by R. J. Blain
“Coincidence isn’t likely. If there’s a were in the area with a demon and a leyline, it was part of the plan.”
Eli called Alex. “Ask Brute if a werewolf is in the vicinity.”
A tinny voice said, “Brute nodded yes.”
“How does he know?” Liz asked.
“He just knows,” Eli said.
Liz’s stomach tumbled into her gut. Demons were uber powerful, but they were stupid. They wanted a human to inhabit, but they couldn’t cross a hedge of thorns without a lot of time and a big fight. Werewolves on the other hand... With the exception of a very few packs, most were like rabid humans. They could think. They could plan. They could hunt.
“How many?” Eli asked. He cursed foully. Eli ended the call and stared out in to the dark. That wasn’t good.
Grindylows were the enforcers of the were-community. They looked like cute neon green kittens until they went into fighting mode. Liz had never seen it, but they were supposed to have steel claws. Like, five-inch blades, four of them at ends of each paw when they executed a were-creature who tried to spread the were-taint. If a were-creature got out of line, they showed up and killed it. But so far as Liz knew, they killed it after the fact, after it bit a human and transmitted the disease that caused humans to wake up furry on the moon and kill their friends and family.
“The werewolf probably scented the demon energies during the last full moon,” Eli said to Liz, toneless, clipped. Even in the dark, she could see that his face had gone totally emotionless, an expression she’d never seen before. It was, maybe the true Eli, the warrior. “Maybe it got some power or ability from the leyline and when it found human form, it located your not-Golda.”
“Or maybe the werewolf is Golda,” Liz whispered. “A witch bitten by a werewolf.”
“The females go into heat and never regain sanity,” Eli said. “Jane saw it happen more than once.” He hesitated, staring at the silver box. “It was bad.”
The silver box blazed red, burning. Using the bedroll, she snapped the top over it and dropped it to the ground. It was energy, even if it was bad energy. If she got desperate, she could try to draw its power into her amulets. “Golda didn’t look insane,” Liz said, “but then I’ve never seen a female werewolf, and I wasn’t with Golda for long. However, if we’re wrong about Golda being a were, then maybe the werewolf, when it was in human form, told Golda about the leyline and the demon energies. And maybe what Golda wanted all along was… What? To free the demon?” Liz frowned and then surprise shivered through her. “Golda wanted me to free the demon, let it take me over in vengeance for something, so she could have the leyline free and clear.”
“I heard you tell Molly that you may have accidently freed the demon. How did your magic free it?”
“Cia and I were accidently contaminated with a blood-curse while fighting a Big Bad Ugly. We still carry the taint in our skin, and any curse is like bait to a demon.” She took a slow breath before admitting to the next part. “Worse, we tangled with a demon once. We accidently trapped it in a circle and managed to bind it back where it came from, but it took everything we had. And it wasn’t much more than a green sprite of evil. This one…” She shook her head. “This one is bigger. Way more powerful.”
Eli cursed succinctly. Liz figured that summed it up perfectly.
The point above her where the hedge was under attack by the bone, went a pale gray. She unwrapped her cut finger and squeezed. It hurt. A lot. Pain shocked through her from the tiny injury, telling her that squeezing and scraping the wound on the rocks had bruised it badly. The wound broke open and her blood flowed. She leaned in and began to smear it across the rocks. “Check behind me,” her breath gave out. She hadn’t admitted even to herself that with the amulets and the battery stone empty, she was expending her own energy on the hedge. And they had been at this less than an hour.
“Lizzie?” he asked.
She cleared her throat and strengthened her voice. “Make sure the rocks are all touching each other,” she said. “No gaps.”
“Got it.” He let go her hand and bent in the small space. He adjusted two rocks for a better connection. The weakness in her hands and her spine eased as the energies flowed more smoothly and the hedge strengthened.
But the demon leaned in harder, pressing on that one single point.
The pain returned to her hands and this time ran up from her fingers, wrists, arms, and into her shoulders. Down her spine. Up into her skull. A soft sound of pain escaped her lips. She was panting. Her heart thundered. The ache of power loss pulled her own life-energy out of her and into the hedge.
