Dirty Deeds

by R. J. Blain

  “He’s a woman-chasing, human-hunting, bloodsucker, Mabs,” Bedelia said casually, cutting him to the bone. “Why do you care?”

  “It’s been a while,” Mable said with asperity. “I’d like a night of fun and wine and wild sex under the full moon.”

  “I’ll pass that along,” Bedelia said, her tone as dry as the Sahara.

  “You do that. Tell him I’ll bring the wine.”

  Staring straight ahead, Bedelia ended the call.

  Linc said, “‘A woman-chasing, human-hunting, bloodsucker’?” He touched his chest. “I’m decimated, Bee. I weep at the characterization.”

  “Uh huh. You want a date with Mabs?”

  “No. As I recall, your friend Mable is a scrawny bottle-blond who smokes clove cigarettes, marijuana doobies as big as cigars, and drinks far too much while sitting on her front porch and flashing her charms to passersby when she’s drunk.”

  “Nailed it. She thinks you’re cute.”

  “I am a gentleman of the highest order, well educated, a fine chef, and utterly charming. I am not cute.”

  Bedelia laughed, the notes cascading through the vehicle like bells in a church.

  Walls Linc hadn’t even known were built around his heart tumbled to the ground like the broken protections of Jericho.

  Bee dialed another number.

  Linc drove as the flashes of memories of them together struck through his brain like lightning, burning him.

  Bee said, “Clara Anne, don’t set the vampires on fire. They’re there to keep the werewolves at bay.” Clara Anne squeaked a question that Linc missed. “Yes. Werewolves. And vampires. The Master of the City swears to our security. We’ll be safe. I promise.” That call, too, ended.

  “Don’t set the vampires on fire?” Lincoln asked, his tone both gentle and amused.

  “Mmmm. She has a new working she’s been wanting to try. She calls it a making vamps crispy working. But there’s a time and a place for everything. Tonight isn’t it.”

  “As always, Bedelia, you terrify me,” he said. She laughed again but he meant every word. She had broken him—heart, mind, and spirit—when she walked away. Or, rather, when he drove her away because he was a fool and had wanted her on his terms, not on hers. He thought the decades had healed that brokenness. He’d been wrong.

  Bedelia

  Linc pulled up to the old Coraville coven home. He stopped, put the SUV in park, and waited, looking out over the grounds and into the rearview. Bedelia followed his gaze behind them, where his people had stopped about a hundred yards back, parked, and got out. They were heavily armed with shotguns and swords. They did that vampire thing where they disappeared into the darkness like wraiths. It was frightening and beautiful and comforting all at once.

  “Can you tell if Shania is home?” she asked, turning her eyes back to the house.

  “One of my people has been here since I was notified. She’s sensed no one in that time. She did, however, tell me that someone had been here just before she arrived.”

  Vampire noses. When you hunt humans for your dinner, you know when prey is around. Or not. Bedelia frowned, knowing he could smell her dismay.

  “Clara Anne and Mable are here,” Linc said, not reacting to her scent change.

  “Can you get inside and find something the witch has used, only the witch? Something personal? Hairbrush? Toothbrush?”

  “Of course.” Linc lowered his window and said softly, “Mary. You heard.”

  “On it,” a voice said out of the dark.

  The window went back up. “What else?” he asked.

  Bedelia pulled her shoulder bag close and reached inside. There was a lot of witch paraphernalia in it, but the lead-lined box from the closet wall took up the most room. She removed it. Placed it on the dash.

  “Bee?” Lincoln asked softly. Clearly he knew what was inside.

  “Once we have the personal item, we can call the witch. You will have to tackle her and put them on her. Fast.”

  “Them?” he asked, the word nearly silky, making her say it.

  “Null cuffs,” she groused. “No, they aren’t legal for me to have. No, the witch council didn’t authorize them. Yes, they’re dangerous for me to have. Will you put them on the witch when she shows or not?”

