by R. J. Blain
The skeleton sank into the mud. A moment later, something rose from the mud, something like a tree trunk, if trees were made of mud. Mud and bone. Long bones stuck out the top, bumpy joints pointing to the cave roof. Embedded in the mud were smaller bones, the toe and finger bones. No copper was visible.
Liz took another step back. The step caught its attention. It leaned in toward her. She froze, except for her desperate breathing and the sudden, urgent need to cough. The mud bent away and then it flung part of itself at her.
A ball of mud and debris hit her in the face. Like muddy slime, it covered her face and hair and down her naked body. It covered her nose and eyes and mouth. And it tried to get inside. Shoving up into her nostrils, trying to slip past her lips. She couldn’t see. If she tried to take a breath, the thing would be inside her. And she had no breath left at all.
She drew all the power she had, all the power she could access. She threw it at the mud thing. It screamed like an animal. Something exploded out from it. It hit her in the chest. Slid down her arms, over the blood-curse remnants. Pain shocked through her.
A third mud bomb hit her. The force threw her back.
Like a ragdoll, she flew back through the waterfall, flailing, taking with her the mud, a rock she caught in one hand, and a small bit of bone that had been in the mud bomb. She landed in the water. Her head above the surface for a moment.
She fought with all her magic, wrapping herself in the leyline. Desperate for a breath. She dunked under. Raised back up. Threw more raw energy.
Mud hit her again.
And something… happened.
Chapter Six
Eli
She wasn’t in the pool. Her boots, clothes, her walking stick, her rock necklace were laid out. A squeeze bottle of homemade soap from her family business was on top of her small pack. He waited. She wasn’t swimming, She didn’t resurface. With a touch he discovered that the protective hedge was still in place. He couldn’t get to the pool, but… it hadn’t been a heavy ward, like a hedge of thorns put in place by a full coven of witches. Had some sort of ward-resistant paranormal creature gotten to her?
Was Lizzie dead?
He should have been here.
His heartrate sped then slowed as he shoved his own reactions away.
The earthquake passed. There was no sign of mudslide. At least not yet. Maybe a mining company or a quarry had set off a charge nearby, but he didn’t think so. It hadn’t felt like the effect of drilled charges, of dynamite. Plus, there wasn’t a lot of mining permitted this close to the Blue Ridge Parkway.
At the risk of screwing up his night vision, Eli closed one eye, clicked on his tactical flashlight, and searched the ground with the other eye. Something had splashed up a lot of water. His instant conclusion was that something had taken Liz, but there were no footprints. He scanned the water patterns, turned off his light, and closed his eyes. Counted to twenty, listening.
Eli had only been halfway joking when he explained why he carried the weapons he did. Not many things in life scared him. Not vamps, not witches, not Janie, not even dying. But being bitten by were-creatures scared the living hell out of him.
He’d quartered the area before his bath and gotten a good lay of the land. The water patterns on the ground suggested a northeast trajectory, some creature that could leap far, carrying a full grown female, without her screaming or fighting. He moved out, silent as death.
Liz
In total darkness, Liz opened her eyes, as if from a dream, lungs burning for air. There was no sense of up or down. Panic rising, she blew bubbles, following them by feel as they tickled across her, showing her the way up. She rotated her body, kicked, and swam to the surface, which brightened slightly above her. When she breached, her breath exploded out. She sucked in fresh air and a little water and started coughing. Her skin was pebbled with cold, teeth chattering. Her hands were so cold she couldn’t grab the roots to pull herself to the surface. It took three tries, and when she landed on the ground, she was shaking so badly she had trouble not curling into a ball and expiring on the spot.
In the dark of deep dusk, she reached for her amulets. Blistered her fingertips.
Her amulets were all scalding hot. In the distance, Eli shouted her name. She tried to reply but the coughing worsened. She picked up her walking stick and banged it against the tree. She doubted he heard her, and she was too weak to bang harder.
