Dirty Deeds

by R. J. Blain

  The grindy, looking like a cute kitten, scampered in his wake.

  Liz

  Eli appeared at the edge of the clearing and dropped a small pack. He was soaked to the skin. He looked ashy with oxygen loss. He was breathing hard and fast, holding his shotgun in one hand and another small bag in the other. He slung back the gun, hefted the bag, and took something in his thumb and forefinger. He asked, “You ready?” His voice was raspy and sounded pained.

  The demon turned to Eli. It roared. It lumbered across the clearing.

  “Now!” Eli shouted.

  The hedge dropped. Eli sprinted to his left. The demon pivoted to follow, growing another leg for leverage. With his off hand, Eli tossed something small to the side of the demon. With his other hand, he swung back like a softball pitcher and chucked the bag into the firepit. It landed in Liz’s lap.

  The hedge of thorns blazed back up.

  The demon stopped and slid another limb along the ground until it picked up the thing that Eli had tossed. It was a small chip of bone. The chip disappeared, pulled into the mud demon’s body. Ignoring the human, the vamp, and the dead werewolf bodies, the demon returned to the hedge. It pressed the original bone fragment into the protective energies. At the point of contact, the hedge was again brown. The edge of the moon was just below the tip of the hills. It would drop behind them soon. Cia would lose all her power in an instant.

  Liz bent her head to the bag. She could feel the power in the copper and bone through the padded waterproof bag. This was dangerous. If she miscalculated, the demon might be able to use this magic to attack Cia. The copper was cold, cold, cold, burning cold. So were the bones. How had Eli touched the fragment he had tossed? His fingers had to be in bad shape.

  “How did you know that throwing a piece of bone at it would work?” Cia asked Eli.

  “You said it might attack me when I brought back a piece of the bone. So I brought five and gave it one. Basic logic.” He started coughing. To combat it he breathed deeper. Hard to do when your lungs are spasming. Liz knew.

  “You gonna be okay?” Cia asked. “Because I need to help my twin and you look and sound like you’re dying.”

  “I’ve been gassed before. I’ll recover. Besides, I was only in the cave for three and half minutes. Your twin was likely in there a lot longer.”

  Cia eyed her and sighed sadly. “She never has taken good care of herself.”

  On the ground, one of the werewolves twitched. Eli whirled and fired the shotgun. Which hadn’t even been in his hands until that moment. “Captain America,” Liz murmured. “Okay. I’m trying to remember what the original binding of the skeleton looked like,” she continued. “How much Holy Water do we have?”

  “I have two in my pack,” Eli said.

  “I have one more on my belt and three in my pack,” Jane said from the edge of the trees. Lincoln, standing beside her, looked back and forth between them, faint alarm on his face. Jane tossed the bottles of Holy Water to Eli, one by one, and he caught them, tucking them into the crook of his arm.

  “This isn’t enough to wash all the demon’s mud away,” Liz said, “but maybe there’s enough to weaken it. Can you put all the water into one container?” she asked Eli. “Then when I say so, throw it or squirt it on the demon? All of it? At one time?”

  “Can do,” Eli said. He knelt and opened his pack, removing a silicone baggie. Methodically, he poured all the bottles of Holy Water into the baggie and zipped it closed.

  “Just be so kind as to aim away from me when you throw that shit,” Shaddock said. “Begging your pardon ladies.”

  Eli gave the vampire his battle smile, a tiny quirk of his lips. “Will do, fanghead.”

  Liz removed all her bandages and studied her hands and wrists. They were in bad shape. She needed stitches to close some of the cuts. But she needed blood to make this work. She inspected higher and discovered that she was still bleeding from one cut on her lower left arm. That would do. “Okay. “I’m going back into the magic of the cave and see if I can begin the rebinding.” Liz closed her eyes.

  Once more she sent magic zinging through the earth, so much faster this time, an old route through the ground. Into the cave. And right up to the skull. “Hello, you little bastard,” she said aloud to the skull. “Did you fight the possession? Or did the power seduce you?” As it would try to seduce her if she failed. And honestly, if she failed, she would want the magical power. That was the nature of all power, to always want more, no matter the cost.