It had been years since she prayed, but now, in desperation, she said a prayer. Nothing happened. “Blade.” She held out her hand for the knife Eli had taken back. Without argument, he placed it in her right hand. She cut her left fingers again, two this time. She smeared the blood, too much blood, onto the rocks. She had cut too deep, severing a tiny artery, but when the blood pulsed out onto the rocks, the hedge strengthened. Eli knelt beside her when she was done and reapplied gauze, wrapping the fingers tightly, and held it, applying pressure. “Captain America?” she whispered.
He laughed, short and hard, his eyes moving from her fingers to the point of contact with the demon bone. “Not Captain America,” he said.
“I had hoped we’d sleep together tonight,” Liz said.
“Just to be clear, in case you didn’t notice, we’re under attack by a mud demon and you’re telling me, in the middle of said demon attack, that you were hoping we’d have sex. Sex. Not sleeping while I listened to you snore.”
“I do not snore.”
“Sure you do. One night you spent at the inn, I was on in-house patrol. I heard you through your bedroom door. Sort of a soft snorting blowing.”
She blushed, her face going hot. “Just to be clear, I was talking about sex and you changed it to snoring.”
He grinned at her outrage and embarrassment. “I find your snores adorable.” He let go of her fingers, stood, and ran a weapons’ check. He looked longingly at the shotgun outside the firepit, out of reach. “So how do we hold off a demon and a werewolf?” he asked, sounding almost casual. And not even hinting that they might lose this battle. Warrior to the bone.
“Blood,” she said, her panting easing. “And—” She stopped, remembering when the hedge of thorns opened. The energies had only penetrated the soil by about eight inches. The hedge was designed to go several feet underground. “I can try to recharge my amulets via long distance. These in the firepit are already drained.” She stopped to breathe, though it didn’t really help. “But the rocks at the waterfall were like the tips of icebergs, big buried boulders sitting on the leyline. I don’t know if they’re close enough to siphon from, but I need to try. And since I left some blood in the cave, I might have a way to tie me, here, to the stones and the leyline.” She looked up at him and said, “You hold me upright, make sure I don’t fall through the hedge, and I’ll see if I can transfer some of the leyline energy to my amulets, or to the circle stones here.” One part of her mind was already working through the geometry and the methodology of such a transfer. Even if it worked, it was going to suck.
One of Eli’s arms went around her. The other was holding that handgun. Which he still couldn’t fire unless the hedge went down. Bullets wouldn’t hurt a demon but might hurt a werewolf if it was loaded with the right ammo. “Silver composite rounds?” she asked.
“One mag. The other is standard, but once the werewolf— or werewolves—are down, the standard rounds will take it out. That?” he inclined his head to the demon, “I need to know what will hurt it.”
Liz peeled off the makeshift bandage. “Let’s try this.” She made a fist and relaxed it; made another. The wound opened again. Liz flung her blood at the hedge in front of the demon. Droplets scattered across the defensive working.
The demon reacted with a sharp jerk. Pulled away. It growled, a sound like sucking mud.
Liz said, “O
kay. Good to know. Blood works. A demon bound since the time of Christ? Beats me. Holy water? Silver? Salt from the Dead Sea? You got a silver cross?”
“Always. The holy water is in my backpack.” He nodded to the backpack outside the firepit. He reached inside his T-shirt and pulled out a chain. On the end dangled a crucifix, the kind with the bloody dead Christ on it. The demon stepped back at the sight and roared as if Eli had shot it.
This demon, who had no knowledge of the Holy Land, hated crosses. Interesting. Liz said, “Captain America with a crucifix. I didn’t know you’re Catholic.”
“We’ll talk about religion later. After a better date, because this one sucks right now.”
