by R. J. Blain
The bushes moved. Eli angled his flash into the area. Smoke blossomed up from the leaves before vanishing in wisps. A… thing… walked into the clearing. It was six feet tall, bipedal with short-stocky legs, and built like the Michelin Tire Man, except it had at least three arms like tree trunks and no head. Bones stuck out everywhere, presumably human bones, with a fully articulated hand in the center of its chest, a femur poking up at the shoulder, and rib bones pressing outward where its liver would have been if it had been human. It had no eyes, no visible ears or nose. No mouth. Other than bones, it seemed composed of mud, sticks, and leaves it had picked up on its way here. The wood and greenery was smoking and curling in the heat. The thing stopped, as if letting them look.
Eli’s flash settled on the only color on the thing—a flash of red near the hand bones. “Blood, Shaped like a fist.” He dropped his flash to Lizzie’s hands and the torn skin of her knuckles. “You did that. Good punch.”
Lizzie’s face underwent a dozen emotions. She said, “There’s a cave beneath the falls. And a skeleton, partially mummified. We… We fought. I think that, when I socked him, I used all the stone power in the cave. It didn’t stop him. It didn’t even slow him down. He covered my face, my nose and mouth, with mud so I couldn’t breathe.”
“How did you get away?” Eli murmured.
The memory came clear. “I touched a boulder that’s connected to a leyline. The demon let me go, and I fell into the pool. Most of the mud washed away. The rest I gagged up on the ground.”
“According to the Book of Enoch, demons are the souls of the children of fallen angels. Why’s it made of mud?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the demon spirit is bound up in the bones? When the skeleton fell into the mud it may have been able to incorporate that into its body?” Lizzie shivered, shaking her head.
The demon walked forward. Not a shamble, not a stride, more as if its legs were different lengths, giving it an uneven stagger. Right up to the hedge of thorns. Eli held down his hand, wanting to see what Liz saw. Without looking, she took his hand. Her fingers were icy.
In the seeing working, the mud thing was blazing with power, orange and a sick green, and pulsating pockets of pitch black. The bones glowed an oily black too. The mud demon leaned close to the hedge, only inches away from Eli’s face. His fingers twitched toward his weapon. Counterproductive. But the urge was hard to ignore.
The demon had no eyes, but Eli knew the thing was looking at him, seeing him, all of him, every failure, every mistake, every bad decision. The sense of wrong, of danger, of evil washed over him. Eli had never seen anything like this, never felt anything like this. Fight or flight were at war in him and he struggled to keep his breath steady and his heartrate low.
Eli looked down at the witch. In her own working, she glowed a soft red, like heated stones. The energies in her necklace were burning fast and hot against her skin. She lifted her free hand and adjusted them so they rested on her jacket. He looked back at the thing he had no weapons to fight.
The… mud and bone demon was a good enough description. The mud and bone demon lifted one of its arms, which ended in a flattened off stump the size and shape of a dinner plate. It placed the stump against the hedge, and it flamed bright red as it fought the unique, dark energies. The thing pushed against the hedge and instead of being burned, the mud bubbled a little, but was otherwise unharmed by the energies. That shouldn’t be possible. The thing pulled the round, plate-shaped limb away. A long thin bone pressed forward, protruding from the limb’s center. It was splintered on the end, maybe part of a broken arm bone—the skinny bone of the lower arm. The demon tapped with it on the hedge, as if it was tapping on a door. Sparks flew from the point of contact.
Eli could feel the heat of the thing, but the demon didn’t seem to notice its own temperature or its effect on its surroundings.
The demon leaned in with that one shattered bone, pressing against the hedge with the splintered point like a long, filthy fingernail. The point of contact blazed with scarlet light, and instantly began to dim slightly, as if energy was being siphoned away.
In her own working, Eli saw Lizzie’s necklace go cold as all the stored energy was sapped away.
Liz picked up the battery stone and placed it in her lap, took the necklace off and coiled it on top. Even he could tell it wasn’t going to be enough. She pressed her bleeding finger onto the firepit rock closest.
