Dirty Deeds

by R. J. Blain

  Oddly, her lungs felt better than they had in a long while, but if Eli had to carry her out of the gorge because her leg muscles locked up, things were going to get dicey. Water splashed louder ahead, and she pulled herself up on a tree, climbing up its roots as if they were stairs. She edged around it to see a narrow, crystal clear, bouncing, ten foot falls splashing into a pool. “Oh my stars and stones,” she murmured.

  The pool was a good twelve feet oval with mossy-green covered rocks everywhere, ferns leaning over the pool, and roots trailing into it. She carefully made her way around the next tree to a small, flat place, one surrounded by bracken and overarching laurel, and with damp scuffs in the dirt made by Eli’s boots. She plopped onto the ground and just breathed as the effect of the day’s hiking and this last little climb leached away in the clean air. It was shadowy beneath the laurel, chilled and wet; droplets fell on her face and hands. She sighed in something close to peace. She shouted, “I’m A-Okay! Opening a ward now!”

  “Good!” Eli shouted back. He sounded a lot closer than she expected, as if he had followed her to make sure she made it. A now-familiar warmth filled her. Interested. And camping overnight. And… Oh yeah.

  Her breathing eased out completely and she lay a hand on a half-buried rock. There was power in the stone, a lot of power. She pulled her hand back, trying to figure out why there was so much power here. It was way more stored energy than should be in the stones, as if someone used this place as a power sink. Except she was absolutely certain no one had been here in a very long time. There was no indication that power had been tapped and siphoned from the site in decades. Maybe centuries. Maybe ever…

  That meant that a previously unknown leyline might run beneath the ground here. Except that was impossible. There were no unmarked leylines in this area, all of them having been mapped by witches over the centuries, and, before the Europeans came, by tribal shamans and medicine-men and women of power. But this felt like leyline power. More importantly, it felt like untapped, unused leyline power.

  Liz took off her necklace and placed it and the battery stone on a powerful, flat rock. She set the amulets to draw energy through the stone in a slow trickle. She removed the crystal from its silver box, checked to see where the dog was, and placed it to recharge too. Carefully, because she was afraid of energy backlash, she drew only on the stones she was attuned to, and opened an old fashioned, protective ward around the pool. It was wider than her usual ward, but the rocks accommodated the simple working easily. She shouted to Eli, “Ward is set.”

  “Good to know,” he called back, still sounding too close. “Heading back to camp. Yell when you’re ready to head back if it’s too dark.”

  She looked at the trees overhead and, though it was quickly growing darker, decided she had nearly half an hour of workable light left. She pulled off her boots and stripped, grabbed the small squirt bottle of Everhart homemade biodegradable soap from her travel kit, and slid into the pool. “Ooooh my god,” she murmured and dunked her head. The water was deep, with no bottom she could touch, and Eli was right, it was cold. Very cold. She shivered, stretched her back and shoulders, and began to bathe. “Best bath ever,” she whispered as she dunked her head again and washed the day’s sweat and twigs and leaves out of her hair, her toes holding onto roots. She tossed the squirt bottle back to the small clearing.

  For a final rinse, she dove deep, searching for the bottom. At ten feet, the light cut off. The water went from cold to icy. There was a small glow at the surface at the splash of the waterfall and just above it. It was so pale she wouldn’t have seen it had the daylight been any brighter.

  She kicked in the water, her red hair in a horse-mane-twirl around her as she approached. The glow started about two feet below the waterline and rose up high behind the falls, not seen in the last of the daylight on the surface. It was a green phosphorescence, a dim light in the dark and above her. She swam closer and saw glowing moss on the rocks below the surface behind where the water splashed, the glow leading up to the surface behind the waterfall. Glowing phosphorescent moss. Molly would have gone nuts over the sight. Liz rose to the surface and touched a rock, feeling for danger or evil or anything not right. It had to be the node of the leyline. Leylines were safe. If she brought word about an untapped leyline to her sisters, it would give them untold power. She caught three breaths before dropping down again and swimming slowly under the falls, closer to the pale light.