  Linc took the box. “You know I will. Bee, I understand that Asheville is Everhart territory, but you seemed to know this place the moment I mentioned it. You seemed unsurprised she would come to this exact spot. You seem to know something about this place that I do not. How did you know that your enemy would be here?”

  “This is a calling ground. Something like… like a myth of power. Like a treasure map. Or King Arthur’s round table. When witches move into the area, they always come here, looking for the Coraville witch circle. Looking for power to accomplish some aim.”

  “So it wasn’t a coincidence that she came here, to a place you know about?”

  That silky voice. It had once sent shivers up her spine.

  “No. Not coincidence. The Coraville circle is buried and locked into a leyline. Most young witches come here on the full moon and try to find the circle, but they can’t find it in one night, on one try. It takes patience and weeks, which most witches don’t have. Mayhew simply had more resources than most. She rented the place.”

  “I see.”

  Linc said nothing else and Bedelia pulled her cell and called her cohorts. She told each that the coast was clear. Moments later the witches pulled up behind Linc’s SUV. Bedelia got out, slung her bag and the ugly sweater over a shoulder, and met the two witches in the dark of the currently moonless night. The others each carried a blanket and a small bag, and each was wearing their amulet necklaces. When they reached one another, they took hands. Together they all said, “Well met and well come. Blessed be, a meeting of three.”

  “How do we catch this bitch?” Mabs asked.

  “You won’t like it. We call her. Lincoln Shaddock has a set of null cuffs,” Bedelia said, knowing Mable would object, but her old friend surprised her.

  “Good. They hurt like a mother, but they stop all magical energies.”

  “How do you know they hurt?” Clara Anne asked.

  Mabs winked at them both and shimmied her skinny shoulders. “I’ll try anything once. Come on. Let’s get this witch trap set.”

  “Oh, dear. Age hasn’t softened you at all, has it?” Clara Anne asked.

  “Nope. Hot-to-trot old cougar here. I like ’em young and don’t mind the fangy types.”

  Bedelia resisted looking back at the SUV. She knew Linc was gone, despite the lack of a door opening and closing. But she didn’t look too closely at how she knew he’d melted into the night. Vampires were crafty, silent, and deadly, and Linc had always been much more than he seemed. “Let’s clip the plantings we need.”

  A woman appeared out of the night with a soft popping sound. Bedelia was expecting her, but Clara Anne flinched and Mabs yelped, both dropping her hands. The vampire bowed deeply and, from that vulnerable position, held out a pillowcase. “My lady. These are the personal items found within the abode: a bra and a toothbrush. I placed them in a clean, unused pillowcase. I did not touch them.”

  “Thank you,” Bedelia said. She took the items, tucking the pillowcase into her shoulder bag. The vampire walked away.

  “I hope they don’t do everything that fast,” Mabs said. “That would be disappointing.”

  Bedelia laughed softly, thinking, No. They most certainly do not do everything so fast…

  “Let’s clip our plant focals and get this show on the road,” Clara Anne said. “Moonrise isn’t too far off and we need Mable in place.” They walked away from one another. Bedelia went toward the house and clipped a few sprigs off the rosemary she’d planted here so long ago. It was massive, taking over much of what once had been a well-tended herb garden. Mabs walked to a rowan tree and, because it had grown so tall, used her scissors to scrape and peel off a bit of bark. She picked up a few leaves from the grou
nd. Clara Anne walked around the house, hunting, and finally came back with a mullein leaf, a stem of wilted looking sage, and a sprig of silver artemisia. They each tucked their clippings into their small bags.

  Holding hands again, the witches crossed the lawn to the flat place just in front of the cliff edge, the precipice where the earth plunged down to a sharp curve of the French Broad River below. The night winds were blowing, inversion layers mixing it up, and the air currents followed the water downstream until they hit the cliff at the elbow of the river and rose fast, up the cliff face, to explode into the clearing. They stood there, silent, peaceful, the wind whipping their hair and clothing. Bedelia pulled all that air magic into her body, the blast of current into her lungs. It was a little like having a glass of wine, heady and freeing. Bedelia felt all the tension she carried in her shoulders evaporate into the air. She dropped her head back, face to the sky. Joyous.