Liz laughed and said, “Amen to that.” She slung more blood on to the hedge. It was her blood, and her hedge and so… that was good to know. “Now shut up while I try to pull in more power.” She lifted her necklace and ran her unbloodied fingers through the beads and amulets. “Cross worked. Okay, let’s try this.” She chose a single depleted amulet and wiped her blood over it. The amulet was a silver cross with a bit of ancient glass in the center, glass from the Holy Land, taken from a two thousand year old archeology site. She looked at Eli in the darkness. “Oh. Prayer. If you believe in that sort of thing.”
“I believe. About the size of a grain of a mustard seed, but that’s supposed to be enough.” When Liz didn’t reply, he said, “If prayer will hurt that thing, then I’ll pray. I’ve seen Jane pray and I’ve seen her when she doesn’t pray. And I grew up with a grammaw who prayed like a machinegun. When grammaw prayed, there was a difference in her and her world.”
The demon eased closer and once again placed the sharp bone on the working. The hedge shivered at the point of demon contact. That small spot glowed instantly red and then began to dim, much faster this time. The color change went from red to a glowing orange, as the power of the working began to fade.
Eli tightened his hold her. “Better hurry.”
“Yeah. I see that.” Liz went limp. She started searching through the upper layer of soil for a stone close to the surface, trying to see what was there and what wasn’t. Searching through this ground for rocks to draw power from wasn’t easy because there was a lot of rotted organic matter mixed in with sand and microscopic rocks, and there was a layer of clay about eighteen inches under the ground. The layer of clay was smooth and clean and dense, and it resisted her magics. She pried and pressed, and eventually resorted to tapping with her magic, hunting for the vibrations in the rocks buried in the clay. It took too long, but she found an oval one about six inches below the clay surface. Then another. Her connection to the stones was iffy, like an old radio signal skipping in and out, but they gave her a bit of respite and let her draw power into her battery stone and into the ring of stone.
When she could breathe again, she tried to figure out why she was having so much trouble searching through the ground. She had pushed through clay before, so it had to be because all the power in the entire area had been tied up in binding the demon. She searched lower, out, in small, six inch spirals, draining the power from the energies of the earth stored in each stone. She found a larger rock out, toward the leyline. Another. The clay, with its weird draining energies thinned and she hit dirt again. Out from here, the clay was just in patches. Her pain decreased and her breath came easier. The hedge strengthened.
“You got this, Lizzie,” Eli whispered in her ear. “It’s working.”
Wending her way through the ground, she moved closer and closer to the leyline beneath the pool.
“Put my hand on one of the rocks,” she whispered. “Make sure there’s blood contact.” Her body jostled. She was sitting cradled between Eli’s thighs, her back against his abdomen. She realized that he was still holding her upper body upright. His hand felt hot when it took hers and squeezed the puncture site open again before placing it on to a rock. “Keep me bleeding,” she said, as she skipped a longer distance to a more remote boulder. The jump this time was closer to eighteen inches and she felt winded just making that leap.
“Would my blood help?” he whispered.
“The prayer of a righteous man,” she quoted, thinking it might be from a long ago Sunday School scripture.
She felt an incredible heat as Eli mixed his blood across her fingers and onto the rocks around them. “There is ‘Power in the Blood,’ ” he said. “That’s an old hymn my grammaw used to sing.”
“Sing it,” Liz breathed.
“My grammaw was as anti-witch as they came. The idea that a witch would cut herself and have me sing about the blood of the redeemer would either make her throw something at me or hug you. Maybe both.” Eli chuckled as if he hadn’t a care in the world and said, “Karaoke in the middle of a magical battle. This one’s for you, Grammaw.” The first notes were as mellow as the moonlight teasing through the canopy of burned leaves overhead as Eli began to sing the old hymn. The tones filled the clearing, vibrating in the air, and as Liz breathed in that air, she smiled and relaxed against him.
The hedge grew stronger. The cross amulet grew stronger. There was power in Eli’s faith and Eli’s song. Even if he didn’t know it.