LIZ
Hazy memories slid through her fast and solidified into a surety: heat and wood and stone and icy cold. She had fought it so hard. So very hard. Her amulets had been on the bank of the pool, far away, resting on a rock. She had fallen through the waterfall and into the water, which had washed the mud away, the only thing that had saved her. She should have died. Washing away some of its mud, the demon had reached into the water and pulled her back to the cave. It had been trying to possess her at the same time it was trying to hold a physical form together. Its attention and energies were divided. She fought it. It tried again to enter her, possess her, through her mouth and nose.
She had socked it with a bare fist, hit it with the raw power of the stones, hit it with everything she could draw from the cave itself. That… that had worked. It fell apart. But she had landed wrong and banged her head. Fallen into the pool again.
If she hadn’t hit her head, if she had stayed and fought, pulling on the leyline, she might have kept it from reknitting its mud body back together.
Using that raw power, she had gotten away. But she hadn’t won. The demon had found its shape again and… it wanted someone to possess.
It had followed her blood trail down the hill. Her only weapons were her amulets and the freaking firepit rocks. And the blood she had just smeared on them. That brought another memory: the blood she had shed in the water-drenched cave. Even small smears of blood had allowed the demon to track her. But the blood here and there also might give her a fighting chance. Her blood here and there might make the difference.
“I think I can share what I’m seeing with you.” She took his hand.
As she did, another thought occurred. Her amulets had been lying on the rock at the pool to recharge. The flat rock surface that had looked so small and innocuous, had been the upper surface of a boulder that had traveled deep underground. That boulder had been touching the leyline far below the pool. As a stone witch, her amulets had instantly attached themselves to the rock-friendly leyline and filled themselves with power to the burning point. The cave was part of the boulder system. There was a connection between the boulder and her amulets and her blood. She might be able to reach the boulder and, through her amulets, draw directly from the raw power of the leyline.
Liz expanded the seeing for him.
Eli
He snarled and cursed, looked longingly at his shotgun. And his backpack. Which was filled with the water. He calculated how long they would have to wait for backup. If they didn’t cook first, they’d be thirsty, but they wouldn’t die of dehydration. He holstered his weapon and turned off the tactical flashlight. “So what do you suggest?” he asked, voice calm.
“Study it. It was moving fast at first, like a spirit through time and space, but it slowed. It almost feels like, I don’t know, as if it’s physically present in reality, but also still tethered to its prison. When it entered the campsite, it almost looked as if it was dragging itself across the ground.”
“Okay. In my own vision, I see mud and bright brown-orange flames, maybe like sasquatch if bigfoot was made out of Play-doh, set on fire, and bound in twisted reeds and rope. The rope is disintegrating.” He couldn’t protect Lizzie from a demon. He’d seen what it took to stop and bind a demon. He’d watched the footage over and over again. One had nearly killed Jane, and she’d had help from witches and maybe an angel. It had sucked.
“Reed ropes,” Lizzie said. “There was a skeleton in the cave, and it had been wrapped in what felt like—looked like—green willow-bark rope, root-rope, and maybe rope made
from the tendons of animals. I’m seeing frayed ends in my seeing working, as if… as if it tore itself away, but…” She held up her hand and he took it again. “Tell me what you see.”
“I see a line of green energies trailing back along the path where the thing’s walking,” Eli said. “It keeps jerking one leg as if there’s something still pulling it back.”
“I think, somehow it’s still bound in the cave,” Lizzie said, “but not by much. Oh.” She stopped. “I think the skeleton was wrapped with copper.”
Copper was a precious metal. It had to mean something. Something he could use. By feel, since the moon hadn’t risen yet and even the stars were hidden by the tree cover, Eli changed out his ammo, replacing traditional lead ten-millimeter rounds with silver-lead composite rounds. Nothing would stop a demon, but if it had an affinity to precious metals, then maybe the silver would slow it down. He didn’t bother to hope. He did what he could. “Tell me what you remember about the skeleton,” he said, his voice flat. “Everything. No detail is unimportant, even if it’s half guesswork.”