  Through their linked hands, she shared the power of the air with her closest friends. Minutes passed. “Ohhhh,” Clara Anne said. “Thanks be and glory be.”

  Mabs, who no longer sounded flirty or silly, but peaceful and wise, used the cadence of ceremony and said, “Well met and well come. Blessed be, a meeting of three.”

  Clara Anne and then Bedelia repeated the words of gathering. It was old school language, old cadence, unlike what the younger witches used. Comforting to them all.

  They released hands, turned a hundred-eighty degrees, and walked back to the spot of the buried circle. Standing outside the buried ring, its power banked, hidden, shielded, and chained, they kicked off their shoes, their feet in contact with the Earth.

  Bedelia, as the one who called this circle, said, “Let us begin.”

  “When the Coraville coven died out, we buried items of power, we planted seeds and rootlings of power, and together we bound this land,” Mabs said, continuing the words of the ceremony from so many years ago. “Together we three, among a very few others, claimed this place for witches and women of power, but limited it, for the danger its unshackled might could pose to the untrained and the foolish.”

  Clara Anne took up the narrative. “Together we claimed the land, this place of power, and the buried circle as sacred, sanctified, and sacrosanct, set aside for future use, for such a time when evil would need to be fought, set aside for the women warriors, the witches of this land, to use and call upon.”

  Bedelia continued, “We expected men to try and take it. Instead, those of our own sex have always been drawn here, and once again, one such has sought to use this place for evil vengeance.”

  Clara Anne said, “The buried circle is a place of power for the women. But its purpose is for the good of humankind… and is under…”

  Together they all said, like a pronouncement, “The Rule of Three.”

  Together they stepped over the long-buried stones, a single long stride that carried them within.

  Mabs said, “For the good of humankind, and beneath the Rule of Three.”

  “Three women of power,” Mabel said.

  “And no single power and no single user may exploit it or filch it or consume it unto evil,” Bedelia said

  “The Rule of Three. So let it be,” they said together. The energies began to rise through the earth, a tingling and sense of expectancy, like the feel of lightning before a strike. The air rising up the cliff swept through the circle in a whirl of power, a strong but small tornado.

  “Let us claim the circle,” Mabs said. “Who shall be north?”

  “Bedelia,” Clara Anne said, “for the Everhart witch clan has been challenged.”

  “Accepted,” Mabs said. “I shall be east.” Mabs went and stood at east.

  “I shall be west,” Clara said, taking that place.

  “And so south shall be vacant,” Bedelia said. “I’ll place the calling items in the center of the circle.” Taking the pillowcase from her bag, she went to the very center of the buried circle and upended it. The two items landed together, the bra wrapped around the hairbrush, and she took her place at north. North meant she was the leader of this calling working. She said, “Thrice around the circle we go, sunwise, each time dropping an item of our power at south.”

  “Sunwise,” they repeated, and Clara added, “deosil, sunward, the path of power.”

  The women dropped a sweater or blanket and anything they didn’t want to carry at the moment. Then, as if on the same beat of an unheard drum, they began the trek clockwise around the buried circle, feeling the path with their feet. And each time they passed the cardinal point of south, they dropped something they had planted in the yard and gathered just now.

  None of their actions were necessary parts of magic. Magic simply was. It was everywhere, a part of the universe, a part of all life, a part of every stone and flower. It was energy and life and the beginning of all creation.

  Unless one had direct access to leyline energies and had the ability to work raw power without getting drunk and falling over to sleep it off, one had to gather the energy of the universe slowly through meditation, and then channel that power through the math of geometry and a little calculus and physics, while adjusting one’s own inner energies to merge with the will and purpose of the group. Tapping into the power of the Earth and stars and sun and moon and water and air and stone, and binding it to one’s will was difficult, but that hard work had been done, sealing the circle here, years ago. Now they had only to claim the energies through the treading of their feet.