  The phosphorescence was in a ring with a center that was darker than night. She surfaced in the shallow mouth of a narrow cave, the falls cascading over her, and grabbed the lip of the cave opening, her hands still underwater on the moss. She kicked to stay upright in the water.

  The cave was about ten by twelve, composed of solid rock. Not smooth stone, like from water seepage through limestone, but jagged and sharp, as if created by a rock fall long ago. The roof was a solid layer of rock, as were the two sides and the back wall. The wall where she held herself was smooth, too, but the rocks inside, on the floor were broken, splintered, shattered rock, as was the area to either side of her. It appeared that the cave had once been completely enclosed on four sides, and the wall at the waterfall had caved in. The glowing moss covered everything, even the broken rock which suggested that the front wall had shattered some time ago. Years? A few decades?

  The stone beneath her hand was even more powerful than the rock on the surface of the ground had been. The rock beneath her seemed to reach up inside her and share its power.

  She pulled herself up and sat, her butt still in the water, on a mossy smooth rock and placed both hands, palms down, on the stones. Power, amazing power, was stored in the stone. Power of the earth, stored in the cave itself, power that seeped into her body, healing her muscles, helping her to breathe better than since Evangelina had used her own power against her and crushed her with a boulder.

  Liz would have expected it to feel cold inside the cave, what with water evaporation and being underground, but it was improbably warm. Not steamy, though she wasn’t chilled, even being naked and wet. When her breath was totally smoothed out, she swiveled her legs inside and stood, stepping into the cave. The roof was eight or nine feet tall. The interior was lit all around with the phosphorescent moss. It was like a playground of energy for a stone witch. Water slid down the stones everywhere, between the tiny phosphorescent mosses covering every surface. It made soft trickling sounds like a high pitched percussion instrument, ground water weeping down from rains above. The lower-pitched sound of the falls just behind her was a deeper thrum with splashy midrange notes. The sounds of water everywhere were magnified, echoing like music in a grand hall.

  Tears that might have been joy or peace came to her eyes and she blinked them away, not wanting to miss a thing. Peace flowed through her. A calm she had never experienced. Inebriating and yet serene.

  For Liz, keeping her witch power locked down had been a necessity all her life. When she was a kid, some people still considered witches to be uniformly evil, and losing control meant proving them right. Losing control meant exposure and being ostracized by friends. With the name Everhart, people already knew she came from a witch family, so they were always watching her and her sisters, watching for the slightest error. She had learned early on to not give in to anger at the taunts of bullies, to not fight back with her magic. She had held herself aloof, her power deeply locked down, as all witches did.

  But this much power all around her, flowing into the soles of her feet, into her lungs with each breath, gently pressing on those internal walls, urging that locked-down-something inside her to give way, to open up, to accept all the energies around her. To be free. She laughed, a sputtering sound that echoed through the cave.

  Her body filled with the power. More and more. Without an amulet, using just raw power, she opened a seeing working, a witch working that let her see energy. She had never opened one before without an amulet to direct the energies. The power all around glowed richly into her, around he
r, beneath her, and she realized she had to be standing directly over that leyline. An unmapped, untapped leyline.

  “Holy…” she whispered. “Holy, holy, holy…”

  Placing her feet carefully between sharper rocks littering the cave floor, she moved deeper inside. Her eyes adjusted to the dim green light, and she saw, at the back, a small area of cave floor that was without stone. It looked like a puddle of mud. Quicksand? The groundwater had to go somewhere, and maybe not all of it ran out into the pool. At the very back of the cave was a different mass, one not covered with moss, yet, in her seeing working, it glowed brighter than the rocks with leyline energies. She eased closer. It looked like a bundle of sticks.

  And then she saw the skull.