She dropped the stick. Her lungs felt full and heavy and the air that moved through them felt thick as slime.
Shaking, coughing, she pulled on her only pair of clean under clothes and a clean tank top. Struggled back into her dirty jeans. There was no way to get her socks and hiking boots on. She was shaking too badly. Her breath was mostly coughing. Her hands ached and burned, and when she ran her fingertips across her knuckles, they were bruised, the skin torn as if she had been fighting. Fresh blood trickled out.
But she didn’t remember what she had been fighting. She wasn’t even certain when she got into the pool.
She slid her arms into the jacket. In her pocket, the silver box was too hot to touch, and she smelled burning nylon. She held it away from her body. She put the amulet necklace on over her head, over the jacket hood, and stuck the battery stone into the pocket on the other side, away from the silver box. The amulets were odd feeling where she touched them, and she didn’t know why.
Headwound? Liz touched her head and her hand came away sticky. Okay. That made sense. She had banged her head on something and had lost some time. And nearly drowned. Still coughing, she carried her boots, socks, the rest of her gear, and moved around the tree.
It was nearly full night, but Eli must have heard her coughing because he appeared out the dark. “Found her.” He ended a call. “Where the hell have you been?” he asked. “I was just here.”
“I don’t know,” she managed between coughing and shaking so hard her teeth rattled. “Boots.”
“How can you not know—” As if realizing questions were counterproductive, he stopped. “Drop the ward.”
Liz touched the small stone and deactivated the protection. Eli squatted and helped her wet feet into her socks and boots. Not an easy task with the shivers. He hoisted her to her feet, put her walking stick in her left hand, and an arm under her right shoulder. That left his right hand free, and he carried the shotgun in it. For once, she was happy to have a mundane weapon on hand and someone who could use it.
Half-carrying her, Eli got her back to the campsite and the fire. “You’re hypothermic,” he said, sitting her on a sleeping bag which he dragged close to the fire. He sat behind her and folded his legs around her before wrapping another sleeping bag around them both. Eventually, her coughing eased, and her lungs felt clear. She wondered if she had taken in more than the drop of water at the surface. Maybe she had taken in a lot of water while deep under.
Eli gave her a scrap of cloth. “Handkerchief. Blow.”
Liz blew and something gross came out of her nose. “Oh yuck.” She several more times, coughed hard for a while, and when the coughing spell passed, she dropped her wet head against his shoulder.
“What happened,” Eli asked, his mouth beside her ear.
“How long?” she asked, the two words bringing on another coughing fit.
“You left the campsite at twenty, o-two,” he said when the racking coughs passed. “At twenty, thirty-two, I went after you. You weren’t at the pool, though your things were there. I started quartering the area. At twenty, forty-seven, I heard you coughing, back at the pool. What. Happened.”
“I don’t know. I’m guessing I banged my head somehow.” She touched her head and Eli turned her to see. “Either that I was underwater for thirty minutes or so.”
Eli’s arms tightened around her, a fast hug, or maybe shock. Her coughing started again, now sounding wet, like pneumonia, and he bent her forward over his left thigh, hitting her back with his open palm in upward thrusts, as if to dislodge something in her airway. Her c
ough worsened. Long wracking sounds. She coughed up water. A lot of water. And something gross. Out of nowhere, she vomited. He seemed to be expecting that and slapped her back with enough force to help her expel the water and gunk from her stomach and lungs. The coughing fit went on too long, and when there was a short break in the coughing, Eli somehow found the three purple healing stones on her necklace and placed all three between her lips.
That helped dramatically. When she could breathe again, he butt-walked them and the sleeping bags away from the gross pool of mucoid muddy water and rolled her back into his lap. He wiped her face. Her shivers went from shaking to bone rattling. Her amulets blazed hot again. She pulled her pocket away, and when Eli realized that the silver box was scorching the fabric, he opened a short-bladed folding knife and cut the pocket out. The box and the burned cloth landed with a hollow thump on the ground.