She described the position of the body, the biological bindings, the metal chain and how the flat rectangular copper plates were attached to create a chain rope. She described the necklace of stone beads and the single black braid. “I think … it was dressed in clothes like tribal people. Definitely not European, so, maybe like the clothes local tribal people might have worn before the European invasion and colonization. Some kind of woven, coarse fabric and tanned hide.”
He took her hand again, saying, “Let me see again. When she opened the seeing working, he watched the demon and said, “Still sasquatch. You?”
“Yes. Just lumpy energy.”
“What else? What else did you see in the cave?”
She closed her eyes, seeming totally unconcerned with the appearance of a demon in the campsite with them. Crazy witch woman.
“Maybe a bow and a quiver of arrows leaning against the back wall of the cave? Beaded moccasins? The necklace, or maybe two, were all stone, no glass beads. Feathers in its hair.”
“Stone beads. Stone witch? Like you?”
“Huh. Okay, that’s odd. I was thinking fire witch wrapped in mud. The stone necklace was the only thing not glowing with leyline power.” She took a slow breath of what sounded like excitement in the pitch dark. “Maybe they had been infused with null energies. Or even death energies, like a death witch might make.”
“Do you see the necklace in with the bones?”
“Hard to tell with all the mud and bones sticking out all over it. It looks like the entire human skeleton could be sticking through the mud.” She took a slow breath.
Eli had not a single idea how to stop this thing. Except it was made of real stuff. Physical stuff. Not pure energy trying to manifest as real. That was different. He dialed Alex to update him.
Liz
Liz pulled on all her knowledge of demon lore which was pitifully small. The demon was either a fire demon, partially trapped and tied to the cave and the leyline, or the skeleton buried in the cave had been a fire practitioner, one that had been tied to the demon either through possession, or through becoming a sacrifice. Not many fire witches survived to adulthood. When they came into their powers, they usually burned themselves up—spontaneous human combustion—or set their family on fire and had to be put down. But the body in the cave had been adult-sized.
In the woods, back along its trail, along the path of the faint green binding, another dead tree went up in flame.
Eli asked, “Can you alter the hedge to resist high temps?”
“Maybe. But that means it’ll burn through my reserves faster.”
“How do we kill it?”
“You don’t kill demons. Impossible.”
“Jane did.” Jane. Not Janie. Maybe Jane when he was talking about the warrior, Janie when he was talking about his adopted sister? It was cute how he divided up the two parts of her.
Liz released Eli’s hand. Jane the warrior had killed her sister, Evangelina, and the demon Evie had called. Or rather, had bound the demon back into hell. Either way, the important part was that Jane had killed Evie. That should have been the coven’s job, but they hadn’t been willing enough to kill their sister, or powerful enough to stop the demon. And killing Evie had proved beyond any doubt that an Everhart had called the demon to the earth. That act had destroyed Liz’s coven, wreaked havoc on her family, tarnished their rep in the witch community, and shattered her faith in the older sister she had revered. And even though Liz knew—with the rational part of herself— that Jane had done the only thing she could to stop the evil of Evangelina, there was a small, mean, little part of her soul that hated Jane for that. The rest of her feelings were still a mishmash of anger, sorrow, grief, and worthlessness, unable to fix anything her sister had done.
She shoved those feelings away and pulled her thoughts from the past. Demons loved hate. It would use negative emotion to weaken her. To take over more than the blood-taint on her flesh and her soul. If she slipped into hate, the demon could take her over completely.
“No rifle? No steel blade, brought by Europeans? No cross used in the binding?” Eli asked.
He was still talking about stuff in the cave. “No,” she said.
“So, by its accessories, we can deduce it was trapped pre colonization, in the American copper age. Somewhere between two and four thousand years ago.”
“That’s what I was thinking, originally, yes. But now I’m leaning to closer to the two K mark.”
“Why?”
Liz shrugged. “No one knows why, but according to witch legends, prior to about 50 BCE, there were no demons on earth, and they all disappeared by two hundred AD.”
