Dark Legacies (Book Four in the Brenna Strachan Series)

by Hadena James

  That narrowed the suspect list to family and a few friends. It wasn’t a real long list, but it numbered above thirty. I couldn’t have Vishnu read their minds, so I had planned to start figuring it out once I regained a body. I just hadn’t had the time yet.

  I wracked my brain trying to figure out the other ones. My memory could only see the angel holding the crossbow, which didn’t help, since half of him was under my house. I needed to know about the other three. They might be indestructible, but we could slow them down. I just wasn’t sure how slow they’d go or how many the ground around my house could hold.

  “Now, get out, but remember, they can’t be housed together. If they are, they grow stronger,” Porlaine flopped over onto his belly and looked towards the wall.

  “Thank you,” I said as we left. He was insane all right, but he also knew about the future. If knowledge was power, I was screwed. I had argued with a fish and only learned a little bit from him. Primarily that my spell book was incomplete.

  “What now?” Pendragon asked.

  “Does anyone remember the tops of the other jars?” I asked.

  “No, it’s like the memory is blank,” Anubis said.

  “Me too. I can only think of the one horseman we’ve seen,” I said.

  “That would be all I can recall as well,” Anubis agreed. “Ezra, there’s nothing you can do to help?”

  “Not really. Don’t tell Porlaine, but Nefera destroyed the original ten books. We’ve spent centuries re-creating them from fragments. No one has anything about the horsemen. Is there really one trapped under the house?”

  “Yes,” I told my book.

  “Do we have to go back to it then?” Ezra asked.

  “No, as a matter of fact, we do not,” Ba’al pointed. We had been walking back to the house as we talked.

  My house had lost all its doors and windows. They weren’t boarded over, they were just gone. It was an obsidian cube with no way in and no way out.

  “The horseman had better not be eating my donuts,” I sighed.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The city was overcrowded. My house was an entry-less obsidian cube currently housing the torso and head of the first horseman. My family was housing homeless refugees. This left me with a room at the prison and not like a guest room, but a prison cell.

  On one side, I had the legs of the horseman. They had reassembled themselves and were now running blindly into walls. On the other side, was Spring-Heeled Jack, who disturbingly kept getting out of his cell and peeking through the window. Luckily, Pendragon had given me a magic vial to lock it from the inside. Directly across from me was a looney Lycan named Victoria, who kept talking in birdcalls.

  The prison was very noisy when Spring-Heeled Jack opened the window. With it closed, I couldn’t hear anything except the occasional thumping of the horseman’s legs running into the adjoining wall. I lay on a bed with a pillow over my head, hoping that sleep would eventually come to me.

  However, just as I would start to fall asleep, Spring-Heeled Jack would open my window and giggle at me. The magic didn’t work on the window. My own magic, still depleted, wasn’t strong enough to work either.

  Nine hours in this place was enough to make anyone crazy. I could hear Victoria tweeting again, meaning the window was open. I pulled the pillow down just enough to see Spring-Heeled Jack’s red eye staring at me. His nose was stuck through the bar.

  “Please, go away,” I finally said to him. He giggled and shut the window. Almost instantly, he reopened it. Then he shut it again. I sighed. It opened again, he giggled again and then he slammed it shut. I got up off the cot and walked to the window. When it opened yet again, I was ready. I grabbed hold of his nose. The giggling increased in both pitch and pace. He tugged and I tugged back. This made him giggle even harder.

  “You might as well stop,” Ezra told me from the desk where he sat.

  “I want him to go away,” I told the book.

  “He isn’t going to go away. He’s just going to keep annoying you.”

  “I can try.”

  Jack jerked his nose out of my fingers. He stood on the other side and giggled. Slowly the face drifted back from the window and a crumbled piece of paper appeared. He shoved it through the window and shut the sliding door.

  “Good grief,” I sighed, looking at the paper.

  “Jack doesn’t write,” Ezra told me.