The instant it landed, the flames in the firepit roared high.
Eli cradled her and rolled them in a half-backward summersault, away from the firepit, his arms and legs cushioning her, the sleeping bags flying. He folded her up in the bags again and grabbed an expandable plastic water container. Tossed its contents on the flames. They blazed higher. Steam rose. “What was that?”
“Opposing magic systems. The elements exploded when they collided.”
Liz touched the blue and green beads on her necklace and cast a seeing working. The flames were dark with something odd, something she hadn’t seen before. She pulled up a sleeve and looked at her arms. The blood-curse was sooty-black beneath her skin, tracing up along her magic.
Beneath her butt, the earth rocked.
“Earthquake,” Eli said. “Or mudslide.” The flames from their fire ignited the leaves twenty feet overhead.
Something was wrong. The smell of brimstone filled the clearing.
The horrible feeling Liz had been carrying for months intensified, a buzzing vibration that brought on a bout of nausea. Her flesh went gray and bruised looking in her seeing working; the blood-curse taint darkened. Her neck burned as the amulet necklace went hot again. All her protections activated at once. A memory came at her, like being hit with club. “It’s not an earthquake,” she whispered. “It’s not a mudslide. It’s a… a fire demon.”
Eli
The logs on the fire erupted again. Heat and magic blasted out. Eli ducked. Cradling Lizzie. Fire hit him. He threw himself away from her, rolling as his shirt flamed and smoked. Instantly, he was on his feet in a crouch. Weapons in hand. Shotgun and vamp-killer.
The fire went out. In the pit, in the leaves overhead. Utter darkness descended. The smell from the fire smelled odd. Brimstone. Very softly, he said, “Fuck. Me.”
The pain was like all first degree burns. Hurt like a mother, but ignorable. He made a fist, stretched. Everything worked. It hadn’t burned deep like thermite and it wasn’t exothermic like sodium. He’d live.
He quartered the campsite. Wished he’d brought some lenses. FLIR would be handy right now. When he was sure there was no immediate threat, he went back to Lizzie and squatted on the ground beside her. “Can we outrun it? What will it take to kill it? Talk to me.”
Liz
“Hang on.” Liz blinked against her human vision of fire-bleached retinas. All she had for the moment was the seeing working. With it, she spotted a muddy blast of energy, brown and orange and gray as death approaching from upstream. From the pool.
She had never seen energies exactly like this, yet she recognized what it was in the sooty ocher of her flesh. She had no memory of it, but she knew she’d just fought the approaching energies, those demonic magics, somehow. And… underwater. In the pool. Either she’d won that battle or she’d gotten away. She needed to remember how, because however she got away might save them now.
A flash of memory returned as the brimstone smoke of the firepit burned her nose. A green glow. A glimpse of darkness. A struggle. There had been a small cave at the pool, behind and underneath the narrow falls. This thing, this demon… had it been in the cave? Had it had tried to take her over? She remembered a struggle, a breathless, desperate struggle.
Later she’d coughed and vomited it out. That meant she had fought this approaching demon off, but somehow it had caused her to forget. Maybe the gunk up her nose had contained a forget-me working? Or the head injury. She touched her head again. It was swollen, it hurt to the touch, and a trickle of fresh blood was running down her forehead.
And…
There had been a leyline. The demon had been bound into the leyine. That was the only thing that made sense.
She touched her head again, fingering the gash on top of the goose-egg lump. She had bled from her knuckles. This thing wasn’t a blood demon. It didn’t fit any of the old grimoires or the old tales, but all demons could track through blood. And this one was coming.
“Lizzie,” Eli demanded.
“Demon,” she said again. The word brought on a coughing fit. “Your weapons won’t touch it.”
Eli pulled his cell. Said into it, “Alex. Demon. Exfil if possible to my GPS. Backup if not. Roger that.” To Liz he asked, “Where?”
“Close. Coming.”