  Chapter Five

  Eli

  Eli positioned the wire cooking rack over the surprisingly efficient pile of kindling. Liz had used the old seating ring he’d noticed and created a firepit in the center, placing the stack of larger deadfall logs to the side of the inner ring. It looked like enough to make it through the night. He checked the leaf canopy overhead. It was far enough above to be safe from sparks, there had been rain two days ago, and there was no burning ban in place. Liz had also cleaned up the campsite so there wouldn’t be unintended fire. Not bad for a weak witch with no survival skills. He wasn’t sure what he felt about that, except maybe satisfied. Relieved. Something. And she’d been totally safe under a portable magical hedge when he had to leave her on the trail. Even he didn’t have a hedge in his arsenal.

  He got a fire going using her lighter and the kindling, poured water to heat in his camping pan, and set bottles of water out. He added two dehydrated dinners and foil packages of salmon and nuts. He placed his weapons within easy reach and lay out the bedrolls. Not close enough that it looked like he was expecting anything.

  But.

  Yeah. But.

  Eli preferred women who liked guns. Even Jane, with all her magic, used and appreciated mundane weapons and trained hard to keep up her proficiency levels. Liz found guns amusing, saying it was because she had defensive and offensive weapons he didn’t. He’d never seen her display any magical weapons and he had to admit to a certain amount of curiosity.

  The military had been trying to get covens to work with them for decades, but except for a few covens that charged fortunes to create anti-magic-spell armor, and a rare outlier witch misfit with delusions of grandeur, they hadn’t been very successful. Hitler had done better, but he’d been willing to use methods to secure cooperation that Uncle Sam hadn’t. Sooo. What did Lizzie have that he didn’t know about?

  Her amusement and that vagueness made her intriguing.

  He squatted over the fire and rearranged the kindling, adding a larger piece of log. He then pulled his machete and used it to cut up one of the longer deadfalls she had dragged over. He placed it on the pit, the splintered end in the flames, the longer end hanging over the rock edge, to be pushed closer to the flames as needed. The burning wood smelled good. He leaned back on his bedroll and drank a bottle of water. Tonight he would need to bring water from the waterfall, purify it, and refill the bottles, but for now he was content to wait.

  Without losing any of the situational awareness that active combat had provided him, he closed his eyes.

  Liz

  It was a partially mummified human corpse, bones showing through. It was propped upright by a small circle of stones, knees high, as if in the fetal position, and was bound with rotted vines and rotted, braided ropes. The skeleton had black hair in a long braid that lay across its shoulder beside a necklace of stone beads. The skeleton was held together with a rotting plant material, cloth, and a strange belt or chain that appeared to be made of metal plates with odd tabs holding them together. The metal was old and pitted. By the light of the moss and the leyline, and with her seeing working, she could tell it was heavily coated with verdigris. That made it copper.

  An ancient skeleton bound with copper was not something that belonged here, and it should have fallen apart ages ago. She touched a nearby rock and felt with her magic through the rocks until her stone magic touched the bones. Ancient, ancient bones. Far older than she expected. Thousands of years they had sat here, in this wet, dark place. And yet they weren’t rotted through to dust. That meant magic had been a part of its burial.

  There had been a copper age in the Americas between 4000 and 2000 BCE, mined from somewhere up north. But even at its height, copper had been extremely valuable and rare, especially here in the Appalachians. The copper miners up north had been tribal people who had mined the ore, smelted it into purity using a method long lost to the ages, and made implements out of it. They’d been up near the Great Lakes. Maybe Upper Michigan? This copper had likely been traded for a lifetime of valuables. And it was buried here, with a skeleton that had sat here for millennia.

  Out of the top of the skull was another piece of copper, this one like a narrow ax blade. She edged closer, avoiding the mudpuddle. Yeah. It was an ax blade. It vaguely reminded her of the ancient ax carried by the mummified man from the Alps. Ötzi.