  “Well, I don’t think he conjured it from thin air. It must be something,” I stared at it, waiting for it to turn into Spring-Heeled Jack. “It looks old.”

  “It’s Jack, it could be a candy wrapper from three hundred years ago.”

  With effort, I squelched the skittish feelings towards the paper and bent down. It was wet. I didn’t want to know why or with what. The paper felt older than anything I’d ever held. It felt like a cottony fiber.

  I opened it. On the page were four drawings. The canopic jars of the horsemen. I recognized the angel with the crossbow.

  “Holy shit!” I exclaimed.

  “What?” Ezra asked.

  “It’s a drawing of the canopic jars, where would Jack have gotten this?”

  “Beats me. Bring it here.”

  I took it so my book could see it. He studied it. Goo dripped onto his cover.

  “That is spit,” Ezra sounded disgusted.

  “From what?” I wiped off the cover.

  “Cerebus.”

  “So, Jack got it from Cerebus, but where did Cerebus get it?”

  “Someone he ate.”

  Knowing Cerebus as I did, that seemed very likely. However, that would have been centuries upon centuries earlier. These pages hadn’t been digested. My stomach had a sinking feeling.

  “Are the spell books indestructible?” I asked.

  “The original ten are, yes,” Ezra answered.

  “If you wanted to hide something from prying eyes, Cerebus would be a good place to hide it.”

  “If you were nuts, yes, it would be a good place. However, getting past Cerebus to hide it in his lair is suicide.”

  “I’ve been in there.”

  “You aren’t exactly normal or sane.”

  “You’re a soul, trapped in a book for eternity because you are a picture of mental health,” I snarked. “Are you an original?”

  “Nah, the Strachan original is long gone. It was lost in a fire.”

  “But it is indestructible.”

  “But you can still lose them.”

  “You said it burnt in a fire.”

  “No, I said it was lost in a fire,” Ezra reminded me. “Story goes there was a huge fire at a coven meeting. A couple of witches perished and when they started sifting through the ashes, the Strachan book was nowhere to be found.”

  “Ages ago,” Ezra answered, “and well before my time.”

  “Great, just great.” I sat down on my cot. “Any chance I can bribe Jack into bringing me the rest of the pages from Cerebus’ lair?”

  “It’s Jack.”

  That pretty much summed up my thoughts too. I still didn’t understand exactly what Spring-Heeled Jack was, or rather, who he was or how he got to be the way he was. The explanation given had some holes in it. Jack looked like a vampire, but he didn’t act like one. He acted like a rabid dog, but with loyalties and I wasn’t sure where those started or ended. Also, for someone who was supposed to be mostly devoid of magic, he seemed to have a ton of it.

  My window opened again. I expected the staring red eye and long nose to poke through the bars. Instead, the eye was blue and huge, like the size of a dinner plate. An alarm began to sound. The thing at my door shut the window. The alarm was silent.

  I sat completely still unsure what to do. I could run out and see why there was an alarm or I could stay put until someone came to fetch me. The window opened again. This time a werewolf’s muzzle came through the window. The door shook. It snarled, slobber dripping from its jaws and disappeared, leaving the window open.

  “Should I go look?” I as
ked.

  “Sure, but I wouldn’t stand within muzzle length,” Ezra answered.

  My stomach flopped again. I was getting really tired of having an upset stomach. It was the lack of donuts and the nervous anticipation that doom was coming for me. As I got close, I saw Victoria’s cell door open. The Lycan, who only talked in birdcalls, was definitely not a bird. Her orange eyes gave her away as a tiger. The fact that she was half-way through the transformation helped with the identification. This made the birdcalls even weirder sounding and looking. She skittered down the hall. Half a dozen gremlins were also visible. They were unlocking cell doors.

  In a place full of magic, I could pull none. One of the gremlins scampered up the door and unlocked it. He pulled the latch down, but the door didn’t budge. He tried repeatedly. Other gremlins came to help him. They pushed at the bottom, but the door stayed firmly shut.