Eli didn’t argue with her estimation, which made her relax a little. Most men argued with a witch, asking, “Why?” or “Are you sure?” or saying, “That doesn’t make sense.” Instead, he made a little humming sound of acceptance and said, “So back two thousand years ago, someone trapped a demon.”
“Yes,” Liz said.
“About the time of the Christ, when all demon lore started,” he pushed. “But that religion hadn’t reached these shores.”
“No. It hadn’t. I’m not sure that demons care about geography or religion. Maybe that was the time when all evil was unleashed on this continent. There were a lot of upheavals, even over here, around that time.” She looked back at the demon. The flames of its energies were orange and a sick olive color. And the spot where the bone pressed was draining her hedge faster than she thought possible. They were well and truly trapped.
“So instead of crosses and arcane religious symbols,” Eli said, “this demon was bound in vines and the bones of a human for two millennia.”
“Somehow the demon used my bathing in the pool to get free.” Had her blood-curse taint helped free it? She applied pressure to the wound on her finger, which started it bleeding again. She touched each stone in the firepit with the finger, strengthening the hedge. When she was done, Eli tossed a roll of one-inch gauze and a similar size roll of sticky-tape into her lap. When she looked up, he was still holding the weapons. Magician. Captain America.
Liz had a bad feeling about this situation. “I was sent here by Golda,” she said.
Eli spoke into his cell. “What do you have on Golda?”
Liz remembered the wifi he’d set up in the trees on the hill, which was great, but they’d need cell chargers. When her finger was wrapped, she went through her essentials and pulled out the cell chargers and cords. Offered one to Eli and plugged in her own.
“Got it.” He dropped the cell from his face. “Liz, Golda died three days ago in Suffolk, England.”
“Glamours that make you look like someone else are illegal,” she said. And instantly knew how stupid that sounded. “Never mind.” She called Molly. When the connection went through, she started talking instantly. “I’m in a stone firepit circle with Eli. A demon is pressing against my hedge. It was bound in pre-Columbian
copper, hidden in a cave behind a waterfall. It looked as if a recent earthquake or maybe just the action of water on the stone, caused a cave-in, and when I took a bath in the pool, I saw the cave and went inside. The pool and the cave are directly over a leyline, which makes me think the leyline was used as a power source to bind the demon and the rocks that held it. So it’s possible I, a blood-curse-marked stone witch, accidently released it when I took a looksee.”
Molly cussed, witch-style. “Son of witch on a stick. Does it have a physical form?”
Liz told her what they could see in human sight and in a seeing working. She added what little they knew or surmised. “Ideas?”
“I’ll research and get back,” Molly said.
“Gotta go, bro.” He ended the call and said to Liz, “Rescue party on the way, dropping in via helicopter. Brute woke up and selected the backup. Per Alex, the werewolf is in charge. And there’s a grindylow attached to his back.”
“Brute? Why did Brute…? Oh. Werewolf,” Liz whispered. Brute was a werewolf stuck in wolf form by contact with an angel. The wolf had a complicated and bloody history. He lived at the inn with Yellowrock and Eli, one of the only werewolves on the planet not guarded over by a grindylow executioner twenty-four-seven. If the angel-touched werewolf was coming, with a grindy, then they might actually have angel backup.
But.
The presence of a grindylow meant other problems. A grindy meant another werewolf was close to them. A rogue werewolf left over from the last attacks months ago. Eli had said he was armed for werewolf, just in case. “Son of a witch,” she whispered. “How long before they get here?”
“Gut feeling? We have two to four hours before they get in the air, find an LZ, land, and then hike in to us.”
“LZ?” she asked.
“Landing site.”
Liz searched around and spotted the silver box; she almost touched it before the sensation of heat registered. Using the sleeping bag edge to protect her hands, Liz plucked open the box. The crystal inside was glowing red. “Whatever fake-Golda attached a charm to, it’s heading this way too. Fast. What if there never was a dog? What if Golda sent us to chase a werewolf? And I stumbled on the demon.”