  “Dang,” she murmured, opening her eyes on the surface, while still holding onto the seeing working in the cave, the place of binding. “I need some plant material.”

  Cia picked up some leaves and twigs and placed them in Liz’s lap with the bag. “You can thank Jane’s crazy run through the hills for these. I’m lucky to be alive.”

  Liz smiled. “Do you remember the Irish Gaelic for, ‘Must remain in place?’ ”

  “Of course.”

  “Okay. Sit at north.”

  Cia tilted her head, finding the position of the moon in her witch gifts. She slid around to the side. Liz lifted her now powerless amulet necklace and opened the clasp. She let all the depleted stones slide off, to trickle onto the ground between her knees. She added the battery stone, which was also nearly drained.

  “Put all your moonstones into the pile.”

  “All?” Cia sounded horrified.

  “All.”

  “You screw this up and bust my moonstones, and we are gonna have a long chat, Lizzie.”

  “I screw this up,” she hesitated, her damaged fingers on the bag. “I screw this up and you need to get Eli to put a silver bullet in my brain. Because if I screw it up, the demon will drop that mud body and be inside me.”

  “Well, hell,” her twin said.

  “Pretty much. And you will not let me kill you or leave this place with that thing in me.”

  “Then you bind that twice bedamned thing and we’ll get it back into the cave.”

  Twice bedamned and thrice bedamned were their grandmother’s favorite cuss words. It spoke to family and witch power and a history of protecting the world with the gifts given to them. Liz nodded. “Right.” She looked at the demon. Its shattered bone was pressing into the hedge of thorns, widening a dark brown spot of weakness. Her sister’s hedge was failing. “How long to full moonset?”

  “Not long. Make it work.”

  “Thanks for the leaves.” Liz slid her power into the earth and fast back to the cave. With her magic in the cave, and with her magic in the firepit, Liz began weaving the twigs and leaves together with her power, simulating the original biological material. Drawing on the power of the leyline, she picked up the small stones of her amulet necklace and added them to the mix. As the power grew stronger, she added more stones, those still inside the cave. When she had the power all in one place, just below the surface of the cavern floor, she began to weave in the floor and the walls and the ceiling of the stone cave. Granite, marble, a mixed jumble of massive rocks. Unlike Liz, whoever created the first binding hadn’t been a stone witch as she understood the concept. Their coven—had there even been one? —had worked magic in ways that felt foreign and like a babble of magic, mixed colors and textures, like a yarn shop hit by a tornado, the skeins all tangled together. The practitioners had used water and green things and woven ropes made of the sinews of animals for the binding. They had put stasis workings on the greenery, the sinews, and the stone walls, but the workings had become poorly connected over the centuries. With the cave-in at the entrance, everything had finally begun to rot. Disintegrate. And because of her, it was happening faster and faster. The original binding was nearly torn asunder.

  Liz pulled the last remaining power from the firepit, from her own stones and amulets, and from her own flesh. She wove it all together into the binding working. She pulled on the moonstones and the moon-power and heard Cia gasp.

  With all the power in her grasp, Liz sank deeply into the leyli
ne. The power had a structure, a shape. It was composed of circles and lines, dots and waves, knotted bunches of them all together that looked like weavings. The magic in it moved fast. She had a momentary worry that if she fell in, the energies there would take her through to another time and place. As if space and time were all screwed up here, in the leyline and the dark cave.

  She braided and wrapped and twisted strands of the leyline together with her own magic, with Cia’s moon-magic, and created a strand as dense and heavy as a bridge-spanning steel cable. She braided another. And another.

  When she had three cables of power she whispered, “Bone.”

  Cia put the first piece of bone between her fingers. It burned, like handling a coal from an old, superhot fire.

  Liz added the copper rectangle, shoving it under the dressing, pressing them together. She forced them hard against her lower arm, near her elbow, into the bloody mess there. The power of the leyline scorched through her body, fast, filling the stones of the firepit, filling her amulets, filling Cia’s moonstone amulets.