  I grabbed Ezra. The gremlins lined up and put their full bodies into it, getting a running start. I opened the door and they tumbled inside. I closed it behind me, shutting the gremlins in and pouring the rest of the potion-like substance on the door. They tried to get out and couldn’t. One crawled to the window.

  I didn’t speak gremlin, but I was still sure he was swearing at me. After a few moments, he pushed his body through the bars and opened the door from the outside. His gremlin buddies all ran past me, shaking their fists and chattering at me.

  “Brenna!” Pendragon came around the corner.

  “Uther, what on earth is going on?”

  “Gremlins, again. We haven’t had two bouts of gremlin infestations in eons, literally. Now we’ve had two in a year. Something is definitely wrong. They are letting everyone out. And I’m not talking about a handful of gremlins. I’m talking about hundreds of them. They seem to be everywhere.”

  “Are there hundreds of gremlins on the island?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t have thought so,” Pendragon sighed and ran a hand down his face. “On the bright side, the city is protected and all portals have been closed to and from the island, so none of the beings from in here can go to the other side, but...”

  “But?” I asked.

  “But we’re going to have to round them all back up. Some of these beings are really bad, worse than you can imagine.”

  “Worse than Jack the Ripper?”

  “We have Caligula locked up, or did.”

  My history wasn’t very fresh in my mind, but I knew the name. I was surprised that he was immortal and wondered if he was Elder or mated. The thought disappeared as a vampire I didn’t know rounded the corner. She stared at me, blood dripping from her fangs. Since vampires didn’t actually drink blood, the dripping fangs bothered me.

  “I don’t have any magic,” I told her.

  “What?” She looked horrified.

  “I used it on the horseman and it hasn’t returned.” I shrugged. I didn’t have a reason for it not to be there. As if he had been conjured by the thought, the legs of the horseman began to run past me. I jumped on them, pinning them to the ground. Pendragon ran off to deal with the vampire.

  What to do with the legs was a mystery. I didn’t want them running back to my house and reuniting with their torso, but I couldn’t hold them for forever. Then an idea came to me, I needed to go visit Cerebus anyway, maybe I could give him the legs as a peace offering to search his lair.

  The legs and I set off among a host of beings escaping the prison. I dragged them behind me by the trouser leg. While most of the escapees ran towards the city, I headed into the woods. I had made it about ten feet into the dark when a pair of glowing red eyes appeared in the dark.

  I didn’t need the giggle to know it was Spring-Heeled Jack. I had a spell book, an extra pair of legs that were trying to escape, no magic, and a lunatic. It could have been worse.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Spring-Heeled Jack sprang out at me. I’d seen him and was expecting it, but didn’t put up a fight. He stood only inches from me and laughed.

  To his credit, Jack didn’t attack me. He giggled and laughed for a few moments, and then he stopped and peered around me at the legs. The free leg was trying to kick at me. I kept having to take a step forward or sideways to avoid it scooting across the ground and landing a blow.

  Jack seemed intrigued by the legs. He watched them and moved with me as I moved. After a few more minutes of his giggling, Jack grabbed the legs from me and slung them over his shoulder. His arms pinned the legs against his chest so that they couldn’t kick him. The waist part was immobilized as well by this hold. It was much better than my method of carrying them.

  I continued forward. Jack followed me. As we neared where I remembered Cerebus’ lair lay, Jack took lead. I began following him.

  The dark became darker. The gaping wound in the earth that served as the entrance to Cerebus’ cave was like a black hole. Only smell and noise escaped it. It smelled of wet dog and decay. The sound of something dying painfully and slowly echoed out of the stone and reverberated through the trees.

  The horseman’s legs went rigid. The upper part began trying to flop. Jack adjusted his grip and went in.

  Unlike Jack, I didn’t have red eyes and couldn’t see in the dark. I dug out my key ring and pushed the button on the little pocket light, before entering the cave. The smell didn’t get better. Added to the decay and the smell of wet dog, was the smell of sulfur. This had nothing to do with the hellhound and everything to do with the bright yellow deposits of sulfur that ran through the cave walls. However, I suspected it helped with his nickname.