  Liz breathed out a laugh and breathed in power. So much power passing into her through the air and the soles of her feet, until she felt a little lightheaded. Drunk. Power, this much power, was a drug to witches. Liz knew that, had been taught that, but saying no to the power felt… wrong. And stupid. And…

  This was what she was supposed to feel like. This wonderful. This powerful.

  The copper sticking out of the skull had no handle, but she spotted the rotting stick resting on the mummy’s shoulder. That suggested that the ax had pierced the skull and been driven deep. And left there. The fact that some ancient tribal people had left the ax behind, a treasure to the ancients, meant it was supposed to stay there. In place. Like a sacrifice or something.

  Her fingers itched to touch the ax. She rubbed fingers and thumbs together. They tingled. Her seeing working strengthened all on its own. She stepped carefully closer.

  She had a feeling she wasn’t supposed to touch it but the copper glowed. It called to her. She passed around the mudpuddle, into arm’s reach of the skeleton. Gently, she reached out to touch the ax. Just a fingertip. The metal was frigid, cold enough to burn. She yanked back her hand and stepped away.

  Her heel touched the very edge of the mudpuddle.

  The ax fell through the skull and landed inside the skull, behind the jaw and teeth.

  Red light blasted up from the mud, so bright it blinded her. Liz shut off the seeing working and stepped away, fast, bruising her instep. Bumping, grazing her knee on a rock. Pain shocked through her, clearing her head.

  The mud burped. A single expulsion of air. No. Of gas. It smelled like sulfur. Like brimstone.

  A second bubble erupted. Sulfur and old ashes and the fetid stink of death. “Oh. Hell.” She looked back at the skeleton. The chain glowed. The ax glowed. She looked down at her body. Her skin glowed where the blood-curse rested just below the surface.

  She had just messed up. Bad. She raced to the cave opening and faced back inside. The floor of the cave was littered with broken rocks. The front wall had once kept all intruders out, hiding the cave. It had once been a solid chamber. Like a prison.

  A rumbling vibrated through her feet. Her skin glowed with the blood-curse magic.

  Something was coming. Something big. Something bad.

  She had to fix this.

  Liz pulled on the leyline, drawing the power into herself. Placing her palms on the rocks near the cave opening, she pushed the energy back out of her body, fast, hard, through the rocks and into the chain that bound the skeleton, everywhere the copper touched the rocks. Shoving the power into the metal hurt. Her energies weren’t usually compatible with refined copper, but there was so much power. So much. It felt far easier than it should have been. She pushed and pushed. Knotting the leyline power into strands that she tied over the copper and into the rocks.

  The mud was bubbling around the edges.

&
nbsp; The vibrations got harder. Earthquake… except not. It was something much worse. The leyline power popped free of the binding she was attempting. Liz stepped back toward the water.

  The rocks holding the copper-wrapped skeleton shook and slid to the side. And into the mud. As they tumbled away, she saw the hands and feet of the skeleton, dozens of tiny bones. They fell apart as she watched. The skeleton rocked. It fell forward. And toppled into the mud.

  Eli

  The earth rumbled. Eli sat up fast. He had been in earthquakes, the kind caused by plates of the earth sliding around, the kind caused by a volcano erupting, the kind caused by mudslides. This felt like that, the low deep, muted rumble of rocks and mud sweeping everything in their path.

  Liz was at the pool. If a mudslide came down the hillside, it would take the path of least resistance: down the runnel.

  Without even looking, he grabbed the gear he might need and sprinted back to the pool.

  Liz

  She cursed. Panting in the sulfur gasses, growing desperate for oxygen. Unable to look away. Unable to leave. Knowing what she had done. Knowing what was happening and unable to fix her stupid, foolish mistake.

  The bones lay there for a moment, on top of the mudpuddle. The mud bubbled harder, even in the center, little plops of sound that shoved gas up, creating holes and suction that began to draw the skeleton down. Heat was mixed in with the reek. Liz covered her mouth and nose. The stench was dangerous. She was breathing too fast and not feeling any better. The stench had displaced the air in the cave, and she wasn’t getting oxygen.