Eli circled the campsite. His shotgun ready to fire. “How long?”
“No time.” Liz made it to her knees. Eli pulled her upright. She grabbed Eli’s wrist and the well-charged battery stone. She stumbled across the firepit stones, inside the circle.
“What the hell?” Eli asked.
“Circle,” she said.
“Got it.” Eli stamped out the last of the hot ash, silent, effective. He placed the shotgun on the ground outside the stones, stepped back out and grabbed up a bedroll, his handgun, and knives.
As he worked, she dropped to her knees again, one hand on the ring of stones. Felt on her necklace for a piece of green marble shaped like a pig.
Eli scooped up the silver box. Stepped back inside the circle.
From the direction of the pool, but much closer to the campsite, a flame appeared through the trees. A torch. A ball of fire. It rose with a whoosh, a blazing conflagration. A dead tree exploded with flame. It shot up to the heavens.
“Oh, that’s not good,” Liz said.
“Do you have a portable hedge of thorns?”
“Yes. But it won’t keep out air. Or temperature changes.”
Eli discovered another thing he was afraid of: roasting to death
She pressed the stone to bring up the hedge of thorns working, a protective barrier. The sparks were all out. He placed everything on the dirt and reached for the shotgun and his backpack. “No!” she shouted.
The magic shot eight feet high and closed on top like a knotted balloon. It went a foot deep into the earth and stopped. Eli cursed again, with vulgar ingenuity that might have made her laugh if she hadn’t been so terrified.
Her newly charged amulets were enough to make a strong hedge of thorns, but the power stored in them wasn’t enough to keep a hedge up until morning, not against a demon. She needed to have charged a boulder for days to have enough stored power to protect against a demon all night. She needed a full coven. Or a priest. She had nothing. Worse, the firepit rocks were nestled on the ground a long way from the leyline. She needed that leyline. She wiped her hand across her head wound and wiped her blood onto the rocks. The hedge glowed brighter but until she saw what form the demon had taken, she didn’t know if it would be enough. She touched her head. The blood there was dying and would already leave a scar. Damn vanity.
“I need a knife,” she said.
Eli clicked on his flashlight. In the beam, she saw him open the short-bladed folding knife he had used to cut her pocket. He placed it hilt first into her palm.
Liz pricked her finger, too deeply, too long. She cursed. The blade was sharp.
Eli half yanked up her wrist and demanded, “How much blood do you need? A body full?”
“I opened a hedge of thorns. Protection from the demon. But we need more power, and fast.” She yanked agains
t his grip and snarled, “Let me work.” He let her go.
On her knees, she crawled around the outer circle of stones, rearranging them, pulling all the inner circle of stones into the outer ring, wedging them in place, making certain they all touched one another. She wiped her blood on each rock to strengthen the working. She had planned both circles of rocks when she created the firepit. Just in case she needed something. But she hadn’t planned for a demon. Especially a fire demon wrapped in mud. If that kind of demonic entity even existed. “Son of a witch,” she muttered, her heart pounding.
Liz looked at the center of inner circle. There was something like burned mud in the there.
Eli-Captain America carried all the things that went bang and was always ready with a weapon. She carried around less mundane weapons and was prepared for… Okay. Not equipped for this. But she had made certain that all the rocks were in the inner and outer circles were touching.
When she looked back at him, Eli was holding his handgun in one hand and a vamp-killer blade in the other. Staring at the shotgun and their backpacks only feet away. “Drop the hedge. I need my weapons,” he said.
“If I drop it, it’ll come back up at lesser power. If you fire that gun or cut with that knife, the hedge of thorns working goes down.
In the light from his flash, his body looked taut, tense, ready for anything. And it was so useless. No weapon he had would even scratch a demon.
“I don’t see anything,” he said, his voice now a whisper. “Except a sparkle here and there from the hedge. Where’s the demon?”
“It’s that way,” she pointed. “It crawled up from the pool. It’s here.”
Chapter Seven
Eli