  “This is a terrible idea,” Ezra whispered from within his bag.

  “I know, but I couldn’t think of a better one,” I answered, “and Jack seems to want to help, which is really good since he and Cerebus have some sort of connection.”

  “If he decides to eat you, try to throw me clear,” Ezra grumbled.

  I ignored the request. If Cerebus ate me, Ezra was coming too.

  A gust of foul smelling wind blew from deep within the cave. My idea was suddenly irrational and my feet wanted to carry me away from the hellhound who smelled of sulfur, wet dog and decay. The cell I had occupied earlier didn’t seem so bad. It had at least been safe.

  Pendragon’s words flashed in my memory again. There were things in the prison worse than Jack the Ripper. There were things worse than Cerebus on the island. I had run across one when the wendigo had snuck up on me. The pep talk sort of worked. At least I managed to convince myself that Cerebus was not the worst thing on the planet I could face. And he would probably kill me quickly because he didn’t seem the type to play with his food. I couldn’t say the same for other things.

  I entered the cavern where Cerebus lived. It was massive, holding the dog that was bigger than a blue whale with room to spare. He was curled up in a ball, one head awake and watching Jack. The other two were on his paws, apparently asleep.

  “Will he eat that?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” came Ezra’s muffled reply.

  “I was talking to Jack.”

  “You’d be better off talking to Cerebus,” Ezra grumped.

  Jack tossed the horseman’s legs to Cerebus. The awake head watched it sail through the air. One of the sleeping heads suddenly sprang to life, snatched it from the air, chewed a few times and swallowed. The movement startled me. I jumped and a small, strangled yelp exited my mouth. Both turned to look at me.

  My feet took me a few steps backwards before I could stop them. My brain did stop them and I stood still, staring back at the two creatures that weren’t beings like me, but somehow were more than just beasts of the island. An intelligence burned inside both of them, and for the first time, I could see it. No, I could feel it, beneath my terror, beneath my desire to run away. There was something else. Something that told me these were not simply creatures that ate and slept. They thought intelligent thoughts and reasoned things out, even if I didn’t understand it. Neither leapt at me, attacked me, or did anything threatening.


  I steeled my nerves and held out the goo soaked paper. Jack sprang to me and took it. He held it up to Cerebus. Cerebus gave a long sigh and settled down onto the floor that was covered in straw like material. I had never noticed it before, but Cerebus had created a bed for himself within the cave. The material would insulate him from the cold floor.

  Jack handed the paper back to me and giggled. His hand shot out and the finger pointed towards the back of the cave. I had been in a cavern back there before and knew it had a small entrance that Cerebus couldn’t use. At the time, I had been on a mission and hadn’t noticed anything else inside of it.

  Now, I crawled into the cavern with Spring-Heeled Jack behind me. I found that comforting for some unknown reason.

  Once inside, I realized it wasn’t a cavern. It was a set of catacombs. Names were carved on round stones set into the walls. Jack wandered back and forth, looking at the names. Finally, he stopped and pointed at one of them.

  Nefera, Great Witch read the stone. It didn’t look like it had been moved in centuries. I wondered if the body of the witch was really entombed within. I pushed the stone and it rolled easily to the side, exposing a deep hole. A skeleton was inside along with several books and pages. The first book I pulled out was a spell book.

  It was bound in leather that I suspected was flesh from a demon based on the color and texture. My fingers opened the pages and found a spot where the pages had been torn out. The words on the cover were too faded to read, but the first page was not. On it was a family tree. The first name was Cailleach Strachan. Beside it was the name Stephen Nickolai. There was only one other name on the page, Nicheven Strachan.

  My gaze moved from the page to Spring-Heeled Jack, also known as Mad Stephen, also known as Stephen Nickolai. He was one of my ancestors. Madness really did run in my family. Spring-Heeled Jack giggled.