  Cia made a different sound, a breath of relief that let Liz know how close they had been to losing the protection of the hedge. And that it was fully strong again. She added the rest of the bone fragments, pressing them deep into her blood.

  Closing her eyes, so her mind could follow only the energies, she pulled in the frayed threads of the ancient binding working. Using the copper and the bones still in the pit of the cave, she rewove the old working with the leyline. When it was strong, when it incorporated the entire cave, every rock in it tied into the leyline, she followed the last thread of the original binding back to the demon. She began to tug.

  The demon screamed.

  Her voice shaking, she said, “Cia, speak the words for ‘Must remain in place.’”

  “Ní mór fós i bhfeidhm,” Cia said.

  “Eli,” Liz said, a bit stronger. “Now.”

  She felt it the moment the Holy Water hit the demon. It lost its cohesiveness. The mud exploded outward, over the hedge, over the clearing. It exploded everywhere. Foul stinking filth, the rot of an abattoir. Shaddock cursed. The others said other things.

  The demon roared and screamed, and it was the sound of bones breaking, the sound of death and dying and loss and fury. A heated wind blasted through. The scream went higher and higher in pitch until her ears ached with the squeal.

  It went silent. Over the deafness of the scream, into the sudden silence, Liz heard a sound like whooomp, followed by clattering, popping, sizzling. She opened her eyes to see that a heavy layer of mud coated the hedge, dripping down it in globs and runnels. In one narrow open area, she could see out. On the ground beyond the hedge, were bones and sticks and rotted bindings scattered in small piles near the firepit. Everything steamed as if it had been boiled. A slimy, blackened scattering.

  With the power of the leyline, Liz drew all the bones together into a net of energies. They scuttled across the ground to the firepit like spiders and rats, gathering into a single clump. “Drop the hedge,” she said.

  “You’re gonna regret that,” Cia said. “I know I am. I loved these jeans.”

  The hedge fell. The demon’s inactivated, rotten mud collapsed onto them. The stench was so intense and foul that Liz nearly lost her hold on the energies. Cia gagged and swore. The filth dripped down their heads and shoulders and backs. Into Liz’s shirt, where it slid down her bare skin. She gagged too. But she kept hold of the binding.

  “We need a backpack big enough to hold the bones and my necklace and my battery stone.”

  “You can have mine. I’ll never be able to get the stink out,” Cia said.

  Her twin stepped from the circle, shaking off the filth in spatters of grossness. She emptied out her once-pink backpack and placed it near the bones. “How are you planning to get the bones into the pack without us touching them?”

  “Eli you still got gloves?” Liz asked, knowing the answer.

  Eli pulled on the gloves from his kit and knelt beside her. “Ready?” he asked.

  “Go for it. Don’t let any of them touch your skin.”

  “Roger that.”

  Liz watched as he carefully lifted and placed each bone into the backpack, making certain that nothing would shift and touch his skin as he worked. When he had all the longer bones and the fragments from the muddy earth, Liz added the small shards from her bandages, and dropped in the copper link. The magic binding clicked into place with an audible sound and an internal vibration she felt in her blood-cursed flesh and deep into her bones. “Now we put it back,” she said.

  Eli zipped the backpack closed, pulled off the gloves, tucked them into a pocket, and lifted the backpack straps by one hand. After testing whether it would hurt him, he tossed the backpack over his shoulder and slung the shotgun forward. He held out his other hand to her and, careful of her injuries, helped her to her feet.

  She was unsteady from blood loss and had to pee so bad it hurt to walk, but she took his hand and let him lead her out of the bloody, muddy firepit back up the hill to the pool. It was a miserable traipse. Her legs ached. Her feet hurt. She stank like a sewer filled with rotting corpses and she was freezing. But Eli’s hand was warm and dependable. His touch steadied her. “Shotgun?” she managed to ask through a voice that was rough with misery and overuse.

  “Just in case of more werewolves.” he said. “Oh, Fanghead,” he called to Lincoln over his shoulder. “The grindy left a werewolf corpse by the pool. It’s all yours.”