  The three sunwise trips were done quickly and they retook their places. As one, they sat and got comfy. That part wasn’t as easy as it used to be. The ground, even with the ugly sweater beneath her, felt a lot harder than it had been last time, though Bedelia had more backside padding now than back then. They all closed their eyes. Their power rose. The witch energies raced through the buried stones, freed after bound so long. Released, the circle sent images of other witches who had crossed this land. The last time, the strongest time, was last night. Seven paranormals had gathered here, three of them both witches and other. The other paranormal energies were unfamiliar, sharp and slivered, cutting and cold, like broken obsidian lying on frozen ground. Bedelia’s eyes popped open and found Mabs and Clara staring at her. They had seen the same wrong energies—witch and other. The four non-witch magic users were also other.

  Bedelia felt through the ground the vibrations of the witches who had tried to find and claim the circle. They smelled the witches on the breeze, tasted their magic in the air.

  “Foul,” Mabs whispered.

  “Abomination,” Clara Anne said.

  “Can we trap all three of the witches?” Bedelia asked.

  “We only need to call one,” Clara Anne said, reminding her. “When she drives up, the vampires can grab her and put the null cuffs on her. From her, your vampires can find the other two and claim them. One at a time.”

  Clara meant that Lincoln and his vampires could bleed and read the captured witch. If she hadn’t tasted the abomination in the witches’ magic just now, she would have thought the suggestion repugnant. Now, anything that cleansed the earth of these foul creatures would be the right thing to do.

  She linked to the skin cells on the personal items and said, “By the Power of Three, we call the witch.” The others echoed her.

  Lincoln

  He was watching Bedelia speaking the words of a summoning when the stink came to him on the air. Wet dog. Odd sweet-sick scent overlaying its primary scent. Female dog, in heat. The scent of sweetness and blood and… insanity.

  Female werewolf. His hunter’s mind knew it.

  Quickly, he sought his Mithran scions through their fresh blood bond and directed them into different positions. Through that bond, he felt their reaction of shock as the scent reached them all, and he directed calm into them.

  A howl shivered through the air, plaintive, desolate, aching. Lost and lonely.

  A creature stepped from the darkness of the trees. It stood there, limned in the night in
his Mithran vision. A silver wolf in half-form—bipedal, standing upright on clawed paw-feet, naked except where wolf-pelt covered her, she carried a silver athame in each half-paw/half-hand, and an amulet necklace of wood beads lay around her half-wolf shoulders, marking her an earth witch. She had a full-wolf head, ears pointing high, wet nose, lips drawn back in a snarl.

  Had he not seen Jane Yellowrock achieve a half-form of a panther/human hybrid, Linc might have been tempted to spin away and run for his life. But he could handle this werewolf witch just fine.

  Out of the woods behind her, another werewolf stepped. Then a third. All female. All in heat. All insane. And three were witches, wearing the amulets of their power around their necks. The Rule of Three as Bedelia had spoken it, but perverted, evil. They were here to claim the Coraville circle and kill anyone who stood in their way. Kill Bedelia if she fought back. And his Bedelia would always fight back.

  The wolves raised their wolf heads and howled. His skin shivered. Holy hell.

  Lincoln glanced back. There was no protective ward around Bedelia and the witches. No hedge of thorns. The circle was defenseless. If the witch-wolves attacked the circle, the rising circle of power where Bedelia sat, it was likely they would break it. The rising energies would backlash. The sitting witches would be injured. They would be unable to protect themselves. They would be killed easily or infected by the attacking werewolves.

  Rage thundered through him. His heart beat. Beat. Beat.

  He drew on all the power gifted him as Master of the City. Drew on the connections he’d made through drinking the blood of his people, from allowing them to sip of him. All the things Bedelia had hated about his life as a vampire clawing his way to the top of a vampire clan, all these things would now save his love. His family. Raising his head, Lincoln Shaddock screamed the battle cry of his old human self, an ululation of rage. He called his people to war. “To me! To me! Silver. Fire at will!”

  Shotguns blasted. But the werewolves were as fast as his kind.