supports. During school our amount of free time dropped, but by that spring the roof was not only holding, the thin layer of soil had sprouted with the green shoots of weed and grass.
In retrospect, we’d created a huge safety hazard for anyone walking through the area, but for the most part the scrub land was ours. That’s probably why it was so popular with the illegal dumpers. With the nearby nature preserves, the scrub land was a distant third on the list of attractive green areas to visit.
So far as I knew the hut was still standing, though it had been a decade since I’d been there. After Jimmy left, I just didn’t have much interest. I was getting old enough that playing outside was starting to feel a little on the silly side. Maybe some of the neighborhood kids had discovered it and gotten some fun out of it. I hoped no one had stumbled across it and gotten injured in the interim.
The hut was southwest of my house, so I led Cassie south on Lakeshore Drive. I’d cut off the road enough times that I knew right where to head west. It would be far easier than trying to navigate an angle in the dark. Between multiple bouts of unconsciousness and interrogation, it was already well after midnight. The moon was up, though it was only just visible through the low-hanging winter clouds. Between that and the dark houses throughout the neighborhood, we were stumbling on the road for lack of visibility. It was going to only get worse when we went off the road, though I still had my flashlight. I’d have to keep the beam low and just hope that Melanie and her goons didn’t see it.
Unless the Edimmu had some sort of night-vision spell in its bag of tricks, though, Melanie was liable to be just as handicapped by the darkness as we were. Any light sources they used would be a help to us in finding them, as the scrub land was an island of darkness between the coastal homes and the main drag. I shrugged and crossed fingers. On one hand, I could say that things hadn’t panned out so great, but I could also say that they were working out spectacularly well. I was still alive, after all, despite walking into Melanie’s trap.
Don’t get cocky, I thought, then huffed a laugh.
“What’s up?” Cassie whispered.
“Nothing,” I replied. “Just thinking. We’re almost there.” I glanced over at her. “Hey, I never asked. Why’d you stop by the house so late?”
She laughed. “I closed tonight and thought I’d be constructively lazy so I could sleep in tomorrow. Great choice on my part, huh?”
“The things we do for sleep,” I agreed. “Where are you working, now?”
“Good old Target,” Cassie replied.
I couldn’t keep the surprise out of my voice. “Wow, still? I figured you’d have graduated college and be doing, umm.” I trailed off as I dug through memories of high school that I hadn’t needed in years. “Art was your thing, right?”
“Sure, still is,” she agreed. “But I also sat down and crunched the numbers and unless I was lucky, the income wasn’t going to be all that great compared to the tuition. I didn’t want to get caught in the student loan trap, so I’ve been working on a business degree a few classes at a time and paying as I go. It’s taking me longer, but I’m not going to be up to my eyeballs in debt after I graduate, either.” She shrugged. “Still have time to draw and paint. I’ve even sold some prints online. It doesn’t pay great, but it’s better than nothing.”
“That’s great,” I said. She laughed a little. “No, seriously. You’ve definitely got your head on straighter than I do. I drive around the country and watch a lot of movies between house calls.”
“You need a business card. Paxton Locke, paranormal entrepreneur.”
“PE instead of PI? My friends out west would get a kick out of that.” I nodded to the side of the road. “This is it.” I handed the flashlight to Cassie. “Try and keep the beam down. You still cool with the plan?”
She frowned. “You still sure?”
I shrugged. “Hey, it beats going solo. And I know the cavalry will be there as soon as I need it.” I winked and forced a grin. “Just shoot straight, all right?”
Cassie and I went our separate ways halfway to the hut. We were still a good distance away, but as I’d hoped, we could see a vague glow in the distance from the flashlights or lanterns they were using to guide them in their search.
Before she left, I sketched a rough diagram of what the area looked like in the dirt and gave her a few minut
es’ head start to loop around. The plan was for her to come up behind the hut, while I made no attempt at stealth whatsoever. It being unfamiliar territory for her, she needed the flashlight more than I did. It was dark, but at least I had the distant light to guide me. If it took me longer to get there because I had to take my time picking across the uneven ground, all the better. It would give Cassie plenty of time to get into position.
Dumb, maybe, but at least I could look forward to the possibility that I wasn’t walking into a trap this time. Melanie, I hoped, would have her focus on digging up the bottom of the hut in search for the grimoire.
My going was slow, which gave me plenty of time — too much, perhaps — to reflect on the night’s happenings and what I needed to do going forward.
Even if I was able to resolve the issue with Melanie and her thugs, there was still Mother and everyone else involved in the group.
The proper term in all the books and movies is coven, of course, but part of me refused to grant them that sort of legitimacy. If they were anything like Melanie, they were a bunch of entitled, privileged kids who’d read too many sparkling vampires books growing up who thought that being evil was ‘kewl.’ I hoped that Melanie’s boyfriend Trace was the only one violated in that way. My more logical part reasoned that if she’d done it to him, the other members of her fan club had probably done it more than once.
All the cool kids had to have clones and every would-be tyrant needs mindless lackeys. A group of modern witches should be no different.
Adding Mother to the equation just presented things worse. The lack of the grimoire should be a limiting factor, but who knew what else she’d gotten her hands on back in the day?
I considered the possibility that the police hadn’t even found everything in the house. How well had I gone through it, myself? Were there any remaining artifacts still inside?
I stopped dead in my tracks. The more I thought about it, the more the idea made sense. It wasn’t like she’d kept an inventory. The police had basically gone through her office and checked what they could find, as well as the decorations and antiques throughout the house. Kent and Esteban had directed that search on the assumption that Mother had no reason to hide anything, but what if they’d been wrong? What if she’d hidden other things away, out of plain sight, because she didn’t want dad or I to stumble across them?
Fade (Paxton Locke Book 1) Page 11