  Lincoln said drily, “Your kindness is boundless.”

  “Think nothing of it.”

  They made their slow, precarious way up the hill, upstream. The others, Cia, Shaddock, Brute, Jane, who looked weak as well water in human form, filed behind them, some of them stumbling in the dark. It took an age, but the pool and waterfall finally came into view. Eli asked, “In the pool or around the side?”

  “Much as I would love a good wash right now, I don’t want to risk getting the bones wet.”

  “Copy that. Side it is. It’s slippery.” He started out and Liz stopped him.

  “Maybe I should go first. Just in case.”

  Eli took a single step back and waited.

  Holding on to the tree, avoiding the dead body, Liz climbed up the rocks, and roots and eased around the tree. Carefully, holding onto stones and trees, her hands aching with each grip, she worked her way across the rock and under the waterfall. Which was icy and glorious for the two seconds it took to get one foot inside and take a sniff.

  The gasses were still here, but not nearly as dense as before she pulled all the energies into one spot and wrapped them around every bit of stone in here. She could breathe. Holding on to a rock that was now covered with dead moss, she extended a hand back out. Eli placed the backpack straps into her hand and she swiveled her body, bringing it inside, protecting it from the waterfall with her body. Again, washing off some of the mud in her hair was the best thing ever.

  Eli followed her, shotgun in his hands.

  When they were both inside the cave, Cia came in, muttering about mud and expensive boots and jeans and her hair and how she would never smell good again. If Cia was griping, then things were probably going to be okay. Cia placed a moonstone on a low, broken rock and activated a light working. Bright as a candle, it lit the cave. She said, “Oh, looky. A skull, a murder weapon, and everything. Perfect for a Halloween haunted house. I’ll have to remember this.”

  Eli swept the room with his eyes, drew a vamp-killer, and faced back out toward the falls. Guard duty.

  The twins discussed whether they had to open the backpack and decided they didn’t. Holding onto each other for balance, they dropped the backpack on the copper chain, near the skull. “Take north,” Liz said. Her sister moved around the pit and sat. Based on her position, Liz took east. They didn’t have to cast a circle, not with the leyline all around them.

  “Son of a witch,” Cia swore, and shivered. “This feels good.”

  “
Too good. Don’t get drunk.”

  Cia put back her muddy head and breathed in the power.

  “Cia,” Liz warned.

  “I know, I know.” She sounded disgusted. “Let’s finish this.”

  “On three, we say the binding, three times,” Liz said.

  “It’s gonna hurt,” Cia said.

  “Probably. One, two, three.”

  Together they said, “Ní mór fós i bhfeidhm,”

  The bones in the filthy backpack rattled. The skull shook and rolled over, landing against the backpack. The leyline blazed with power, wrapping itself around the backpack and the bones. The copper chain clinked and rattled and slipped around the backpack. Around the skull.

  “Ní mór fós i bhfeidhm,” they said.

  The chain tightened. The ax head moved and thudded around inside the skull. Liz pulled the piece of copper and bones from her bag and tossed them into the pit. They struck the bones and disappeared.

  “Ní mór fós i bhfeidhm.”

  The leyline sang a note like an angel in heaven, pure and strong and so high it vibrated the stones. And then the ground began to quake.

  “Out, out, out!” Liz said, struggling to her feet. Eli yanked them both up by the arms and threw Liz out of the cave, into the hands of Lincoln Shaddock. Vamp-strong, he caught her before she landed in the pool and set her to the side, on the ground. He caught Cia next. And then he grabbed Eli midleap. “Move,” Liz said.

  The earth quaked and shook. She fell and Eli dragged her along. Shaddock picked up Cia and carried her down the hill. Vamp-fast. Brute growled and disappeared. Which would probably be freaky if she ever examined it too closely. Behind them, the cave shuddered. Rock fell with a landslide, into the cave itself, and into the water. The cave roof came down. They all fell with the impact. Caught themselves on trees or rolled in the dirt.