Eli
Where to cut yourself when helping a witch keep up a magical protection from a demon hadn’t been included in his extensive military training, so he was winging it. Unlike the witch, he chose to make small slices in the thin skin of the thinner part of his wrist, not his fingertips. The skin was thicker on fingers, had thousands more nerve endings, so it hurt more, made it difficult for him to use weapons properly, and healed much slower. Since it worked for him, he tried it on her. Cutting a comrade-in-arms was a new experience for him. He’d taken out his fair share of enemies with blades. He’d picked up a soldier’s leg and loaded it into a helo with him once when the guy stepped on an IED, but he’d never actually cut a noncombatant on purpose, except to save a life.
He sang until he ran out of remembered hymns and his voice went hoarse from lack of moisture. He checked his cell every thirty mikes, watching for progress reports texted by Alex. When the hedge began to fail again, he cut them both again and mixed their blood onto the rocks. But that didn’t seem to be enough. He hunted through all his pockets until he found five plastic-wrapped candies that he kept on hand for patients whose blood sugar dropped. They were old and the plastic was adhered to the candy, but it was better than nothing.
Around the gooey, plastic-y candy, again he sang.
For three hours, Eli cut them both and sang hymns about blood, several songs over and over, until his voice was only a whisper and he had to open another disappearing candy to keep his mouth moisturized. And he cut and cut, not looking at his backpack with the water outside the circle. Not looking at the other bottles tantalizingly out of reach next to their supper. They bled over rocks, and he held Lizzie. He reopened wounds until he needed stitches, wrapping each wound when it got too deep from the repeated cuts and moving onto a different location.
Finally, Lizzie stirred and sat up. Her voice was as dry as his when she said, “I’ve drained all the energy I can from the boulders. The leyline is just beyond the last boulder I can reach, but I can’t tap into it from underground. Stupid thing just sits there, glimmering with all that power, tied up in the working that bound the demon.” She laughed softly, a hoarse, mocking sound. “If I had a full coven of five or seven, with a properly constructed witch circle, reaching it would have been a piece of cake. Instead, it’s like a mirage. Close. And yet not really there.”
Around them, the hedge began to waver again at the point of contact with the demon’s broken bone. Eli didn’t tense around her. Didn’t give away what he’d seen.
“See this?” she asked. Lizzie pointed down, indicating the bright energies of the silver box. It was glowing in her seeing working, a shocking scarlet.
“I see it.”
“Wanna know what’s funny?” she asked.
“Sure. Tell me a joke.”
“Not what I meant, but o
kay. Why not? Knock knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“Werewolf. There wolf. And that’s why,” she pointed out into the woods, beyond the mud demon. With her witch sight, he saw brilliant green-yellow paranormal forms moving toward the campsite. Mixed with the green, were dark spots of curse-brown. Not on them, but in them. “It’s been said that were-creatures were made when an ancient goddess cursed them, so they carry the dark of blood-curse in their skin. Like I do. I’m guessing that means they’ll want me.”
Eli tightened his arms and legs around her, staring back and forth between the cursed shapes moving toward them and the heated silver box. It was glowing so hot he could feel the fire from only inches away. No question now. Werewolves were tied magically to the amulet in the silver box. They had been sent here.
“When they get here, they’ll attack the hedge too. And it will go down. That is gonna suck mightily,” she said.
He said, “When the wolves get here, you’ll have to drop the hedge and run away from the demon. Fast. So I can fire at the wolves.”
“I’ll never be able to run,” she said. “I’m so tired my heart hurts when it beats.”
That wasn’t good. “How long can you hold the hedge when they get here?”
“I’m draining myself. If I keep draining my own life energies at this rate, I’ll be dead in…” she gave a feeble shrug, “half an hour?”
A very faint, familiar throbbing sound echoed over the hills. Eli went from abject terror at her words to a spark of hope. “Okay. Hang on, Lizzie,” Eli said. “The helo’s almost here.” He shifted her and sent a text to Alex asking for a text number to whoever was on the helo.
“How’s you wifi battery on the hilltop doing?” Liz mumbled. “I just realized you’ve been texting for hours as I drained rocks and we bled.”